Psychological effects of risk glorification in the media: Towards an integrative view

Media contents that glorify risk-taking (e.g., video games that simulate illegal street racing, TV depictions of dangerous extreme sports or stunts) are becoming increasingly popular. Theory and research suggest that risk glorification is associated with risk-taking among the audience. Until recently the evidence was limited in three ways: First, most studies, being correlational, did not permit clear causal inferences. Second, we did not know the strength of the effect of different types of media and different types of risk-taking outcomes. Third, early research did little to isolate the underlying psychological processes that mediate the pernicious effects of risk glorifying media formats. In order to address these open questions we review the results of an experimental programme of research and the findings of a comprehensive meta-analysis. The main findings are that (a) the risky media contents do indeed have causal force; (b) according to our meta-analysis active participation in risk glorifying media interfaces has a larger effect than passive consumption; (c) psychological processes include the priming of risk-related constructs, effects of risk-positive situational heuristic cues, perceived social norms, personal risk habituation, and changes in the recipient's self-concept. To integrate these findings we propose a theoretical framework derived from broad-range socio-cognitive models. We conclude with a discussion of possible directions for future research.     

Religious Coping and Quality of Life Among Severely Ill Lung Patients in a Secular Society

This survey study investigated the prevalence of religious beliefs and religious coping and possible associations between religious factors and quality of life (QoL) among a group of severely ill lung patients (lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) in Denmark (N = 111). Almost two thirds (64.8%) reported having some belief in God and/or a spiritual power. Patients who reported believing in God and patients who believed in God and a spiritual power reported better QoL than patients who reported that they believed in a spiritual power only. Religious coping was prevalent; for positive religious coping strategies, those used from least to most often, respectively, were invoked 15% to 37% of the time; for negative religious coping strategies the percentages were 3% to 16%. Negative religious coping was associated with lower QoL (β = ?0.320, p < .006), whereas no associations were found between positive religious coping and QoL. Results are discussed in relation to the cultural context of secularized societies like the Scandinavian countries.     

Asymmetries in ethics

Ethical notions such as good and bad, are often treated as though they were ‘symmetric’ in the sense of having the same moral ‘weight’, one in a positive the other in a negative sense. I argue that they are in fact ‘asymmetric’ and that the negative members of such pairs of notions are more fundamental and definite, logically speaking, and operationally more important than the positive members. Detailed arguments are given to show this for some non‐moral notions, such as life and death, health and illness; some semi‐moral notions such as pleasure and pain; and finally for the moral notions of happiness, benevolence, right, and good and their negative counterparts. One of the intentions of the article is to show that a systematic view of such asymmetries may have consequences for one's view of the proper or desirable structure of a general theory of ethics: norms stating prohibitions and norms stating permissions will be seen to be, in a sense defined in the text, more fundamental and important than norms stating ('positive') obligations.     

Quine's truth

W. V. Quine has made statements about truth which are not obviously compatible, and his statements have been interpreted in more than one way. For example, Donald Davidson claims that Quine has an epistemic theory of truth, but Quine himself often says that truth is just disquotational. This paper argues that Quine should recognize two different notions of truth. One of these is disquotational, the other is empiricist. There is nothing wrong with recognizing two different notions of truth. Both may be perfectly legitimate, even though, to some extent, they may be applicable in different contexts. Roughly speaking, a sentence is true in the empiricist sense if it belongs to a theory which entails all observation sentences which would be assented to by the speakers of the language in question (and no observation sentences which would be dissented from by these speakers). Various objections to this idea are discussed and rejected.