Thoughts on Rigoletto

The author discusses the traditional interpretations of the principal dramatis personae in Verdi's Rigoletto, suggesting that the opera expresses the composer's unconscious but highly perceptive and intuitive exploration of: (i) paranoid and perverse father-daughter oedipal dynamics as enacted between Rigoletto and Gilda; (ii) a folie-à-deux sado-masochistic relationship between Rigoletto and the Duke; (iii) the avoidance of conscious guilt and responsibility for Rigoletto's part in the tragedy through the rejection of insight achieved via massive projection, an addiction to mania, and perversion. In this respect Rigoletto is compared with King Lear. Some technical aspects of Verdi's compositional style employed to portray the contrasting characters of the protagonists are analysed. The paper also touches on Verdi's own possible unconscious (as well as conscious) investment in this particular opera, noting similarities between Verdi's portrait of the tragic, hunchback jester and his own self-depiction. The author notes similarities and contrasts between his analysis of the opera and recent papers by Hudson (1992),Tarnopolsky (1995)and Bergstein (2003)on the same subject.     

Constructivism and Career Decision Self‐Efficacy for Asian Americans and African Americans

Career development that adequately addresses the needs of multicultural students is important. The authors explored whether a constructivist career course might be a viable mechanism for improving career decision self‐efficacy for 81 Asian American and African American college students. Results indicated significant increases in all 5 elements of career decision self‐efficacy: self‐appraisal, occupational information, goal selection, planning, and problem solving. Hence, constructivism shows potential as a way to integrate multicultural and career competencies in the classroom.     

Multidimensional Self-Perception of Sexually Abused Girls: Factor Models and Differences Between Sexual Abuse and Comparison Groups

This study investigated the multiple dimensions of self-perception in a sample of sexually abused and nonabused comparison girls (n = 140), with particular attention to self-perception in the scholastic, social, athletic, physical (appearance), and behavioral conduct domains. First, this study examined whether the five dimensions of self-perception were psychologically discrete. Second, the relationships between the self-perception factors and childhood sexual abuse were investigated using structural equation modeling. The results supported the multidimensionality of self-perception and suggested the presence of two distinct second-order self-perception factors: academic- and social-self. While the sexually abused girls indicated less positive perception for the academic-self than the comparison group, the two groups did not differ regarding the social-self. The findings highlight the importance of a multidimensional approach to self-perception in assessing and treating sexually abused children.     

Characteristics of Preschool Gender Enforcers and Peers Who Associate with Them

Sex Roles - Children who try to exclude others due to their gender can be considered as “gender enforcers.” Using multiple methods (observations, interviews) and informants (children,...     

When Is Honesty the Best Policy? The Effect of Stated Company Intent on Consumer Skepticism

Prior research suggests that consumers evaluate firms more negatively if they attribute the firm's business practices to firm‐serving motivations rather than to motivations that serve the public good. We propose an alternative hypothesis: Firm‐serving attributions lower evaluation of the firm only when they are inconsistent with the firm's expressed motive. As such, the negative effect of consumer skepticism regarding a firm's motives can be inhibited by public acknowledgment of the strategic benefits to the firm. The power of this inhibition procedure was demonstrated in an experiment in which we manipulated the salience of firm‐serving benefits and the firm's publicly stated motive. Consumer evaluation of the sponsoring firm was lowest in conditions when firm‐serving benefits were salient and the firm outwardly stated purely public‐serving motives. This experiment also revealed that the potential negative effects of skepticism were the most pronounced when individuals engaged in causal attribution prior to company evaluation. Finally, in this study we measured the different effects on attribution and evaluation of 2 distinct forms of skepticism: situational skepticism, which is a momentary state of distrust of an actor's motivations, and dispositional skepticism, which is an individual's ongoing tendency to be suspicious of other people's motives.     

Sinning Saints and Saintly Sinners: The Paradox of Moral Self-Regulation

ABSTRACT— The question of why people are motivated to act altruistically has been an important one for centuries, and across various disciplines. Drawing on previous research on moral regulation, we propose a framework suggesting that moral (or immoral) behavior can result from an internal balancing of moral self-worth and the cost inherent in altruistic behavior. In Experiment 1 , participants were asked to write a self-relevant story containing words referring to either positive or negative traits. Participants who wrote a story referring to the positive traits donated one fifth as much as those who wrote a story referring to the negative traits. In Experiment 2 , we showed that this effect was due specifically to a change in the self-concept. In Experiment 3 , we replicated these findings and extended them to cooperative behavior in environmental decision making. We suggest that affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally. However, when moral identity is threatened, moral behavior is a means to regain some lost self-worth.     

Decision-Making About Inherited Cancer Risk: Exploring Dimensions of Genetic Responsibility

Since genetic information has implications for family members, some choices about genetic risk may be influenced by perceptions of responsibility to relatives. Drawing upon 25 semi-structured interviews with test recipients in Canada, this study explored decisions about inherited breast-ovarian and colon cancer. Qualitative data analysis revealed the pervasive significance of genetic responsibility in test decisions. We highlight three dimensions of genetic responsibility: 1) to know about the self for self; 2) to know about the self for others; 3) to know about the self to oblige others to know. It is argued that these dimensions of genetic responsibility have implications for test decisions, family relationships and other family members’ desire to know (or not know) and to act (or not act) with respect to their own genetic risk. In particular, genetic responsibility may play out as a framing of a relative’s moral obligation to know their risk that could obviate any interest they might have in not knowing. We conclude that perceptions of responsibility to—and of−other family members be thoroughly explored in genetic counseling sessions.     

Performance of british university psychology departments as measured by number of publications in BPS journals

The aim of this investigation was to gauge the comparative research performance of university departments of psychology in Britain. The performance indicator was the number of publications per departmental staff member in the journals of the British Psychological Society (BPS) during the seven-year period 1983–1989. The contents of these journals were thoroughly searched, and articles written by members of university psychology departments in Britain were counted. The number of publications of each psychology department was divided by the size of the department in the corresponding year and the resulting annual figures were summed to determine the number of publications in BPS journals per departmental staff member over the seven-year period. These research performance figures correlated significantly with an earlier measure of departmental research performance based on publications in the seven European psychological journals with the highest citations per published article and with recent performance indicators based on other criteria     

The optimal number of alternatives at a choice point with travel time considered

The problem of optimal design is considered for tasks that can be represented as n choice points with a_i alternatives per choice point. Examples are mazes or multiple choice tests. Some fixed time t′ elapses between choice points, say traveling from one to the other or reading a question, and additional time t is spent considering each alternative at the choice point. For fixed total time, the goal is to find the optimum number of choice points and the optimum number of alternatives at each choice point. In general, the longer the time spent between choice points, the greater the optimum number of alternatives at each point.