Leader personality and 360‐degree assessments of leader behavior

To investigate the relationship between personality and multi‐source feedback, we assessed 190 health care managers by applying the Understanding Personal Potential personality test, which provides comprehensive measurement of the Big Five dimensions and eight narrower personality traits. Managers' leadership behaviors were assessed by colleagues, supervisors, a random sample of each manager's subordinates as well as the managers themselves using a 360‐degree change, production, employee (CPE) instrument. Hierarchical multivariate regression analysis showed that the Big Five variables were significantly related to the Managers' leadership behavior in all CPE dimensions. Also, addition of narrow personality variables to the Big Five increased explained variance in leadership behavior. This study is the first of its kind to include the full range of viewpoints in a 360‐degree instrument, along with a large number of subordinate assessments. We found that both the strength of the relationship between personality and behavior and the configuration of different predictors varied depending on who did the rating and what leadership orientation was investigated, and this observation merits further investigation.     

Concept Formation and Concept Grounding

Recently Carrie S. Jenkins formulated an epistemology of mathematics, or rather arithmetic, respecting apriorism, empiricism, and realism. Central is an idea of concept grounding. The adequacy of this idea has been questioned e.g. concerning the grounding of the mathematically central concept of set (or class), and of composite concepts. In this paper we present a view of concept formation in mathematics, based on ideas from Carnap, leading to modifications of Jenkins’s epistemology that may solve some problematic issues with her ideas. But we also present some further problems with her view, concerning the role of proof for mathematical knowledge.     

Interoceptive sensitivity,body image dissatisfaction,and body awareness in healthy individuals

Relationships among interoceptive sensitivity (IS), body image dissatisfaction, body mass index (BMI), and self‐reported body awareness were investigated in a cross‐sectional study. Eighty‐two Norwegian high school students and 70 Hungarian undergraduate university students participated in the study. Subjects completed two questionnaires (Body Image Ideals Questionnaire – BIQ; Body Awareness Questionnaire – BAQ) followed by the assessment of interoceptive sensitivity using the Mental Tracking Method (MTM). An inverse, medium‐level relationship between body image dissatisfaction and IS was found in both the Norwegian and the Hungarian samples. The relationships between IS and self‐reported body awareness, and between body image dissatisfaction and BMI were uniformly non‐significant in both samples. Predictors of body image dissatisfaction were resting heart rate, gender, and IS in the regression analysis after controlling for BMI, age, and nationality. The negative relationship between IS and body image dissatisfaction described in patients with anorexia nervosa also exists in healthy individuals. There is no direct connection between IS and self‐reported body awareness.     

A Comparison of Applicants' and Incumbents' Mean Scores on Health Constructs and Personality Constructs. A Follow‐up Study of Military Recruits in a Selection Setting

This study investigated the change in means on both personality constructs and the more infrequently studied, health constructs, as a possible effect of self‐enhancement in a real selection setting. The participants (N = 202) were assessed first as applicants, and later as incumbents. The result revealed that, while all the means for personality constructs changed across situations, the effect sizes on the health constructs were stronger. The analysis also revealed that it was twice as likely for the incumbents to confirm having experienced previous traumatic/stressful events compared with applicants. Implications for the observed changes on both personality and health constructs in military selection setting are discussed.     

What makes displaced revenge taste sweet: Retributing displaced responsibility or sending a message to the original perpetrator?

The present research investigates the psychological dynamics underlying displaced revenge. We examine (1) the effect of entitativity on displaced revenge tendencies, including potential mediators of this effect, and (2) the conditions under which taking displaced revenge is satisfying for avengers. In three studies, we show that (a) perpetrator group entitativity predicts the tendency to take displaced revenge via perceptions that the vengeful action is effective in delivering a message to the original perpetrator, (b) that displaced revenge is satisfying when the group continues to exist in its original form, but not when the perpetrator has left the group or when the group has dissolved, and (c) that displaced revenge is most satisfying when both the original perpetrator and the target of revenge understand why revenge has been taken. These findings imply that sending a message to the original perpetrator is an important aspect of the psychological dynamics underlying displaced revenge.     

Ill-health in Sweden 2005: Discontent in a modern welfare society and its relation to globalization

Abstract

The growing ill-health in Sweden is related to the crisis of the welfare state and to globalization and the expansion of a new virtual reality affecting the conceptualization of time and space, as well as to wider areas of human interaction, thinking, and ethical judgment. Fear and anxiety are emotional states of mind that have widespread effects on an individual level as well as on the whole of society.     

The exclusion of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy from the publicly financed medical health sector in Sweden

Abstract

Schreber's fantasy of turning into a woman to be fertilized by God and produce a new race of mankind was a major motive for Superintendent of Sonnenstein, Dr Guido Weber, to maintain that Schreber was a case of chronic and incurable paranoia and unfit for life in society, failing to see the difference between the concrete and the metaphorical. Schreber not only proved Weber wrong, but prophetically anticipated a number of issues in current awareness of gender psychology and gender roles in society.

In Schreber's system the two principal elements of his delusions (his transformation into a woman and his favored relation to God) are linked by the assumption of a feminine attitude towarh God. It will be our task to show that there is an essential genetic relation between these two elements. Otherwise we shall be like a man holding a sieve under a he-goat while some one else milks it. Sigmung Freud     

A Meaningful Intercourse: Some Thoughts about Thinking

This article traces the development of ideas about consciousness, symbolisation, thinking and affects in the works of Freud, Bion, Meltzer and Stern. Consciousness is viewed as a special quality of psychic functions and therefore related to the complexity of the world of experience, to its different dimensions as Meltzer describes them. Freud's initial idea about direct and reproductive thinking and a compulsion to associate returns in Bions development of an epistemological instinct and are referred to by Stern as an ongoing, omnipresent milieu of thoughts in which instinctual life takes place. Bion develops Freud's thinking of unpleasure, primary and secondary processes, when he formulates the difference between pain and suffering, which also makes it possible for him to develop Freud's views on symbol formation. Bion's grid describes the relation between different forms of symbols and makes it possible to understand the importance of the reverie of the mother and how a feeling of meaning unfolds, when symbol formation takes place in a process in which the individual is in contact with the underlying structure. These ideas are in its turn developed in another direction by Stern in his theories of a pre-narrative envelope. Freud's ideas about perceptual identity and thought identity as a criteria for the release of motor activity are looked upon as a criteria for truth, which returns in Bion's ideas about the relation between truth and the development of the capacity to think. Meltzer takes up this thread when he claims that truth is beauty and beauty truth.