Book Reviews

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Blatant benevolence and conspicuous consumption: when romantic motives elicit strategic costly signals

Conspicuous displays of consumption and benevolence might serve as "costly signals" of desirable mate qualities. If so, they should vary strategically with manipulations of mating-related motives. The authors examined this possibility in 4 experiments. Inducing mating goals in men increased their willingness to spend on conspicuous luxuries but not on basic necessities. In women, mating goals boosted public--but not private--helping. Although mating motivation did not generally inspire helping in men, it did induce more helpfulness in contexts in which they could display heroism or dominance. Conversely, although mating motivation did not lead women to conspicuously consume, it did lead women to spend more publicly on helpful causes. Overall, romantic motives seem to produce highly strategic and sex-specific self-presentations best understood within a costly signaling framework.     

In the Shadow Side of Hope: Charisma and Mutuality in the Pastoral Care of Men with Tendencies Toward Affective Disturbance

This paper explores dialectical relationships between affective mental disturbance and religious development in men. It then proposes a form of pastoral engagement—the mutual encounter—with men so afflicted. In care giving, the pastor may draw on his or her own charismatic endowment to solicit the recognition of the same within the care seeker, all the while respecting a man’s attenuating psychosocial need for communicative boundaries and privacy. Both pastor and care seeker may engage the care process as a mutual, continuing, and dialogic quest for authentic Christian relationship, charisma, and selfhood where each serves as “guide” and “messenger.”

Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation Difficulties in Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Preliminary Evidence for Independent and Overlapping Contributions

Diminished levels of mindfulness (awareness and acceptance/nonjudgment) and difficulties in emotion regulation have both been proposed to play a role in symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD); the current studies investigated these relationships in nonclinical and clinical samples. In the first study, among a sample of 395 individuals at an urban commuter campus, self-reports of both emotion regulation difficulties and aspects of mindfulness accounted for unique variance in GAD symptom severity, above and beyond variance shared with depressive and anxious symptoms, as well as variance shared with one another. In the second study, individuals with GAD (n = 16) reported significantly lower levels of mindfulness and significantly higher levels of difficulties in emotion regulation than individuals in a nonanxious control group (n = 16). Results are discussed in terms of directions for future research and potential implications for treatment development.     

Integer programs for one- and two-mode blockmodeling based on prespecified image matrices for structural and regular equivalence

Establishing blockmodels for one- and two-mode binary network matrices has typically been accomplished using multiple restarts of heuristic algorithms that minimize functions of inconsistency with an ideal block structure. Although these algorithms likely yield exceptional performance, they are not assured to provide blockmodels that optimize the functional indices. In this paper, we present integer programming models that, for a prespecified image matrix, can produce guaranteed optimal solutions for matrices of nontrivial size. Accordingly, analysts performing a confirmatory analysis of a prespecified blockmodel structure can apply our models directly to obtain an optimal solution. In exploratory cases where a blockmodel structure is not prespecified, we recommend a two-stage procedure, where a heuristic method is first used to identify an image matrix and the integer program is subsequently formulated and solved to identify the optimal solution for that image matrix. Although best suited for ideal block structures associated with structural equivalence, the integer programming models have the flexibility to accommodate functional indices pertaining to regular equivalence. Computational results are reported for a variety of one- and two-mode matrices from the blockmodeling literature.     

Breaking the Fourth Wall and Sex Role Stereotypes: An Examination of the 2006–2007 Prime-Time Season

Characters break the fourth wall on television when they speak directly to the camera. Using a stratified random sample of one episode of every situation comedy, drama, and reality program airing on the five broadcast networks in the United States (N?=?113) during the 2006–2007 prime-time season, we found that, overall, male characters broke the fourth wall more frequently than females. However, when a program employed at least one woman in a powerful behind-the-scenes position, female characters broke the fourth wall more than males. Also, male characters breaking the fourth wall were more likely to make personal comments about themselves and others, whereas female characters talked about competitive strategy and competition.