Status and solidarity in social comparison: agentic and communal values and vertical and horizontal directions

Social comparison involves positioning the self relative to others on a vertical or status dimension (ranging from upward to downward comparisons) and a horizontal or solidarity dimension (ranging from contrastive to connective comparisons). Across 3 studies in which 389 undergraduates recorded everyday social comparisons (n = 4,417), downward and connective comparisons were rated as more helpful and mood enhancing than upward and contrastive comparisons. The effects of horizontal comparisons were greater for people for whom solidarity was an important value; however, the effects of vertical comparisons were not greater for people who valued status. The roles of the comparison target, topic, and situation were also explored; for example, noticing undesirable features of the target enhanced status but undermined solidarity.     

The Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms Distress Index: A pragmatic exploration of general factors to enhance a multidimensional scale

Objective: The authors attempted to develop and validate a general distress index for a multidimensional psychological symptom/outcome measure used in over 300 college counseling centers with more than 100,000 cases annually: the Counseling Center Assessment of Psychological Symptoms (CCAPS). Method: Four models were compared for fit indices (n = 19,247): the existing first-order factor model (without a general factor), a second-order factor model, a bifactor model, and a single factor or “total score” model. In separate clinical and non-clinical samples, concurrent and divergent validity were examined using several well-established measures of psychological symptoms, as well as two-week test–retest and treatment utilization data. Results: Second-order and bifactor models which captured a single “distress” factor both exhibited good fit to the data relative to the baseline and “total score” model. Validity data indicated that factors adequately measured meaningful clinical onstructs. Conclusion: Both the bifactor and second-order models indicated the presence of a “distress index” comprised items across many of the CCAPS subscales. This distress scale has strong applicability for benchmarking the overall severity and complexity of patients at different centers, and can be used to help identify colleges and universities with areas of clinical strength, which can be studied to improve the field. Clinically, the distress index offers a parsimonious and efficient method for clinicians to monitor patients’ progress through treatment.     

Quidditism without quiddities

Structuralism and quidditism are competing views of the metaphysics of property individuation: structuralists claim that properties are individuated by their nomological roles; quidditists claim that they are individuated by something else. This paper (1) refutes what many see as the best reason to accept structuralism over quidditism and (2) offers a methodological argument in favor of a quidditism. The standard charge against quidditism is that it commits us to something ontologically otiose: intrinsic aspects of properties, so-called ??quiddities??. Here I grant that quiddities are ontologically otiose, but deny that quidditism requires them. According to a view I call ??austere quidditism??, properties are individuated by bare numerical identity. I argue that, as far as ontological parsimony is concerned, austere quidditism and structuralism are on a par. But is austere quidditism a coherent alternative to structuralism? To see that it is, we must get clear on what exactly we mean by ??property individuation??. What we discover is that structuralism is a counterpart theory for properties, and that austere quidditism is simply the rejection of counterpart theory. I conclude with a methodological argument to the effect that counterpart theory for properties ought to be rejected. This paper begins by situating the debate between structuralists and quidditists within the context of a debate over the epistemic limits of fundamental science. At the center of this debate is David Lewis??s posthumously published ??Ramseyan Humility?? (2008). In the appendix I explain the precise role of austere quidditism in Lewis??s argument.     

The Decision-Theoretic Lockean Thesis

Abstract

Certain philosophers maintain that there is a ‘constitutive threshold for belief’: to believe that p just is to have a degree of confidence that p above a certain threshold. On the basis of this view, these philosophers defend what is known as ‘the Lockean Thesis’, according to which it is rational to believe that p just in case it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p above the constitutive threshold for belief. While not directly speaking to the controversy over the Lockean Thesis, this paper defends the general idea behind it—namely, the thesis that there is some threshold such that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence greater than that threshold. This paper identifies the threshold in question—not with the alleged constitutive threshold for belief—but with what I call ‘the practical threshold for rational belief’. Roughly, the thesis defended here is that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p that rationalizes engaging in certain types of practical reasoning.     

Practical Certainty

When we engage in practical deliberation, we sometimes engage in careful probabilistic reasoning. At other times, we simply make flat out assumptions about how the world is or will be. A question thus arises: when, if ever, is it rationally permissible to engage in the latter, less sophisticated kind of practical deliberation? Recently, a number of authors have argued that the answer concerns whether one knows that p. Others have argued that the answer concerns whether one is justified in believing that one knows that p. Against both of these, this paper argues that the answer concerns whether p is ‘practically certain’—that is, whether the actual epistemic probability that p differs from epistemic certainty that p only in ways that are irrelevant to the decision one currently faces.     

Language and life history: a new perspective on the development and evolution of human language

It has long been claimed that Homo sapiens is the only species that has language, but only recently has it been recognized that humans also have an unusual pattern of growth and development. Social mammals have two stages of pre-adult development: infancy and juvenility. Humans have two additional prolonged and pronounced life history stages: childhood, an interval of four years extending between infancy and the juvenile period that follows, and adolescence, a stage of about eight years that stretches from juvenility to adulthood. We begin by reviewing the primary biological and linguistic changes occurring in each of the four pre-adult ontogenetic stages in human life history. Then we attempt to trace the evolution of childhood and juvenility in our hominin ancestors. We propose that several different forms of selection applied in infancy and childhood; and that, in adolescence, elaborated vocal behaviors played a role in courtship and intrasexual competition, enhancing fitness and ultimately integrating performative and pragmatic skills with linguistic knowledge in a broad faculty of language. A theoretical consequence of our proposal is that fossil evidence of the uniquely human stages may be used, with other findings, to date the emergence of language. If important aspects of language cannot appear until sexual maturity, as we propose, then a second consequence is that the development of language requires the whole of modern human ontogeny. Our life history model thus offers new ways of investigating, and thinking about, the evolution, development, and ultimately the nature of human language.     

視、听語文材料同时識記的干扰与相对优势

問題識記时若有两种或多种感觉通道同时活动,可能彼此助长,也可能相互干扰。这对于了解識記时神經中枢各部分的活动与相互影响可能有一定的启发意义。视、听两种感觉通道在学习时最常应用,两种感觉通道可以同时或先后接受同一的刺激物,也可接受不同的刺激物。以往关于比較視、听材料識記效果的研究較多,結果指出,两种感觉材料的識記效果一般难分高低,主要决定于材料的性貭与被試的經驗等条件。     

Action,movement, and neurophysiology

Action is to be distinguished from (mere) bodily movement not by reference to an agent's intentions, or his conscious control of his movements (Sect. I), but by reference to the agent as cause of those movements, though this needs to be understood in a way which destroys the alleged distinction between agent‐causation and event‐causation (Sect. II). It also raises the question of the relation between an agent and his neurophysiology (Sect. III), and eventually the question of the compatibility of purposive and mechanistic accounts of human behaviour (Sect. IV). For the two to be compatible it is necessary that, e.g., intentions and brain states be not merely co‐existent but also causal equivalents, in a way which allows for the mechanical explanation of teleological states — or vice versa.     

Methods of Group Psychotherapy by Raymond J. Corsini

Abstract

I call attention to the metapsychology of sense, and the role sense plays–phenomenologically and symbolically–in the life of the clinician and the group. Each group member asserts influence in taking a role as the perceiver and the perceived, the senser and the sensed. We reach for sense, for without sense reference, we cannot grasp or even talk about psychic reality. It serves as sign and symbol, as metaphor, analogy, illustration, and model. Sense fixes experience yet may fixate experience and interfere with developing abstract thoughts. Clinical vignettes illustrate how the leader may utilize his or her particular clinical sensibility to reach the group and focus attention, to link sense to psychic qualities: to the personality of the members, the group culture and process, and the live clinical interaction.