The Most Important Election of Our Lifetime: Focalism and Political Participation

This article argues that a psychological bias called “focalism” contributes to an overestimation of the differences between political candidates, which in turn increases participation and polarization. Focalism causes people to confuse the allocation of attention to things with the importance of those things. Because attention to politics typically centers on conflict, the result is an exaggeration of differences across the partisan divide. I test this intuition using an experimental design that provides all respondents with all the information they need to estimate how much Joe Biden and Donald Trump objectively disagreed on policy positions just before the 2020 election. I find that shifting attention—toward either those positions the candidates agreed or disagreed with each other on—influences beliefs about the differences between candidates. The effect exceeds that of identifying as a Democrat or as a Republican. Beyond those perceptions, focalism increases turnout intentions, perceptions of election importance, negative feelings towards the out-candidate, and affective polarization.     

Getting interested in interests for employee selection: Key concerns and areas for future research

The paper by Wille and De Fruyt suggests that vocational interests should be used throughout the human resources cycle and provides a useful model that can facilitate the application of interests throughout this process. This commentary builds on their review to discuss the unique benefits and challenges of implementing vocational interests in the employee selection process. Using research from the employee selection literature, we also discuss potential solutions for many of the issues raised by Wille and De Fruyt. Therefore, our commentary is meant to supplement the focal article and answer specific questions about why and how vocational interests can be used in this high-stakes setting.     

Eco-restrictive experiences forming extraordinary consumer experiences

This article contributes to different research traditions when proposes to reflect on theoretical fields, such as consumer culture and contemporary marketing. The study in a tourist and ecological conservation project revealed eco-restricted extraordinary experiences. We found a group of volunteers that build meanings and practices connected with new actions and habits that offer, not only ecological and sustainable benefits, but new value consumption relations. In contextualizing our findings, we highlight experiences and curiosities that are glossed over in academic and practical accounts that celebrate the extraordinary experience. It was observed, by analyzing data from various qualitative techniques, that the findings cross borders of mundane ingrained practices and bring an emerging domain, where both, consumption and anti-consumption experiences, offer insights into to a diversity of areas of knowledge.     

Direct quantitative judgments of sums and a two-stage model for psychophysical judgments

Judged magnitudes of differences between stimuli have previously been shown to support a two-stage interpretation of magnitude estimation, in which input transformations and output transformations are each describable as power functions. In an effort to provide support for the model independent of the difference estimation procedure. the present investigation employed two additional judgment tasks. We obtained magnitude judgments and category judgments of the combined magnitudes (sums) of paired weights from two groups of Ss. Values of the inferred input exponent k calculated from the two sets of data were very similar and were also remarkably similar to the exponent previously calculated from magnitude estimations of differences between weights. The output exponent calculated from magnitude judgments of sums described a concave upward function; however. the similar function describing category judgments was essentially linear. These results show that the inferred input exponent is not the result of the difference estimation task, and in addition provides support for the contention that the interval scale may be a less biased sensory measure than the magnitude scale. The introduction of an additive constant to the model improved its fit to the data but the rule by which it was introduced made very little difference.     

Murder in the family: An analysis of two Poe short stories

Learning to be possessed has been described elsewhere by the writer as a form of pathogenic relating begun when children are taught by adults that they will receive a lesser penalty for misbehavior if they can show they were not responsible, such as if it were caused by an evil agent or the Devil. It was suggested that learning to be possessed can be an underlying cause of psychopathology, the delusion of persecution in particular. Two short stories by the distinguished American writer Edgar Allan Poe are examined to develop the formulation of learning to be possessed, especially when it has passed to a delusion of persecution. Two propositions are offered: (1) Where it appears that a family member is murdered by a delusional assailant by accident, it is not an accident; and (2) the delusion of persecution entails a memory loss so that the murderer not only can claim lack of personal responsibility for the act, but also spares himself the guilt of having broken a fundamental taboo. Further comparison is made between learning to be possessed as a cause of delusion, and the psychoanalytic theory in which the defense mechanism of projection is central. In the latter theory, interpretation of the delusion is critical; whereas in the former, interpretation is counterproductive because it merely reinforces the delusion.Probably a note of appreciation is due the writer's daughter Cary, who at age 14 is an expert at badgering her father for help with homework assignments. For several weeks the writer was alternatively pestered and cajoled to help Cary with her Poe Project for high school English which required an essay analyzing the work of a great American writer denigrated by the author as weird by his recollection formed decades earlier. Cary's persistence required the author to consider Poe anew, to recognize his unwarranted earlier prejudice, and to recognize that Poe offered him a gift of understanding regarding a topic about which the author had been thinking for several years, namely that form of pathogenic relating named learning to be possessed.     

Improvisational therapy: Evolving one's own clinical style

This article offers an invitation to develop one's own unique clinical style, relying less on institutionalized schools of therapy and more on the therapist's own natural resources. An emphasis is placed upon understanding therapy as art, trusting one's imagination, and maintaining a healthy irreverence for professional politics.     

Family coping strategies and the rural Appalachian working poor

Naturalistic research methods were used in this study to collect the voices, ideas, and opinions of rural, working poor, Appalachian families from Southeast Ohio about the stress of poverty in family life and family coping in the face of poverty. This data should be of interest to the professional family therapist who practices with the working poor.     

Live supervision in the postmodern era of family therapy: Issues,reflections, and questions

This article asserts that the family therapy field is approaching an epistemological shift from structuralism and positivism to postmodernism and relativism. The confluence of these movements: feminism, constructivism/constructionism, and cultural relativism is cited as a major impetus for the shift. Live supervision is examined within the context of this transformation, with a discussion of implications for the future.