Understanding choice utterances

When individuals offer choices, they intend them to be mandatory (requiring action) or permissive (not requiring action), and they intend them to be open (allowing the choice of both options) or closed (not allowing the choice of both options). In two studies subjects were presented with sets of syntactically equivalent disjunctive sentences with varying content designed to represent four patterns of permitted choice. The research indicates that individuals distinguish four distinct uses of “or” in deontic contexts, and that individuals more often judge choices as mandatory than permissive. The research also compared responses to questions about choice giver intent and receiver choice. The data indicate that when judging intent, individuals are inclined to understand some choices to be permissive. However, when judging what action they might take as choice receiver, subjects tend to regard action to be mandatory. It appears that although people have some facility in assessing a permission giver's intent, they often apply a more restrictive rule to themselves than is required by the choice giver.     

Experiential Research

ABSTRACT: This paper reports a research project that has focused on the inner experience of suicidal depression and its relationship to the social milieu. Adopting a suicidal identity, a clinical anthropologist lived in a psychiatric hospital, and then, along with a clinical psychologist, in several posthospital care facilities for periods from two weeks to a month in each setting. The evidence indicates the researchers were able to establish identities closely resembling those of genuinely suicidal persons. Their experiential accounts along with their observations of the social settings in which they lived provide the core material for analysis. Additional data from hospital records and posttreatment meetings with staff members and fellow patients supplemented the researchers' observations. Data are presented on social situational variables that support and/or undermine feelings of self-worth, the social presentation of a suicidal self, and introspective accounts of suicidal “world views” and styles of thinking. Suggestions are made for suicide prevention in institutional settings on the basis of life-supporting relationships and appropriately designed social-structural features.     

WHO CARES? THE EFFECT OF GENDER AND CONTEXT ON THE SELF AND MORAL REASONING

Theorists suggest that gender differences in moral reasoning are due to differences in the self-concept, with women feeling connected to others and using a care approach, whereas men feel separate from others and adopt a justice approach. Using a self-categorization analysis, the current research suggests that the nature of the self–other relationship, rather than gender, predicts moral reasoning. Study 1 found moral reasoning to be dependent upon the social distance between the self and others, with a care-based approach more likely when interacting with a friend than a stranger. Study 2 suggests that when individuals see others as ingroup members they are more likely to utilize care-based moral reasoning than when others are seen as outgroup members. Further, traditional gender differences in moral reasoning were found only when gender was made salient. These studies suggest that both the self and moral reasoning are better conceptualized as fluid and context dependent.     

Personality,Life Situation,and Life Expectancy

ABSTRACT: This study explores demographic, medical, and psychological variables which appear to be related to survival in institutionalized elderly chronically ill patients. Patients who died within 12 months of an assessment procedure were compared with patients who were still alive over 12 months later. Those who died within the year tended to be younger and less religious, to have a somewhat poorer prognosis, greater cognitive impairment, lower life satisfaction, and higher scores on a suicide potential scale and on an observation checklist of indirectly self-destructive behaviors.