Unending Narrative,One-sided Empathy,and Problematic Contexts of Interaction in David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person”

In 1997, David Foster Wallace published “The Depressed Person,” a short story about a privileged, deeply unhappy woman dedicated to exploring and recounting the texture and etiology of her chronic depression. This essay argues that “The Depressed Person” challenges the long-standing assumption that narrativizing the pain of depression is crucial to overcoming it, and the contemporary view that empathic responses from others promote recovery of the depressed. Taken together, these two critiques inform Wallace’s portrayal of chronic depression as an interactive phenomenon that is articulated, sustained, and regenerated through problematic contexts of interaction. Written at a time when public knowledge of and talk about depression was surging, “The Depressed Person” holds an important, if presently under-recognized place, in the expansive corpus of depression texts that emerged in the 1990s.     

Perceived responsibility for learning,self-efficacy,and sources of self-efficacy in mathematics: a study of international baccalaureate primary years programme students

The purpose of this study was to assess the interrelationship of elementary students’ perceived responsibility for learning, self-efficacy, and sources of self-efficacy in mathematics, and differentiation as a function of gender and grade level. Participants in this study included 442 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students from U.S. International Baccalaureate schools. Self-report measures were used to assess key study variables. Students in grade five reported higher levels of mathematics self-efficacy and perceived responsibility for learning than those in grade three. Grade four students also reported higher levels of perceived responsibility than grade three students. In addition, regression results revealed that mastery experience, vicarious experience, social persuasion, and physiological state accounted for a significant amount of variance in students’ mathematics self-efficacy, with social persuasion being the strongest predictor. Educational implications for practice within the context of International Baccalaureate schools are discussed.     

Einfühlung as the breath of art: six modes of embodiment

Robert Vischer’s concept of Einfühlung, feeling-into, translated as empathy, serves as the departure point for a proposal about viewing art using the body for a non-imitative form of empathy termed a transomatization and for other embodied operations. A transomatization occurs when viewers reinterpret a component or process of their own bodies to serve as a non-imitative stand-in, or correlate, for something outside of the self, specifically, some quality of an art work or its production. This creates an overlap of the self and other that might be experienced subjectively as a feeling of projection, an operation characteristic of empathy. Transomatizations and other embodied experiences are grounded in empathic, intersubjective modes of engaging others that begin in early life. As applications of the proposed concepts, six different embodiments of the viewer’s breathing are explored in regard to Friedrich E. Church’s 1848 oil painting Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains. Support for elements of the proposed concepts and applications is drawn from research in the biological and social sciences and from first person, embodied accounts of viewing.