Deliberate self-harm in 14-year-old adolescents: how frequent is it, and how is it associated with psychopathology, relationship variables, and styles of emotional regulation?

Deliberate self-harm was studied in 14-year-old adolescents from four schools in southern Sweden with a test-retest design, using a nine-item version of the Deliberate Self-Harm Inventory. At Time 1, 40.2% of the adolescents indicated deliberate self-harm on at least one occasion compared with 36.5% at Time 2. Test-retest data showed high stability over periods of up to 2 months in duration. Cross-validation of the results from Time 1 to Time 2 showed robust correlations between deliberate self-harm and general psychopathology, a relative absence of positive feelings toward parents, and a ruminative style of emotional regulation. Further, rumination/negative thinking and a relative absence of positive feelings toward parents were predictors of self-harm independently of general psychopathology. In addition, deliberate self-harm correlated with symptoms of eating disorder and negative body esteem in girls.     

Educating the Senses: Explorations in Aesthetics,Embodiment and Sensory Pedagogy

Studies in Philosophy and Education - This volume takes two different, albeit intertwined approaches. The first concerns a reformulation of aesthetics in education—one which highlights the...     

On the logic of adverbs

In the paper I investigate aspects of adverbial modification as an operation applying an adverb or adverbial phrase to a predicate and thereby creating a new predicate. The logic of adverbial modification, on this view, belongs to the logic of predicate modifiers. The theory I present is intended to cover not only adverbial modification but also attributive modification, but problems concerning the latter will not be given any special attention.     

Analysing trends in subjective well-being in 15 European countries, 1973–2002

Previous empirical research has been unable to find a sufficient correlation between subjective well-being and per capita income, being hampered by limited longitudinal information and an inability to account for the predictions of competing theories. We bring new evidence to this question by exploiting a long and complete time-series from the Eurobarometer Survey, 1973–2002 allowing an examination of trends in life satisfaction across 15 European countries employing a modified version of Kendall’s Tau. Our results show that while current GDP growth does not affect trends in well-being, accelerations in GDP growth do. In addition, faster GDP growth and faster growth of government consumption than in neighbouring countries induces positive trends in life satisfaction. Our findings are consistent with the predictions of aspirations theory and the theory of reference group comparisons.     

What's in a (neutral) face? Personality disorders, attachment styles, and the appraisal of ambiguous social cues

Attachment theory suggests that borderline, avoidant, and schizoid personality disorders are differentially associated with anxious and avoidant attachment styles. The variations of insecure attachment in these disorders, in turn, might influence how others are perceived or appraised. To test these ideas, 176 college students completed questionnaires measuring attachment styles and personality disorder features, and each rated 10 emotionally neutral faces on 18 bipolar appraisal dimensions. As expected, borderline personality was associated with anxious attachment, avoidant personality was associated with anxious and avoidant attachment, and schizoid personality was weakly associated only with avoidant attachment. Furthermore, path analyses showed that borderline and avoidant personality features were associated with anxious attachment, which in turn related to negative face appraisals (e.g., tendencies to rate faces as less friendly and more rejecting). Discussion highlights the potential of simultaneously studying biases in social information processing and attachment disturbances among individuals with personality disorders.     

Over-Determined Harms and Harmless Pluralities

A popular strategy for meeting over-determination and pre-emption challenges to the comparative counterfactual conception of harm is Derek Parfit’s suggestion, more recently defended by Neil Feit, that a plurality of events harms A if and only if that plurality is the smallest plurality of events such that, if none of them had occurred, A would have been better off. This analysis of ‘harm’ rests on a simple but natural mistake about the relevant counterfactual comparison. Pluralities fulfilling these conditions make no difference to the worse for anyone in the over-determination cases that prompted the need for revising the comparative conception of harm to begin with. We may choose to call them harmful anyway, but then we must abandon the idea that making a difference to the worse for someone is essential to harming. I argue that we should hold on to the difference-making criterion and give up the plural harm principle. I offer an explanation of why Parfit’s and Feit’s plural harm approach seems attractive. Finally, I argue that the consequences of giving up the plural harm principle and holding on to the simple comparative counterfactual analysis of harm are less radical than we may think, in relation to questions about wrongness and responsibility.     

Ordinary experience and the epoché: Husserl and Heidegger versus Rosen (and Cavell)

In various publications, Stanley Cavell and Stanley Rosen have emphasized the philosophical importance of what they both call “the ordinary.” They both contrast their recovery of “the ordinary” with traditional philosophy, including the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl. In this paper, I address Rosen’s claims in particular. I argue that Rosen turns the real situation on its head. Contra Rosen, it is not the case that the employment of Husserl’s epoché distorts the authentic voice of “the” ordinary—a voice that is clearly audible only from within everyday life. For (pace both Cavell and Rosen) there is no single “voice” of the ordinary: There are many such “voices,” not all of which are to be relied upon. Therefore, if we want to achieve an adequate grasp of ordinary experience, and Rosen does want this, we precisely need the epoché to curtail the misleading messages of certain other “voices of the ordinary.” Moreover, and somewhat surprisingly, this positive evaluation of the Husserlian epoché finds support in Heidegger’s writings from the twenties. I argue that Heidegger, too, believed that the epoché was an indispensable tool for the philosophical attempt to capture ordinary experience.     

Auditory verbal hallucinations: Dialoguing between the cognitive sciences and phenomenology

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are a highly complex and rich phenomena, and this has a number of important clinical, theoretical and methodological implications. However, until recently, this fact has not always been incorporated into the experimental designs and theoretical paradigms used by researchers within the cognitive sciences. In this paper, we will briefly outline two recent examples of phenomenologically informed approaches to the study of AVHs taken from a cognitive science perspective. In the first example, based on Larøi and Woodward (Harv Rev Psychiatry 15:109–117, 2007), it is argued that reality monitoring studies examining the cognitive underpinnings of hallucinations have not reflected the phenomenological complexity of AVHs in their experimental designs and theoretical framework. The second example, based on Jones (Schizophr Bull, in press, 2010), involves a critical examination of the phenomenology of AVHs in the context of two other prominent cognitive models: inner speech and intrusions from memory. It will be shown that, for both examples, the integration of a phenomenological analysis provides important improvements both on a methodological, theoretical and clinical level. This will be followed by insights and critiques from philosophy and clinical psychiatry—both of which offer a phenomenological alternative to the empiricist–rationalist conceptualisation of AVHs inherent to the cognitive sciences approach. Finally, the paper will conclude with ideas as to how the cognitive sciences may integrate these latter perspectives into their methodological and theoretical programmes.     

(Neuro)predictions,Dangerousness, and Retributivism

Through the criminal justice system so-called dangerous offenders are, besides the offence that they are being convicted of and sentenced to, also punished for acts that they have not done but that they are believe to be likely to commit in the future. The aim of this paper is to critically discuss whether some adherents of retributivism give a plausible rationale for punishing offenders more harshly if they, all else being equal, by means of predictions are believed to be more dangerous than other offenders. While consequentialism has no problem, at least in principle, with this use of predictions most retributivists have been opponents of punishing offenders on the basis of predictions. How can an offender deserve to be punished for something that he has not done? But some retributivists like Anthony Duff and Stephen Morse have argued in favor of punishing offenders who are considered to be dangerous in the future more harshly than non-dangerous offenders. After having reconstructed their arguments in detail, it will be argued that both Duff’s and Morse’s attempts to give a retributivistic justification have several shortcomings.