The Confrontation with Death and the Renewal of Life

ABSTRACT: Several writers have argued that a majority of suicidal acts are “gambles with death.” A distinction is made between cases where the gamble with death is merely consequential (i.e., arising from ignorance, apathy, indifference) and cases where it is the very essence of the act. Typically in these latter cases others are excluded from possible intervention. The individual is thus playing a game of “pure” chance. Death is summoned and challenged in order that life may continue. It is argued, from an interactionist perspective, that such acts are desperate efforts to confirm existence in situations of extreme uncertainty and represent a distinct form of what Shneidman has called “egotic” suicide.     

Primary prevention of psychological difficulties in vulnerable mothers: pilot programme evaluation

This pilot study evaluated a primary prevention programme delivered to mothers who were considered to be vulnerable to the development of psychological difficulties (N = 11). Beneficial effects were noted in terms of mood and coping, as well as a reduction in the mothers' attendance at their general practitioners surgery. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Millisecond timing on PCs and Macs

A real-time, object-oriented solution for displaying stimuli on Windows 95/98, MacOS and Linux platforms is presented. The program, written in C++, utilizes a special-purpose window class (GLWindow), OpenGL, and 32-bit graphics acceleration; it avoids display timing uncertainty by substituting the new window class for the default window code for each system. We report the outcome of tests for real-time capability across PC and Mac platforms running a variety of operating systems. The test program, which can be used as a shell for programming real-time experiments and testing specific processors, is available at http://www.cs.dal.ca/~macinnwj. We propose to provide researchers with a sense of the usefulness of our program, highlight the ability of many multitasking environments to achieve real time, as well as caution users about systems that may not achieve real time, even under optimal conditions.     

Emotions,concepts and the indeterminacy of natural kinds

Synthese - A central question for philosophical psychology is which mental faculties form natural kinds. There is hot debate over the kind status of faculties as diverse as consciousness, seeing,...     

Explaining the better-than-average effect among prisoners

We addressed explanations for why prisoners manifest the Better-Than-Average Effect (perceptions of superiority to the average peer), focusing on three biases: self-enhancing (social as well as temporal) comparisons, denial, and self-serving attributions. We tested the Better-Than-Average Effect in regards to prisoners’ perceptions of their worst trait, and assessed the relationship between the three biases and positive self-evaluations. Prisoners engaged in self-enhancing comparisons, differentiating themselves from other prisoners and their past selves who committed the crime, but also expected self-improvement in the future. Prisoners also demonstrated denial for intentions to commit the crime, planning of it, recidivism, and over-estimation of crime prevalence in the general population. Although prisoners made self-serving attributions by distancing their own character from their criminal behavior and reporting they had experienced more hardship relative to others, they did not attribute the cause of their crime to such hardship. More extensive self-enhancing temporal comparisons and denial predicted more positive self-evaluations of prisoners’ worst trait relative to the average community member. The strength of some of these biases varied with levels of narcissism and psychopathy.