Still standing out: children's names in the United States during the Great Recession and correlations with economic indicators

Continuing a long‐standing trend in the U.S. Social Security Administration database of first names (N = 358 million), American parents were less likely to choose common names for their children between 2004 and 2015, including the years of the Great Recession (2008–2010). These trends were similar in California (severely affected by the recession) and Texas (less affected). Over a longer time period (1901–2015), cyclical economic indicators were either not correlated with common names (e.g., stock market performance) or worse economic times predicted fewer common names. The results are consistent with increasing individualism, with limited support for the idea that economic threat leads people to embrace uniqueness and no real support for the idea that economic deprivation leads to more communal name choices.     

Twenty Years Post‐genocide: The Creation of Mental Health Competence among Rwandan Survivors Through Community‐based Healing Workshops

Twenty years after the genocide, many Rwandans still suffer from the psychological wounds of the past. The country's mental health agenda is based on individualised and psychiatric approaches that help some but cannot be provided on a large scale. Further, many reconciliation initiatives have been based on public testimonies, which have been shown to be potentially re‐traumatising, leading to calls for small‐scale community‐based approaches to healing, which constitute a middle way between individualised and public approaches. Drawing on the concept of ‘mental health competence’ (Campbell and Burgess, 2012), this study evaluates one such approach: the Life Wounds Healing workshops offered by the African Institute for Integral Psychology. Twenty‐one semi‐structured interviews were conducted with former workshop participants, staff members and the institute's founder to investigate their views on how these workshops can help genocide survivors. The results suggest that the workshops succeed in creating mental health competence by establishing a safe social space for people to open up, increasing people's critical understandings of the processes of pain — and potential for healing — that informs behaviour change, generating bonding social capital and offering participants' income‐generating possibilities. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Narcissism and Hypomania Revisited: a Test of the Similarities and Differences in Their Empirical Networks

The goal of the present research was to clarify the relationship between narcissism and hypomania, both of which are multidimensional in nature. More specifically, this study examines the relations between two narcissism dimensions (grandiose and vulnerable) and three hypomania dimensions (social vitality, mood volatility, and excitement) in relation to adverse developmental experiences, affective experiences, a multidimensional model of impulsivity, and general personality traits. The absolute similarities across the patterns of correlations manifested by the narcissism and hypomania subscales were then examined. Like the multidimensionality found in narcissism in which grandiose and vulnerable narcissism manifest unrelated or negatively related empirical networks, the same was true for the hypomania dimensions. Grandiose narcissism manifested substantially similar empirical profiles with the hypomania components of social vitality and, to a lesser extent, excitement. Conversely, vulnerable narcissism manifested a profile quite similar to a third hypomania component – mood volatility. These findings are discussed in the context of the difficulty in developing robust and coherent research literatures when using multidimensional total scores for either narcissism or hypomania.     

Honor and Moral Revolution

Western philosophers have generally neglected honor as a moral phenomenon worthy of serious study. Appiah’s recent work on honor in moral revolutions is an important exception, but even he is careful to separate honor from morality, regarding it as only “an ally” of morality. In this paper we take Appiah to be right about the psychological, social, and historical role honor has played in three notable moral revolutions, but wrong about the moral nature of honor. We defend two new theses: First, honor is an emotional and moral form of recognition respect that can hinder or aid moral progress. Second, honor, so conceived, can play a rational role in progressive moral change, as it did among the working class in the British abolition of slave trade, when the pressure of moral consistency moved them to protest American slavery as an affront to their honor without change in their moral belief that slavery is wrong.     

“Satan Has Afflicted Me!” Jinn-Possession and Mental Illness in the Qur’an

Mental health stigma in Muslim communities may be partly due to a commonly held belief among some Muslims about the supernatural causes of mental illness (i.e. jinn-possession brought on by one’s sinful life). A thematic analysis was carried out on four English translations and the Arabic text of the Qur’an to explore whether the connection between jinn-possession and insanity exists within the Muslim holy book. No connection between spirit-possession and madness or mental illness was found. Pagans taunted and labelled people as jinn-possessed only to ostracize and scapegoat. Linking the labelling of people as jinn-possession to a pagan practice may be used to educate Muslims, so they can reassess their community’s stigma towards the mentally ill.     

The composition of reasons

How do reasons combine? How is it that several reasons taken together can have a combined weight which exceeds the weight of any one alone? I propose an answer in mereological terms: reasons combine by composing a further, complex reason of which they are parts. Their combined weight is the weight of their combination. I develop a mereological framework, and use this to investigate some structural views about reasons. Two of these views I call “Atomism” and “Wholism”. Atomism is the view that atomic reasons are fundamental: all reasons reduce to atomic reasons. Wholism is the view that whole reasons are fundamental. I argue for Wholism, and against Atomism. I also consider whether reasons might be “context-sensitive”.     

Social Contexts and Building Social Capital for Collective Action: Three Case Studies of Volunteers in the Context of HIV and AIDS in South Africa

Social capital is increasingly conceptualised in academic and policy literature as a panacea for a range of health and development issues, particularly in the context of HIV. In this paper, we conceptualise social capital as an umbrella concept capturing processes including networks, norms, trust and relationships that open up opportunities for participation and collective action that allow communities to address issues of common concern. We specifically outline social capital as comprising three distinct forms: bonding, bridging and linking social capital. Rather than presenting original data, we draw on three well‐documented and previously published case studies of health volunteers in South Africa. We explore how social contexts shape the possibility for the emergence and sustainability of social capital. We identify three cross‐cutting contextual factors that are critical barriers to the emergence of social capital: poverty, stigma and the weakness of external organisations' abilities to support small groups. Our three case studies suggest that the assumption that social capital can be generated from the ground upwards is not reasonable. Rather, there needs to be a greater focus on how those charged with supporting small groups—non‐governmental organisations, bureaucracies and development agencies—can work to enable social capital to emerge. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.