Beyond Components of Wellbeing: The Effects of Relational and Situated Assemblage

Despite multiple axes of variation in defining wellbeing, the paper argues for the dominance of a ‘components approach’ in current research and practice. This approach builds on a well-established tradition within the social sciences of attending to categories whether for their identification, their value or their meanings and political resonance. The paper critiques the components approach and explores how to move beyond it towards conceptually integrating the various categories and dimensions through a relational and situated account of wellbeing. Drawing on more fluid social sciences, wellbeing is framed as an effect, dependent on the mobilisation of resources from everyday encounters with complex assemblages of people, things and places. Through such a framing, wellbeing can be conceived of as stable and amenable to change, as individual and collective and as subjective and objective. Policy interventions then need to attend to the relationalities of particular social and spatial contexts.     

Does happiness function like a motivational state?

According to Brehm's intensity of emotion theory, if an emotion has motivational properties, its intensity should be non-monotonically affected by factors similar to those determining the intensity of motivational states. These factors are called deterrents. In the case of emotion, one category of deterrents consists of factors that can potentially interfere with feeling the emotion, such as reasons for not feeling the emotion. Two experiments were carried out to examine whether happiness is a motivational state and, thus, if its intensity is non-monotonically determined by the importance of reasons for not feeling happy. We expected happiness to be reduced by a low importance reason for not feeling happy, to remain high in the presence of a moderately important reason, and to be reduced or eliminated by a very important reason. Both experiments supported the cubic function that results from these expectations, and when the results of the two studies were combined, each of the individual legs of the cubic function was found to be reliable along with the cubic function itself. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.     

Anxiety and disgust: Evidence for a unidirectional relationship

This paper reports the results of three studies using mood induction procedures (MIPs) designed to investigate the relationship between anxiety and disgust. Study 1 used guided imagery vignettes (i.e., asking participants to imagine themselves in a series of described situations) and music (Mayer, Allen, & Beauregard, 1995). Study 2 used video clips (Gross & Levenson, 1995). Study 3 used autobiographical recall and music (Blagden & Craske, 1996). In order to be as sure as possible that target moods were being induced, and that manipulation checks provided good evidence of mood induction, Studies 1 and 2 measured six moods (anxiety, sadness, happiness, anger, disgust, and contempt) on visual analogue scales. In addition, Study 3 included two further mood measures: a 30-adjective rating scale measuring 10 emotions, the Differential Emotion Scale (DES; Izard, 1972) and a free label questionnaire, allowing participants to record how they feel without any prior imposed structure. Results from all three studies demonstrated that induced anxiety will produce increases in reported disgust, but there was no evidence for an effect of induced disgust on reported anxiety. These findings were independent of the type of MIP (guided imagery vignette and music, video clips, and autobiographical recall and music), and the type of dependent mood measure used (visual analogue scale, differential emotion scale or a free label questionnaire). The findings have important implications for the putative role of disgust in anxious psychopathologies, and suggest that if disgust does have a causal influence in some anxious psychopathologies, this influence is not mediated simply by experienced disgust facilitating experienced anxiety.     

On the Proposed Sexual and Gender Identity Diagnoses for DSM-5: History and Controversies

In February, 2010, the American Psychiatric Association unveiled its proposed revisions to the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders for the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The proposals have reinvigorated historical controversies about whether sexual and gender diagnoses may stigmatize and medicalize behaviors that are now considered nonpathological. This article traces the recent past of these controversies, beginning with early discourse about the future DSM-5. It addresses the content of the DSM-5's proposed changes to Gender Identity Disorder (GID) and the paraphilias, outlining responses to them in mental health and activist communities. Points of contention surrounding the recent proposals are assessed within the context of historical concerns. Additionally, my opinion regarding the potential of the DSM-5 proposals to assuage versus exacerbate longstanding controversies is presented.     

Reclamation from Absence? Luce Irigaray and Women in the History of Philosophy

Luce Irigaray's work does not present an obvious resource for projects seeking to reclaim women in the history of philosophy. Indeed, many authors introduce their reclamation project with an argument against conceptions, attributed to Irigaray or “French feminists” more generally, that the feminine is the excluded other of discourse. These authors claim that if the feminine is the excluded other of discourse, then we must conclude that even if women have written philosophy they have not given voice to feminine subjectivity; therefore, reclamation is a futile project. In this essay, I argue against such conclusions. Rather, I argue, Irigaray's work requires that philosophy be transformed through the reclamation of women's writing. She gives us a method of reclamation for the most difficult cases: those in which we have no record of women's writing. Irigaray offers this method through an engagement with the character of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. The method Irigaray demonstrates is reclamation as love.     

Failure Avoidance Motivation in a Goal-Setting Situation

Scholars have consistently identified contextual performance or organizational citizenship behavior as a core component of job performance. The current literature on this issue has been dominated by a single-level approach, typically conducted at the individual level of analysis. This study adopts a multilevel approach to simultaneously examine main effects of and cross-level interactions among individual- and group-level predictors of interpersonal helping behavior. Results from a large-scale longitudinal data set show that at the individual level, helping behavior was predicted by perceived organizational support (POS), fairness, and affective commitment. At the group level, helping behavior was predicted by trust among group members. Trust among members also significantly moderated the individual-level relationships between POS and helping behavior and between fairness and helping. These crosslevel moderations indicated that the group- and individual-level predictors were complementary (instead of mutually reinforcing) in predicting interpersonal helping behavior. This finding indicates that various antecedents of interpersonal helping are characterized by distinct dynamics at the individual and group levels of analysis.     

Social Support and Coping Adaptability in Initial Military Training

Social support and coping adaptability were explored as factors leading to successful outcomes in initial military training. Hierarchical regression and bootstrapping of indirect effects were used to explore these relationships in a sample of 2,293 New Zealand Defence Force trainees. Support from instructors was related to lower difficulty coping and higher performance and military belonging. Support from external sources was related to higher coping adaptability, performance, military belonging, and, paradoxically, increased difficulty coping. Coping adaptability mediated the beneficial effects of external support. Resources provided by different sources of support, applications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Modeling the Indirect Association of Combat Exposure With Anger and Aggression During Combat Deployment: The Moderating Role of Perceived Unit Morale

Anger and aggression are common combat-related behavioral health problems. The impact of combat on anger and aggression appears to be largely attributable to symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Factors that moderate the purported pathway from combat to anger and aggression are poorly understood. We examined the conditional direct and indirect associations of combat exposure with self-reported anger and aggression using survey data collected from 592 U.S. Soldiers during a combat deployment in Afghanistan. Unit morale was examined as a moderator between combat exposure and PSTD symptoms, as well as the indirect association of combat exposure with anger and aggression via PTSD symptoms, controlling for depression symptoms. Results indicated that unit morale was negatively correlated with PTSD symptoms and self-reported anger and aggressive behaviors. Perceptions of unit morale moderated the direct association of combat exposure with PTSD symptoms. Unit morale also moderated the indirect association of combat exposure with anger and aggression through PTSD symptoms. Unit morale moderated the association of combat exposure with anger and aggression during combat operations by putatively mitigating the deleterious effect of combat on stress-related symptoms. The impact of policy and leadership on soldier and unit morale should be carefully considered given its protective role during combat operations.     

On Measuring and Modeling Physiological Synchrony in Dyads

Physiological synchrony within a dyad, or the degree of temporal correspondence between two individuals' physiological systems, has become a focal area of psychological research. Multiple methods have been used for measuring and modeling physiological synchrony. Each method extracts and analyzes different types of physiological synchrony, where ‘type’ refers to a specific manner through which two different physiological signals may correlate. Yet, to our knowledge, there is no documentation of the different methods, how each method corresponds to a specific type of synchrony, and the statistical assumptions embedded within each method. Hence, this article outlines several approaches for measuring and modeling physiological synchrony, connects each type of synchrony to a specific method, and identifies the assumptions that need to be satisfied for each method to appropriately extract each type of synchrony. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how to test for between-dyad differences of synchrony via inclusion of dyad-level (i.e., time-invariant) covariates. Finally, we complement each method with an empirical demonstration, as well as online supplemental material that contains Mplus code.     

Discrepancies Between Parent and Adolescent Beliefs About Daily Life Topics and Performance on an Emotion Recognition Task

Parents and children and adolescents commonly disagree in their perceptions of a variety of behaviors, including the family relationship and environment, and child and adolescent psychopathology. To this end, numerous studies have examined to what extent increased discrepant perceptions—particularly with regard to perceptions of the family relationship and environment—predict increased child and adolescent psychopathology. Parents’ and children and adolescents’ abilities to decode and identify others’ emotions (i.e., emotion recognition) may play a role in the link between discrepant perceptions and child and adolescent psychopathology. We examined parents’ and adolescents’ emotion recognition abilities in relation to discrepancies between parent and adolescent perceptions of daily life topics. In a sample of 50 parents and adolescents ages 14-to-17 years (M?=?15.4 years, 20 males, 54 % African-American), parents and adolescents were each administered a widely used performance-based measure of emotion recognition. Parents and adolescents were also administered a structured interview designed to directly assess each of their perceptions of the extent to which discrepancies existed in their beliefs about daily life topics (e.g., whether adolescents should complete their homework and carry out household chores). Interestingly, lower parent and adolescent emotion recognition performance significantly related to greater parent and adolescent perceived discrepant beliefs about daily life topics. We observed this relation whilst accounting for adolescent age and gender and levels of parent-adolescent conflict. These findings have important implications for understanding and using informant discrepancies in both basic developmental psychopathology research and applied research in clinic settings (e.g., discrepant views on therapeutic goals).