Jung's view on myth and post-modern psychology

Post-modern psychology embodies two core themes, the social mind and the narrative self. Whereas the social-mind thesis seems diametrically opposed to Jung's position regarding human nature, the narrative-self thesis is associated with research and theorizing about personal myth and mythmaking in ways that could make contact with Jung's concerns. Jung's view is examined here with particular attention to McAdams' theory of narrative identity. It is suggested that the ostensible differences between Jung and post-modern psychology might reflect divergent interests, rather than necessarily irreconcilable worldviews.     

Conscientiousness, autonomy fit, and development: a longitudinal study

The authors examined employee development and its relationship with Conscientiousness and person-environment fit (in terms of needs and supplies of autonomy). They hypothesized that Conscientiousness would be positively associated with development but only when employees felt that the autonomy supplied by the organization did not fit their needs. In other words, whereas Conscientiousness could supply the dispositional resources for development, misfit was needed to create the need for development. The results supported the authors' predictions. Conscientiousness was positively related to development but only when employees were misfits with respect to autonomy. Employee involvement in development activities was then linked to subsequent fit.     

Infants perceiving and acting on the eyes: tests of an evolutionary hypothesis

It has been hypothesized that an evolutionarily ancient mechanism underlies the ability of human infants to detect and act upon the direction of eye gaze of another human face. However, the evidence from behavioral studies with infants is also consistent with a more domain-general system responsive to the lateral motion of stimuli regardless of whether or not eyes are involved. To address this issue three experiments with 4-month-old infants are reported that utilize a standard face-cueing paradigm. In the first experiment an inverted face was used to investigate whether the motion of the pupils elicits the cueing effect regardless of the surrounding face context. In the second experiment pupil motion and eye gaze direction were opposed, allowing us to assess their relative importance. In a third experiment, a more complex gaze shift sequence allowed us to analyse the importance of beginning with a period of mutual gaze. Overall, the results were consistent with the importance of the perceived direction of motion of pupils. However, to be effective in cueing spatial locations this motion needs to be preceded by a period of direct mutual gaze (eye contact). We suggest that evolution results in information-processing biases that shape and constrain the outcome of individual development to eventually result in adult adaptive specializations.     

A negative order-repetition priming effect: inhibition of order in unattended auditory sequences?

A novel negative priming (NP) effect is reported in which serial recall for a sequence of visually presented digits was poorer if the same sequence was presented as an irrelevant auditory sequence on the previous trial (Experiments 1 and 2). The effect was enhanced when attention was divided between the to-be-repeated auditory sequence and the concurrent to-be-remembered (TBR) sequence (Experiment 3). When the TBR sequences were also presented auditorily, NP arose only when the repeated TBR sequence was in the same voice as the previous irrelevant sequence; a voice mismatch produced positive priming (Experiment 4). The results suggest that the order of auditory events is registered preattentively and that inhibition may be applied to the acoustic transitions between irrelevant events.     

Learning myopia: an adaptive recency effect in category learning

Recency effects (REs) have been well established in memory and probability learning paradigms but have received little attention in category earning research. Extant categorization models predict REs to be unaffected by learning, whereas a functional interpretation of REs, suggested by results in other domains, predicts that people are able to learn sequential dependencies and incorporate this information into their responses. These contrasting predictions were tested in 2 experiments involving a classification task in which outcome sequences were autocorrelated. Experiment 1 showed that reliance on recent outcomes adapts to the structure of the task, in contrast to models' predictions. Experiment 2 provided constraints on how sequential information is learned and suggested possible extensions to current models to account for this learning.     

Gender Differences in Managers' Conceptions and Perceptions of Commitment to the Organization

This study explored the effect of gender on managers' conceptions and perceptions of those behaviors seen as demonstrating commitment to the organization. Three major findings are reported: (1) female managers and male managers with families evaluated traditional commitment behaviors as less indicative of commitment than their single male counterparts; (2) managers' conceptions of behaviors indicative of commitment conformed to the views of the majority gender within their work-group; and (3) managers' perceptions of commitment were not affected by gender-based in-group biases.     

The psychological effects of Hurricane Andrew on ethnic minority and Caucasian children and adolescents: a case study

The impact of Hurricane Andrew on 212 African American, Caucasian, and Hispanic elementary and middle school children was examined at 6 months postdisaster. Using self-report instruments, this case study examined the predictive utility of several hypothesized mediators of children's reactions to disaster. Results showed higher levels of intrusive symptomatology for girls and for elementary school children as compared with their middle school counterparts. No differences were found with reference to race. The lack of findings concerning race is addressed, as well as implications for future studies.     

The ‘redefinition of death’ debate: Western concepts and western bioethics

Biomedicine is a global enterprise constructed upon the belief in the universality of scientific truths. However, despite huge scientific advances over recent decades it has not been able to formulate a specific and universal definition of death: In fact, in its attempt to redefine death, the concept of death appears to have become immersed in ever increasing vagueness and ambiguity. Even more worrisome is that bioethics, in the form of principlism, is also endeavouring to become a global enterprise by claiming neutrality. It appears that the discourse within both disciplines have similarly manipulated the boundaries of death to include the “dying”. This paper argues that the redefinition of death debate in biomedicine reveals a concept of personhood which is profoundly western in origin and which is in accordance to the concept adhered to within principlism. Biomedicine and bioethics do not appear to acknowledge the limitations of their own world view and hence lack an understanding of their applicability and appropriateness in diverse social and cultural contexts; a situation which adds credence to claims as to the hegemonic and imperialistic nature of all such global enterprises. Ms. Jones is an intensive care clinical nursing specialist. Dr. Kessel is a public health physician and medical ethicist.