LOSING SAMMY: A CATALYST FOR EXITING AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP

Abstract

Miscarriage is a relatively prevalent occurrence in our society. The reported incidence of this event indicates that 20% of all women experience a miscarriage. Women who have miscarried report friends and family responding in ways that seem to try to reduce the impact and importance of the event. This leaves the grieving woman with a sense of little support or understanding of what she had just experienced. Furthermore, the experiences reported by women who have had a miscarriage are quite different from those reported by other individuals who have experienced other types of loss such as a spouse, partner, parent, or friend. Women who have miscarried report a lack of recognition that they have experienced a loss. Little is known about how society views miscarriage or why individuals respond in such an apparently unsupportive manner to a woman who has had a miscarriage. The present work sought to determine whether miscarriage is an unrecognized loss and to assess the meaning of miscarriage to others. Although the results indicate miscarriage is viewed as a loss, it is a loss with minimal grounded or valuative meaning for others, which suggests that the cultural norm of silence surrounding early pregnancy and miscarriage should be lifted     

Educating Virtue as a Mastery of Language

That only those who have mastered language can be virtuous is something that may strike us as an obvious truism. It would seem to follow naturally from, indeed simply restate, a view that is far more commonly held and expressed by philosophers of the virtues, namely that only those who can reason can be virtuous properly said. My aim in this paper is to draw attention to this truism and argue its importance. In doing so, I will take the starting point for my reflections from a couple of concrete occasions in which the desire to offer a foothold to the language of the virtues encounters an obstacle that might be described as a recalcitrance of language: certain intuitions that seem decidedly linguistic get in the way to suggest that this vocabulary is out of place or out of order. Taking my cue from the discomfort of our linguistic intuitions, what I will be suggesting is that certain difficulties do indeed attend our use of the vocabulary of the virtues, and that there is a particular way of understanding their inevitability, one which is closely connected to the context of moral education. My hope is that reflecting on these difficulties and on the task of moral education with which they are associated can help us illuminate and recover the insight that a mastery of language may be indispensable for a mastery of virtue.     

Grasping the Nature of Pictures

The role of experience in the development of pictorial competence has been the center of substantial debate. The four studies presented here help resolve the controversy by systematically documenting and examining manual exploration of depicted objects by infants. We report that 9-month-old infants manually investigate pictures, touching and feeling depicted objects as if they were real objects and even trying to pick them up off the page. The same behavior was observed in babies from two extremely different societies (the United States and the Ivory Coast). This investigation of pictures occurs even though infants can discriminate between real objects and their depictions. By the time infants are 19 months of age, their manual exploration is replaced by pointing at depicted objects. These results indicate that initial uncertainty about the nature of pictures leads infants to investigate them. Through experience, infants begin to acquire a concept of "picture." This concept includes the fact that a picture has a dual nature (it is both an object and a representation of something other than itself), as well as knowledge about the culturally appropriate use of pictures.     

Moral mires and the grip of the group: Morality as internalized group norms

I argue that morality is a set of internalized group norms. It is a reliable guide in a complex social world where group status and membership are not guaranteed by birth, but have to be asserted and maintained continuously. Morality is acquired through the process of socialization when children learn in their experience with peers, from observation of adults, and by instructional stories, such as fairy tales. Failure to internalize group norms results in a clinical condition of Psychopathy, or Antisocial Personality Disorder. Research into Antisocial Personality Disorder suggests that likely pathways of group norm internalization are states of arousal associated with social situations.     

Beneath the Surface: Uncovering the relationship between extraversion and organizational citizenship behavior through a facet approach

To date, an empirical link between the broad factor extraversion and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has not been found. We propose that a facet conceptualization of extraversion including surgency, sociability and positive emotions predict an individual's level of citizenship behaviors in opposing ways, thus masking the predictive ability of a broad factor of extraversion. In study one, we establish the foundation for predictive differences by documenting differential relationships between the facets of extraversion and the type of organizational cultures potential job applicants are attracted to. In study two, analysis of peer rated OCB from 117 individuals working in various organizations supports the superior predictive ability of the facets over that of the broad factor.     

‘The Mind as an Object of God's Knowledge’: Another Cartesian Temptation?

In this paper my aim is to consider the picture of God's immediate knowledge of the mind as this appears in Wittgenstein's work, where its soundness seems to be brought into question. My argument is that the response to this denial should take the form, not of an investigation of a theological position concerning God's knowledge (“can God look into the human mind?”), but of a negotiation of the difficulties affecting our use of this picture. A great part of the latter can be seen as difficulties in mastering the communicative relation between God and man which lies at the heart of the religious form of life, and which arises from the dislocation which familiar language‐games undergo within it.     

Empathic accuracy in coach–athlete dyads who participate in team and individual sports

ObjectiveThe purpose of the present study was to investigate the empathic accuracy of coach–athlete dyads participating in team and individual sports.MethodAn adaptation of Ickes's [2001. Measuring empathic accuracy. In J. A. Hall & F. J. Bernieri (Eds.), Interpersonal sensitivity (pp. 219–242). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates] unstructured dyadic interaction paradigm was used to assess the empathic accuracy of 40 coach–athlete dyads. Accordingly, each dyad was filmed during a training session. The dyad members viewed selected video footage that displayed discrete interactions that had naturally occurred during that session. Dyad members reported what they remembered thinking/feeling while making inferences about what their partner's thought/felt at each point. Empathic accuracy was estimated by comparing self-reports and inferences.ResultsThe results indicted that accuracy for coaches in individual sports was higher than coaches in team sports. Shared cognitive focus also differed between team and individual sports, and fully mediated the effect of sport-type on coach empathic accuracy. Moreover, coaches whose training sessions were longer demonstrated increased empathic accuracy. No differences were found for athletes.ConclusionsThe results suggest that the dynamics of the interaction between a coach and an athlete play a key role in how accurately they perceive each other.     

putting action back into action planning: experiences of career clients

This study used the critical incident technique to investigate what helped and hindered unemployed and career‐changing people in implementing the action plans they developed while participating in career or employment counseling. Information from interviews with 23 women and 16 men generated 9 categories of helping incidents and 9 categories of hindering incidents. These categories increase understanding of the nature of action planning and reveal implications for preparing clients to engage in action planning activities.     

Helping and proactive extra-role behaviors: The influence of motives, goal orientation, and social context

We explore how two motivational orientations (communion and status striving) influence three extra-role organizational behaviors: proactive engagement, providing help, and seeking help. We propose and confirm intervening mechanisms, in the form of (a) goal orientations and (b) attitudes toward coworkers. Proactive behaviors are predicted by status striving, through the intervening mechanisms of both learning and performance proving goal orientations. Providing help is, in turn, motivated by communion striving, and the relationship is mediated by goal orientations (learning and performance avoiding) and by satisfaction with and commitment to coworkers. Finally, seeking help is a function of communion striving, which influences the outcome through learning goal orientation and satisfaction with and confidence in coworkers.     

Generalized multilevel structural equation modeling

A unifying framework for generalized multilevel structural equation modeling is introduced. The models in the framework, called generalized linear latent and mixed models (GLLAMM), combine features of generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) and structural equation models (SEM) and consist of a response model and a structural model for the latent variables. The response model generalizes GLMMs to incorporate factor structures in addition to random intercepts and coefficients. As in GLMMs, the data can have an arbitrary number of levels and can be highly unbalanced with different numbers of lower-level units in the higher-level units and missing data. A wide range of response processes can be modeled including ordered and unordered categorical responses, counts, and responses of mixed types. The structural model is similar to the structural part of a SEM except that it may include latent and observed variables varying at different levels. For example, unit-level latent variables (factors or random coefficients) can be regressed on cluster-level latent variables. Special cases of this framework are explored and data from the British Social Attitudes Survey are used for illustration. Maximum likelihood estimation and empirical Bayes latent score prediction within the GLLAMM framework can be performed using adaptive quadrature in gllamm, a freely available program running in Stata.gllamm can be downloaded from http://www.gllamm.org. The paper was written while Sophia Rabe-Hesketh was employed at and Anders Skrondal was visiting the Department of Biostatistics and Computing, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.