A wise and generous soul: Tribute to Dr. June Singer (1919–2004)

Using personal anecdotes and examples from the arts, the author explores attitudes that inform experiences around death. These reflections are linked to Jung's ideas about the relativization of the ego in the second half of life as well as the increasing importance of holding the opposites. The willingness to engage with life and the ability to maintain a sense of purpose exist alongside the certainty and mystery of death and the inclination to resist consciousness of death's inevitability. Paradoxically, the psyche both prepares for death and is unconcerned.     

Former Latchkey Children: Personality and Academic Correlates

The purpose of this study was to examine the prevalence and correlates (demographic, personality, and academic) of former latchkey status (children unsupervised by an adult after school during their elementary or middle school years) in a college student sample (N = 188). A clear operational definition of latchkey status was provided. Students were surveyed and administered a personality questionnaire, and their academic aptitude test scores were verified through university records. Twenty-five percent of the male and 14% of the female participants were identified as former latchkey children, resulting in an 18% latchkey prevalence rate. The mean age of onset of latchkey status was 8.7 years for the male and 10.0 years for the female subjects. Having been a latchkey child was positively associated with being male and Caucasian, coming from a one-parent family, and having had a mother who worked outside the home. Multivariate analyses of the personality and academic measures revealed no significant between-group differences.     

Criticising from “Outside”

I look at a disagreement between Elizabeth Anscombe, on the one hand, and Peter Winch and Ilham Dilman, on the other, about whether it is legitimate to call something an error that counts as knowledge within some alien system of belief; and I look also at the question what Wittgenstein's view was. I try to show that our understanding of what is real cannot be adequately elucidated if we consider only its role within language‐games, and I argue that an important element in our thinking about what is and is not real emerges in our response to conflicting modes of thought.     

Towards an interpersonal understanding of bodily experience

This paper attempts to understand the interpersonal nature of bodily experience. It explores the way the body symptoms we meet in the consulting room, and in everyday life, express and communicate disturbances in our relationships with others. The article seeks to understand how others that are close to us can really get under our skins. The work of the philosopher of the body, MerleauPonty, findings from contemporary developmental psychology, recent psycho-biological studies and psychoanalytic insights are all drawn upon as a way of offering an introduction to contemporary developments in thinking and research on the body.

The article explores the interdependence of body and environment. In particular, the body is always in an interpersonal context with others. Bodies are interdependent; communication is first and foremost bodily. Bodily behaviour and biological functions develop in the context of a relationship. The relationship with the other influences the formation of bodily processes and actions. Clinical examples are drawn upon to illustrate how interpersonal disturbances in development are expressed in bodily symptoms. The difference between a hysterical and psychosomatic body symptom is also briefly addressed.     

Want a tip? Service performance as a function of emotion regulation and extraversion

Surface acting and deep acting with customers are strategies for service performance, but evidence for their effectiveness is limited and mixed. We propose that deep acting is an effective strategy for most employees, whereas surface acting's effect on performance effectiveness depends on employee extraversion. In Study 1, restaurant servers who tended to use deep acting exceeded their customers' expectations and had greater financial gains (i.e., tips) regardless of extraversion, whereas surface acting improved tips only for extraverts, not for introverts. In Study 2, a call center simulation, deep acting improved emotional performance and increased the likelihood of extrarole service behavior beyond the direct and interactive effects of extraversion and other Big Five traits. In contrast, surface acting reduced emotional performance for introverts and not extraverts, but only during the extrarole interaction. We discuss implications for incorporating traits into emotional labor research and practice.     

Adolescent attachment insecurity and parasympathetic functioning predict future loss adjustment

Losing a close relationship is highly stressful and a robust predictor of major depression in adolescents. The current study examined relationships between attachment insecurity, parasympathetic nervous system activity, indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and adolescent adjustment to the loss of a close social partner. Adolescents with more attachment anxiety to their mother at age 14 were more likely to report poorer adjustment to a subsequent loss than adolescents with less attachment anxiety. Attachment avoidance interacted with stress-induced changes in RSA to predict loss adjustment. Among adolescents with higher RSA in response to the stressor, those with more attachment avoidance reported better loss adjustment, whereas among adolescents with lower RSA in response to the stressor, those with more attachment avoidance reported poorer loss adjustment. In sum, the combination of attachment insecurity and stress-induced changes in RSA predicted how well adolescents adjusted to a loss.     

Environmental enrichment protects against the effects of chronic stress on cognitive and morphological measures of hippocampal integrity

Chronic stress has detrimental effects on hippocampal integrity, while environmental enrichment (EE) has beneficial effects when initiated early in development. In this study, we investigated whether EE initiated in adulthood would mitigate chronic stress effects on cognitive function and hippocampal neuronal architecture, when EE started one week before chronic stress began, or two weeks after chronic stress onset. Adult male Sprague Dawley rats were chronically restrained (6h/d) or assigned as non-stressed controls and subdivided into EE or non-EE housing. After restraint ended, rats were tested on a radial arm water maze (RAWM) for 2-d to assess spatial learning and memory. The first study showed that when EE began prior to 3-weeks of chronic stress, EE attenuated chronic stress-induced impairments in acquisition, which corresponded with the prevention of chronic stress-induced reductions in CA3 apical dendritic length. A second study showed that when EE began 2-weeks after the onset of a 5-week stress regimen, EE blocked chronic stress-induced impairments in acquisition and retention at 1-h and 24-h delays. RAWM performance corresponded with CA3 apical dendritic complexity. Moreover, rats in EE housing (control or stress) exhibited similar corticosterone profiles across weeks, which differed from the muted corticosterone response to restraint by the chronically stressed pair-housed rats. These data support the interpretation that chronic stress and EE may act on similar mechanisms within the hippocampus, and that manipulation of these factors may yield new directions for optimizing brain integrity and resilience under chronic stress or stress related neuropsychological disorders in the adult.     

Refining the understanding of inhibitory processes: how response prepotency is created and overcome

Understanding (a) how responses become prepotent provides insights into when inhibition is needed in everyday life. Understanding (b) how response prepotency is overcome provides insights for helping children develop strategies for overcoming such tendencies. Concerning (a), on tasks such as the day‐night Stroop‐like task, is the difficulty with inhibiting saying the name of the stimulus due to the name being semantically related to the correct response or to its being a valid response on the task (i.e. a member of the response set) though incorrect for this stimulus? Experiment 1 (with 40 4‐year‐olds) suggests that prepotency is caused by membership in the response set and not semantic relation. Concerning (b), Diamond, Kirkham and Amso (2002) found that 4‐year‐olds could succeed on the day‐night task if the experimenter sang a ditty after showing the stimulus card, before the child was to respond. They concluded that it was because delaying children’s responses gave them time to compute the correct answer. However, Experiment 2 (with 90 3‐year‐olds) suggests that such a delay helps because it gives the incorrect, prepotent response time to passively dissipate, not because of active computation during the delay.     

Is Good Sex Good for You? Rethinking Sexuality and Health

Despite the central importance of sexuality to human well‐being, the study of sexuality remains marginalized within health psychology, which hampers the ability of clinicians and policy‐makers to promote comprehensive health and well‐being. In this review we discuss the evidence that sexual functioning makes critical contributions to human health, focusing specifically on findings linking sexual activity to morbidity and mortality, to the health‐promoting effects of intimate relationships, and to processes of emotion regulation. We argue that researchers studying the psychology of health and well‐being should more substantively integrate sexuality into their research agendas. Health psychologists’ specific expertise in investigating and interpreting complex, reciprocal associations between subjective emotional states, health‐relevant cognitions, and health‐relevant behavior can make a notable contribution to elucidating some of the most intruiging correlations between sexuality and health that have emerged from medical and epidemiological studies. If we want to foster optimum physical and mental health among youths and adults, we must rigorously investigate the multiple mechanisms through which positive sexual functioning plays a unique and fundamental role in human well‐being across the life course.