Going Topless

The view that people go where their brains go remains popular in discussions of personal identity. But since the brain is only a small part of the body, defenders of that view need to provide an account of what it is that makes the brain specially relevant to personal identity. The standard answer is that the brain is special because it is the carrier of psychological continuity. But Peter van Inwagen has recently offered (in Material Beings ) an alternative account of the brain' special relevance. Those who reject the view that we go with our brains obviously need to respond to this new account. According to van Inwagen, there is an important difference between the life-support requirements of a severed head and those of a headless body: whereas a severed head would need only a pump to survive, a headless body would need the functional equivalent of a computer in its life-support system. It follows, according to van Inwagen, that we go with our brains. In this paper I argue that van Inwagen's argument is doubly defective: the inference from his premisses to his conclusion is dubious; and in any case his premisses misrepresent the relevant physiological facts.     

Self-affirmation and affective forecasting: Affirmation reduces the anticipated impact of negative events

When forecasting how they will feel in the future, people overestimate the impact that imagined negative events will have on their affective states, partly because they underestimate their own psychological resiliency. Because self-affirmation enhances resiliency, two studies examined whether self-affirmation prior to forecasting reduces the extremity of affective forecasts. Participants in self-affirmation conditions completed a values scale or wrote an essay asserting their most important value, whereas participants in the no-affirmation condition asserted a relatively unimportant value. Participants then predicted their affective reactions to a negative or positive imagined event. In both studies, self-affirmation reduced the unpleasant affect expected to result from a negative event, but had no impact on affective forecasts for a positive event. This pattern was mediated by participants’ cognitive appraisals of the imagined event, but not by differential focus on that event. Results are consistent with self-affirmation activating or enhancing psychological resiliency to counteract immune neglect during affective forecasting of a negative event.     

Publishing Action Research in Counseling Journals

The increased use of action research in counseling training and professional publications provides an opportunity to bridge the research‐practitioner gap that has plagued the profession for decades. In this article, action research is defined, and special considerations that counselor researchers need to address when designing, conducting, and reporting action research are presented. Suggestions are included throughout the article to assist counseling action researchers in publishing their studies in American Counseling Association journals.     

Ability,relevant possibilities,and the fixity of the past

Philosophical Studies - In several writings, John Martin Fischer has argued that those who deny a principle about abilities that he calls ‘the Fixity of the Past’ are committed to...     

Can emotions be truly group level? Evidence regarding four conceptual criteria

Recent advances in understanding prejudice and intergroup behavior have made clear that emotions help explain people's reactions to social groups and their members. Intergroup emotions theory (D. M. Mackie, T. Devos, & E. R. Smith, 2000; E. R. Smith, 1993) holds that intergroup emotions are experienced by individuals when they identify with a social group, making the group part of the psychological self. What differentiates such group-level emotions from emotions that occur purely at the individual level? The authors argue that 4 key criteria define group-level emotions: Group emotions are distinct from the same person's individual-level emotions, depend on the person's degree of group identification, are socially shared within a group, and contribute to regulating intragroup and intergroup attitudes and behavior. Evidence from 2 studies supports all 4 of these predictions and thus points to the meaningfulness, coherence, and functionality of group-level emotions.     

Familiarity impacts person perception

We investigated the effects of familiarity on person perception. We predicted that familiarity would increase non‐analytic processing, reducing attention to and the impact of individuating information, and increasing the impact of category labels on judgments about a target person. In two studies participants read either incriminating or exculpatory individuating information about a defendant in a criminal case and made judgments of guilt. In Study 1, participants were subliminally exposed to the defendant's photo, another matched photo, or no photo before seeing the evidence. Participants familiar with the defendant's photo both processed and used the individuating information less. In Study 2, participants were subtly made familiar or not with the incriminating and exculpatory information itself, and the defendant was described either as a priest or as a skinhead. Familiarity with the information reduced attention to its content and also tended to increase reliance on category information in guilt judgments. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.