A Response To H. O. Mounce

Wittgenstein: “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” (PI, p. 223) Wittgenstein bids us to be wary of trying to explain or interpret language and its use, instead of limiting ourselves – with a rigorous discipline – to describing such use as comprehensively and clearly as we can. This injunction, it seems to me, is important even when discussing ‘normal’, ‘everyday’ uses of language by fully sentient human beings, but even more so in such unique cases of sentient disability as Helen Keller’s. As the above quote suggests, explanatory extrapolation from the behaviour of animals risks even greater philosophical confusion.     

Researching self-help/mutual aid groups and organizations: Many roads, one journey

Self-help and mutual help groups are defined and the status of the literature described and reviewed. Self-help groups are different from peer and nonprofessional services under the supervision of professionals. Controlled studies of mutual help groups may be neither possible nor desirable as the method of choice by which to understand the phenomena of interest. Other approaches to research, including worldly evaluations, and ways of construing self-help organizations, that is, as normative communities and political action organizations rather than as psychological treatments, are discussed, and suggestions for future research are presented.     

Early stress and social support influences on mothers' and high-risk infants' functioning in late infancy

The relationships among early stress, maternal social network supports, and mother-infant functioning during later infancy were explored in a group of 52 mothers and their high-risk premature infants. Maternal stress and support data were collected 1 month after infants were released from the hospital, and measures of parenting, mother-infant interaction, infant social and developmental competence, and infant attachment were collected at infant corrected ages of 8 and 12 months. Results indicated that stress and support from various ecological sources, including professionals, were related to parent and infant outcomes at both measurement occasions. Varying sources of support differentially predicted varying parent and infant measures where support had a stress buffering effect only under certain conditions. Professional support was found to account for significant amounts of variance in relation to some parenting factors beyond that attributable to other support sources. The results are discussed within the context of previous support findings and in relation to transactional models of high-risk infant development.     

Self-Esteem, Narcissism, and Aggression: Does Violence Result From Low Self-Esteem or From Threatened Egotism?

A traditional view holds that low self-esteem causes aggression, but recent work has not confirmed this. Although aggressive people typically have high self-esteem, there are also many nonaggressive people with high self-esteem, and so newer constructs such as narcissism and unstable self-esteem are most effective at predicting aggression. The link between self-regard and aggression is best captured by the theory of threatened egotism, which depicts aggression as a means of defending a highly favorable view of self against someone who seeks to undermine or discredit that view.     

Divine Action in the World of Physics: Response to Nicholas Saunders

Nicholas Saunders claims that, in my view, divine action requires and is confined to indeterminacies at the quantum level. I try to make clear that, in speaking of "gaps" in physical causality, I mean that the existence of intentions entails that determining law explanations alone cannot give a complete account of the natural world. By "indeterminacy" I mean a general (not quantum) lack of determining causality in the physical order. Construing physical causality in terms of dispositional properties variously realized in more or less creative ways in different contexts may be most helpful in developing an account of divine action.     

Orientation tuning of shapefrom shading

Four experiments were performed to assess the effect of different orientations and direction of lighting on the visual processing of shaded or bipartite disks. In the first two experiments, observers were presented with nine different shading orientations from 0° to 180°. Targets were detected in a rapid and parallel fashion for shaded disks when the orientation of the shading gradient was not horizontal (90°) or oriented at 67.5°. Search asymmetries favoring the detection of “pock” targets over “ball” targets were found for all orientations. The search rates for bipartite disks were similar to the shaded disks at 0°, 22.5°, and 90° but not for intermediate orientations, and no search asymmetries were found. These differences suggest that shaded displays and bipartite displays are processed by different underlying mechanisms. The third experiment showed that the direction of the light source (left or right) had no influence on search asymmetries around the 90° point. Shading gradient orientation affected magnitude estimates of depth in the fourth experiment. These experiments show that the visual system’s “as-sumption” of overhead lighting is broadly tuned.     

A cross-cultural study of rape

Rape is often considered a crime and, as such. is subject to punishment. This paper reports a test of a “deterence theory” of rape with a cross-cultural study which uses a sample of societies drawn from the Human Relations Area Files. Fraternal interest group theory is also tested. This theory argues that the presence of fraternal interest groups, power groups of related males, predicts the occurrence of rape in a society. Although the results support both theories, a composite theory, using both deterrence and fraternal interest group theories, was found to provide a better explanation for the occurrence of rape than either theory alone.     

THE HISTORICAL CONNECTION BETWEEN THE GOLDEN RULE AND THE SECOND GREATEST LOVE COMMAND

The golden rule, perhaps the most recognizable moral maxim in Western culture, is an inadequate basis for morality. In light of its flaws as a precept and its apparent lack of moral content, it is initially perplexing that the historic Judeo‐Christian tradition has often linked the golden rule with the second greatest command to love one's neighbor as oneself. However, after examining the presuppositions behind this link and investigating the biblical context of these sayings, it is clear that the Judeo‐Christian tradition is justified in making this connection. Although the golden rule and the love command should not be conflated and their distinctions should not be abandoned, the biblical intention of the golden rule can only be understood and properly practiced in connection with the love command.     

How Often Does Deliberate Self‐Harm Occur Relative to Each Suicide? A Study of Variations by Gender and Age

Deliberate self‐harm (DSH; i.e., nonfatal self‐poisoning or self‐injury) occurs much more frequently than suicide, yet there has been little detailed investigation of the comparative rates of DSH and suicide. We conducted a study of how rates of DSH relate to suicide rates across the life cycle by gender and by method of estimation of DSH rates, using 10 years of data from a local system for monitoring DSH presentations to a general hospital and national and local suicide statistics. The rate‐ratio of DSH to suicide was 36 (95% CI 34.9–37.1) based on annual person‐based rates of DSH episodes and was nearly five times higher in females (87.9; 95% CI 84.4–91.6) than in males (18.7; 95% CI 17.9–19.6). The ratio varied markedly across the life cycle, decreasing from more than 200 in teenagers to less than 10 in persons aged 60 years and over. The difference in the ratio between females and males also decreased over the life cycle. There were very similar findings when local suicide rates were used. These patterns were replicated when the data were analyzed, first, on the basis of all episodes of DSH during the study period, but with expectedly larger DSH:suicide ratios (e.g., overall 52.7; 95% CI 51.4–54.1), and second, on the basis of individual persons only engaging in DSH during the study period, but with smaller ratios (e.g., overall 26.2; 95% CI 25.4–27.2). The DSH:suicide rate ratios for those with high and low suicidal intent were similar within age groups except for those aged 60 years and over, in whom there was a greater proportion of high intent acts. These findings illustrate how the nature of self‐harming behavior may vary in intention across the life cycle and between the genders, and provide a basis for further comparative work of this kind.