Re-empowering a disabled family network

In this paper, we will present a case history of a disabled network which includes a multiproblem family and the social service agencies serving it. We will describe a five-step model for effective intervention into the entire system. Social service agents frequently become overwhelmed and therefore impotent in their attempts to help multiproblem families. In such cases, agents reflect the family's dysfunction by becoming dysfunctional themselves and their actions serve to increase the family's alienation from its community by reinforcing its stigmatized self-image. Our model focuses on building boundaries and creating hierarchies which encourage individuation within the family and empowers the network to effectively meet family needs.     

Children's attributions of intentions to an invisible agent

Children ages 3-9 years were informed that an invisible agent (Princess Alice) would help them play a forced-choice game by "telling them, somehow, when they chose the wrong box," whereas a matched control group of children were not given this supernatural prime. On 2 unexpected event trials, an experimenter triggered a simulated unexpected event (i.e., a light turning on/off; a picture falling), and children's behavioral response to these events (i.e., moving their hand to the opposite box) was coded. Results showed a significant Age GroupxExperimental Condition interaction; the only children to reliably alter their behavior in response to the unexpected events were the oldest children (M=7 years 4 months), who were primed with the invisible agent concept. For children's posttest verbal explanations, also, only these children saw the unexpected events as being referential and declarative (e.g., "Princess Alice did it because I chose the wrong box"). Together, these data suggest that children may not regularly begin to see communicative signs as embedded in unexpected events until they are around 7 years of age.     

Mental Contamination in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Associations With Contamination Symptoms and Treatment Response

The most common symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is contamination fear. Feelings of contamination can be provoked through contact with a physical contaminant, referred to as contact contamination (CC), as well as in the absence of one, referred to as mental contamination (MC). Prior research indicates that CC and MC are distinct, and MC may interfere with treatment for CC. However, no study to date has examined how MC may be associated with responses to physical contaminants and treatment response for CC. This study examined the relationships between CC and MC in a sample of individuals with elevated contamination symptoms (N = 88), half of whom met diagnostic criteria for OCD. Participants engaged in three sessions of exposure and response prevention (ERP) for CC and completed self-report measures and behavioral tasks assessing CC and MC at pretreatment, posttreatment, and follow-up. As hypothesized, at pretreatment, MC was positively associated with reactivity to physical contaminants, even after participants washed their hands. ERP for CC was associated with unique changes in CC and MC across self-report and behavioral measures, and greater pretreatment MC predicted greater posttreatment CC, though this effect was evident in only one of two CC measures. Additionally, specificity analyses indicated changes in MC were independent of changes in disgust propensity, a related construct. Pretreatment disgust propensity also predicted treatment outcome, though the addition of pretreatment disgust propensity as a covariate reduced the relationship between pretreatment MC and posttreatment CC to nonsignificance. Results suggest MC plays an important role in the manifestation and treatment of CC symptoms and may represent a manifestation of disgust proneness. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.     

Nie Wieder: Group‐Based Emotions for In‐Group Wrongdoing Affect Attitudes toward Unrelated Minorities

This article focuses on the effects of group‐based emotions for in‐group wrongdoing on attitudes towards seemingly unrelated groups. Two forms of shame are distinguished from one another and from guilt and linked to positive and negative attitudes towards an unrelated minority. In Study 1 (N = 203), Germans' feelings of moral shame—arising from the belief that the in‐group's Nazi past violates an important moral value—are associated with increased support for Turks living in Germany. Image shame—arising from a threatened social image—is associated with increased social distance. In Study 2 (N = 301), Britons' emotions regarding atrocities committed by in‐group members during the war in Iraq have similar links with attitudes towards Pakistani immigrants. We extend the findings of Study 1 by demonstrating that the effects are mediated by a sense of moral obligation and observed more strongly when the unrelated group is perceived as similar to the harmed group. Guilt was unrelated to any outcome variable across both studies. Theoretical and practical implications about the nature of group‐based emotions and their potential for affecting wider intergroup relations are discussed.     

Handling Inconsistencies in the Early Calculus

The early calculus is a popular example of an inconsistent but fruitful scientific theory. This paper is concerned with the formalisation of reasoning processes based on this inconsistent theory. First it is shown how a formal reconstruction in terms of a sub-classical negation leads to triviality. This is followed by the evaluation of the chunk and permeate mechanism (C&P) proposed by Brown and Priest in (Journal of Philosophical Logic, 33(4), 379–388, 2004) to obtain a non-trivial formalisation of the early infinitesimal calculus. Different shortcomings of this application of C&P as an explication of inconsistency tolerant reasoning are pointed out, both conceptual and technical. To remedy these shortcomings, an adaptive logic is proposed that allows for conditional permeations of formulas under the assumption of consistency preservation. First the adaptive logic is defined and explained and thereafter it is demonstrated how this adaptive logic remedies the defects C&P suffered from.     

Remedial Responsibility for Severe Poverty: Justice or Humanity?

Remedial responsibility is the prospective responsibility to assist those in great need. With tens of millions of people worldwide suffering from severe poverty, questions about the attribution of remedial responsibility and the nature of the relevant duties of assistance are among the most pressing of our time. This article concerns the question of whether remedial responsibility for severe poverty is a matter of justice or of humanity. I discuss three kinds of situation in which an agent owes remedial responsibility to another suffering from severe poverty. In the first, the remedially responsible agent foreseeably and avoidably caused the poverty. In the second, the poverty was caused by forces outside the control of any agent, such as natural disaster. And in the third situation, the agent who was originally attributed remedial responsibility fails to fulfil it, and so remedial responsibility for the poverty in question is acquired by a secondary bearer. According to David Miller, remedial responsibility is a matter of justice in the first two situations, but not in the third. I argue that his grounds for thinking that remedial responsibility in the second situation are in tension with his view that remedial responsibility is not a matter of justice in the third situation. This has important implications in our world in which remedial responsibilities too often go unfulfilled.