Absolutist thinking and emotional problems

Anger is a common emotional experience which can have a very distrubing impact upon the angered person, physically and psychologically, and upon that person's relations with others. The arousal of anger can be best explained in many instances as the reaction of people when they see or anticipate the violation of their demands, that is, as reflecting absolutist thinking. Such thinking can not only lead to anger but is also believed to play an important role in promoting other emotional problems, including those of anxiety and depression. This paper characterises the absolutist style of thinking and illustrates its hypothesized role in several emotional problems using brief case histories. It is suggested that the failure of a therapist to identify absolutist thinking, when it exists, deprives the therapist of considerable leverage in handling a patient's problems and may explain the limited effectiveness of cognitive therapy for such patients.     

The lost direction in binocular vision: the neglected signs posted by Wells, Towne, and LeConte

Studies of vision have informed theories first in philosophy and then in psychology. Over the centuries, an increasing number of phenomena have been enlisted to refute or reinforce particular theories. Nowhere has this been more evident than in binocular vision. How we see a single world with two eyes is one of the oldest and most consistently studied topics in vision research. It has been discussed at least since the time of Aristotle and it has been examined experimentally since the second century, when Ptolemy defined lines of visual correspondence for the two eyes. Prior to Wheatstone's invention of the stereoscope in the 1830s, binocular vision had been studied in terms of visual directions. The stereoscope established distance (or depth) as well as direction as dimensions of binocular vision. Subsequently, depth rather than direction has been the principal concern of students of vision, and texts in English devoted to analyses of direction rather than depth have been neglected. We examine the experiments on binocular visual direction conducted by Wells before Wheatstone, and by Towne and LeConte after him, and discuss the reasons for their neglect.     

Notions of Destiny in Women’s Self-Construction

What can women become? How is their becoming fashioned? What forces affect it? What sense do they make of their becoming? In this article the author aims to raise issues which pertain to women and their conceptions of destiny, and to consider these in the light of recent feminist analyses. Three issues are discussed: the ‘good woman’, or the impact of gendered norms and expectations upon women’s destinies; women’s self-construction and the possibility of women envisioning or creating their own destinies; and the becoming of the woman-subject, the desire of women collectively to accomplish their subjectivity as women. The themes of determinism and women’s differences are also considered.     

Before Language and After

It has been assumed by some writers that Wittgenstein's talk of primitive reactions amounts to a theory of concept formation out of instinctive behaviour. Others have argued that Wittgenstein is thinking of reactions within language-games, which therefore belong to its structure not its origins . The author concurs, but argues that Wittgenstein also has in mind that it belongs to the grammars of certain concepts that the language-games in which they lie are themselves supplementary to natural behavioural forms. This provides a context in which the notion of pre-linguistic behaviour may be employed legitimately in philosophy whilst avoiding unjustified theorising.     

Pupillary response as a general measure of activation

Pupil size was measured while 30 male college students undertook five tasks respectively concerning, (a) muscle tension induced by the lifting of weights, (b) fear induced by threat of a gunshot, (c) intense stimulation induced by loud pure tones, (d) heightened attention from viewing novel pictures, and (e) pleasantness and unpleasantness in reaction to pictures that differed in terms of their affect-inducing characteristics. Highly regular relationships were found between pupil size and degree of muscle strain and between pupil size and the temporal ordering of events during threat of a gunshot. Significant effects on pupil size also were found for the other three types of stimulation.     

Relationships and the social brain: integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives

Psychological studies of relationships tend to focus on specific types of close personal relationships (romantic, parent-offspring, friendship) and examine characteristics of both the individuals and the dyad. This paper looks more broadly at the wider range of relationships that constitute an individual's personal social world. Recent work on the composition of personal social networks suggests that they consist of a series of layers that differ in the quality and quantity of relationships involved. Each layer increases relationship numbers by an approximate multiple of 3 (5-15-50-150) but decreasing levels of intimacy (strong, medium, and weak ties) and frequency of interaction. To account for these regularities, we draw on both social and evolutionary psychology to argue that relationships at different layers serve different functions and have different cost-benefit profiles. At each layer, the benefits are asymptotic but the costs of maintaining a relationship at that level (most obviously, the time that has to be invested in servicing it) are roughly linear with the number of relationships. The trade-off between costs and benefits at a given level, and across the different types of demands and resources typical of different levels, gives rise to a distribution of social effort that generates and maintains a hierarchy of layered sets of relationships within social networks. We suggest that, psychologically, these trade-offs are related to the level of trust in a relationship, and that this is itself a function of the time invested in the relationship.