Associations between abstainer,moderate and heavy drinker prototypes and drinking behaviour in young adults

Objective: Previous research has focused mostly on abstainer and/or general drinker prototypes. The present studies examined an abstainer, moderate drinker and heavy drinker prototype in relation to drinking behaviour.

Design: Two studies among young adults aged 18–25 (paper-and-pencil, cross-sectional, N?=?140; online, prospective, N?=?451) assessed prototype favourability and participants’ perceived similarity to the prototypes. Participants were also categorised into abstainers, moderate, and heavy drinkers.

Results: Similarity and favourability had similar sequences in both studies: the moderate drinker and abstainer prototypes were evaluated most favourable and felt similar to; the heavy drinker prototype was rated the least favourable and felt similar to. Importantly, heavy drinking participants felt most similar to the moderate drinker prototype and rated the heavy drinker least desirable. The results suggest a need for research to include other prototypes, such as the moderate drinker, besides the abstainer and heavy drinker.

Conclusion: The studies provide insights into the contribution of alternative prototypes (i.e. moderate drinker) into the relationship between prototype perceptions and drinking behaviour. The results suggest tailoring prototype-based interventions according to drinking behaviour. Importantly, realistic perceived similarity to the more favourable moderate drinker prototype may therefore need to be encouraged only after appropriate reductions in heavy drinkers’ alcohol consumption.     

Am I Abnormal? Relative Rank and Social Norm Effects in Judgments of Anxiety and Depression Symptom Severity

Overdetection and underdetection of depression and anxiety in primary care are common and may partly reflect individuals' misperceptions of the severity of symptoms they experience. Here, we explore how people's judgments about the severity of their own symptoms are influenced by their beliefs about the distribution of symptoms experienced by the rest of the population. We apply the rank‐based decision by sampling cognitive model of judgment to symptom severity. The model proposes that judgments depend on the relative rank of an item within a mental sample of comparable items. It is predicted that judgments of symptom severity will be context dependent and more specifically that an individual's judgments will be invalid to the extent that the individual has inaccurate beliefs about the relevant social context. Two studies found that participants' assessments of symptom severity were rank based. Study 1 elicited participants' beliefs about the social distribution of symptoms and found that participants' judgments of whether they were depressed or anxious were mainly predicted not by their symptoms' objective severity but rather by where participants ranked the severity of their symptoms in comparison with the believed symptoms of others. Study 2 varied symptom distributions experimentally and again found relative rank effects as predicted. It is concluded that the real‐world application of contextual models of judgment requires investigation of individual differences in participants' background beliefs. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stereotypes and stereotyping: What's the brain got to do with it?

Influential social-psychological models suggest that perceivers frequently use information-processing strategies that result in the stereotype-based construal and treatment of other people. To elucidate in greater detail when, why, and how social encounters elicit stereotyping, researchers have begun to incorporate neuroscientific tools into their repertoire of investigative methods. The current article reviews these studies and considers their significance in light of existing theories of person perception, knowledge representation, and impression formation. Finally, using the concrete example of stereotyping, benefits and pitfalls of adopting a social neuroscience approach are discussed.     

On Theoretical Edges and Exclusionary Borders: Towards a Genealogy of “Analyzability” in Jungian Psychoanalysis1

An oft-repeated and largely unexamined assumption in Jungian psychoanalysis is the notion of “analyzability”, that is, of an individual's ability or present capacity to think symbolically. It is often taught that if someone is unable to think symbolically, a depth analysis is not possible. Such an individual may be more aptly suited for supportive psychotherapy, the argument goes, an experience that may very well lead to the development of the ego's capacity for symbolic thought but is not, in and of itself, a Jungian analysis. While this sort of categorical thinking has, at times, crossed over into ontological claims about individuals and groups, the notion of analyzability encountered in psychoanalytic theory and praxis is often cloaked in facially neutral language. The impact, however, has been anything but neutral in effect. In this paper, I propose a softening of our theoretical edges through a genealogy of the category of analyzability within the broader history of psychoanalysis. Through this excavation, I explore the contingent nature of the category of analyzability, how it has constricted knowledge, perpetuated inequality, and, more broadly, obscured ways of knowing. In so doing, I recover the radically democratic potential that lies at the heart of Jungian psychoanalysis.     

Nietzschean Constructivism: Ethics and Metaethics for All and None

Abstract

This paper develops an interpretation of Nietzsche’s ethics and metaethics that reconciles his apparent antirealism with his engagement in normative discourse. Interpreting Nietzsche as a metaethical constructivist—as holding, to a first approximation, that evaluative facts are grounded purely in facts about the evaluative attitudes of the creatures to whom they apply—reconciles his vehement declarations that nothing is valuable in itself with his passionate expressions of a particular evaluative perspective and injunctions for the free spirits to create new values. Drawing on Nietzsche’s broader epistemological and psychological views, I develop a distinctive, and genuinely Nietzschean, version of constructivism. On this account, evaluative properties are grounded in affective valuations of the new philosophers. The proposed interpretation synthesizes a variety of disparate features of Nietzsche’s writings and improves on existing interpretations in the literature. The resulting version of constructivism is also worthy of attention in contemporary theorizing. The fruits of understanding the distinctive form of Nietzsche’s ethical theory are an illuminating example of how metanormative inquiry can undergird normative evaluation in practice.     

Revisiting Milgram’s Cyranoid Method: Experimenting With Hybrid Human Agents

In two studies based on Stanley Milgram’s original pilots, we present the first systematic examination of cyranoids as social psychological research tools. A cyranoid is created by cooperatively joining in real-time the body of one person with speech generated by another via covert speech shadowing. The resulting hybrid persona can subsequently interact with third parties face-to-face. We show that naïve interlocutors perceive a cyranoid to be a unified, autonomously communicating person, evidence for a phenomenon Milgram termed the “cyranic illusion.” We also show that creating cyranoids composed of contrasting identities (a child speaking adult-generated words and vice versa) can be used to study how stereotyping and person perception are mediated by inner (dispositional) vs. outer (physical) identity. Our results establish the cyranoid method as a unique means of obtaining experimental control over inner and outer identities within social interactions rich in mundane realism.     

Manipulating Morality: Third‐Party Intentions Alter Moral Judgments by Changing Causal Reasoning

The present studies investigate how the intentions of third parties influence judgments of moral responsibility for other agents who commit immoral acts. Using cases in which an agent acts under some situational constraint brought about by a third party, we ask whether the agent is blamed less for the immoral act when the third party intended for that act to occur. Study 1 demonstrates that third‐party intentions do influence judgments of blame. Study 2 finds that third‐party intentions only influence moral judgments when the agent's actions precisely match the third party's intention. Study 3 shows that this effect arises from changes in participants' causal perception that the third party was controlling the agent. Studies 4 and 5, respectively, show that the effect cannot be explained by changes in the distribution of blame or perceived differences in situational constraint faced by the agent.