The politics of time: Conservatives differentially reference the past and liberals differentially reference the future

Conservatives are thought to favor certainty and value tradition (suggesting a focus on the past), whereas liberals are thought to favor change (suggesting a focus on the future), even when it is associated with some degree of uncertainty. On this basis, two studies contrasted references to the past versus the future in language usage. Study 1 analyzed 600 texts from conservative and liberal websites. After adjusting for normative differences, a cross‐over interaction was obtained: Conservative posts referenced the past to a greater extent than the future and liberal posts referenced the future more than the past. A conceptually parallel cross‐over interaction was obtained in Study 2, which analyzed 145 State of the Union addresses. The temporal orientation of conservatives and liberals, then, appears qualitatively different.     

Organizational Structure,Context, and Climate: Their Relationships to Job Satisfaction at Three Managerial Levels

Managers from 120 organizations (183 men and 27 women) from four major Canadian urban centers were surveyed about their job satisfaction. Seven aspects of job satisfaction were evaluated: satisfaction with the firm, pay, promotional opportunities, the job itself, other managers at the same level, immediate supervisor, and subordinates. Overall, managers at the highest level reported the most job satisfaction. For presidents, satisfaction was related to the organization's structure and context, as well as to its climate, whereas for middle managers and vice presidents, job satisfaction was related more frequently to the organization's climate and less frequently to its structure and context.     

Successes and failures in resisting cigarettes affect partner support for smoking cessation

Objective: Potential support providers may rely on observable behaviours (e.g. resisting a cigarette vs. smoking) to determine how much and what kind of support to provide. We evaluated the effect of smokers’ salient behaviour on partners’ likelihood of providing positive and negative support.

Design: Partners of smokers (N = 131) were randomly assigned to recall a time when their partner either successfully resisted a cigarette, failed to resist a cigarette or a control condition (no recall). All participants reported the likelihood of providing positive and negative support to their partner. Perceived commitment to quitting smoking was measured as a potential mediator.

Main Outcome Measures: The main outcome was intention to provide support for a quit attempt.

Results: Participants who recalled their partners’ past failures reported more intentions to engage in negative support and smaller ratios of positive to negative intended support than did participants in the success or control condition. These effects were partially mediated by perception of commitment to quitting.

Conclusion: Lapses in a quit attempt may change the nature of the support quitters receive. Interventions to improve communication between partners about the smoker’s commitment to quitting and experienced challenges may result in better support.     

Rascals,triflers, and pragmatists: developing a Peircean account of assertion*

While the topic of assertion has recently received a fresh wave of interest from Peirce scholars, to this point no systematic account of Peirce’s view of assertion has been attempted. We think that this is a lacuna that ought to be filled. Doing so will help make better sense of Peirce’s pragmatism; further, what is hidden amongst various fragments is a robust pragmatist theory of assertion with unique characteristics that may have significant contemporary value. Here we aim to uncover this theory, and to show that assertion for Peirce is not a mere corollary of pragmatic conceptions of truth, judgement, and belief, but is rather a central aspect of his philosophy.     

Role of the primary somatosensory cortex in motor learning: An rTMS study

Somatosensation is thought to play an important role in skilled motor learning. The present study investigated how healthy adults learn a continuous implicit motor task when somatosensation is altered by 1 Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) delivered over the primary somatosensory cortex (S1). Twenty-seven right-handed participants enrolled in a two-part experiment. In Experiment 1, we verified that 20 min of 1 Hz rTMS over S1 disrupted cutaneous somatosensation (indexed by two-point discrimination) in the wrist/hand; the impact of 1 Hz rTMS on wrist proprioception (tested by limb-position matching) was variable. Sham rTMS had no effect on either measure. We exploited these effects in Experiment 2 by pairing either 1 Hz or sham rTMS with practice of a continuous tracking task over two separate sessions on different days. Implicit motor learning was indexed on a third, separate retention test day when no rTMS was delivered. Across practice in Experiment 2, both the 1 Hz and sham rTMS groups showed improved tracking performance; however, 1 Hz rTMS was associated with less accurate tracking and smaller improvements in performance. Importantly, at the no rTMS retention test the effects of altering sensation with stimulation over S1 were still evident in the persistently less accurate tracking behavior of the 1 Hz rTMS group. The current study shows that disruption of somatosensation during task practice impairs the magnitude of change associated with motor learning, perhaps through the development of an inaccurate internal model.     

Resisting Gendered Smoking Pressures: Critical Consciousness as a Correlate of Women's Smoking Status

Gender is one of the social structures, along with social class and ethnicity, that shapes women's smoking behaviors. We examined how different responses to gender pressures (internalization and resistance) relate to smoking. We analyzed data from a national random digit dial survey of 945 women and found that never smokers scored high on resistance to gender pressure (indicated by high scores on feminist consciousness) and on education and Body Mass Index; current smokers had the reverse pattern. Ex-smokers scored high on one measure of resistance (advertising skepticism) and on two measures of internalization (embodied femininity and weight concern); they were also likely to have high household income and to be European American. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for smoking cessation programs and antismoking campaigns.     

The big two dictionaries: Capturing agency and communion in natural language

Four studies developed and validated two dictionaries to capture agentic and communal expressions in natural language. Their development followed the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) approach (Study 1) and we tested their validity with frequency-based analyses and semantic similarity measures. The newly developed Agency and Communion dictionaries were aligned with LIWC categories related to agency and communion (Study 2), and corresponded with subjective ratings (Study 3), confirming their convergent validity. Very low or absent correspondence between proposed dictionaries and unrelated LIWC categories demonstrated their discriminant validity (Study 2). Finally, we applied both dictionaries to language used in advertisements. In correspondence to gender stereotypes, male-dominated jobs were advertised with more agentic than communal words, and female-dominated jobs with more communal than agentic words (Study 4). Both dictionaries represent reliable tools for quantifying agentic and communal content in natural language, and will improve and facilitate future research on agency and communion.     

Parenting and adolescent well-being in two European countries

The main and interactive effects of parental behavioral control and parental support on adolescent adjustment were examined with students ages 15-19 in Italy (N = 391, 59.1% male) and The Netherlands (N = 373, 45.3% male). In general, parental support was associated with better adjustment and parental control was associated with worse adjustment. However, parental control as well as age and sex moderated the effects of parental support on psychological discomfort and expectations of future success. Positive self-perceptions were less well predicted. Further, there were more moderated effects in the Dutch sample than in the Italian sample. Generalizability of the contributions of parenting behavior to adolescent adjustment outside of a North American context is discussed.     

Pastoral Conversation: Relational Listening and Open-Ended Questions

This article suggests that the most important thing a pastoral counselor does is to listen carefully to the client. It emphasizes the will to listen and a more relational understanding of listening as a natural outcome of the evolutionary history of psychotherapy. It highlights the importance of the work of Goolishian and Anderson (1992) and Anderson (1997) for this more relational view of therapeutic conversation. The article further suggests that one of the implications of a new conception of listening is an innovative understanding of open-ended questions for facilitating an inherently creative therapy conversation more than information gathering.     

论自主性与公正之间的张力--一试管受精案例引起的伦理困境

高科技医疗技术,如试管受精技术在医疗实践中往往引发伦理原则之间的冲突.通过对英国一试管受精案例的分析,展示自主性原则与公正原则之间存在的深层张力.在对两个基本范畴作哲学解析的基础上,寻找两个基本原则的契合点,为解决类似的伦理困境提供一奈可能的途径.