Inequality and the Altruistic Life: A Study of the Priestly Vocation Rate

This article takes the rate of new incorporations into the Catholic priesthood within national societies as a social fact revealing underlying societal tendencies of broad theoretical relevance extending well beyond the study of religion. Our emphasis lies on the impact of income inequality on the prevalence of altruistic life options. We examine cross‐national and time‐series variation in the priestly vocation rate as the empirical foundation to theorize social dynamics underpinning a life option that entails the renunciation of opportunities for individual material advantage alongside the commitment to serve a broader community. The article elaborates why we view the vocation rate as resting on a combination of piety and altruistic dispositions, and provides a theoretical rationale for expecting inequality to diminish this—and other—altruistic life options. We also examine the impact of other variables that have been theorized to influence the prevalence of Catholic clerical vocations and elaborate the broader theoretical relevance of our empirical findings.     

Performance Excellence: A Personal Perspective on the Link Between Sport and Business

This article provides a personal perspective on the link between excellence in sport and business. It traces the author's transition from sport psychologist to business consultant before identifying specific areas in which direct links can be drawn between the two domains. Specifically, five major areas are addressed: organizational issues, in which a demands, supports, constraints approach is outlined; stress, including a model of stress in leaders and a model of stress and coping; leadership, in which a model of leadership and how it relates to performance is presented; high-performing teams, based on a create, unite, perform (CUP) model of team building, team work, and team effectiveness; and one-to-one coaching/consulting, in which common areas across sport and business are identified. The general conclusion is that the principles of elite performance in sport are easily transferable to the business context, and also that sport has a considerable amount to learn from excellence in business.     

A Psychoanalytic Reader’s Commentary: On Erasure and Negation as a Barrier to the Future

This paper is a psychoanalytically informed critical race theoretical commentary on Daniel Gaztambide’s paper, “A Preferential Option for the Repressed: Psychoanalysis Through the Eyes of Liberation Theology,” which received the 2014 Multiculturalism and Psychoanalysis Award by the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis’ Committee on Ethnicity, Race, Culture, Class & Language. This discussion is an attempt to utilize psychoanalytic and literary techniques to explore some of the ways psychoanalysis continues to inscribe cultural practices and normative thinking that foreclose opportunities to expand its margins to be more inclusive. I selected one sentence and used it to suggest how it affected this Black American reader who is also a psychoanalyst.     

The persistent impact of incidental experience

As we perform daily activities—driving to work, unlocking the office door, or grabbing a coffee cup—our actions seem automatic and preprogrammed. Nonetheless, routine, well-practiced behavior is continually modulated by incidental experience: In repetitive experimental tasks, recent (~4) trials reliably influence performance and action choice. Psychological theories downplay the significance of sequential effects, explaining them as rapidly decaying perturbations of behavior, with no long-term consequences. We challenged this traditional perspective in two experiments designed to probe the impact of more distant experience, finding evidence for effects spanning up to a thousand intermediate trials. We present a normative theory in which these persistent effects reflect optimal adaptation to a dynamic environment exhibiting varying rates of change. The theory predicts a heavy-tailed decaying influence of past experience, consistent with our data, and suggests that individual incidental experiences are catalogued in a temporally extended memory utilized in order to optimize subsequent behavior.     

Job Preference in the People's Republic of China: Distinguishing the Self From Others

Job-preference rankings were collected from a sample of middle-level managers and cadres in the People's Republic of China in 1986. Respondents provided rankings of 10 job factors as they applied to themselves, other Chinese, and United States workers. Chinese managers viewed their own job preferences as different from the preferences of the other two groups and perceived other Chinese and U.S. workers to have relatively similar job preferences. The Chinese managers also ranked an intrinsic job factor more highly for themselves and extrinsic job factors more highly for other Chinese and U.S. workers. These findings are discussed in terms of management training, leadership roles, perceptual and attributional processes, and cultural factors.     

Examiner Errors on the WAIS-R: A Source of Concern

Munchausen syndrome (MS) is characterized by patients' chronic and relentless pursuit of medical treatment for combinations of symptoms of consciously self-inflicted injury and falsely reported symptomatology. MS patients are adults, as are perpetrators of Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP). MSBP is an unusual form of child abuse in which a parent, usually the mother, brings a child for medical attention with symptoms falsified or directly induced by the mother. Most reports of MSBP have been of a few cases appearing in medical and pediatric literature. Motivation in both disorders is unclear, and diagnosis and treatment present difficult problems that require more research.     

Department of Psychology University of Maryland College Park,Maryland

The timed responses of normal and schizophrenic subjects have been observed in a context permitting independent measurement of lift reaction time, jump reaction time, and speed of traverse over the same distances used for jump reaction time, cued either by signals provided by the experimenter

or by the subject himself. Significant differences were found between the performance of normal and psychotic subject groups on all four measures: time to initiate response, time to initiate and to complete a thrust response, and time of traverse over the same distances—both to cues given by the experimenter or at the subject's own volition. Noticeably increased variation (interindividual and intraindividual) was also found to characterize all measures of response.