Personality or Role? Comparisons of Turkish Leaders Across Different Institutional Positions

Personality approaches to politics are often criticized for not examining the effect that institutional role constraints have on individual beliefs and preferences. When leaders appear to change their stance when they change roles, it is assumed that roles have a determining influence. Modern personality theory and contemporary sociological role theory, however, view the effects of roles as interacting with agents’ personalities. In this article, we investigate this question by comparing personality profiles of three Turkish leaders (Özal, Demirel, and Gül) during their tenure as prime minister and during their subsequent time as president. For Gül, we perform an additional comparison during his time as foreign minister. The personality profiles are in the form of quantitative scores generated from machine‐coded content analysis of leaders’ words using the Leadership Trait Analysis method. We hypothesize that different leaders will be more susceptible to changing role contexts, depending on core personality traits, and that different traits are more likely to change with new roles. Overall, our results suggest that leaders’ traits are fairly resistant to changes across roles and that task orientation is the most likely trait to change as leaders adapt to different role demands and expectations. This study makes a contribution to our understanding of the interaction between personality and political contexts by offering specific theoretically derived hypotheses and by empirically and statistically examining a preliminary set of expectations that could be applied more broadly to other leaders.     

Development of perceptual completion originates in information acquisition

Adults have little difficulty perceiving objects as complete despite occlusion, but newborn infants perceive moving partly occluded objects solely in terms of visible surfaces. The developmental mechanisms leading to perceptual completion have never been adequately explained. Here, the authors examine the potential contributions of oculomotor behavior and motion sensitivity to perceptual completion performance in individual infants. Young infants were presented with a center-occluded rod, moving back and forth against a textured background, to assess perceptual completion. Infants also participated in tasks to assess oculomotor scanning patterns and motion direction discrimination. Individual differences in perceptual completion performance were strongly correlated with scanning patterns but were unrelated to motion direction discrimination. The authors present a new model of development of perceptual completion that posits a critical role for targeted visual scanning, an early developing oculomotor action system.     

Positive development in emerging adulthood

Positive functioning in the developmental period of emerging adulthood has received little investigation. The current study investigated components of positive development using confirmatory factor analysis of Australian Temperament Project data collected from 1,158 young adults aged 19–20 years. Positive development constructs that have been theoretically conceptualised were examined to test core concepts. Five first‐order constructs were identified in this sample: Civic Action and Engagement, Social Competence, Life Satisfaction, Trust and Tolerance of Others, and Trust in Authorities and Organisations. A second‐order positive development factor defined by these constructs provided good fit for the data. This model of positive development in emerging adulthood can provide an outcome measure that can then be used to investigate the developmental processes and pathways involved.     

Dewey’s Theory of Experience,Traumatic Memory,and Music Education

Studies in Philosophy and Education - Trauma’s ubiquity in society leads to an acknowledgement that damaging experiences likely affect more students than they leave untouched. Dewey...     

Therapeutic interventions in infancy: Two contrasting cases of persistent crying

Infants are liable to many symptoms of emotional disturbance. However, it is now widely agreed that there is no such thing as individual psychopathology in infancy. Infantile disturbances are considered to be a function of current relationships. The paper briefly summarises available psychodynamic approaches to problems in infant relationships. It argues that more case-studies of therapeutic interventions in infancy are needed to increase our understanding of early disturbances and of their treatment. Two contrasting case-studies of intervention in persistent crying attempt to understand what may sustain this distressing problem. In each case the possible meaning of the crying, both to the babies and to their families, is considered.     

Effects of experimenter and mother presence on the attentional performance and activity of hyperactive boys

The attentional performance, activity, and off-task behavior of hyperactive boys with and without conduct problems and normal boys were compared on a cancellation task under three conditions: when performing the task alone, with mother present, and with experimenter present. Results indicated that both the hyperactive groups achieved poorer attentional scores than normal subjects in the alone and mother present conditions, but improved in the experimenter present condition. The performance of the hyperactive boys with conduct problems was particularly affected by this condition. The activity and off-task behavior scores of both the hyperactive groups were higher than controls in all conditions, although the hyperactive boys with conduct problems decreased in off-task behavior when the experimenter was present. Attention and behavior scores were not significantly correlated. The implications of these findings for assessment of hyperactivity, and the role of noncompliance in the attentional behavior of hyperactive children, are discussed.This study is based in part on the first author's Ph.D. thesis in the Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne.     

Facing fascism: A feminine politics of jouissance

Conclusion To resume, then, the need for a written Law specifically prohibiting Genocide. (1) It should by now be evident that the pleasure principle needs its ethical mandate, beyond the reality principle of a social field that can no longer be considered homeostatic and nonconflictual. The fantasmatic character of human pleasure must not only be accounted for in any ethic today, it must take primacy. Fantasy formations grow ever central in our lives; fantasy is the support of our reality.(2) The writing of such a Law would permit the enunciation of positively negative content, thereby reframing the Other as lacking; and it would also provide a way for the increasingly stateless citizens of the postmodern, global community, to be asked todecide on the necessarily paired alternatives (Good and Evil, to kill or to love) which have once again become the starkest of possibilities for them. Only this kind of decision — which is not that of thevel — suffers resistance to the will of the people when it is a malignant will-to-jouissance.     

EFFECTS OF REINFORCEMENT FOR ALTERNATIVE BEHAVIOR DURING PUNISHMENT OF SELF-INJURY

A number of variables influence the effectiveness of punishment and may determine the extent to which less intrusive forms of punishment may be used as alternatives to more intrusive interventions. For example, it has been suggested that response suppression during punishment may be facilitated if reinforcement is concurrently available for an alternative response. However, results of basic research demonstrating this finding have not been replicated with interventions more commonly prescribed as treatments for problem behavior. We evaluated the effects of relatively benign punishment procedures (reprimands or brief manual restraint) on the self-injurious behavior of 4 individuals who had been diagnosed with mental retardation, when access to reinforcement for alternative behavior (manipulation of leisure materials) was and was not available. In all cases, punishment produced greater response suppression when reinforcement for an alternative response was available.