Facing a Disruptive Face: Embodiment in the Everyday Experiences of “Disfigured” Individuals

In recent years, facial difference is increasingly on the public and academic agenda. This is evidenced by the growing public presence of individuals with an atypical face, and the simultaneous emergence of research investigating the issues associated with facial variance. The scholarship on facial difference approaches this topic either through a medical and rehabilitation perspective, or a psycho-social one. However, having a different face also encompasses an embodied dimension. In this paper, we explore this embodied dimension by interpreting the stories of individuals with facial limb absence against the background of phenomenological theories of the body, illness and disability. Our findings suggest that the atypical face disrupts these individuals’ engagement with everyday projects when it gives rise to disruptive perceptions, sensations, and observations. The face then ceases to be the absent background to perception, and becomes foregrounded in awareness. The disruptions evoked by facial difference call for adjustments: as they come to terms with their altered face, the participants in our study gradually develop various new bodily habits that re-establish their face’s absence, or relate to its disruptive presence. It is through these emergent habits that facial difference comes to be embodied. By analyzing the everyday experiences of individuals with facial limb absence, this article provides a much-needed exploration of the embodied aspects of facial difference. It also exemplifies how a phenomenological account of illness and disability can do justice both to the impairments and appearance issues associated with atypical embodiment.     

Thinness and eating expectancies predict subsequent binge-eating and purging behavior among adolescent girls

One's expectancies for reinforcement from eating or from thinness are thought to represent summaries of one's eating-related learning history and to thus influence the development of binge-eating and purging behavior. In a 3-year longitudinal study, the authors tested this hypothesis and the hypothesis that binge eating also influences subsequent expectancy development. The authors used trajectory analysis to identify groups of middle school girls who followed different trajectories of binge eating, purging, eating expectancies, and thinness expectancies. Initial eating and thinness reinforcement expectancies identified girls whose binge eating and purging increased during middle school, and expectancies differentiated girls who began these problem behaviors from girls who did not. Initial binge-eating scores differentiated among eating expectancy developmental trajectories. The onset of most behaviors can be understood in terms of learned expectancies for reinforcement from these behaviors. The same model can be applied to the risk for eating disorders.     

Lost in the wilderness: terror management, action orientation, and nature evaluation

The authors propose that wilderness is intrinsically associated with death, and, consequently, terror management concerns may promote more negative evaluations of wilderness. Consistent with this, wilderness inspired more thoughts about death than either cultivated nature or urban environments (Study 1), and death reminders reduced perceived beauty of wilderness (Study 2). The authors further suggest that active self-regulation facilitates suppression of the dark side of wilderness. Consistent with this, action orientation was positively related to perceived beauty of wilderness (Study 3), and after viewing wilderness, action-oriented individuals were more efficient at suppressing the association between wilderness and death than state-oriented individuals (Study 4). Direct death reminders overruled the effects of action orientation on nature evaluation (Study 5), presumably because direct death reminders are difficult to suppress even for action-oriented individuals.     

A BRIEF FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF AGGRESSIVE AND ALTERNATIVE BEHAVIOR IN AN OUTCLINIC SETTING

We conducted a brief functional analysis to identify maintaining variables for aggressive behavior and an alternative replacement response during a 90-min outpatient evaluation of 3 individuals with severe handicaps. During the initial analogue assessment, which focused on identifying maintaining contingencies for aggressive behavior, each participant displayed a substantially greater frequency of aggressive behavior during one condition than during any other. The contingency that produced the highest percentage of aggressive behavior was then presented for the occurrence of a specific alternative behavior (a mand). During this contingency reversal phase, each participant displayed a substantial reduction in aggressive behavior and a substantial increase in alternative behavior, thus providing a direct analysis of the equivalency of the contingency for maintaining either behavior.     

On the validity and utility of discriminating among impulsivity-like traits

The ability to make precise distinctions among related personality constructs helps clarify theory and increases the utility of clinical assessment. In three studies, the authors evaluated the validity of distinctions among four impulsivity-like traits: sensation seeking, lack of planning, lack of persistence, and urgency (acting rashly when distressed). Factor analyses indicated that lack of planning and lack of persistence are two distinct facets of one broader trait, whereas urgency and sensation seeking are both very modestly related to each other and to the planning/persistence measures. The authors developed interview assessments of each, and multitrait, multimethod matrix results indicated clear convergent and discriminant validity among the constructs. The distinctions among them were useful: The traits accounted for different aspects of risky behaviors. Sensation seeking appeared to relate to the frequency of engaging in risky behaviors, and urgency appeared to relate to problem levels of involvement in those behaviors.     

Dispositional Optimism and Marital Adjustment

Research showing the distinct influence of positive attributes on relationships has been growing. This study examined the impact of husbands’ and wives’ dispositional optimism on their own and partner’s relationship satisfaction, consensus, and cohesion using data from the National Survey of Families and Households. Results indicate that wives’ optimism influences their own later marital satisfaction as well as their husbands’ later marital satisfaction. However, husbands’ optimism did not appear to influence their own nor their wives’ later satisfaction. Potential interventions for increasing optimism in the therapeutic setting are discussed.     

Educational potentials of embodied art reflection

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - With reference to a standard work on embodied cognition – The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991) by Francisco Varela, Evan...     

Covert shifts of attention can account for the functional role of “eye movements to nothing”

When trying to remember verbal information from memory, people look at spatial locations that have been associated with visual stimuli during encoding, even when the visual stimuli are no longer present. It has been shown that such “eye movements to nothing” can influence retrieval performance for verbal information, but the mechanism underlying this functional relationship is unclear. More precisely, covert in comparison to overt shifts of attention could be sufficient to elicit the observed differences in retrieval performance. To test if covert shifts of attention explain the functional role of the looking-at-nothing phenomenon, we asked participants to remember verbal information that had been associated with a spatial location during an encoding phase. Additionally, during the retrieval phase, all participants solved an unrelated visual tracking task that appeared in either an associated (congruent) or an incongruent spatial location. Half the participants were instructed to look at the tracking task, half to shift their attention covertly (while keeping the eyes fixed). In two experiments, we found that memory retrieval depended on the location to which participants shifted their attention covertly. Thus, covert shifts of attention seem to be sufficient to cause differences in retrieval performance. The results extend the literature on the relationship between visuospatial attention, eye movements, and verbal memory retrieval and provide deep insights into the nature of the looking-at-nothing phenomenon.