Stalking: Patterns,motives, and intervention strategies

Stalking is generally defined as an intentional pattern of repeated intrusive and intimidating behaviors toward a specific person that causes the target to feel harassed, threatened, and fearful, or that a reasonable person would regard as being so. Motivations for stalking include a delusional belief in romantic destiny, a desire to reclaim a prior relationship, a sadistic urge to torment the victim, or a psychotic overidentification with the victim and the desire to replace him or her. Stalkers may carry a variety of diagnostic labels, including psychotic disorders, delusional disorders, or cluster-B personality disorders, and are generally refractive to conventional psychological treatments. Risk factors for violence in a stalking scenario include a prior intimate relationship, the stalker's feeling of being rejected or humiliated, and generic risk factors for violence such as low educational level and substance abuse. Cyberstalking can be as distressing, if not more so, to victims as physical stalking due to the concealment and anonymity afforded by electronic communication. Victims may adopt varying strategies for dealing with stalkers, such as avoiding, confronting, seeking third party assistance, and accessing the legal system. Threat management specialists have offered certain recommendations that can make it easier for a victim to deter and discourage a stalker.     

Social support,coping, and depressive symptoms in cardiac illness among Hispanic and non-Hispanic White cardiac patients

In Multi-Trait Multi-Method (MTMM) studies of causal attributions for laboratory events, there is little evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for attribution measures. We report the first MTMM study to investigate the validity of two methods of eliciting causal beliefs for an illness, specifically, myocardial infarction. Adult respondents (N?=?107) listed causes of MI, then completed questionnaire rating scales for causal beliefs for MI. Measures were compared using both Campbell and Fiske's approach to MTMM analyses, and a Confirmatory Factor Analysis approach. Neither single item measures causal beliefs, nor scales of causal beliefs derived using exploratory factor analysis provided much evidence of convergent and discriminant validity. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that a model containing only causal belief factors provided a moderately good fit to the data. Adding a questionnaire method factor significantly improved the fit of the model, as well as substantially changing the pattern of factor loadings: loadings of questionnaire items on causal belief factors were markedly reduced. These results highlight major problems with the measurement of causal beliefs, and in particular question the validity of factor analysis of questionnaire measures of causal beliefs. They also suggest that at least some of the MI causal belief factors reported in the literature are artefacts of common questionnaire method variance.     

How well do the theory of reasoned action and theory of planned behaviour predict intentions and attendance at screening programmes? A meta-analysis

Meta-analysis was used to quantify how well the Theories of Reasoned Action and Planned Behaviour have predicted intentions to attend screening programmes and actual attendance behaviour. Systematic literature searches identified 33 studies that were included in the review. Across the studies as a whole, attitudes had a large-sized relationship with intention, while subjective norms and perceived behavioural control (PBC) possessed medium-sized relationships with intention. Intention had a medium-sized relationship with attendance, whereas the PBC–attendance relationship was small sized. Due to heterogeneity in results between studies, moderator analyses were conducted. The moderator variables were (a) type of screening test, (b) location of recruitment, (c) screening cost and (d) invitation to screen. All moderators affected theory of planned behaviour relationships. Suggestions for future research emerging from these results include targeting attitudes to promote intention to screen, a greater use of implementation intentions in screening information and examining the credibility of different screening providers.     

The effect of ageing on the recollection of emotional and neutral pictures

This study investigated age-related differences in recognition memory for emotional and neutral pictures. Younger and older participants were asked to rate pictures according to their emotional valence, arousal, and visual complexity. Two weeks later they had to recognise these pictures and the states of awareness associated with memory were assessed with the “remember/know/guess” paradigm. We found that, although the influence of emotion on recognition accuracy (as assessed by d′) was similar in both age groups, the tendency for positive and negative pictures to create a rich recollective experience was weaker in older adults. In addition, “remember” responses were more often based on a recollection of emotional reactions in older than in younger participants. We suggest that the elderly tend to focus on their feelings when confronted with emotional pictures, which could have impaired their memory for the contextual information associated with these stimuli.     

Lecturers' faces fatigue their students: Face identity aftereffects for dynamic and static faces

Face adaptation has been used as a tool to probe our representations for facial identity. It has also been claimed to play a functional role in face processing, perhaps calibrating the visual system towards encountered faces. However, for this to be so, face aftereffects must be observable following adaptation to ecologically valid moving stimuli, not just after prolonged viewing of static images. We adapted our participants to videos, static image sequences or single images of the faces of lecturers who were personally familiar to them. All three stimulus types produced significant, and equivalent, face identity aftereffects, demonstrating that aftereffects are not confined to static images but can occur after exposure to more naturalistic stimuli. It is also further evidence against explanations of face adaptation effects solely in terms of low-level visual processing.     

Passion at work and burnout: A two-study test of the mediating role of flow experiences

Vallerand et al. (2003) developed a Dualistic Model of Passion where two types of passion are proposed: harmonious and obsessive passion. They generally predict adaptive and less adaptive outcomes, respectively. We hypothesized that the type of passion one holds towards his/her work should influence one's experience of burnout symptoms. We hypothesized that a harmonious passion for work would lead to low levels of burnout through its facilitation of frequent flow experiences, whereas an obsessive passion would directly lead to high levels of burnout. Two studies (one cross-sectional and one prospective) were conducted and results of structural equation modelling analyses supported the hypotheses.     

Speaking out of Turn: Martin Heidegger and die Kehre

' Speaking out of Turn : Martin Heidegger and die Kehre ' examines the difference between Heidegger's own understanding of 'the turning' and that understanding which originated with Karl Lowith and was later presented to English-speaking readers by William Richardson in Martin Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought . The study focuses on Heidegger's own introduction to Richardson's book, and argues that, far from confirming Richardson's view that there is a 'Heidegger I' and 'Heidegger II' connected by the 'reversal' or turning, Heidegger sought to indicate with (sometimes indirect) reference to his own works that the 'turning' is a movement in thought that it was part of the original project of Being and Time to carry through, but which he only succeeded in describing much later. The study attempts to illustrate this by a close examination of the works to which Heidegger alludes in his Foreword to Richardson's book. Many of these were not available when Richardson published (1963), and so it has only more recently been possible to amplify Heidegger's earlier published works with reference to his lecture courses. The study concludes that the horizon of time and the analytic of Dasein never really disappear from his later thinking, as many have claimed, and proposes that the relationship between the earlier and later Heidegger be re-examined. This re-examination takes the form of accepting that far from the 'turning' representing a fracture, where Heidegger abandons the existential-temporal analytic of Dasein in favour of an attempt to think only being ( das Sein ) as such, the 'turning' represents the point of unity in Heidegger's work. This point of unity shows how Dasein and being 'belong together' in 'the event' ( das Ereignis ).     

Rethinking Early Western Buddhists: Beachcombers, ‘Going Native’ and Dissident Orientalism

Recent research on the life of U Dhammaloka and other early western Buddhists in Asia has interesting implications in relation to class, ethnicity and politics. ‘Beachcomber Buddhists’ highlight the wider situation of ‘poor whites’ in Asia—needed by empire but prone to defect from elite standards of behaviour designed to maintain imperial and racial power. ‘Going native’, exemplified by the European bhikkhu, highlights the difficulties faced by empire in policing these racial boundaries and the role of Asian agency in early ‘western’ Buddhism. Finally, such ‘dissident Orientalism’ has political implications, as with specifically Irish forms of solidarity with Asian anti-colonial movements. Within the limits imposed by the data, this article rethinks ‘early western Buddhism’ in Asia as a creative response to colonialism, shaped by Asian actors, marked by cross-racial solidarity and oriented to alternative possible futures beyond empire.     

Philosophy of Science A Personal Peek into the Future

In this opinion piece, the authors offer their personal and idiosyncratic views of the future of the philosophy of science, focusing on its relationship with the history of science and metaphysics, respectively. With regard to the former, they suggest that the Kantian tradition might be drawn upon both to render the history and philosophy of science more relevant to philosophy as a whole and to overcome the challenges posed by naturalism. When it comes to the latter, they suggest both that metaphysics has much to learn from the philosophy of science and that it offers an array of tools that philosophers of science can themselves appropriate.