Naked Subjectivity: Minimal vs. Narrative Selves in Kierkegaard

In recent years a significant debate has arisen as to whether Kierkegaard offers a version of the “narrative approach” to issues of personal identity and self-constitution. In this paper I do not directly take sides in this debate, but consider instead the applicability of a recent development in the broader literature on narrative identity—the distinction between the temporally-extended “narrative self” and the non-extended “minimal self—to Kierkegaard's work. I argue that such a distinction is both necessary for making sense of Kierkegaard's claim that we are ethically enjoined to become selves, and can indeed be found in Either/Or and the later The Sickness Unto Death . Despite Kierkegaard's Non-Substantialism, each of these texts speaks (somewhat obliquely) of a “naked self” that is separable from the concrete facticity of human being. In both cases, this minimal self is linked to issues of eschatological responsibility; yet the two works develop very different understandings of “eternity” and correspondingly divergent accounts of the temporality of selfhood. This complicates the picture of Kierkegaardian selfhood in interesting ways, taking it beyond both narrativist and more standard neo-Lockean models of what it is to be a self.     

Parent–Child Discrepancies in Report of Psychopathology: The Contributions of Response Bias and Parenting Stress

Summary: Two experiments were conducted to examine the relationship between conservatism and openness to experiences. In Study 1, the responses of 64 males and 60 females to the Conservatism Scale and the Coan (1972) Experience inventory were correlated. For the total sample, conservatism was significantly related to the total score of the Experience Inventory plus six of seven of the component scales. Study II examined the relationship between conservatism and the expressed willingness to volunteer for certain psychological experiments that were assumed to require more openness. Subjects were 91 males and 114 females from introductory psychology classes. High conservative subjects were less wiling to volunteer for the experiments that required more openness as compared to low conservative subjects. These results were discussed in the context of volunteer bias in psychological research.     

Reward boosts working memory encoding over a brief temporal window

Selection mechanisms for WM are ordinarily studied by explicitly cueing a subset of memory items. However, we might also expect the reward associations of stimuli we encounter to modulate their probability of being represented in working memory (WM). Theoretical and computational models explicitly predict that reward value should determine which items will be gated into WM. For example, a model by Braver and colleagues in which phasic dopamine signalling gates WM updating predicts a temporally-specific but not item-specific reward-driven boost to encoding. In contrast, Hazy and colleagues invoke reinforcement learning in cortico-striatal loops and predict an item-wise reward-driven encoding bias. Furthermore, a body of prior work has demonstrated that reward-associated items can capture attention, and it has been shown that attentional capture biases WM encoding. We directly investigated the relationship between reward history and WM encoding. In our first experiment, we found an encoding benefit associated with reward-associated items, but the benefit generalized to all items in the memory array. In a second experiment this effect was shown to be highly temporally specific. We speculate that in real-world contexts in which the environment is sampled sequentially with saccades/shifts in attention, this mechanism could effectively mediate an item-wise encoding bias, because encoding boosts would occur when rewarded items were fixated.     

Exploring the relationship between mentoring and counselling

In this article, the author examines the relationship between mentoring and counselling in the context of a mentoring relationship. Drawing on Clutterbuck and Megginson's (1999) Mentoring Executives & Directors, Butterworth-Heinemann, seven roles in mentoring, he explores how career functions of mentoring are incommensurable with psycho-social functions--following Kram's (1983) original terms--with a specific focus on counselling. This analysis raises some problems with the notion of counselling as part of the repertoire of the mentor, with the aim of the article not being to resolve these tensions but, instead, to put them forward as issues worthy of attention, debate and empirical investigation.     

Why do implicit and explicit attitude tests diverge? The role of structural fit

Implicit and explicit attitude tests are often weakly correlated, leading some theorists to conclude that implicit and explicit cognition are independent. Popular implicit and explicit tests, however, differ in many ways beyond implicit and explicit cognition. The authors examined in 4 studies whether correlations between implicit and explicit tests were influenced by the similarity in task demands (i.e., structural fit) and, hence, the processes engaged by each test. Using an affect misattribution procedure, they systematically varied the structural fit of implicit and explicit tests of racial attitudes. As test formats became more similar, the implicit-explicit correlation increased until it became higher than in most previous research. When tests differ in structure, they may underestimate the relationship between implicit and explicit cognition. The authors propose a solution that uses procedures to maximize structural fit.     

Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches

Visual forms of episodic memory and anticipatory imagination involve images that, by virtue of their perspectival organization, imply a “notional subject” of experience. But they contain no inbuilt reference to the “actual subject,” the person actually doing the remembering or imagining. This poses the problem of what (if anything) connects these two perspectival subjects and what differentiates cases of genuine memory and anticipation from mere “imagined seeing.” I consider two approaches to this problem. The first, exemplified by Wollheim and Velleman, claims that genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations are phenomenally “unselfconscious,” with the co-identity of the notional and actual subjects secured by a determinate causal history. The second approach posits some distinctive phenomenal property that attaches to genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations and serves to experientially conflate the notional and actual subject. I consider a version of the second approach, derived from Kierkegaard’s discussions of phenomenal “contemporaneity,” and argue that this approach can better account for the possibility of affective alienation from the selves we were and will be: the way in which our sense of self and awareness of our causal history can sometimes come apart.     

Are there dead persons?

Schechtman’s ‘Person Life View’ (PLV) offers an account of personal identity whereby persons are the unified loci of our practical and ethical judgment. PLV also recognises infants and permanent vegetative state patients as being persons. I argue that the way PLV handles these cases yields an unexpected result: the dead also remain persons, contrary to the widely-accepted ‘Termination Thesis.’ Even more surprisingly, this actually counts in PLV’s favor: in light of our social and ethical practices which treat the dead as moral patients, PLV gives a more plausible account of the status of the dead than its rival theories.