Does subjective well-being show a relationship between parents and their children?

The relationship between the subjective well-being of parents and their own 12–16-year-old children was explored in a Spanish sample of N = 266 families. A positive relationship was expected due to both a shared environment and the possibility of the genetic transmission of subjective well-being ‘set-points’. A positive significant relationship was found for the summated scale of satisfaction domains forming the Personal Well-being Index, and for the specific domains of health and security for the future. However, no relationship was found for the other five domains that make up this Index or for satisfaction with life as a whole. We conclude while these results provide some evidence for the expected influence of a shared environment, they have failed to provide evidence for high heritability of set-points for subjective well-being.     

The being-with of being-there

In Being and Time, Heidegger affirms that being-with or Mitsein is an essential constitution of Dasein but he does not submit this existential to the same rigorous analyses as other existentials. In this essay, Jean-Luc Nancy points to the different places where Heidegger erased the possibility of thinking an essential with that he himself opened. This erasure is due, according to Nancy, to the subordination of Mitsein to a thinking of the proper and the improper. The polarization of Being-with between an improper face, the Anyone, and a proper one, the people, which is also, as Nancy shows, a polarization between everydayness and historicity, between a being-together in exteriority (indifference and anonymity) and a being-together in interiority (union through destiny), between a solitary dying and the sacrificial death in combat, leaves the essential with unthought. This essay shows not only the tensions that arise out of Heidegger’s own analyses of Mitsein and affect the whole of Being and Time but also underlines in the end a “shortfall in thinking” inherent not only to Heidegger’s work but, as Nancy claims, to our Western tradition, a shortfall which Nancy has attempted to remedy in his Being Singular Plural. A slightly different version has been published under the title “L’être-avec de l’être-là” in Lieu-Dit 19 “Communauté” (Spring 2003). All additions in square brackets are the translators’ unless otherwise indicated. The German words in parentheses are Nancy’s additions. For the translation of citations from Being and Time, we have used the Macquarrie & Robinson’s translation which we have modified only when constrained by Nancy himself. Overall, we have tried to be faithful to the Heideggerian tone of Nancy’s text by using the accepted English translation of the central concepts of Being and Time. When we depart from the accepted translations, it is to remain true to Nancy’s paraphrases, emphases, and displacements. For example, we refrain from using “authentic” and “inauthentic.” Translated by Marie-Eve Morin Department of Philosophy, 4-97 Humanities Centre, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6G 2E5 e-mail: mmorin1@ualberta.ca

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Bonjour’s Arguments against Skepticism about the <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Priori</Emphasis>

I reconstruct and critique two arguments Laurence BonJour has recently offered against skepticism about the a priori. While the arguments may provide anti-skeptical, internalist foundationalists with reason to accept the a priori, I show that neither argument provides sufficient reason for believing the more general conclusion that there is no rational alternative to accepting the a priori.     

The scientific use of ‘representation’ and ‘function’: avoiding explanatory vacuity

Nearly all of the ways philosophers currently attempt to define the terms ‘representation’ and ‘function’ undermine the scientific application of those terms by rendering the scientific explanations in which they occur vacuous. Since this is unacceptable, we must develop analyses of these terms that avoid this vacuity. Robert Cummins argues in this fashion in Representations, Targets, and Attitudes. He accuses ‘use theories’ of representational content of generating vacuous explanations, claims that nearly all current theories of representational content are use theories, and offers a non-use theory of representational content which avoids explanatory vacuity. One task I undertake in this article is to develop an alternative non-use theory which avoids an objection fatal to that theory. My second task is to adapt Cummins’ argument to criticize most current analyses of ‘function,’ which undermine scientific explanation in an analogous way. Though Cummins does not explicitly argue in this manner, his own analysis of ‘function,’ by avoiding any appeal to use, avoids the explanatory vacuity to which they succumb. Consequently, I endorse Cummins’ notion of function. However, although use theories fail as analyses of the terms ‘representation’ and ‘function,’ they can still make significant contributions to the sciences employing these terms. For, while philosophers seeking to define ‘representation’ and ‘function’ must avoid incorporating representational and functional uses into their definitions, scientists must still find a way to determine which representations and functions are being used. Suitably re-construed use theories of representation and function may in many cases assist them in this task.     

Negative Affectivity and Drinking in Adolescents: An Examination of Moderators Predicted by Affect Regulation Theory

This investigation examined potential moderators of the longitudinal relation between negative affectivity and drinking. Specifically tested was the degree to which alcohol expectancies and coping styles moderate the relation between negative affectivity in early adolescence and drinking in middle and late adolescence. Four hundred ninety nine early adolescents completed inventories of negative affectivity, coping style, and tension reduction expectancies, and were followed up with inventories of drinking in middle and late adolescence. Constructive coping moderated the relation between negative affectivity and drinking in middle adolescence, such that only those with poor coping skills exhibited this positive relation. Although early negative affectivity was directly related to drinking in late adolescence, no interactions between negative affectivity and expectancies or coping were detected for drinking at that age. This absence of consistent moderating effects indicates significant limitations in the ability of the traditionally-conceived affect regulation model to reliably predict adolescent drinking. This research was conducted at the Center for Education and Drug Abuse Research (CEDAR) which is located in the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and is supported by grant P50-DA-05605 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.     

The indexicality of ‘knowledge’

Epistemic contextualism—the view that the content of the predicate ‘know’ can change with the context of utterance—has fallen into considerable disrepute recently. Many theorists have raised doubts as to whether ‘know’ is context-sensitive, typically basing their arguments on data suggesting that ‘know’ behaves semantically and syntactically in a way quite different from recognised indexicals such as ‘I’ and ‘here’ or ‘flat’ and ‘empty’. This paper takes a closer look at three pertinent objections of this kind, viz. at what I call the Error-Theory Objection, the Gradability Objection and the Clarification-Technique Objection. The paper concludes that none of these objections can provide decisive evidence against contextualism.     

The Difficulty of Making Psychology Research and Clinical Practice Relevant to Medicine: Experiences and Observations

Psychology and medicine research and practice have demonstrated substantial and unique bodies of knowledge designed to both improve patient care and respond to contemporary health care needs for use of evidence and cost consciousness. At their full potential they represent a significant paradigm shift in healthcare. Despite impressive successes, it is clear that we are just on the cusp of such a change. These findings have had limited impact and penetration into medical practice, particularly outside of academic medicine and large, organized systems of health care, and there are multiple examples of such limitations in various arenas of health care. There also appear to be common themes to such examples which provide us opportunities to consider how psychologists might move things ahead. They also suggest how our unique position in academic medicine can both limit our impact and provide ways of creating continued shifts in the healthcare paradigm. This paper is based in part on the author’s presentation at the Association of Psychologists in Academic Health Centers 3rd National Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 2007.     

Calculating Impact Factor: How Bibliographical Classification of Journal Items Affects the Impact Factor of Large and Small Journals

As bibliographical classification of published journal items affects the denominator in this equation, we investigated how the numerator and denominator of the impact factor (IF) equation were generated for representative journals in two categories of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). We performed a full text search of the 1st-ranked journal in 2004 JCR category “Medicine, General and Internal” (New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM, IF = 38.570) and 61st-ranked journal (Croatian Medical Journal, CMJ, IF = 0.690), 1st-ranked journal in category “Multidisciplinary Sciences” (Nature, IF = 32.182) and journal with a relative rank of CMJ (Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciencias, AABC, IF = 0.435). Large journals published more items categorized by Web of Science (WoS) as non-research items (editorial material, letters, news, book reviews, bibliographical items, or corrections): 63% out of total 5,193 items in Nature and 81% out of 3,540 items in NEJM, compared with 31% out of 283 items in CMJ and only 2 (2%) out of 126 items in AABC. Some items classified by WoS as non-original contained original research data (9.5% in Nature, 7.2% in NEJM, 13.7% in CMJ and none in AABC). These items received a significant number of citations: 6.9% of total citations in Nature, 14.7% in NEJM and 18.5% in CMJ. IF decreased for all journals when only items presenting original research and citations to them were used for IF calculation. Regardless of the journal’s size or discipline, publication of non-original research and its classification by the bibliographical database have an effect on both numerator and denominator of the IF equation. Preliminary results of the study were presented at the 2006 ORI Research Conference on Research Integrity, Tampa, FL, December 1–3, 2006.