The Historical Character of Human Nature in Freud's Theories

In Freud’ theories of human development, human nature is described and analyzed as essentially historical. At the core of human history is the restructuring of the sexual instinct and the death instinct (or its unique form as destructive impulses). The conscious, asked-for shaping of these two instincts, under the rule of the “reality principle”, forms the basis of human society at all stages. This conscious restructuring has also unintended, unasked-for results, which are part of the historically developing human nature. The historical choice has been the building of human society as a social complex based on the de-eroticization of both the individual and society. Freud suggested that the historical process of changing human nature and maintaining the achieved new structure has mainly been an enterprise of enlightened political elite, which has imposed (in all societies) the various elements of the new nature upon the ordinary people. Human history is essentially a deed of the political sphere. In viewing human nature as consisting of both asked-for and unasked-for results of human conscious purposeful activity Freud belongs to the same historical school as Marx.     

Managing the death of close others: Evidence of higher valuing of ingroup identity in young adults who have experienced the death of a close other

The death of a close other (DOCO) is perhaps the most difficult experience that people endure. According to terror management theory (TMT), people manage the potentially terrorizing awareness of their mortality by immersing in cultural worldviews that allow them to feel like valuable members of a meaningful universe who may have some existence or trace after death. Although TMT has potential implications for understanding how people cope with DOCO, few studies have examined this possibility. We report results from four studies showing that, in line with TMT, students who experienced DOCO reported stronger valuing of their identification with their in-groups, which in turn was associated with higher levels of self-esteem. These findings shed new light on the social-psychological dynamics of DOCO.     

Scientific Explanation and Moral Explanation*

Moral philosophers are, among other things, in the business of constructing moral theories. And moral theories are, among other things, supposed to explain moral phenomena. Consequently, one's views about the nature of moral explanation will influence the kinds of moral theories one is willing to countenance. Many moral philosophers are (explicitly or implicitly) committed to a deductive model of explanation. As I see it, this commitment lies at the heart of the current debate between moral particularists and moral generalists. In this paper I argue that we have good reasons to give up this commitment. In fact, I show that an examination of the literature on scientific explanation reveals that we are used to, and comfortable with, non‐deductive explanations in almost all areas of inquiry. As a result, I argue that we have reason to believe that moral explanations need not be grounded in exceptionless moral principles.     

Round numbers as goals: evidence from baseball, SAT takers, and the lab

Where do people's reference points come from? We conjectured that round numbers in performance scales act as reference points and that individuals exert effort to perform just above rather than just below such numbers. In Study 1, we found that professional baseball players modify their behavior as the season is about to end, seeking to finish with a batting average just above rather than below .300. In Study 2, we found that high school students are more likely to retake the SAT after obtaining a score just below rather than above a round number. In Study 3, we conducted an experiment employing hypothetical scenarios and found that participants reported a greater desire to exert more effort when their performance was just short of rather than just above a round number.     

Changes in muscle and joint coordination in learning to direct forces

While it has been suggested that bi-articular muscles have a specialized role in directing external reaction forces, it is unclear how humans learn to coordinate mono- and bi-articular muscles to perform force-directing tasks. Participants were asked to direct pedal forces in a specified target direction during one-legged cycling. We expected that with practice, performance improvement would be associated with specific changes in joint torque patterns and mono- and bi-articular muscular coordination. Nine male participants practiced pedaling an ergometer with only their left leg, and were instructed to always direct their applied pedal force perpendicular to the crank arm (target direction) and to maintain a constant pedaling speed. After a single practice session, the mean error between the applied and target pedal force directions decreased significantly. This improved performance was accompanied by a significant decrease in the amount of ankle angular motion and a smaller increase in knee and hip angular motion. This coincided with a re-organization of lower extremity joint torques, with a decrease in ankle plantarflexor torque and an increase in knee and hip flexor torques. Changes were seen in both mono- and bi-articular muscle activity patterns. The mono-articular muscles exhibited greater alterations, and appeared to contribute to both mechanical work and force-directing. With practice, a loosening of the coupling between bi-articular thigh muscle activation and joint torque co-regulation was observed. The results demonstrated that participants were able to learn a complex and dynamic force-directing task by changing the direction of their applied pedal forces through re-organization of joint torque patterns and mono- and bi-articular muscle coordination.     

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Developed Dynamic Reference Work

The present information explosion on the World Wide Web poses a problem for the general public and the members of an academic discipline alike, of how to find the most authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date information about an important topic. At the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), we have since 1995 been developing and implementing the concept of a dynamic reference work (DRW) to provide a solution to these problems, while maintaining free access for readers. A DRW is much more than a web-based encyclopedia, and its scope far exceeds that of an electronic journal or preprint exchange. In this article we document the progress of the SEP toward full implementation of the DRW concept. We discuss the fiscal challenges posed by our desire to maintain free or low-cost access to the contents of the SEP, and we consider technological challenges posed by the desire to stay abreast of technological developments in document markup while making it easy for authors and subject editors to write and maintain entries representing the very best scholarship.     

The role of network therapy in the treatment of relational disorders: Cults and folie a deux

This article discusses the successful outcome of a network intervention in a case of cult-involvement andfolie a deux. The intervention, specifically designed to help a family in which one member had become involved with an individual who claimed to be the Messiah—an involvement that entailed the exclusion and alienation of all other family members—used a team of network specialists and consisted of a pre-network planning meeting, the network meeting itself which included approximately 70 persons over four hours, and several follow-up meetings with network subgroups.     

Metalexical Awareness: Development, Methodology or Written Language? A Cross-linguistic Comparison

This study explores the ability to access word boundaries of pre-school children, using an on-line methodology (Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, Sims, Jones, & Cockle (1996). Cognition, 58, 197–219.), which has hardly been used outside English-speaking countries. In a cross-linguistic study in the Netherlands and Norway, four and five-year-old children were asked to repeat the last word every time a narrator stopped reading a story. In total 32 target-words were used, both closed and open class words, and both monosyllabic and disyllabic words. The outcomes in both countries were different from those of the original English study (Karmiloff-Smith et al., 1996): four- and five-year-olds were successful in only about 26% of the cases, whereas the success rate in the former English experiment was 75% for the younger and 96% for the older children. No differences were found between age groups and between open and closed class words. This methodology does reveal the ability to access word boundaries, but probably not because of the ease of the on-line methodology in itself, but rather because literacy introduces new representations of language, even in on-line processing. The outcomes implicate that the ability to mark word boundaries does not seem to be a valid indication of who is ready for reading.     

Believe it or not: on the possibility of suspending belief

We present two experiments that cast doubt on existing evidence suggesting that it is impossible to suspend belief in a comprehended proposition. In Experiment 1, we found that interrupting the encoding of a statement's veracity decreased memory for the statement's falsity when the false version of the statement was uninformative, but not when the false version was informative. This suggests that statements that are informative when false are not represented as if they were true. In Experiment 2, participants made faster lexical decisions to words implied by preceding statements when they were told that the statements were true than when the veracity of the statements was unknown or when the statements were false. The findings suggest that comprehending a statement may not require believing it, and that it may be possible to suspend belief in comprehended propositions.