Pollyanna's personal judgments

The Pollyanna hypothesis is extended into the field of intertrait inference to predict that inferential thresholds for positively evaluated characteristics will be lower than those for negatively evaluated characteristics. This prediction is confirmed, and is shown to have important implications for models of inference rules. Data from several studies are analysed to reveal that the Pollyanna threshold effect is reliably greater for women than for men, and it is shown that this effect is unrelated to sex differences in extremity of responding.     

A personal odyssey

In this autobiography, I tried to capture important aspects of my personal and professional development from my childhood in the ethnic ghettos of South Philadelphia to Pennsylvania State University and the University of Chicago and eventually to over 45 years on faculty at Yale. It has been a journey that I could never have anticipated and that has given me a sense of the unpredictability of psychological development. We all evolve in an open system and a significant portion of the variance of the outcome is determined by fate. But much is also determined by the ability to recognize opportunities and the willingness to take chances and to work hard when opportunities arise. As I reflect on my career of over 50 years, I have been delighted that I opted for a career as a clinical psychologist because it has provided me with opportunity to develop clinical skills and to combine these skills with scholarship and research. While I take considerable satisfaction in the recognition that my contributions have received, the most important aspect of my career has been my relationship with students and colleagues. These collaborations have clearly enriched my work; but more important, they have enriched my life.     

Changing personal rules

This article examines the characteristics and types of personal rules and traditions, and illustrates how they may be maladaptive to the individual. Suggestions are given to improve methods of assessment and intervention strategies for the development of more adequate rules, by a combination of cognitive and operant approaches, which take into account both environmental consequences and feedback.The author is grateful to Joseph A. Himle for his constructive editorial comments.     

Non-branching personal persistence

Philosophical Studies - Given reductionism about people, personal persistence must fundamentally consist in some kind of impersonal continuity relation. Typically, these continuity relations can...     

Purpose as personal

Ethics and Education R. S. Peters London: George Allen &; Unwin, Ltd., 1966 Pp. 333, $4.50     

A short personal memoir

The history of the formation of the different analytical psychology groups in Britain is briefly described to illustrate the recurring splitting that has taken place throughout the development of the profession of analytical psychology. The author discusses her role as editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology.     

Compatibilism and personal identity

Compatibilists disagree over whether there are historical conditions on moral responsibility. Historicists claim there are, whilst structuralists deny this. Historicists motivate their position by claiming to avoid the counter-intuitive implications of structuralism. I do two things in this paper. First, I argue that historicism has just as counter-intuitive implications as structuralism when faced with thought experiments inspired by those found in the personal identity literature. Hence, historicism is not automatically preferable to structuralism. Second, I argue that structuralism is much more plausible once we accept that personal identity is irrelevant to moral responsibility. This paves the way for a new structuralist account that makes clear what it takes to be the diachronic ownership condition (which is normally taken to be personal identity) and the locus of moral responsibility (which is normally taken to be ‘whole’ person), and helps to alleviate the intuitive unease many have with respect to structuralism.     

Self-identity and personal identity

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - The key to understanding self-identity is identifying the transcendental structures that make a temporally extended, continuous, and unified experiential...     

Perceived group and personal discrimination: differential effects on personal self‐esteem

In two studies, we investigate the differential influence of perceived group and personal discrimination on self‐esteem in the context of the Rejection–Identification model (Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999 ). We first polled a group of African immigrants and found that whereas personal discrimination was negatively related to personal self‐esteem, group discrimination was positively associated with it. As expected, identification served as a buffer between personal discrimination and self‐esteem. We replicated these effects in a second study using women as our respondents. These results suggest that perceiving group discrimination may be positively related to self‐esteem because people feel less alone in their plight, thereby alleviating the ill‐effects of exclusion. We discuss these results in relation to both the Rejection–Identification model and the discounting hypothesis (Crocker & Major, 1989 ). Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cognitive representation of personal stereotypes

A production task analogue of the traditional multiple choice trait checklist method was used to investigate stereotypes. Subjects were asked to supply rather than to select the most characteristic attributes of specified social groups. In a departure from tradition, stability of the content of stereotypes was analysed for personal stereotypes held by individuals rather than for social stereotypes shared by a cultural group. In contrast to the widely held belief that social stereotypes are fixed and unchanging, personal stereotypes were found to be only moderately stable over time. Only about two-fifths of the most characteristic attributes were duplicated in sessions separated by one week, and only about one-fifth of the most Characteristic attributes were duplicated in sessions separated by one-month or two-month intervals. Findings also supported the notion that general attributes, most characteristic attributes, and least characteristic attributes of a social category are not totally redundant and are represented quasi-independently in memory. Only about half of the most characteristic responses had also occurred on free response protocols and over half of the least characteristic responses tended not to be polar opposites of the most characteristic responses. It was the case, however, that with a production analogue of the multiple-choice trait checklist, trait-adjectives were the most frequent class of person information and accounted for between 50 and 60 per cent of the responses. However, eleven other classes of person information also occurred. Empirical results were applied toward a reexamination of the concepts of stereotype (data structure for the most characteristic attributes of a social group) and stereotyping (rigid procedures for processing data structures) and to a conceptual analysis of how stereotypes and social categories are structurally related.     

Individual characteristics and personal relationships

The nature of a personal relationship depends in part on the characteristics of the participating individuals. Yet the relations between individual characteristics and relationships are complex because (i) there are difficulties in specifying the dimensions along which individuals differ; (ii) the characteristics that an individual displays vary with the situation; (iii) relationships have properties that result from interaction between the participants; and (iv) the mechanisms whereby individual Characteristics affect relationships are diverse. In this paper the first three of these issues are discussed briefly and a number of examples of the fourth are provided.     

Narcissism and the personal myth

Kris (1956) described the concept of the personal myth as an autobiographical story built around a family romance fantasy seen specifically in obsessive characters and serving a defensive function. In this paper the concept of the personal myth was expanded to include similar defensive constellations originating from within the grandiose self, built around omnipotent and omniscient fantasies and occurring in character formations with pregenital, narcissistic pathology. The case of a known author and poet, Nikos Kazantzakis, was used to illustrate the thesis of the paper. The available biographical material and the work of the author offer evidence to support the claim that the author's personal myth was a protective shield against anxiety originating in early narcissistic traumata.     

Reactive attitudes and personal relationships

Abolitionism is the view that if no one is responsible, we ought to abandon the reactive attitudes. This paper defends abolitionism against the claim, made by P.F. Strawson and others, that abandoning these attitudes precludes the formation and maintenance of valuable personal relationships. These anti-abolitionists claim (a) that one who abandons the reactive attitudes is unable to take personally others’ attitudes and actions regarding her, and (b) that taking personally is necessary for certain valuable relationships. I dispute both claims and argue that this objection exaggerates the role of the reactive attitudes and underestimates the importance of non-reactive moral emotions.     

Shared intention and personal intentions

This article explores the question: what is it for two or more people to intend to do something in the future? In a technical phrase, what is it for people to share an intention? Extending and refining earlier work of the author’s, it argues for three criteria of adequacy for an account of shared intention (the disjunction, concurrence, and obligation criteria) and offers an account that satisfies them. According to this account, in technical terms explained in the paper, people share an intention when and only when they are jointly committed to intend as a body to do such-and-such in the future. This account is compared and contrasted with the common approach that treats shared intention as a matter of personal intentions, with particular reference to the work of Michael Bratman.