Career,Marriage, and Family: Values in Adult Roles and Guidance

Use of occupational, marriage, and parenthood values may help young women to distinguish values that can be satisfied in major adult roles and assist in the earlier formation of a vocational identity.     

Soul,freedom and salvation: a literary,cinematic and musical journey to the crossroads

It is tempting to assume that the construction of rational arguments for the existence of God reflects the basic logical form of theological discourse and debate. However, it would also seem that most if not all major religions are grounded mainly in stories (including biographies) of divine or divinely inspired saviours or prophets, and that the form of much ordinary religious understanding is ‘narratival’. In addition, such latter‐day moral and social theorists as Alasdair MacIntyre have held that human moral and spiritual understanding cannot but take a narrative form, and regarded religious stories as contributing crucially to such appreciation. However, while it is tempting to support such claims by reference to classics of literary and artistic culture, it is arguable that much contemporary cinematic and other popular art has also developed the major moral and spiritual themes of classical culture in significantly insightful ways. This article explores the movie Crossroads as a particularly fertile instance of such development.     

Roles for Values in Scientific Activities

My aim in this paper is to rebut objections that have been made of the account of the various roles for values in scientific activities that I have developed, initially in my book Is Science Value Free?, in response to criticizing the proposal that science is value free. Specifically I respond to objections that my account does not recognize the significance of basic science, and that my defense of the ideal of impartiality cannot be sustained.     

The common mirror dream, dreamer, and the dream mirror

From the widely diverse category of so-called mirror dreams, we have differentiated the most frequent, which we have designated the common mirror dream (CMD). It is one in which the dreamer at some point looks into a mirror and reports seeing himself, a part of himself or a distorted though recognizable version of himself. Mirror dreams, including CMDs, are distinctly uncommon. Every dreamer of CMDs in our series had felt enjoined by the mother (in most cases with the father's collusion) not to see and regard her clearly and not to be an accurately reflecting mirror for her. The intensity with which the maternal injunction against accurate visual perception and evaluation was feared was an important distinguishing feature in our patients with CMDs. The essence of the CMD has been hypothesized to be a reciprocal, reverberating, visual-exhibitionistic dyad representative of the mother-child relationship. The dream mirror may represent the wish that the analyst-mother counter a feared parental injunction against accurate visual perception and evaluation so as to correct the distorted perceptions of self and objects and provide visual affirmation of the value and integrity of the self-representation. For some patients, defense against the dangers of castration and loss of maternal love was accomplished by the mirror mechanisms of magically transforming images in the mirror, the ease of creating illusion in the mirror, and a fetishistic mechanism of visually reintrojecting a phallic symbol from the mirror. Our data failed to confirm many of the hypotheses of previous contributors as to specific symbolic meanings of the dream mirror. More relevant than the symbolism of the dream mirror are the many functions of the dream mirror for the dreamer. These are analyzed and discussed.     

The singularity of the cinematic object

In order to avoid the reduction of desire to demand and to produce a theory in keeping with the insights of psychoanalysis, Lacan had to move beyond Hegel’s theorization based on recognition. To do so, Lacan had to come up with a new form of object, an object irreducible to the signifier but with the power to arouse the desire of the subject. The theorization of the objet a enables Lacan to make an important advance on Hegel’s theory of desire, an advance that effectively reverses the priority that Hegel establishes between the object and the Other. Despite the widespread association of Lacan with the signifier and its laws, his one great theoretical breakthrough concerns what remains absolutely irreducible to signification. My central contention in this essay is that Lacan’s theory of desire allows us to understand how singularity appears in the cinema, despite the medium’s inherent resistance to it. I examine this appearance of singularity through two filmic occasions—Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Michael Mann’s Heat. It is a medium in which recognition predominates, and yet the singularity of the objet a nonetheless emerges and animates the desire of the spectator.     

Unpacking cognitive reappraisal: goals, tactics, and outcomes

Studies of emotion regulation typically contrast two or more strategies (e.g., reappraisal vs. suppression) and ignore variation within each strategy. To address such variation, we focused on cognitive reappraisal and considered the effects of goals (i.e., what people are trying to achieve) and tactics (i.e., what people actually do) on outcomes (i.e., how affective responses change). To examine goals, we randomly assigned participants to either increase positive emotion or decrease negative emotion to a negative stimulus. To examine tactics, we categorized participants' reports of how they reappraised. To examine reappraisal outcomes, we measured experience and electrodermal responding. Findings indicated that (a) the goal of increasing positive emotion led to greater increases in positive affect and smaller decreases in skin conductance than the goal of decreasing negative emotion, and (b) use of the reality challenge tactic was associated with smaller increases in positive affect during reappraisal. These findings suggest that reappraisal can be implemented in the service of different emotion goals, using different tactics. Such differences are associated with different outcomes, and they should be considered in future research and applied attempts to maximize reappraisal success.     

When goals collide: Monitoring the goals of multiple characters

Most story plots contain multiple characters who are independent, interact, and often have conflicting goals. One would expect that narrative understanding would require monitoring of the goals, concerns, and situations of multiple agents. There is considerable evidence that understanders monitor the primary protagonist's goal plans (e.g., Suh & Trabasso, 1993). However, there is relatively little research on the extent to which understanders monitor the goals of multiple agents. We investigated the impact of characters' roles and prominence on the extent to which understanders monitor the goal plans of multiple characters in a feature length film. In Experiment 1, participants made situation change judgments, and in Experiment 2, they verbally described scenes. Both types of judgments indicated that viewers monitor the goals and plans of multiple agents but do so to a greater extent for characters more prominent to the plotline.     

Achievement goals, social goals, and motivational regulations in physical education settings

This study examined the relationship between achievement and social goals, and explored how both goals affect students' level of informed self-determination in Physical Education. Participants were 395 high school students. Three scales were used to assess achievement, social goals, and motivation. Several hierarchical regression analyses revealed that mastery-approach goals were the greatest contributors to the individuals' levels of self-determination. Achievement and social goals were found to be separate predictors of students' levels of self-determination, and this highlights the importance of separating mastery and performance goals into avoidance and approach profiles. Girls reported significantly higher values than boys on responsibility, relationship, and mastery-avoidance goals, whereas boys scored higher on performance-approach goals. Researchers could use achievement and social goals to study students' motivation and achievement in Physical Education settings.     

Basic Personal Values,Core Political Values,and Voting: A Longitudinal Analysis

We theorize that political values express basic personal values in the domain of politics. We test a set of hypotheses that specify how the motivational structure of basic values constrains and gives coherence to core political values. We also test the hypothesis that core political values mediate relations of basic personal values to voting demonstrated in previous research. We measured the basic personal values, core political values, and vote of Italian adults both before (n = 1699) and after (n = 1030) the 2006 national election. Basic values explained substantial variance in each of eight political values (22% to 53%) and predicted voting significantly. Correlations and an MDS projection of relations among basic values and political values supported the hypothesized coherent structuring of core political values by basic values. Core political values fully mediated relations of basic values to voting, supporting a basic values—political values—voting causal hierarchy.     

Growth goals, maturity, and well-being

In 2 studies (125 college students and 51 adults), 2 forms of growth goals (exploratory and intrinsic) were compared with 2 forms of personality development (social-cognitive maturity and social-emotional well-being). Participants whose narratives of major life goals emphasized conceptual exploration were especially likely to have high levels of maturity (measured as ego development; J. Loevinger, 1976), whereas those whose goals emphasized intrinsic interests (K. M. Sheldon & T. Kasser, 1995) were especially likely to have high levels of well-being. Participants who had coherent hierarchies of growth goals on the levels of major life goals and everyday goals were especially likely to have high levels of personality development. Finally, growth goals accounted for some relationships between age and personality development. Growth goals are discussed in terms of intentional self-development and specific developmental paths.     

Mirror, mirror on the wall: enhancement in self-recognition

People's inferences about their own traits and abilities are often enhancing. A series of experiments suggests that this enhancement extends to more automatic and perceptual judgments as well, such that people recognize their own faces as being more physically attractive than they actually are. In each experiment, participants' faces were made more or less attractive using a morphing procedure. Participants were more likely to recognize an attractively enhanced version of their own face out of a lineup as their own, and they identified an attractively enhanced version of their face more quickly in a lineup of distractor faces. This enhancement bias occurred for both one's own face and a friend's face but not for a relative stranger's face. Such enhancement was correlated with implicit measures of self-worth but not with explicit measures, consistent with this variety of enhancement being a relatively automatic rather than deliberative process.     

On representation,goals and cognition

In this paper we address three concepts that are much talked about in the animal robotics community. These concepts are (1) representations, (2) goals, and (3) minimal cognition. We want to distinguish between information as an objective commodity and representation as something which involves a user, i.e. a system which accesses and uses information. Information per se lies out there and exists independently of any system that makes use of it. Representations presuppose design and require a user. We want to distinguish different kinds of purposive behaviour, which involve different notions of goals, which themselves appear to be different from the point of view of the agent, the designer and the naive observer. We want to try to define cognition in terms of the minimal criteria that would be acceptable in view of our definitions of representations and goals. We recognise that full‐blown cognition may require ingredients other than those of minimal cognition.