Growing Up in Conflict: The Personal and the Political

This article is an autobiographical account of conflicts, both personal and political, that I experienced growing up in South Africa in a context of racism and civil conflict. It speaks to how these conflicts shaped my work as an analyst and as a person. In regard to specific issues that were fore-fronted, these included an interest in the ugly emotions, trauma and dissociation in both victims and perpetrators, the application of psychoanalysis in war zones, the issue of voice, the effects of emigration and the diaspora, the centrality of context, and the dynamics of racism.     

Alienation and Therapy in Existentialism: A Dual Model of Recognition

Many philosopers and social theorists pursue the notion that recognition is a fruitful framework for engaging with a social analysis of moral and political life, and – more critically – that the failure of recognition is a feature of alienation. This article argues that the thrust of these arguments can be properly attuned by deploying a dual model of recognition that draws especially on Sartre’s work. Where there is struggle for recognition between subjects, the object of struggle is not the recognition of identity, or even of difference, but the recognition of non-identity. The claim will be that this practical attitude of recognition designates inter-subjective attitudes that can institute normative practices whereby agents’ claims are motivated by the epistemic virtue of non-identity.     

Everyday rhetoric: Argument and persuasion in everyday life

While the study of rhetoric in the humanities has an impressive pedigree, rhetorical analysis in organization studies is rather less developed. In this article, I want to provide an introduction to rhetorical analysis, drawing particularly on the work of Billig (1996) and Potter (1996), and illustrate its application to organizational issues through a case example concerning technological change in a public sector organization. In doing this, I demonstrate how alternative approaches to traditional positivism may augment the explanatory power of research in work and organizational psychology. In particular, I want to argue that an awareness of the everyday rhetoric of organizational talk can be illuminating in explaining how the work of an organization is accomplished.     

BIS Sensitivity,Negative Affect and Performance: Dynamic and Multilevel Relationships

This study examined the dynamic and multi-level relationships among the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS), negative affect and performance. Participants performed multiple trials of a simulated air traffic control task. A single measure of BIS was taken before practice, whereas negative affect and performance were measured at repeated intervals. As expected, there was a negative relationship between negative affect and performance at both an inter- and intraindividual level of analysis. The key findings from this research relate to dynamic effects. The detrimental effect of negative affect on task performance strengthened across practice, at both levels of analysis. The negative relationship between BIS and performance was also found to change over time. These findings are discussed by drawing on resource allocation theory and reinforcement sensitivity theory. This study emphasizes the importance of examining dynamic and multilevel relationships to understand how BIS and negative affect relate to task performance.     

Some evidence for parallel comparisons in a letter recognition task

Subjects were asked to judge successively presented letter trigrams “same” or “different.” The different stimuli were divided into four groups; not confusable (NC), acoustically confusable (AC), visually confusable (VC), and both visually and acoustically confusable (VC & AC). Reaction times (RT) were lengthened only by the double confusability. It is argued that comparisons are normally made in both channels, so that confusability in a single channel has no effect since the alternative channel is unimpaired. RTs are only increased when both channels are slowed down. A further experiment confirms this interpretation. When the situation is manipulated so that only the visual channel is employed, the VC group shows the same increase as the VC & AC group.     

Migration,Open Borders,Human Rights,and Democracy

Two important recent books on migration and justice argue for different approaches to how we should view borders. Alex Sager defends open borders, while Sarah Song argues for the rights of democratic communities to find their own balance between open and closed borders. While both authors present significant considerations in defence of their views, in this article I argue that a human-rights-oriented account of migration justice captures their strengths well while not sharing the weaknesses I identify with each. In addition, the approach I favour offers some progressive pathways for holding each other to account in reducing migration injustice in our actual world, in ways that are both feasible and normatively compelling.     

Hybrid Identifications,Mixed Feelings: Reply to Commentaries

In responding to the insightful papers of Suchet and White I explore further my own hybrid identifications in regard to the socially constructed category of race. The paper explores the dangers of both idealization and denigration of otherness. It shows how a traumatic confrontation with otherness may destabilize later identifications in favor of earlier more archaic ones. Melanie Suchet, in her very gracious response to my paper, comments that I refuse to “reside in the comfortable.” However, any wish I may have had to reside in the comfortable was derailed by the thought-provoking comments of both Melanie Suchet and Cleonie White. Both authors prompted me to confront myself and to examine a number of painful issues. These included not only a resistance to owning my own vicarious traumatization but the fact that I was subject to the return of the repressed as the personal meanings of the signifier black shifted and changed in the course of my paper. But most significantly, both authors confronted me with the challenge of Otherness.     

Have you got the look? Gaze direction affects judgements of facial attractiveness

Much is known about the attractiveness of physical attributes, such as symmetry and averageness. Here we examine the effect of a social cue, eye-gaze direction, on facial attractiveness. Given that direct gaze signals social engagement, we predicted that faces showing direct gaze would be preferred to faces showing averted gaze. Thirty-two males completed two tasks designed to assess preferences for female faces displaying a neutral expression. Participants were more likely to select the face with direct gaze, when choosing the more attractive face from direct- and averted-gaze versions of the same face. This direct-gaze preference was stronger for high-attractive than low-attractive face sets, but was present for both. Attractiveness ratings were also higher for faces with direct than averted gaze. Interestingly, stimulus inversion weakened the preference for inverted faces, which suggests the preference does not simply reflect a bilateral symmetry bias.     

A Meta‐Analytic Investigation of the Within‐Person Self‐Efficacy Domain: Is Self‐Efficacy a Product of Past Performance or a Driver of Future Performance?

We conducted a meta‐analysis to determine whether the within‐person self‐efficacy/performance relationship is positive, negative, or null and to compare the strength of the self‐efficacy/performance and past performance/self‐efficacy within‐person relationships. The self‐efficacy/performance within‐person corrected correlation was .23 but was weak and nonsignificant (ρ = .06) when controlling for the linear trajectory, revealing that the main effect was spurious. The past performance/self‐efficacy within‐person corrected correlation was .40 and remained positive and significant (ρ = .30) when controlling for the linear trajectory. The moderator results revealed that at the within‐person level of analysis: (a) self‐efficacy had at best a moderate, positive effect on performance and a null effect under other moderating conditions (ρ ranged from –.02 to .33); (b) the main effect of past performance on self‐efficacy was stronger than the effect of self‐efficacy on performance, even in the moderating conditions that produced the strongest self‐efficacy/performance relationship; (c) the effect of past performance on self‐efficacy ranged from moderate to strong across moderating conditions and was statistically significant across performance tasks, contextual factors, and methodological moderators (ρ ranged from .18 to .52). Overall, this suggests that self‐efficacy is primarily a product of past performance rather than the driving force affecting future performance.     

Sex differences in interpretation bias in adolescents

Interpretation biases, in which ambiguous information is interpreted negatively, have been hypothesized to place adolescent females at greater risk of developing anxiety and mood disorders than same‐aged males. We tested the hypothesis that adolescent girls interpret ambiguous scenarios more negatively, and/or less positively, than same‐aged males using the Adolescent Interpretation and Belief Questionnaire (N = 67, 11–15 years old). We also tested whether adolescent girls and boys differed in judging positive or negative interpretations to be more believable and whether the scenario content (social vs. non‐social) affected any sex difference in interpretation bias. The results showed that girls had higher average negative interpretation scores than boys, with no sex differences in positive interpretation scores. Girls and boys did not differ on which interpretation they found to be most believable. Both sexes reported that positive interpretations were less likely to come to mind, and were less believable, for social than for non‐social scenarios. These results provide preliminary evidence for sex differences in interpretation biases in adolescence and support the hypothesis that social scenarios are a specific source of anxiety to this age group. A greater understanding of the aetiology of interpretation biases will potentially enhance sex‐ and age‐specific interventions for anxiety and mood disorders.