Tales of Plagues and Carnivals: Samuel R. Delany, AIDS, and the Grammar of Dissent

While even today lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people might have cause to distrust the healthcare establishment, how much more fragile was the relationship between sexual minorities and health professionals in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. Dissent from consensus healthcare and health research then was a question of survival in the face of political and medical intransigence. This article focuses on one version of AIDS dissent: The narrative representations of AIDS in fiction by the gay African-American fantasy writer Samuel R. Delany, which rejected the rigid binarism of “safe” and “unsafe” sex practices, Delany’s evidence-based dissent. He also engaged in a related form of cultural dissent: speaking the unspeakably obscene, at a time when Silence?=?Death. Delany called into question both the inferential leaps based on limited epidemiological research that were represented in safer sex guidelines and the widespread public reticence about sexual behavior.     

Implicit volition and stereotype control

Goals are mental representations that vary in accessibility and operate within goal systems. The implicit nature of goal activation and pursuit is shown here to make goals effective not merely at overturning the influence of an activated stereotype on how people respond to members of stereotyped groups, but effective at implicitly controlling the activation of stereotypes in the first place. In a set of experiments examining chronic egalitarian goals, faces and names of members of stereotyped groups presented as target stimuli led to the inhibition of stereotypes, as well as to the heightened accessibility of egalitarian goals. A separate set of experiments illustrate a similar ability of individuals to control stereotype activation when egalitarian goals are temporarily triggered within a context, rather than being chronically held. Goals that require one to inhibit stereotypic associations to a target can lead to the intended, yet implicit, control of stereotype activation, even when one is not aware the goal is active or being pursued or being regulated.     

Tanya and the Adaptive Dialectic of Romantic Passion and Secure Attachment

My analytic work with Tanya illustrated one unique, heightened, individual version of a pervasive human conflict: the way in which erotic passion can be experienced as inherently conflicting with other relational bonds and broader values. In virtually every culture throughout human history, we find expressions of this tension between passionate Eros and other forms of love.

My clinical approach entails an openness to multiple analytic perspectives, including Mitchell's posthumous views in Can Love Last. In addition, I make use of a sensibility informed by evolutionary biology as a vantage point for understanding the individual struggle of patients like Tanya, as well as illuminating some of the larger issues about Eros and attachment. I suggest that romantic aspects of Eros may have evolved as part of a complex psychological system designed to deal with specifically human existential vulnerabilities and anxieties, as well as a way of challenging the inherent human tendency to over-accommodate to the subjective world of the other.     

Are Past Normative Behaviors Predictive of Future Behavioral Intentions?

We acknowledge the limitations in measures of moral reasoning and pursue an alternative technique by investigating past behaviors as they relate to present behavioral intentions. Our purpose is to evaluate the merits of patterned normative behavior for predicting present and future, morally relevant outcomes. Participants (N = 177) completed a policy capturing experimental design responding to questions that orthogonally varied the situational nature of the decision context. Results indicate that past normative behaviors are significantly and directly related to ethical behavioral intentions. Moreover, they moderate the relationships between situational factors and intended outcomes as well as moral reasoning and intended outcomes.     

Predictable and self-initiated visual motion is judged to be slower than computer generated motion

Self-initiated action effects are often perceived as less intense than identical but externally generated stimuli. It is thought that forward models within the sensorimotor system pre-activate cortical representations of predicted action effects, reducing perceptual sensitivity and attenuating neural responses. As self-agency and predictability are seldom manipulated simultaneously in behavioral experiments, it is unclear if self-other differences depend on predictable action effect contingencies, or if both self- and externally generated stimuli are modulated similarly by predictability. We factorially combined variation in (1) predictability of action effects, (2) spatial congruence, and (3) performance by the self or computer to dissociate these influences on a visual discrimination task. Participants performed 2AFC speed judgments. Self-initiated motion was judged to be slower than computer-initiated motion when action effect contingencies were predictable, while spatial congruence influenced speed judgments only when action effect contingencies were unpredictable. Results are discussed in relation to current theories of sensory attenuation.