Natality and mortality: rethinking death with Cavarero

In this article I rethink death and mortality on the basis of birth and natality, drawing on the work of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero. She understands birth to be the corporeal event whereby a unique person emerges from the mother’s body into the common world. On this basis Cavarero reconceives death as consisting in bodily dissolution and re-integration into cosmic life. This impersonal conception of death coheres badly with her view that birth is never exclusively material but always has ontological significance as the appearance of someone new and singular in the world of relations with others. This view of birth calls for a relational conception of death, which I develop in this article. On this conception, death is always collective, affecting all those with whom the one who dies has maintained relations: As such, our different deaths shade into one another. Moreover, because each person is unique in virtue of consisting of a unique web of relations with others, death always happens to persons as webs of relations. Death is relational in this way as a corporeal, and specifically biological, phenomenon, to which we are subject as bodily beings and as interdependent living organisms. I explore this with reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of her mother’s death from cancer. Finally I argue that, on this relational conception, death is something to be feared.     

Ethnic and racial differences in body size perception and satisfaction

Body dissatisfaction in women in the United States is common. We explored how women from various racial and ethnic groups used figural stimuli by exploring differences in current and preferred silhouette, and their discrepancy. We surveyed 4023 women aged 25–45 in an online investigation. Participants were identified using a national quota-sampling procedure. Asian women chose a smaller silhouette to represent their current body size, which did not remain significant after adjusting for self-reported BMI. After controlling for BMI, African American women selected a smaller silhouette than White women to represent their current size. Both African American and women reporting “Other” race preferred larger silhouettes than White women even after controlling for BMI. The discrepancy score revealed lower body dissatisfaction among African American than White women. Understanding factors that promote body satisfaction differentially across racial and ethnic groups could become a tool in appropriately tailored interventions designed to prevent eating disorders.     

Executive attention and self-regulation in infancy

This study investigates early executive attention in infancy by studying the relations between infant sequential looking and other behaviors predictive of later self-regulation. One early marker of executive attention development is anticipatory looking, the act of looking to the location of a target prior to its appearance in that location, a process that involves endogenous control of visual orienting. Previous studies have shown that anticipatory looking is positively related to executive attention as assessed by the ability to resolve spatial conflict in 3–4-year-old children. In the current study, anticipatory looking was positively related to cautious behavioral approach in response to non-threatening novel objects in 6- and 7-month-old infants. This finding and previous findings showing the presence of error detection in infancy are consistent with the hypothesis that there is some degree of executive attention in the first year of life. Anticipatory looking was also related to the frequency of distress, to looking away from disturbing stimuli, and to some self-regulatory behaviors. These results may indicate either early attentional regulation of emotion or close relations between early developing fear and later self-regulation. Overall, the results suggest the presence of rudimentary systems of executive attention in infants and support further studies using anticipatory looking as a measure of individual differences in attention in infancy.     

Distressed Mothers and Their Infants Use a Less Efficient Timing Mechanism in Creating Expectancies of Each Other’s Looking Patterns

The prediction of events and the creation of expectancies about their time course is a crucial aspect of an infant's mental life, but temporal mechanisms underlying these predictions are obscure. Scalar timing, in which the ratio of mean durations to their standard deviations is held constant, enables a person to use an estimate of the mean for its standard deviation. It is one efficient mechanism that may facilitate predictability and the creation of expectancies in mother-infant interaction. We illustrate this mechanism with the dyadic gaze rhythm of mother and infant looking at and looking away from each other's faces. Two groups of Hi- and Lo-Distress mothers were created using self-reported depression, anxiety, self-criticism and childhood experiences. Lo-Distress infants (controls) used scalar timing 100% of the time, about double that of Hi-Distress infants. Lo-Distress mothers used scalar timing about nine times as much as Hi-Distress mothers. The diminished use of scalar timing patterns in Hi-Distress mothers and infants may make the anticipation of each other's gaze patterns more difficult for both partners.     

The Contributions of Personality to Organizational Behavior and Psychology: Findings,Criticisms, and Future Research Directions

Skepticism regarding the importance of personality traits as predictors of organizational behavior criteria has given way to an appreciation of the broad array of work outcomes predicted by personality. This article considers the effects of the five‐factor model (‘Big Five’) personality traits on the following work outcomes: (1) job performance; (2) work motivation; (3) job attitudes; (4) leadership; (5) power, politics, and influence; (6) stress, adaptability, and coping; (7) team effectiveness; (8) counterproductive/deviant workplace behaviors; (9) workplace accidents; and (10) conflict and negotiation. Two contemporary criticisms of personality research in organizational behavior – that the validities are small and that faking undermines the usefulness of personality inventories in employment contexts – are then evaluated. Finally, a brief agenda for future research is provided which highlights needed areas of advancement.     

Categorical priming of famous person recognition: a hitherto overlooked methodological factor can resolve a long-standing debate

The Burton, Bruce and Johnston [Burton, A. M., Bruce, V., & Johnston, R. A. (1990). Understanding face recognition with an interactive activation model. British Journal of Psychology, 81, 361-380] model of person recognition proposes that representations of known persons are connected by shared semantic attributes. This predicts that priming should be observed between persons from the same category, e.g. famous persons with the same occupation. Empirical investigations to date have produced mixed results, and comparison of methods suggests that priming based on shared occupation may have been suppressed by the presence of prime-target pairs representing a stronger relationship of close association. In the present experiment, 72 participants performed a familiarity decision to famous names preceded by close associates or members of the same occupational category. As predicted, categorical priming was observed in the group of participants for whom the same occupation prime-target pairs were presented before the close-associate pairs, but not in the group for whom the two types of relationship were intermixed. Associate priming was significant in both groups. These results are attributed to differing levels of processing of the primes, invoked by participants' observation of the most salient prime-target relationship.     

Interidentity memory transfer in dissociative identity disorder

Controversy surrounding dissociative identity disorder (DID) has focused on conflicting findings regarding the validity and nature of interidentity amnesia, illustrating the need for objective methods of examining amnesia that can discriminate between explicit and implicit memory transfer. In the present study, the authors used a cross-modal manipulation designed to mitigate implicit memory effects. Explicit memory transfer between identities was examined in 7 DID participants and 34 matched control participants. After words were presented to one identity auditorily, the authors tested another identity for memory of those words in the visual modality using an exclusion paradigm. Despite self-reported interidentity amnesia, memory for experimental stimuli transferred between identities. DID patients showed no superior ability to compartmentalize information, as would be expected with interidentity amnesia. The cross-modal nature of the test makes it unlikely that memory transfer was implicit. These findings demonstrate that subjective reports of interidentity amnesia are not necessarily corroborated by objective tests of explicit memory transfer.     

The Role of Women's Relationships With Their Partners in Their Adjustment Following Prenatal Genetic Testing1

This study explored how aspects of the couple relationship contributed to the adjustment of 95 women who underwent prenatal diagnostic (PND) testing because of advanced maternal age (AMA). Participants completed self‐report measures prior to genetic counseling (T1), during the waiting period for PND test results (T2), and after normal results were received (T3). At T2, distress was predicted by the degree to which women approached the PND decision jointly with their partners, and marital adjustment was predicted by women's satisfaction with the support received from their partners. Marital adjustment at T3 was predicted by earlier levels of partner agreement about PND‐related issues. Results suggest that the couple relationship has the potential to facilitate or hinder women's experience of PND testing.     

A comparison of the Psychological Entitlement Scale and the Narcissistic Personality Inventory's Entitlement Scale: relations with general personality traits and personality disorders

Given the negative consequences of psychological entitlement, it is important to have a reliable and valid measure of the construct. We used an undergraduate sample (N = 271) to examine the Entitlement subscale (ENT) of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (Raskin & Terry, 1988) and the Psychological Entitlement Scale (PES; Campbell, Bonacci, Shelton, Exline, & Bushman, 2004) in relation to general personality traits (i.e., Revised NEO Personality Inventory; Costa & McCrae, 1992) and personality disorders (PDs; Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire-4; Hyler, 1994). We found similar personality correlates (e.g., disagreeableness; Cluster B PDs) for both measures, although ENT was comprised of greater disagreeableness and less warmth and positive affect. ENT was also more positively associated with schizoid and borderline PDs compared to the PES. Overall, these measures are closely related with regard to their relations with general and pathological personality dimensions, although the ENT scale may capture a slightly more pathological variant.