Attitudes,Tracing, and Control

There is an apparent tension in our everyday moral responsibility practices. On the one hand, it is commonly assumed that moral responsibility requires voluntary control: an agent can be morally responsible only for those things that fall within the scope of her voluntary control. On the other hand, we regularly praise and blame individuals for mental states and conditions that appear to fall outside the scope of their voluntary control, such as desires, emotions, beliefs, and other attitudes. In order to resolve this apparent tension, many philosophers appeal to a tracing principle to argue that agents are morally responsible (only) for those attitudes whose existence can be traced back, causally, to a voluntary action or omission in the past. My aim in this article is to critically evaluate this tracing strategy and to argue that it gives us a misguided picture of when and why we are morally responsible for our attitudes. I argue that we should accept a ‘judgment sensitivity’ condition of moral responsibility rather than a ‘voluntary control’ condition, and defend this account against various objections.     

Somatic response to stress, physical symptoms and health service use: The role of current stress

The study examined physical symptoms and health service utilization of subjects high or low on a measure of the tendency to experience stress somatically and high or low on a measure of current stress. High somatic responders reported greater numbers of symptoms than low somatic responders regardless of stress level. However, high somatic responders who were experiencing high levels of current stress reported significantly more symptoms than high somatic responders who were experiencing low levels of stress. These findings indicate that somatic response to stress reflects both a general tendency to focus on physical symptoms, and a specific tendency to focus more on physical symptoms when under stress. Analysis of health service records indicated that high somatic responders had more visits prompted by symptoms than low somatic responders, but did not differ in frequency of health service visits designed to maintain health. The findings further clarify the relationship between somatic response to stress, physical symptoms and health service use.     

The Public and Private Use of Consensus-Raising Excuses

ABSTRACT Two experiments tested the proposition that people use consensus-raising excuses more in private than in public when the audience has information that could refute subjects' claims about others In Experiment 1, subjects received success or failure feedback and made public or private attributions to ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck In Experiment 2, subjects received positive or negative feedback and evaluated themselves and others on the trait Task difficulty attributions and evaluations of others are consensus-raising measures Consistent with our hypothesis, subjects receiving negative feedback in Experiment 1 claimed that the task was more difficult, and in Experiment 2 evaluated the other more negatively in private than in public.     

From appraisal to emotion: Differences among unpleasant feelings

Recent research has indicated strong relations between people's appraisals of their circumstances and their emotional states. The present study examined these relations across a range of unpleasant situations in which subjects experienced complex emotional blends. Subjects recalled unpleasant experiences from their pasts that were associated with particular appraisals and described their appraisals and emotions during these experiences. Situations defined by particular appraisals along the human agency or situational control dimensions were reliably associated with different levels of anger, sadness, and guilt, as predicted. However, predicted differences in emotion were not observed for situations selected for appraisals along the certainty or attention dimensions. Most subjects reported experiencing blends of two or more emotions, and correlation/regression analyses indicated that even in the context of these blends, patterns of appraisal similar to those observed previously (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985, 1987) characterized the experience of the individual emotions. The regressions further indicated that appraisals along some dimensions were more important to the experience of particular emotions than were appraisals along other dimensions. Thesecentral appraisals are compared with the adaptive functions their associated emotions are believed to serve, and the implications of these findings are discussed.This research was supported in part by a Stanford University graduate fellowship and in part by a National Institute of Mental Health training grant to Craig Smith. Part of the writing was done while Phoebe Ellsworth was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and by the James McKeen Cattell Fund.     

Affective state mediates causal attributions for success and failure

The influence of affect on causal attributions for success and failure was examined in this experiment. A positive, neurtral, or negative mood was induced in subjects who then learned they had either succeeded or failed an aptitude test taken previously. Relative to neutral mood control conditions, subjects in both positive and negative mood conditions showed a pronounced self-serving bias, particularly following success. The finding is interpreted as self-regulation of affective state. Specifically, causal attribution of success to internal factors can sustain or enhance positive affect; attribution of failure to external factors can diminish negative affect. Ancillary analyses corroborated this interpretation.     

Does spreading activation summate?

Summary Network models of semantic memory assume implicitly or explicitly that the degree of activation of a node is a monotonic function of the total amount of excitation reaching that node from all sources. For example, the activation level of the node representing apple should be greater if it is receiving excitation due to the activation of the nodes for fruit and pear than if only one of these neighboring nodes is activated. This notion was tested by presenting semantic primes 80 ms or 320 ms before a letter string (e.g., apple or ipple) requiring a lexical decision. The prime stimuli consisted of a pair of simultaneous items that were identical in the single prime condition (e.g., fruit/fruit or pear/pear) or different in the double prime condition (e.g., fruit/pear or pear/fruit), and were either related (target = apple) or unrelated (target = copper) to the target, or neutral. As predicted by the summation of semantic activation assumption of network models there was a larger priming effect (in the 320 ms SOA condition) following the simultaneous activation of two related nodes than following the activation of only one node.This research was supported by grants to the first author from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.     

Marx,technocracy, and the corporatist ethos

Communism, in Marx' mind, did not mean simple liberation, but the economics of liberation. The realm of necessity (technē) was to become the primary field for emancipation (praxis), the latter taking form in new institutions, responsive to real socio-economic needs. In this sense, the problem of technocracy and the corporatist ethos in Marx are part of a broader discursive structure, which links the experiences of workers through the industrial revolution with the philosophies ofpraxis as they reach from Hegel through Marković.     

Mass media treatment of violence in sports and its effects

There appears to be a strong relationship between mass media portrayals of violence and real-life violence itself. This article reviews the available literature on the effects of media treatment of sports violence; analyzes the theoretical explanations for this treatment; and makes proposals on how the problems of both sports violence and its media coverage may be remedied, with a particular focus on amateur hockey in Canada.     

The Utility of Problem-solving Training that Emphasises Selfmanagement Principles

This study examined the usefulness of an 8-week applied problem-solving training program. Specifically, the study examined (a) whether problem-solving training that emphasised self-management principles would be useful, (b) if the effects of training would persist over time, (c) whether an individual difference variable (problem-solving appraisal) would affect training outcomes, and (d) whether the cognitive responses of the subjects during the course of training were related to their problem-solving appraisal or the change process. Results indicated that problem solving training was effective at enhancing students’ problem-solving appraisal, and that the self-report changes were maintained at a 1 year follow-up. In particular, training seemed most useful for students who initially appraised their problem solving very negatively. Finally, the results suggested that the process-oriented cognitive responses were related to students' initial problem-solving self-appraisal as well as the impact of training. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of counselling interventions, problem solving training, the interpersonal influence process, and future research.