The erosion of a friendship

Abstract

The following story is about my childhood friend Amber and the loss of a close relationship. The story traces the relationship from grade school through adolescence. As we grew, we faced different obstacles, at first together and then apart. I follow in the footsteps of Ellis (1995) and Uematsu (1996) in discussing the advantages of writing about loss.     

Projection and Behavior: A Rorschach Study of Assaultive Mental Hospital Patients

Collapsing DSM-III schizotypal and borderline groups to form a borderline population is unwarranted when the results are then related to borderline personality organization. In a comparison of overlapping scoring systems for inferring defensive operations, Lerner, Albert, and Walsh intertwine fact and theory extravagantly and are not justified by their chosen populations nor their assumptions about the theories involved.     

Giving cognition a helping hand: The effect of congruent gestures on object name retrieval

The gestures that accompany speech are more than just arbitrary hand movements or communicative devices. They are simulated actions that can both prime and facilitate speech and cognition. This study measured participants’ reaction times for naming degraded images of objects when simultaneously adopting a gesture that was either congruent with the target object, incongruent with it, and when not making any hand gesture. A within‐subjects design was used, with participants (N= 122) naming 10 objects under each condition. Participants named the objects significantly faster when adopting a congruent gesture than when not gesturing at all. Adopting an incongruent gesture resulted in significantly slower naming times. The findings are discussed in the context of the intrapersonal cognitive and facilitatory effects of gestures and underline the relatedness between language, action, and cognition.     

Ethics, Finance, and Automation: A Preliminary Survey of Problems in High Frequency Trading

All of finance is now automated, most notably high frequency trading. This paper examines the ethical implications of this fact. As automation is an interdisciplinary endeavor, we argue that the interfaces between the respective disciplines can lead to conflicting ethical perspectives; we also argue that existing disciplinary standards do not pay enough attention to the ethical problems automation generates. Conflicting perspectives undermine the protection those who rely on trading should have. Ethics in finance can be expanded to include organizational and industry-wide responsibilities to external market participants and society. As a starting point, quality management techniques can provide a foundation for a new cross-disciplinary ethical standard in the age of automation.     

Adjusting to life in retirement: the protective role of new group memberships and identification as a retiree

ABSTRACT

Among the many factors that influence retirement adjustment, there is increasing recognition of the role played by people’s social relationships. In particular, research points to the benefits that joining new groups can have for people’s well-being when they experience life change. In three studies, we extend this research to assess the contribution that new groups and identities make to supporting the well-being and adjustment of people transitioning to retirement. Study 1, involving 302 retirees, demonstrates that joining new groups in retirement and developing a stronger sense of identification with retirees predicts life satisfaction after controlling for known predictors (e.g., financial planning, marital status, physical health status, retirement aspirations), while only retiree identification predicts adjustment. We then examine the extent to which multiple group memberships support retirement adjustment and well-being through the mediating role of new group memberships and retiree identification. This is first examined in a cross-sectional study of 90 retired academics (Study 2) and then in a two-wave study involving a general sample of 121 recent retirees (Study 3). Findings from both studies point to the importance of social group and identity gain in retirement adjustment and highlight the particular importance of retiree identification in the transition.     

The Seattle Longitudinal Study: Relationship Between Personality and Cognition

This article reviews the history, measures and principal findings of the Seattle Longitudinal Study. This study began in 1956 focusing upon age differences and age changes in cognitive abilities. Its sampling frame is a large HMO in the Pacific Northwest. The study has been expanded to investigate various influences on cognitive aging including, cognitive styles, personality traits, life styles, and family environment. Current interest is also in the early detection of risk for dementia. In addition, this article reports original analyses of the relation of personality dimensions to cognitive abilities (both concurrent and longitudinal). While personality remains relatively stable over the adult life span, modest proportions of variance are shared between various personality traits and the cognitive abilities.     

Asymmetries in Benefiting, Harming and Creating

It is often said that while we have a strong reason not to create someone who will be badly off, we have no strong reason for creating someone who will be well off. In this paper I argue that this asymmetry is incompatible with a plausible principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives, and that a more general asymmetry between harming and benefiting is difficult to defend. I then argue that, contrary to what many have claimed, it is possible to harm or benefit someone by bringing her into existence.     

I am not now,nor have I ever been,a turnip.

This paper considers how to put together two popular ideas in the philosophy of time: detenserism (the view that tense can be analysed in token-reflexive terms) and perdurantism (the view that objects persist through time by having temporal parts. On the most obvious way of doing this, certain problems arise. I argue that to deal with these problems we need a tool that is unfamiliar to most detensers and perdurantists—the distinction between sortal and non-sortal predicates.     

Trash talk in a competitive setting: Impact on self‐efficacy and affect

The effects of trash talk and competition outcome on self‐efficacy and affect were examined in 40 Madden? NFL 08 football video game players randomly assigned to two conditions: silence talk, where they played the first game in complete silence; and the second trash talking. Measures of self‐efficacy, positive affect (PA), and negative affect (NA) were administered. Results revealed that players enforced to be silent in the first game instantaneously exhibited lower self‐efficacy, lower PA, and higher NA than players permitted to talk in Game 1. However, players subsequently instructed to remain silent in the second game showed markedly decreased self‐efficacy compared to players permitted to talk in Game 2. Results are interpreted in light of the social‐cognitive‐motivational theory.