Maternal Interaction Style in Affective Disordered,Physically III,and Normal Women

Affective style (AS) and communication deviance (CD) have been suggested as markers of dysfunctional family environments that may be associated with psychiatric illness. Studies have focused mainly on parental responses during family interactions when an offspring is the identified patient. The present study is unique in examining AS and CD in mothers with unipolar depression, bipolar disorder, or chronic physical illness, and in normal controls. The sample consisted of 64 mothers with children ages 8 to 16. Unipolar mothers were more likely to show negative AS than were any other maternal group. There were no group differences for CD. Chronic stress, few positive life events, and single parenting were associated with AS. CD was associated solely with lower socioeconomic status. Results suggest that dysfunctional interactions are determined not only by maternal psychopathology, but also by an array of contextual factors that are related to the quality of the family environment.     

Revenge of the Philosophical Mole: Another Response to David Miller on Nationality

ABSTRACT David Miller has written extensively on the ethical value of the nation. A satisfactory response to Miller's ideas on nationalism requires an assessment of the whole range of his writings on the subject. After stating the outlines of Miller's conception of 'nationality', I evaluate the most important arguments for and against any attribution of ethical importance to the nation. Finally, I assess Miller's commitment to conational ethical priority in the context of duties of justributive justice. My main conclusions are as follows. (i) Miller's conservative strategy of justification is unacceptable, and a critical strategy suggests several plausible arguments for valuing national attachments. These arguments are not conclusive, however, (ii) In so far as Miller's position depends on real historical connections between persons, it is susceptible to the objection from historical myth. (iii) Miller offers an unexpected and ultimately unsuccessful response to the claim that national sentiments are partial and hence biased, (iv) Miller provides no good reason to believe that the duties of distributive justice are owed in the first instance to conationals.     

TOWARD A THEORY OF PERSONAL SPACE EXPECTATIONS AND THEIR VIOLATIONS

Proxemics literature is synthesized and placed in a theoretical framework based on norms and expectations. Two major and three subordinate propositions are supported, and a model for predicting effects of violations of proxemic expectations is advanced. A sample of hypotheses generated from the model is included.     

COHERENTISM AND THE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION OF MORAL BELIEFS: A CASE STUDY IN HOW TO DO PRACTICAL ETHICS WITHOUT APPEAL TO A MORAL THEORY

This paper defends a coherentist approach to moral epistemology. In “The Immorality of Eating Meat” (2000), I offer a coherentist consistency argument to show that our own beliefs rationally commit us to the immorality of eating meat. Elsewhere, I use our own beliefs as premises to argue that we have positive duties to assist the poor (2004) and to argue that biomedical animal experimentation is wrong (2012). The present paper explores whether this consistency‐based coherentist approach of grounding particular moral judgments on beliefs we already hold, with no appeal to moral theory, is a legitimate way of doing practical ethics. I argue (i) that grounding particular moral judgments on our core moral convictions and other core nonmoral beliefs is a legitimate way to justify moral judgments, (ii) that these moral judgments possess as much epistemic justification and have as much claim to objectivity as moral judgments grounded on particular ethical theories, and (iii) that this internalistic coherentist method of grounding moral judgments is more likely to result in behavioral guidance than traditional theory‐based approaches to practical ethics. By way of illustrating the approach, I briefly recapitulate my consistency‐based argument for ethical vegetarianism. I then defend the coherentist approach implicit in the argument against a number of potentially fatal metatheoretical attacks.     

Lines of advance in psychoanalytic psychotherapy

Freud's 1919 paper is taken as a starting-point to review how far we have advanced towards fulfilment of his prophetic remarks about the need to develop psychoanalytic psychotherapy for the masses. A glance is taken back to some of the circumstances and characters involved in Budapest where the paper was given at the 1918 congress, where there was much talk about the need to do something about the war neuroses. Similar pressures led to the founding of the Tavistock Clinic and Cassel Hospital in the UK, long before the start of the NHS. The pressures of both world wars advanced the applications of psychoanalysis; the next wave of pressures may come from NHS changes and entry into Europe. The history of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the UK is also considered via looking briefly at the history and development of psychoanalytic publications, of the Tavistock Clinic, of psychoanalytic training, of child psychotherapy and the emergence of adult (non-medical) psychotherapy. There have always been tensions between exponents of the pure gold of analysis and the needs of its wider applications. More flexible arrangements and boundaries are necessary if we are to spread psychoanalysis beyond London and to fulfil Freud's own hopes about the large-scale application of psychoanalytic therapy.