The Accuracy and Rationality of Imprecise Credences

It has been claimed that, in response to certain kinds of evidence (“incomplete” or “non‐specific” evidence), agents ought to adopt imprecise credences: doxastic states that are represented by sets of credence functions rather than single ones. In this paper I argue that, given some plausible constraints on accuracy measures, accuracy‐centered epistemologists must reject the requirement to adopt imprecise credences. I then show that even the claim that imprecise credences are permitted is problematic for accuracy‐centered epistemology. It follows that if imprecise credal states are permitted or required in the cases that their defenders appeal to, then the requirements of rationality can outstrip what would be warranted by an interest in accuracy.     

Social and Psychological Factors of Rural Youth Sexting: An Examination of Gender-Specific Models

To date, few studies have examined the social and psychological effects of sexting behaviors. The current study examined how delinquency, social, and psychological factors were associated with sexting behavior in a sample of rural, high school students (n = 548). The results demonstrated that property delinquency, bully-victimization, alcohol, marijuana use, and bullying increased odds of sending and receiving nude photos. Gender specific models indicated that females who had participated in sexting behavior were more likely to report using alcohol and being a victim of bullying, while males were more likely to report using marijuana and being a perpetrator of bullying. Implications are discussed.     

Feminism,Therapy, and Changing the World

ABSTRACT

In this essay, Miriam Greenspan reviews her life’s work as an early pioneer of Feminist Therapy, the influence of her birth in a displaced person’s camp to parents who were Holocaust survivors, and her development as a feminist, social activist, and psychotherapist. She discusses her most influential works, including A New Approach to Women & Therapy (1983 Greenspan, M. (1983). A new approach to women & therapy. New York: McGraw Hill. [Google Scholar], 1993 Greenspan, M. (1993). A new approach to women & therapy (10th anniversary ed.). New York: McGraw Hill. [Google Scholar]) and Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair (2003 Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Boston: Shambhala. [Google Scholar]). She concludes with a look back at her own spiritual evolution, her assessment of the ultimate contribution of Feminist Therapy to society, the need for a wide model of therapy that incorporates the political and spiritual dimensions of experience, and the challenges that psychology and psychotherapy face in an age of global threat.     

Complex Collective Trauma Following a Terror Attack in a Small Community: A Systemic Analysis of Community Voices and Psychosocial Interventions

In this ethnographic study, data were collected four months, one year, and three years following a terror attack on civilians in a small Israeli community. The data included protocols of meetings of the intervention team, informal and formal interviews, and follow-up telephone interviews with local leaders and psychosocial professionals who worked with individuals, families, and groups in the community. Content analysis of field notes and interviews led to the elaboration of the theoretical construct “complex collective trauma.” The analysis of the community voices and psychosocial interventions indicated the importance of action-oriented, meaning-making community projects and memorials, screening and government-funded short-term trauma therapy, mapping interlocking circles of vulnerability, and an integrated clinical-community model coordinated long-term (one year) by an outside professional.     

Is a lower dose of cyproterone acetate as effective at testosterone suppression in transgender women as higher doses?

Objective: The recommended dose of cyproterone acetate (CPA), an anti-androgen that is commonly used in the hormonal treatment of transgender women, is 50–100 mg daily. Our objective was to determine whether CPA at 25 mg daily would suppress total testosterone as effectively as 50 mg daily in transgender women.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis of transgender women attending an endocrinology clinic between April 1, 2009, and June 30, 2015. We used a generalized linear mixed model to compare total testosterone between patients on CPA 25 mg versus CPA 50 mg or higher. In a subgroup of patients for which the CPA dose was decreased from 50 mg to 25 mg, we compared total testosterone levels before and after the decrease.

Results: We divided the sixty-eight patients included in the study into 4 groups: group 1, CPA 25 mg (N =31); group 2, CPA 50 mg or higher (N = 19); group 3, CPA dose lowered from 50 mg to 25 mg (N = 15); group 4, CPA dose increased from 25 mg to 50 mg (N = 3). The mean total testosterone on treatment was 0.9 nmol/L (95% CI 0.7 to 1.1) in group 1 and 1.2 nmol/L (95% CI 0.9–1.5) in group 2 and were not significantly different (p = 0.087). In group 3, there was no significant difference between total testosterone levels before and after decreasing the dose of CPA from 50 mg to 25 mg, p = 0.86. Group 4 was excluded from analysis.

Conclusions: We found that 25 mg of CPA daily was effective at suppressing testosterone levels to within normal female range when used in combination with recommended estrogen therapy in transgender women. Clinicians should consider using a lower dose of CPA in order to minimize potential adverse effects.     

What Makes a Basic Structure Just?

In his multi-faceted attack on Rawls’s account of justice, G.A. Cohen has argued that the notion of basic structure is necessarily insensitive to the importance of informal social norms to social justice. The paper argues that the most plausible account of the basic structure is not blind to informal social norms in any meaningful sense. Whereas informal, non-legally coercive institutions are not part of the basic structure as such, their careful consideration is necessary for the assessment of whether the basic structure itself is indeed just. This claim is based on an account of what it means for normative principle to apply to institutions, which I expound in detail throughout the paper. Principles apply to institutions, I argue, not in that they restrain their conduct, but in that they indicate which social conditions they should bring about.

Transition to motherhood: A longitudinal study

A prospective longitudinal study assessed the development of the mother-child relationship within the context of other important aspects of transition to parenthood. In the prenatal phase, 238 women who were 8 months pregnant with their first child completed a set of questionnaires. At 1 month post-partum, 165 of these women completed a second set of questionnaires, and a subset of 86 were observed for 1 hour at home with their infants. When their child was 2 years old, 62 of the 86 mothers completed questionnaires and were observed in interaction with their toddler in the laboratory. The several hundred individual variables were reduced to internally consistent composite variables, 5 in the prenatal phase, 7 postpartum, and 14 in the toddler phase. Preliminary analyses reported in this paper assessed the structure of relationships among the composite variables within each phase (Pearson correlations) and whether there was significant prediction from one dimension to another across the phases, beyond stability in the predicted dimension (multiple regressions). Causal modeling analyses are still in progress. The results indicate that the development of maternal attachment is a gradual process and that feelings of attachment are related to a number of other measures of women's psychological well-being. Parenting confidence was found to play a central role in adaptation to motherhood within each phase, as well as from the prenatal to postpartum and postpartum to toddler phases.     

Availability of three-year-old kibbutz children to mothers and metapelets in two functional contexts

Responsiveness and availability of kibbutz children to mothers and to metapelets in two functional contexts were studied. Thirty-three 3-year-old children, participated in the study. Every child participated twice in two co-construction tasks: once with the mother and once with the metapelet. A factor analysis conducted over the present categories yielded six orthogonal factors: Three pertained to cooperative child involvement of the adult and three referred to oppositional involvement. Analyses of variance indicated that children involved the mother more often than the metapelet in their activities and were more responsive to her. Additional analyses conducted on each factor separately showed that this higher level of involvement of the mother was evident in the cooperative factors. The children's involvement of the adults and their responsiveness to the adults' bids differed significantly between tasks. © 1997 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

Determinants of academic self-efficacy in different socialization contexts: investigating the relationship between students’ academic self-efficacy and its sources in different contexts

Social Psychology of Education - The present study examined the four sources of self-efficacy (mastery experience, vicarious experience, verbal and social persuasion, and physiological state) and...     

The influence of social identity on value perceptions and intention

Despite much research on consumers' brand identification, researchers remain divided regarding the conceptualization of the dimensions underlying social identity and how these dimensions impact marketing outcome variables. Further, previous studies have failed to examine the underlying psychological process driving this effect. The current research is the first to assess the importance of affective social identity as the mediator through which cognitive social identity impacts consumers' purchase intentions by ways of emotional and social value. Results show that affective social identity mediates the relationship between cognitive social identity and emotional value, where affect is the main driver in the formation of purchase intention. This study highlights the need to model cognitive and affective social identity separately and provides insight into how consumers' social identification influences their perceptions of identity‐linked products. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.