Sexuality,Intimacy, and Recovery

Human sexuality is an inseparable part of the yearning for intimacy, merging, and touch, both for people in general and for those with severe mental disorders. The exploration and acceptance of sexuality and the yearning for intimacy are vital to the recovery process of people with severe mental disorders. Despite this importance, therapists appear to disregard sexual issues in therapy with people with severe mental disorders. This article discusses the sexuality difficulties of these patients resulting from their personal history and examines the difficulties of therapists and therapeutic institutions in dealing with these patients’ sexuality-related issues.     

The ‘Right’ Side of Creativity: Creative Personality and Social Risk-Taking Predict Political Party Affiliation

Factors that predict political party affiliation are of particular importance in research due to the wider implications in politics and policy making. Extending this line of work, the idea that creativity predicts party affiliation was tested using 2 conceptualizations of creativity: creative personality and creative ideation. Participants (N = 406) based in the United States completed measures of creativity, socio-political attitudes, and domain specific risk-taking, and indicated their party affiliation. Results revealed a significant link between creative personality and political party affiliation. Furthermore, in addition to the socio-political attitudes, this link was explained, in part, by individuals’ social risk-taking. Specifically, individuals with higher scores on creative personality were more likely to affiliate to the Democratic party, whereas the reverse was true for affiliation to the Republican party. This article provides new insights into factors that predict political party affiliation and presents wider social implications of the findings.     

A Wittgensteinian Solution to the Sorites

I develop a solution to the Sorites Paradox, according to which a concatenation of valid arguments need not itself be valid. I specify which chains of valid arguments are those that do not preserve validity: those that pass the vague boundary between cases where the relevant concept applies and cases where that concept does not apply. I also develop various criticisms of this solution and show why they fail; basically, they all involve a petitio at some stage. I criticise the conviction that if every short argument in a long concatenated argument is valid, so is the long argument: it is, I argue, the result of an unjustified generalisation from the case of arguments that do not employ vague concepts (as in mathematics) to arguments that do employ them. My approach is Wittgensteinian in its “leaving everything as it is,” in its claiming that the “beginning” has been searched too far back (see paper's epigraph) and in its claim that the paradox was generated by a misapplication of a partial picture of the behaviour of arguments. I conclude my paper by comparing and contrasting my approach to the few precedents found in the vagueness literature and by answering a few additional objections that were raised there.     

Good things come to those who wait: Time discounting differences between adult offenders and nonoffenders

Criminal behavior has been explained by the idea that offenders have a lack of self-control. Yet, Wilson and Daly reported that juvenile offenders exhibit time-discounting tendencies similar to those of nonoffending juveniles. As no previous study has compared time-discounting behavior of adult offenders with nonoffenders, we raise the question, do adult offenders exhibit shorter time horizons or the tendency to discount future rewards? To answer this question, 89 offenders (ex-prisoners and prisoners) and 106 nonoffenders completed a time-discounting measure containing 27 different monetary choices. Our results show that, counter to findings with juvenile offenders, adult offenders (ex-prisoners) exhibit significantly shorter time horizons and discount more than nonoffenders as delayed payoffs increase to medium and large rewards. Furthermore, both offenders and nonoffenders are less likely to discount as the reward of future gains increases to medium and large.     

The Semantics of Kind Terms

Philosophical Studies -     

Immigration and the interplay among citizenship, identity and career: The case of Ethiopian immigration to Israel

Migration is a common phenomenon of the globalization era. In this article we explore the interplay of three foundational concepts in the migration experiences of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants in Israel: citizenship, identity and career. Through our analysis we examine the multiple layers of being an immigrant citizen. Following immigration, as reflected in empirical studies with members of this community, we have observed tensions between inclusion and exclusion, equality and difference, work and family as well as gender role transformation, family restructuring, and generational differences. These issues are discussed in the context of the development of active citizenship and career. Career development is found to be a core process in the enactment of citizenship, the promotion of a sense of belonging and deeply related to identity formation. Identity as an overarching perspective, with its personal and collective meanings, plays an important role at the intersection between citizenship and career.     

A comparison of the risk‐taking behaviors of prisoners and non‐prisoners

Do prisoners and non‐prisoners differ in their risk‐taking behavior and the domains where they take risks? Surprisingly little psychological research has addressed these questions, despite the well‐established paradigms and extensive literature on risk taking among non‐prison populations. To fill this gap, we used the Domain‐Specific Risk‐Taking Scale to compare 75 male prisoners' and 75 male non‐prisoners' risk‐taking behavior, risk perception, and risk benefit in five domains (ethical, financial, health, recreational, and social). Our results show that prisoners and non‐prisoners did not differ in their risk‐taking behavior in the ethical, financial, recreational, or social domains. In the health domain, however, prisoners exhibited significantly higher risk‐taking tendencies. With regard to risk perception, prisoners perceived activities as significantly more risky than non‐prisoners, aside from the financial domain where non‐prisoners reported significantly higher risk perception. In all five domains, prisoners perceived risk‐taking activities as offering fewer benefits compared to the non‐prisoner sample. Our results also indicate that risk‐taking activities are better predicted by the expected benefits than by risk perception for both prisoners and non‐prisoners in the recreational, financial, and ethical domains. However, for prisoners, risk taking in the social domain increased with level of perceived benefit. In the health domain, prisoners' risk taking decreased with increasing level of perceived risk, whereas for non‐prisoners, perceived benefits, but not risk perception, predicted risk taking. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Levinasian thoughts on witnessing: Forgiveness,guilt, and reconciliation

The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that operated in South Africa in the mid-1990s represented an exceptional political effort to overcome the country’s intricate blood-stained history using a mechanism based on foundations of forgiveness in a Christian sense, public trial in a symbolic sense, and commissions of inquiry in a political and legal sense. These commissions constituted one of the most daring and impressive attempts in the history of world politics to transform the national social agenda and to facilitate a shared life for the different groups in South Africa. This article engages in a philosophical discussion of a few major aspects of these commissions via the prism of Levinasian philosophical thought and the philosophical and ethical meaning it assigns to the act of bearing witness.     

On the Presence and Absence of Supervisors

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - The presence or absence of another person, and the relationship between these two contradictory and complementary relational phenomena, significantly...