What is Original in Merleau-Ponty’s View of the Phenomenological Reduction?

Despite the recent increase of interest in the work of Merleau-Ponty there is still a persistent tendency to overlook the uniqueness of the philosophical position he advances in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article I present a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the phenomenological reduction that explains how it is original. I do this by contrasting his presentation of the reduction with that of the early Husserl, highlighting how his emphasis on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’ leads him to reject Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as a ‘philosophical science,’ and the Kantian language in which the this account is framed. I go on to critically discuss the interpretations of the reduction advanced by Stephen Priest and Joel Smith as examples of readings that fail to fully grasp Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘natural attitude’ as resting on the inherent objectivizing structure that is built into perception itself. The way that these authors misinterpret Merleau-Ponty helps to make maximally clear the profound philosophical significance that he places on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’.     

Psychometric Properties of the Primary Care Behavioral Health Screen

The Primary Care Behavioral Health Screen (PCBHS) is a self-report instrument developed to screen for behavioral health problems in primary care settings. The present paper describes development of the PCBHS and reports findings from item analyses and studies examining the instrument’s convergent validity and test–retest reliability. Results suggest the PCBHS is a useful and valid method for screening a variety of behavioral health problems in a busy primary care practice. Recommendations for further research on the PCBHS are provided.     

The Impact of Life Design Counselling on Adolescents

This study records a process of heightening self-awareness within a semi-structured ‘life design counselling’ process. The research was conducted on the basis of a case study designed to facilitate co-constructive conversation with a purposefully selected youth. The participant was enabled to reconstruct a preferred and meaningful future that could change as different experiences, challenges and needs arose. The study suggested that the postmodern techniques that were implemented enhanced the involvement of the participant in the study. The participant revealed heightened self-insight into his personal experiences, a ‘changed’ attitude to certain aspects of his life context and pro-active behaviour with regard to the challenges he was facing. We (the researchers) concluded that life design counselling could be a promising strategy that could have a lasting effect on adolescents.     

ACTIONS,HABITS AND CONSTITUTION

In this paper I offer a critique of the view made popular by Davidson that rationalization is a species of causal explanation, and propose instead that in many cases the explanatory relation is constitutive. Given Davidson’s conception of rationalization, which allows that a huge range of states gathered under the heading ‘pro attitude’ could rationalize an action, I argue that whilst the causal thesis may have some merit for some such ‘attitudes’, it has none for others. The problematic ‘attitudes’ are those which can be attributed to the agent only on the basis of her history of doing a certain sort of thing. In other words, they are among the agent’s habits. I argue that such temporally extended states cannot be the causes of any present occurrence. Instead, I suggest we should think of the present action as partly constituting the state in question, and give a corresponding interpretation of the explanatory relation. Such explanations invite us to abandon a conception of agency narrowly based on psychology, in favour of an enriched one which takes an agent’s habits to partly constitute the agent.     

Effect of Object and Task Properties on Bimanual Transport

The use of both hands simultaneously when manipulating objects is fairly commonplace, but it is not known what factors encourage people to use two hands as opposed to one during simple tasks such as transport. In particular, we are interested in three possible transport strategies: unimanual transport, handing off between hands, and symmetric bimanual transport. In this study, we investigate the effect of object size, weight, and starting and ending position (configuration) as well as the need to balance the object on the use of these three strategies in a bowl-moving task. We find that configuration and balance have a strong effect on choice of strategy, and size and weight have a weaker effect. Hand-offs are most often used when the task requires moving an object from left to right and vice versa, while the unimanual strategy was frequently used when passing front to back. The bimanual strategy is only weakly affected by configuration. The need to balance an object causes subjects to favor unimanual and bimanual strategies over the hand-off. In addition, an analysis of transport duration and body rotation suggests that strategy choice may be driven by the desire to minimize body rotation.     

Are changes in blood pressure and total cholesterol related to changes in mood? An 18-month study of men and women.

The authors investigated the within-person association of reported mood with blood pressure and total cholesterol (TC) levels, each assessed 4 times over an 18-month period in 128 men and 154 women. Change over time in tense arousal was significantly positively associated with changes over time in systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) but not TC. A change in hedonic tone was significantly associated with SBP (an increase in negative affect was associated with an increase in SBP) but not with DBP or TC. There were no sex differences in associations of mood with SBP or TC. However, increases in tense arousal and negative affect were significantly associated with an increase in DBP for women but not men.     

Motivation is not enough: prediction of risk behavior following diagnosis of coronary heart disease from the theory of planned behavior.

Perceived behavioral control (PBC) and intention, the proximal predictors from the theory of planned behavior (TPB), were used to predict cardiovascular risk behaviors in 597 patients 1 year after diagnosis with coronary heart disease. The outcome measures were self-report measures of exercise plus objective measures of fitness (distance walked in 6 min) and cotinine-confirmed smoking cessation. In multivariate analyses incorporating both PBC and intention, PBC predicted exercise, distance walked, and smoking cessation, but intention was not a reliable independent predictor of any health behavior measured. Thus, the effective theoretical component of the TPB was PBC. Similar predictions could derive from social-cognitive theory. In coronary patients, behavioral change needs to address issues of action implementation rather than motivational factors alone.