Individual and Collective Intentionality: Elaborating the Fundamentality-Question

This is a contribution to the controversy which of individual or collective intentionality is more fundamental. I call it the fundamentality-question. In a first step, I argue that it is really two questions. One is about sense and one about reference. The first is: Can one grasp or understand the concept individual intentionality and, correspondingly, individuality, on the one hand, without grasping or understanding the concept collective intentionality and, correspondingly, collectivity, on the other? The second is: Can the concept individual intentionality and corresponding concept of individuality, on the one hand, refer to something without the concept of collective intentionality and corresponding concept of collectivity referring to something, on the other? Simplifying somewhat, this elaborated fundamentality-question admits of nine answers. In a second step, I pursue a tentative answer to the elaborated fundamentality-question. Given a disambiguation of individuality and, correspondingly, individual intentionality, the answer is the combination of claims that individuality and individual intentionality in one sense is fundamental in reference-dependence but that collectivity and collective intentionality is fundamental in reference-dependence in the other sense of individuality, while collectivity and collective intentionality is in both cases fundamental in sense-dependence.

     

Factors Related to Use of Mental Health Services by Immigrant Children

Journal of Child and Family Studies - This study examined factors in immigrant children’s use of mental health services. Employed data described 4873 immigrant parents and children...     

Don’t worry,be happy! Positive affect at work,greater balance at home. A daily diary study on work-family balance

IntroductionThe dynamics pertaining to work-family interface such as conflict, enrichment, etc. have received considerable scholarly attention in social sciences. However, the daily processes that are involved have been examined to a lesser extent, least of all including the role played by emotions.ObjectiveThis study aimed at examining, consistently with the Affective Events Theory, if positive and negative affect experienced during the working day played a mediational role in the associations between daily levels of work-family conflict and work-family enrichment on one side, and work-family balance on the other. Moreover, the moderating cross-level role of trait emotional stability was examined.MethodThe study included a convenience sample of 104 Italian employees who completed a diary-book over five consecutive working days.ResultsMultilevel-modelling results highlighted, controlling for emotional stability, a mediational role of only daily positive affect in the relationships between both work-family conflict and enrichment on the one side and work-family balance on the other side.ConclusionThis study contributed to the literature emphasizing the role of positive affective states experienced at the workplace and their connections with the private life. Limitations and implications for research and practice are described.     

Chicks like consonant music

The question of whether preference for consonance is rooted in acoustic properties important to the auditory system or is acquired through enculturation has not yet been resolved. Two-month-old infants prefer consonant over dissonant intervals, but it is possible that this preference is rapidly acquired through exposure to music soon after birth or in utero. Controlled-rearing studies with animals can help shed light on this question because such studies allow researchers to distinguish between biological predispositions and learned preferences. In the research reported here, we found that newly hatched domestic chicks show a spontaneous preference for a visual imprinting object associated with consonant sound intervals over an identical object associated with dissonant sound intervals. We propose that preference for harmonic relationships between frequency components may be related to the prominence of harmonic spectra in biological sounds in natural environments.     

The Impact of Culture on the Individual Subjective Well-Being of the Italian Population: An Exploratory Study

The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between cultural access and individual psychological well-being, in order to provide a possible estimation of the impact of cultural participation upon subjective perceptions of well being. Our exploratory research was based on a cross-sectional survey undertook on a medium-large sample (n = 1500) of Italian residents in fall 2008. We refer to the Psychological General Well-Being Index–PGWBI, a tool that has been validated through 30 years of research, as an index of measurement. Moreover, we have administered to the sample an additional questionnaire inquiring about access to 15 distinct culturally related activities. Data are processed by means of a specific methodology based on ANN and Called TWIST. TWIST has been developed by the Semeion Research Center, Rome. Our analysis suggests that culture has a relevant role as a determinant of individual psychological well-being, in that a selected subset of cultural variables turn out to perform among the best predictors of individual PGWB levels. Our results also allow some preliminary considerations about innovative, well-being focused public health policies leveraging upon the human and social developmental role of culture.     

Examining patients' and other group members' agreement about their alliance to the group as a whole and changes in patient symptoms using response surface analysis

There is a lack of research examining patients' and other group members' agreement about their therapeutic alliance. In the present study, the person-group (P-G) fit model was adopted to predict that the group member symptom reduction will be greater when the group member's and the other group members' perceptions of their alliance to the group-as-a-whole fit and are high. In addition, the effect of disagreement between the group member and the other group members in their perceptions of the group alliance on the individual's outcome was investigated by using response surface analysis. Thirty-two patients from 5 long-term (> 1 year) psychodynamic group treatments were studied. Participants filled out the California Psychotherapy Alliance Scale-Group (CALPAS-G; Gaston & Marmar, 1993) and the Outcome Questionnaire-45 (OQ-45; Lambert et al., 1996) monthly over the course of group treatment until termination. As hypothesized, patient's symptom reduction was greater when there was agreement between the group member and the other group members that their alliance to the group as a whole was strong. Contrary to the authors' hypothesis, a lack agreement on alliance to the group as a whole between the patient and the other group members was not related to less symptom reduction, as lack of fit increased, symptom reduction decreased. Also contrary to the authors' hypothesis, when other group members saw their alliance to the group as a whole as stronger than did the patient, there was increased symptom reduction. The findings suggest that the P-G fit model may be a useful strategy to examine group process variables in the psychotherapy context.     

Outcomes of specific interpersonal problems for binge eating disorder: comparing group psychodynamic interpersonal psychotherapy and group cognitive behavioral therapy

We assessed whether an attachment-based treatment, Group Psychodynamic Interpersonal Psychotherapy (GPIP) had a greater impact compared to Group Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (GCBT) on Cold/Distant and Intrusive/Needy interpersonal problems. Ninety-five individuals with Binge Eating Disorder (BED) were randomized to GPIP or GCBT and assessed at pre-, post-, and six months post-treatment. Both therapies resulted in a significant decrease in all eight interpersonal problem subscales except the Nonassertive subscale. GPIP resulted in a greater reduction in the Cold/Distant subscale compared to GCBT, but no differences were found for changes in the Intrusive/Needy subscale. GPIP may be most relevant for those with BED who have Cold/Distant interpersonal problems and attachment avoidance.     

Representations in mental imagery and working memory: Evidence from different types of visual masks

Although few studies have systematically investigated the relationship between visual mental imagery and visual working memory, work on the effects of passive visual interference has generally demonstrated a dissociation between the two functions. In four experiments, we investigated a possible commonality between the two functions: We asked whether both rely on depictive representations. Participants judged the visual properties of letters using visual mental images or pictures of unfamiliar letters stored in short-term memory. Participants performed both tasks with two different types of interference: sequences of unstructured visual masks (consisting of randomly changing white and black dots) or sequences of structured visual masks (consisting of fragments of letters). The structured visual noise contained elements of depictive representations (i.e., shape fragments arrayed in space), and hence should interfere with stored depictive representations; the unstructured visual noise did not contain such elements, and thus should not interfere as much with such stored representations. Participants did in fact make more errors in both tasks with sequences of structured visual masks. Various controls converged in demonstrating that in both tasks participants used representations that depicted the shapes of the letters. These findings not only constrain theories of visual mental imagery and visual working memory, but also have direct implications for why some studies have failed to find that dynamic visual noise interferes with visual working memory.     

Commitment to a developing preference and predecisional distortion of information

People tend to distort their evaluation of decision-relevant information in favor of the currently preferred alternative. We test whether this predecisional distortion of information is amplified by increased commitment to that current preference. We manipulated commitment, without changing the preferred option’s content, by requiring participants to indicate their preference either by circling or by darkening a sizable box (cf. feature-positive effect). Experiment 1 revealed that the effort to darken substantially increased predecisional distortion. Experiment 2 ruled out elaboration as an explanation for the effect of darkening. Experiment 3 showed that, among participants who attributed the darkening effort to an external source, predecisional distortion decreased when the source was believed to summon effort. These findings suggest that the developing commitment to a tentatively preferred alternative is one driver of predecisional distortion.