Mental Disorders and Socioeconomic Status: Impact on Population Risk of Attempted Suicide in Australia

The population attributable risk (PAR) of mental disorders compared to indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) for attempted suicide was estimated for Australia. For mental disorders, the highest PAR% for attempted suicide was for anxiety disorders (males 28%; females 36%). For SES, the highest PAR% for attempted suicide in males was for occupation (males 31%; females 16%) and education level (males 19%; females 8%), following adjustment for age and mental disorders. The study results suggest that one third of suicide attempts in both males and females are attributable to anxiety disorders, the same proportion attributable to low educational or occupational status.     

TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGY: WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING MORE?

Abstract. Teleological thinking permeates biology and is useful in pondering unanswered biological questions. Such thinking differs from the usual sense of teleology in that “purpose” in biology carries no imputation of causation. A few examples are given. The teleological system of biology is every bit as elegant a construct of the human mind as any other teleological system and in no way precludes spirituality. I argue that it provides a firmer foundation for moral guidance than supernatural systems.     

Alcoholics Anonymous and the Counseling Profession: Philosophies in Conflict

This article describes the contribution of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) to drug and alcohol treatment. The potential for AA's steps to encourage growth is discussed, and their consistency with counseling philosophy examined. To stimulate constructive discussion, 12 new steps based on counseling theory are proposed and contrasted with AA's steps. The need for counselors to be aware of these differences is emphasized and the move toward more solid boundaries between AA and the counseling profession is advocated.     

Taboo Trade-offs: Reactions to Transactions That Transgress the Spheres of Justice

Taboo trade-offs violate deeply held normative intuitions about the integrity, even sanctity, of certain relationships and the moral-political values underlying those relationships. For instance, if asked to estimate the monetary worth of one's children, of one's loyalty to one's country, or of acts of friendship, people find the questions more than merely confusing or cognitively intractable: they find such questions themselves morally offensive. This article draws on Fiske's relational theory and Tetlock's value pluralism model: (a) to identify the conditions under which people are likely to treat trade-offs as taboo; (b) to describe how people collectively deal with trade-offs that become problematic; (c) to specify the conceptual components of moral outrage and the factors that affect the intensity of reactions to various explicit trade-offs; (d) to explore the various strategies that decision-makers—required by resource scarcity and institutional roles to confront taboo trade-offs—use to deflect the wrath of censorious observers; (e) to offer a method of dispute resolution based on pluralism.     

Unconfigured Tractarian Objects

According to the Tractatus , the world consists of atomic objects arranged in various configurations, and the ways the world might be are determined by the ways these objects can be configured. The question I address is whether these very objects can be unconfigured as well as configured. Much depends on a positive answer to this question, including, as I show, the internal coherence of the Tractatus itself. I argue that these objects can be unconfigured, and am critical of certain interpretive claims made by Fogelin which lead to the conclusion that they cannot be.     

ATTITUDES TOWARD WOMEN IN TAIWAN AND CHINA

The goals of this article are to review published data from both English and Chinese sources on current attitudes toward women in Taiwan and China and to discuss issues in cross-cultural research that may affect the discovery and reporting of effects. Chinese women in both countries, when compared to men, had more liberal attitudes toward women, but women in China had more traditionally oriented attitudes than women in Taiwan. Yang's (1986) modernization theory was used to explain these results. There was also some overlap of gender roles in both cultures, with some traditional masculine (or feminine) roles played by the other gender. We propose that modernization may lead not only to greater gender equality but also to changes in the nature of gender roles, leading to greater gender-role overlap, in which it is advantageous for both men and women to have less distinctive gender-role characteristics. Finally, issues of construct validation, response sets, and alternative approaches to scale development are addressed, and suggestions for future research are offered.     

Moment-to-moment changes in feeling moved match changes in closeness,tears, goosebumps,and warmth: time series analyses

Feeling moved or touched can be accompanied by tears, goosebumps, and sensations of warmth in the centre of the chest. The experience has been described frequently, but psychological science knows little about it. We propose that labelling one’s feeling as being moved or touched is a component of a social-relational emotion that we term kama muta (its Sanskrit label). We hypothesise that it is caused by appraising an intensification of communal sharing relations. Here, we test this by investigating people’s moment-to-moment reports of feeling moved and touched while watching six short videos. We compare these to six other sets of participants’ moment-to-moment responses watching the same videos: respectively, judgements of closeness (indexing communal sharing), reports of weeping, goosebumps, warmth in the centre of the chest, happiness, and sadness. Our eighth time series is expert ratings of communal sharing. Time series analyses show strong and consistent cross-correlations of feeling moved and touched and closeness with each other and with each of the three physiological variables and expert-rated communal sharing – but distinctiveness from happiness and sadness. These results support our model.     

Children retain implicitly learned phonological sequences better than adults: a longitudinal study

Whereas adults often rely on explicit memory, children appear to excel in implicit memory, which plays an important role in the acquisition of various cognitive skills, such as those involved in language. The current study aimed to test the assertion of an age‐dependent shift in implicit versus explicit learning within a theoretical framework that explains the link between implicit sequence memory and word‐form acquisition, using the Hebb repetition paradigm. We conducted a one‐year, multiple‐session longitudinal study in which we presented auditory sequences of syllables, co‐presented with pictures of aliens, for immediate serial recall by a group of children (8–9 years) and by an adult group. The repetition of one Hebb sequence was explicitly announced, while the repetition of another Hebb sequence was unannounced and, therefore, implicit. Despite their overall inferior recall performance, the children showed better offline retention of the implicit Hebb sequence, compared with adults who showed a significant decrement across the delays. Adults had gained more explicit knowledge of the implicit sequence than children, but this could not explain the age‐dependent decline in the delayed memory for it. There was no significant age‐effect for delayed memory of the explicit Hebb sequence, with both age groups showing retention. Overall performance by adults was positively correlated with measures of post‐learning awareness. Performance by children was positively correlated with vocabulary knowledge. We conclude that children outperform adults in the retention over time of implicitly learned phonological sequences that will gradually consolidate into novel word‐forms. The findings are discussed in the light of maturational differences for implicit versus explicit memory systems that also play a role in language acquisition. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/G5nOfJB72t4