Joseph Margolis on Pragmatism

This paper begins with a memoir of the author’s interactions with Joseph Margolis that delineates both Margolis’s importance as a teacher and their disagreements on aspects of American philosophy. It then turns to Margolis’s discussions of pragmatism as a philosophical movement, with an emphasis on his understanding of John Dewey. The paper considers, third, Margolis’s account of the decline and rebirth of pragmatism, the latter process attributed largely to the work of Richard Rorty. The paper concludes with an examination of what it sees as Margolis’s most valuable work: his explorations of the nature of the self and of human society.     

Borderline personality disorder,complex trauma,and problems with self and identity: A social-communicative approach

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a relatively highly prevalent psychiatric disorder that is associated with very high personal and socioeconomic costs. This paper provides a state-of-the-art review of the relationship between complex trauma and key features of BPD, with a focus on problems with self-coherence and self-continuity. We first review evidence for the high prevalence of complex trauma in BPD patients. This is followed by a discussion of emerging knowledge concerning the biobehavioral mechanisms involved in problems related to self and identity in BPD. We emphasize three biobehavioral systems that are affected by complex trauma and are centrally implicated in identify diffusion in BPD: the attachment system, mentalizing or social cognition, and the capacity for epistemic trust—that is, an openness to the reception of social communication that is personally relevant and of generalizable significance. We formulate a new approach to personality and severe personality disorders, and to problems with self and identity in these disorders, rooted in a social-communicative understanding of the foundations of selfhood. We also discuss how extant evidence-based treatments address the above-mentioned biobehavioral systems involved in identity diffusion in BPD and related disorders, and the supporting evidence. We close the paper with recommendations for future research.     

Relationship science and the credibility revolution: An introduction to the first part of the special issue

In the past 10 years, the field of relationship science—like many other fields—has been exposed to dramatic changes in how scientists approach the research process. Relationship science has been at the forefront of many recent changes in the field, whether it be high profile replication attempts or broader discussions about how to increase rigor and reproducibility. A major goal of this special issue was to provide an opportunity for relationship scientists to engage with these issues and reforms. The first four articles in this special issue represent a sampling of different approaches relationship researchers have used to enhance the credibility of their work.     

Taxonomies of aggressive behavior: A preliminary report

It has been widely and regularly suggested that aggression is not a unitary concept but rather an omnibus term concealing important and distinct subclasses of behavior. Psychologists have offered various categorical schemes highlighting motivation and form as distinguishing criteria. Many writers have also noted the social relativity of dermitions of classes of aggression and called for a consideration of lay conceptions of aggressive behavior. The present paper explores the correspondence between psychologists' and laypersons' categorizations of aggressive acts. Ten short scenarios of aggression were generated to embody systematic permutations of form and motive as suggested by the published work of social psychologists. Subjects rated every pairwise combination in terms of perceived similarity. The data were subjected to three-factor, multidimensional scaling. The resulting structure indicated that subjects' ratings were not random and reflected consideration of motive (hostile, normative, instrumental, status) and of direct versus indirect form. The data were thus in close correspondence with the classifications generated by psychologists. The desirability of refining this technique and extending it to other cultural and subcultural groups is discussed.     

Development of knowledge bases and the reliability of a decision support system for behavioral treatment consultation for persons with mental retardation: The Mental Retardation-Expert

The development of expert and decision support systems requires the collection, organization, codification, and storage of a body of specialized knowledge. The development, using reconstructive methods, of two such knowledge bases, the first containing the current scientific literature and the second containing an expert’s knowledge, is described for an automated decision support system, the Mental Retardation-Expert. This system provides practitioners with assistance in the treatment of aggressive, self-injurious, and destructive behaviors displayed by individuals with mental retardation or developmental disabilities. The average interobserver reliability of the expert knowledge base ranged from 92.5% to 95.0% when calculated across four clinicians’ assessments of 31 abstracted cases.     

Defensive reactions of “wild-type” and “Domesticated” wild rats to approach and contact by a threat stimulus

Selective breeding of wild rats over many generations on the basis of low or high defensive threat and attack to human approach and contact has produced highly polarized “domesticated” and “wild-type” animals. Because the selection procedure selectively involves these two defense patterns, and these clearly differ in the two groups, it is of interest to determine if other, nonselected, defensive behaviors to threat stimuli also change. “Domesticated” and “wild-type” rats of the thirty-fifth generation were run in a fear defense test battery (F/DTB) to systematically evaluate defensive behaviors to a variety of present threat stimuli. “Domesticated” rats showed reduced avoidance and slower flight speed to an approaching experimenter, reduced jump/startle response to handelap and dorsal contact, less vocalization and boxing to vibrissae stimulation or to an anesthetized conspecific, and reduced defensiveness to an attempted pickup by the experimenter. These results indicate that selective bi-directional breeding for defensive threat and attack to human approach and contact produces group differences in a variety of defensive behaviors, and in defensiveness to stimuli other than those on which the selection was based. © 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Navigating Comics II: Constraints on the Reading Order of Comic Page Layouts

Although readers typically believe that comic page layouts should be read following the left to right and down ‘Z‐path’ inherited from written language, several spatial arrangements can push readers to deviate from this order. These manipulations include separating panels from each other, overlapping one panel onto another, and using a long vertical panel to the right of a vertical column to ‘block’ a horizontal row. We asked participants to order empty panels in comic page layouts that manipulated these factors. All manipulations caused participants to deviate from the conventional Z‐path, and this departure was modulated by incremental changes to spatial arrangements: The more layouts deviated from a grid, the less likely participants were to use the Z‐path. Overall, these results reinforce that various constraints push comic readers to engage with panels in predictable ways, even when deviating from the traditional Z‐path of written language. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

More about brows: how poses that change brow position affect perceptions of gender

The speeded categorisation of gender from photographs of men's and women's faces under conditions of vertical brow and vertical head movement was explored in two sets of experiments. These studies were guided by the suggestion that a simple cue to gender in faces, the vertical distance between the eyelid and brow, could support such decisions. In men this distance is smaller than in women, and can be further reduced by lowering the brows and also by lowering the head and raising the eyes to camera. How does the gender-classification mechanism take changes in pose into account? Male faces with lowered brows (experiment 1) were more quickly and accurately categorised (there was little corresponding 'feminisation' of raised-brow faces). Lowering gaze had a similar effect, but failed to interact with head lowering in a simple manner (experiment 2). We conclude that the initial classification of gender from the facial image may not involve normalisation of the face image to a canonical state (the 'mug-shot view') for expressive pose (brow movement and direction of gaze). For head pose (relative position of the features when the face is not viewed head-on), normalisation cannot be ruled out. Some perceptual mechanisms for these effects, and their functional implications, are discussed.