Framing,Reciprocity and the Grounds of Egalitarian Justice

John Rawls famously claims that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions’. On one of its readings, this remark seems to suggest that social institutions are essential for obligations of justice to arise. The spirit of this interpretation has recently sparked a new debate about the grounds of justice. What are the conditions that generate principles of distributive justice? I am interested in a specific version of this question. What conditions generate egalitarian principles of distributive justice and give rise to equality as a demand of justice? My paper focuses on relationalist answers to this question. Advocates of relationalism assume that ‘principles of distributive justice have a relational basis’, in the sense that ‘practice mediated relations in which individuals stand condition the content, scope and justification of those principles’. To say that principles of justice are ‘based’ on and ‘conditioned’ by practice mediated relations is ambiguous. I will here be concerned with advocates of what I call the relationalist requirement, viz. positions which assume that ‘practice mediated relations’ constitute a necessary existence condition for principles of egalitarian distributive justice. Relationalists who endorse this view come in different varieties. My focus is on relationalists that view social and political institutions as the relevant ‘practice mediated relation’. The question at stake, then, is this: Are institutionally mediated relations a necessary condition for equality to arise as a demand of justice? Strong relationalists of the institutionalist cast, call them advocates of the institutionalist requirement, differ in important respects. They argue about what set of institutions is foundationally significant, and they disagree on why only that institutional relation gives rise to egalitarian obligations of justice. My paper engages two ways of arguing for the institutionalist requirement: Julius’s framing argument and Andrea Sangiovanni’s reciprocity argument. The issue at stake are the grounds of egalitarian justice and I will argue that the institutionalist requirement is mistaken. It is not the case that egalitarian obligations of distributive justice arise only between and solely in virtue of individuals sharing a common institution.     

The “sexually abused child”: Potential mechanisms of adverse influences of such a label

Labeling and the effects of labeling have been extensively researched in the psychological literature in a variety of different contexts. For example, labeling has been empirically shown to lead to lowered expectancies of behavior and achievement, which can then contribute to the potential for the occurrence of a self-fulfilling prophecy with adverse consequences. Another area that has been extensively researched, with a dramatic increase in the literature base in recent history, is that of child sexual abuse (CSA). Despite various shortcomings of the research literature, the consistent findings have been identification of a variety of negative correlates and symptomatologies associated with CSA. In addition to any direct, negative effects of CSA, there may also be an additional impact from the “label” itself. Although the literature pertaining to CSA and labeling runs deep independently, efforts at addressing the issue of CSA within a labeling contextual framework have been minimal. To that end, this article examines hypothesized mechanisms of how the “sexual abuse” label may potentially have an adverse influence on the children subjected to such a label. The implications of an analysis, which addresses childhood sexual abuse from such a theoretical framework, may be a broader and more holistic understanding of the complexities and sequelae associated with CSA.     

Outcomes in clients transitioning from in-person counselling to telehealth counselling with trainees

The onset of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a rapid transition of mental health services from in-person to telehealth counselling. Despite the far-reaching impact of this transition, we know little about the impact of this transition on outcomes for clients working with counsellor trainees. The present study utilised longitudinal data collected from a counselling training centre at a major U.S. university to compare client ratings of depression, anxiety and working alliance across 1) in-person services delivered (i.e. pre-pandemic) and 2) telehealth services delivered after the pandemic began (i.e. intra-pandemic) among the same group of clients. Results support our hypothesis that changes in clients' self-reports would be generally equivalent across in-person and telehealth services. Depression and anxiety symptoms decreased, and working alliance tended to increase during both in-person and telehealth care; however, these trends were only statistically significant during telehealth services. Limitations related to sample size (N = 15 clients; up to 17 sessions per client) and low statistical power are discussed. Nonetheless, this study supports the growing body of literature supporting the efficacy of telehealth counselling services. We provide suggestions for future telehealth research and discuss implications for counsellor training.     

Shifting social identities as a strategy for deflecting threatening social comparisons

Results of three studies suggest that the multifaceted nature of identity provides a strategic basis for reducing the threat involved in upward social comparisons. After performing worse than a comparison standard, people may strategically emphasize aspects of their identity that differentiate them from the standard, thereby making the standard less relevant for self-evaluation. On the basis of previous research showing that persons low in self-esteem are less likely to make effective use of self-protection strategies, we hypothesized that this strategy of deflecting the threat involved in upward comparison (i.e., decreasing perceived comparability by emphasizing an unshared social identity) would be used primarily by persons who are characteristically high in self-esteem. This pattern was confirmed in three studies. Moreover, use of the strategy was associated with relatively more positive affect following threatening upward comparisons.     

Source cuing: Memory for melodies

Source cuing is a source-monitoring process in which the retrieval of a memory trace is aided by the use of a memory probe that includes information that is indicative of the original source. This is in contrast to source discrimination, where people need to retrieve the identity of the source of information. Thus, in source cuing, the source information is given, and in source discrimination, the source information is to be retrieved. The operation of source cuing was demonstrated in two experiments in which people had to identify which of two melodies had been heard earlier. Source cuing was present for information that was more indicative of the source (i.e., timbre), but not for information that was less indicative of the source (i.e., pitch). A third experiment demonstrated that the use of source cuing can be influenced by the retrieval context.     

Sadness and susceptibility to judgmental bias: the case of anchoring

In a wide range of empirical paradigms, sadness has been associated with more extensive and detail-oriented thinking than happiness, resulting in reductions in judgmental bias that arise from reliance on stereotypes and other simple decision heuristics. It was hypothesized that anchoring would constitute a significant exception to this general pattern. Recent research on anchoring indicates that an active thought process underlies the emergence of this bias. If sad people are likely to think more actively about the judgmental anchor than their neutral-mood counterparts, their subsequent judgments should be more likely to be assimilated toward this reference point. This prediction was confirmed in two experiments demonstrating that sad people are indeed more susceptible to anchoring bias than are people in a neutral mood. Moreover, this effect generalized over judgments in positive, neutral, and negative content domains.     

Reproducing affective norms with lexical co-occurrence statistics: Predicting valence,arousal, and dominance

Human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance are frequently used to study the cognitive mechanisms of emotional attention, word recognition, and numerous other phenomena in which emotions are hypothesized to play an important role. Collecting such norms from human raters is expensive and time consuming. As a result, affective norms are available for only a small number of English words, are not available for proper nouns in English, and are sparse in other languages. This paper investigated whether affective ratings can be predicted from length, contextual diversity, co-occurrences with words of known valence, and orthographic similarity to words of known valence, providing an algorithm for estimating affective ratings for larger and different datasets. Our bootstrapped ratings achieved correlations with human ratings on valence, arousal, and dominance that are on par with previously reported correlations across gender, age, education and language boundaries. We release these bootstrapped norms for 23,495 English words.     

Engaged,Committed and Helpful Employees: The Role of Psychological Empowerment

Although previous research has been focused on the relationship among personality, empowerment, and outcomes, little is known about the incremental effect of empowerment on positive work outcomes. This article aims at exploring the relation between personality factors (i.e., extraversion and conscientiousness) and positive work outcomes (i.e., work engagement, affective organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior), and at determining the incremental effect of psychological empowerment on these outcomes. A convenience sample from three organizations has been used for data collection (N = 258; 52% women, mean age 38.55 years, SD = 10.21). Hierarchical multiple regressions indicate that personality and psychological empowerment explain a significant amount of the variance in the positive organizational outcomes, and that psychological empowerment has a significant incremental value over demographics and personality for the studied outcomes.