Some limits of the boundary concept

A reexamination of the boundary concept and its applicability to different theoretical approaches to psychoanalysis reveals it to be of questionable usefulness in the present climate of psychoanalytic pluralism. In the light of clinical illustrations, it is suggested that an underlying problem with this concept may be a failure to discriminate between technical and moral dimensions. The necessity of separating the legal issues involved is also indicated. Recognizing the existence of separate domains and considering the rules that apply to each are offered as an alternative to focusing on boundary concepts.     

Comment on Anderson and Ones (2008)

The ‘erratum and addendum’ by Anderson and Ones ( 2008 ) does not state unambiguously that participants' Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) scale scores were incorrectly matched with their scores on the other inventories' scales, nor does it mention the existence of other errors in the scoring of the Occupational Personality Questionnaire (OPQ) and Business Personality Indicator (BPI) scales. We demonstrate these errors and we recommend the retraction of the articles by Anderson and Ones ( 2003 ) and Ones and Anderson ( 2002 ). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Understanding Materialism Among Youth

As an emerging value, materialism helps explain the consumer behavior of youth. Using a national sample of 9‐ to 14‐year‐olds, in this study we developed a Youth Materialism Scale. The findings suggest that more materialistic youth tend to shop more and save less. They are most interested in new products and most responsive to advertising and promotional efforts. Their parents view them as more expert with regard to products and they wield more purchase influence on their parents. Parents who are more materialistic tend to have children who are more materialistic. This study also reveals a modest negative relation between materialism and liking for school and school performance.     

COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND HATHAYOGA

Abstract. Cognitive science and hathayoga both make emphatic claims about the relationship between the body and the mind. To examine this complementary relationship I draw upon the five main approaches currently being used by cognitive science and then consider their implications within the context of three specific points of contact with hathayoga theory: the rejection of dualism, the nature of consciousness, and the role of the nervous and circulatory systems in religious experience. This type of comparative analysis can provide additional information about the nature of consciousness and the potential practices that heighten our awareness or knowledge of it. Consequently, cognitive science offers a new and provocative way to dialogue with Indian yoga traditions in terms of the methods and theories of modernity.     

Stigma, social context, and mental health: lesbian and gay couples across the transition to adoptive parenthood

This is the first study to examine change in depression and anxiety across the first year of adoptive parenthood in same-sex couples (90 couples: 52 lesbian, 38 gay male). Given that sexual minorities uniquely contend with sexual orientation-related stigma, this study examined how both internalized and enacted forms of stigma affect the mental health of lesbians and gay men during the transition to parenthood. In addition, the role of contextual support was examined. Higher perceived workplace support, family support, and relationship quality were related to lower depressive and anxious symptoms at the time of the adoption, and higher perceived friend support was related to lower anxiety symptoms. Lower internalized homophobia and higher perceived neighborhood gay-friendliness were related to lower depressive symptoms. Finally, individuals with high internalized homophobia who lived in states with unfavorable legal climates regarding gay adoption experienced the steepest increases in depressive and anxious symptoms. Findings have important implications for counselors working with sexual minorities, especially those experiencing the transition to parenthood.     

Replicability and 40-year predictive power of childhood ARC types

We examined 3 questions surrounding the undercontrolled, overcontrolled, and resilient-or Asendorpf-Robins-Caspi (ARC)-personality types originally identified by Block (1971). In analyses of the teacher personality assessments of over 2,000 children in 1st through 6th grade in 1959-1967 and follow-up data on general and cardiovascular health outcomes in over 1,100 adults recontacted 40 years later, we found bootstrapped internal replication clustering suggesting that Big Five scores were best characterized by a tripartite cluster structure corresponding to the ARC types. This cluster structure was fuzzy rather than discrete, indicating that ARC constructs are best represented as gradients of similarity to 3 prototype Big Five profiles; ARC types and degrees of ARC prototypicality showed associations with multiple health outcomes 40 years later. ARC constructs were more parsimonious but, depending on the outcome, comparable or slightly worse classifiers than the dimensional Big Five traits. Forty-year incident cases of heart disease could be correctly identified with 67% accuracy by childhood personality information alone and stroke incidence with over 70% accuracy. Findings support the theoretical validity of ARC constructs, their treatment as continua of prototypicality rather than discrete categories, and the need for further understanding the robust predictive power of childhood personality for midlife health.     

Listening,Watching, and Reading: The Structure and Correlates of Entertainment Preferences

ABSTRACT People spend considerable amounts of time and money listening to music, watching TV and movies, and reading books and magazines, yet almost no attention in psychology has been devoted to understanding individual differences in preferences for such entertainment. The present research was designed to examine the structure and correlates of entertainment genre preferences. Analyses of the genre preferences of more than 3,000 individuals revealed a remarkably clear factor structure. Using multiple samples, methods, and geographic regions, data converged to reveal five entertainment‐preference dimensions: Communal, Aesthetic, Dark, Thrilling, and Cerebral. Preferences for these entertainment dimensions were uniquely related to demographics and personality traits. Results also indicated that personality accounted for significant proportions of variance in entertainment preferences over and above demographics. The results provide a foundation for developing and testing hypotheses about the psychology of entertainment preferences.     

The metasemantics of memory

In Sven Bernecker’s excellent new book, Memory, he proposes an account of what we might call the “metasemantics” of memory: the conditions that determine the contents of the mental representations employed in memory. Bernecker endorses a “pastist externalist” view, according to which the content of a memory-constituting representation is fixed, in part, by the “external” conditions prevalent at the (past) time of the tokening of the original representation (the one from which the memory-constituting one is causally derived). Bernecker argues that the best version of a pastist externalism about memory contents will have the result that there can be semantically-induced memory losses in cases involving unwitting “world-switching”. The burden of this paper is to show that Bernecker’s argument for this conclusion does not succeed. My arguments on this score have implications for our picture of mind-world relations, as these are reflected in a subject’s attempts to recall her past thoughts.     

A normative account of epistemic luck

This paper develops a normative account of epistemic luck, according to which the luckiness of epistemic luck is analyzed in terms of the expectations a subject is entitled to have when she satisfies the standards of epistemic justification. This account enables us to distinguish three types of epistemic luck—bad, good, and sheer—and to model the roles they play e.g. in Gettierization. One controversial aspect of the proposed account is that it is non‐reductive. While other approaches analyze epistemic luck in non‐epistemic terms—either in modal terms (lack of safety) or in agential terms (lack of creditworthiness)—I argue that the non‐reductive nature of the normative account is actually a selling‐point relative to its competitors.     

Dean's Reception,October 14, 2001, Town Club. Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -