Recoupling in Mid‐Life and Beyond: From Love at Last to Not So Fast

Divorce rates have dropped in the United States, except for couples over 50 where they are rising steeply, along with rates of late‐life recoupling. Both stepcouples and their young adult and adult children in new older stepfamilies are often surprised to find themselves facing many of the same challenges that younger stepfamilies do. Some challenges are even intensified by the decades‐long relationships and additional layers of extended family that come with recoupling after mid‐life. Stepfamilies formed in later life must also negotiate decisions about estate planning and elder care among stakeholders who often have sharply divergent agendas before there is time to establish trusting relationships. This article describes the “normal” challenges facing stepcouples who come together over age 50. It provides evidence‐informed guidance for therapists in meeting these challenges on three levels of clinical work: Psychoeducational, Interpersonal, and Intrapsychic/Intergenerational. As in younger stepfamilies, “family therapy” must usually begin in subsystems—often the adult stepcouple and parent–adult child. The article then describes a particularly fraught subgroup of recouplers: over‐50 fathers and their new partners, where the dad's young adult or adult daughter is very unhappy with his new relationship. In these latter stepfamilies, father–daughter repair must precede stepfamily bonding. Stepfamilies that are preceded by a partner's death and those that begin with affairs are also discussed. Finally, some “easy wrong turns” for therapists are described.     

Demons are everywhere: The effects of belief in pure evil,demonization, and retribution on punishing criminal perpetrators

Do preconceived beliefs about evil influence perceptions and punishments of those who harm others? We examined the effects of belief in pure evil (BPE), demonization, and belief in retribution on punishment of a stereotypically (vs. non-stereotypically) evil criminal. Participants punished the stereotypically evil perpetrator more (i.e., greater recommended jail time, opposition to parole, and support for his execution) because of increases in demonization (i.e., greater perceptions of the criminal as wicked, evil, and threatening), but not increases in retributive feelings. However, regardless of the criminal’s exhibited stereotypically evil traits, greater BPE predicted harsher punishment of the perpetrator; both greater demonization and stronger retributive feelings mediated the relationship between BPE and severe punishments. Further, effect sizes indicated BPE (vs. the evilness manipulation) more strongly predicted demonization and punishment. Thus, some individuals naturally see perpetrators as demons, and retributively punish them, whether or not there is more explicit stereotypic evidence of their evil dispositions.     

Do internals speed less and externals speed more to cope with the death anxiety?

Past research has showed that mortality salience (MS) increases reckless driving and speeding when the individual perceives driving to be relevant to his or her self-esteem. We claimed that drivers’ control orientations also play a significant role in the relationship between MS and speeding. We hypothesized that both a general desirability of control and traffic locus of control (T-LOC) would moderate the effect of MS on speeding. We tested our hypothesis using an online experiment on a sample of 208 young male drivers. Participants were exposed to either mortality or dental pain salience, and they filled out desirability of control, T-LOC, and self-report speeding measures. The results showed that, for individuals with low desirability of control, MS increased preferred speed and decreased intention to comply with speed limit and the percentage of time complied with the speed limit on urban roads with 50 km/h speed limit. For individuals with high desirability of control, on the other hand, MS increased intention to comply with the speed limit on rural roads and percentage of the time complied with the speed limit on both urban and rural roads. In contrast, the interaction between MS and T-LOC showed that an external T-LOC is positively associated with both intention to comply and the percentage of the time complied with the speed limits only on rural roads with 90 km/h.     

Eating Disorders: A Bond between Medicine,Culture and Psychoanalysis

Action in connection with the therapeutic process is often equated with acting out. The subtle behaviour that belongs to ?the complicated system of transmitting and receiving unconscious signals? (Sandler), with which the patient attempts to make the analyst behave as the object of transference or to fulfill an unconscious desire, is also described as acting out or micro-acting out (Treurniet). This fine-grained action, however, means nothing; it is not symbolic or communicative action. Its intention is, rather, to trigger effects and induce interactions. It occurs not only on the side of the analysand but also on that of the analyst, and is part of the unconscious communication in the therapeutic process. Presented here are some of the various interactive ways and means with which the analyst is prompted into unconscious action and certain, unnoticed, ways in that he turn ?treats? the patient. The analyst's action responses can bear the character of interpretations with which he may unintentionally reveal how he regards the behaviour of the patient.     

A Woman Is Being Beaten - Issues on Violence and Femininity

What kind of contributions can psychoanalysis make toward issues that concern violence and femininity, specifically the violence that women establish in the relations with the significant other and themselves? In this paper, the authors attempt to answer this question by dealing with concepts such as instinct, masochism and enjoyment. Additionally, they recognize the act of psychoanalytic listening as a genuine and valid manner of getting the unconscious to speak. This act of listening can be practiced either in the traditional psychoanalytic setting of private offices or in psychoanalysis applied to public institutions, for the principal tool is language as it permeates human relationships and proportions the structure of the unconscious mind.     

Psychological Risk Factors of Sudden Cardiac Arrest

This study tested the hypotheses that Vital Exhaustion (VE) increases the risk of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) and that non-expression of emotions modifies the risk of VE. Data came from 99 victims of SCA and 103 healthy controls matched for gender and age. Victims of SCA were more often assessed as exhausted and as being closed by their family members than controls, the estimated relative risks being 2.81 (95% CI 1.1-7.3) and 2.28 (95% CI 1.1-4.6), respectively. No significant interaction between exhaustion and being closed on the risk of SCA was observed. These findings indicate that a state of exhaustion and being closed belong to the risk indicators of SCA.     

Children's understanding of death as the cessation of agency: a test using sleep versus death

An important problem faced by children is discriminating between entities capable of goal-directed action, i.e. intentional agents, and non-agents. In the case of discriminating between living and dead animals, including humans, this problem is particularly difficult, because of the large number of perceptual cues that living and dead animals share. However, there are potential costs of failing to discriminate between living and dead animals, including unnecessary vigilance and lost opportunities from failing to realize that an animal, such as an animal killed for food, is dead. This might have led to the evolution of mechanisms specifically for distinguishing between living and dead animals in terms of their ability to act. Here we test this hypothesis by examining patterns of inferences about sleeping and dead organisms by Shuar and German children between 3 and 5-years old. The results show that by age 4, causal cues to death block agency attributions to animals and people, whereas cues to sleep do not. The developmental trajectory of this pattern of inferences is identical across cultures, consistent with the hypothesis of a living/dead discrimination mechanism as a reliably developing part of core cognitive architecture.     

Death anxiety among New Zealanders: the predictive role of gender and marital status

The aim of this cross-sectional study was to investigate attitudes of New Zealanders towards death and dying. We administered an online version of Collett–Lester Fear of Death Scale and Concerns About Dying Instrument subscales to a representative sample of the New Zealand population. In total, 1001 people responded to the survey. Women reported more anxiousness concerning their own death (p?=?.001) and dying at a young age (p?>?.001). Women also showed more agreement towards spiritual aspects of dying (p?>?.001). Single female respondents worry more about dying (p =?.02) especially when young (p?=?.003). Single participants (p >?.001) aged 18 and 29 (p?>?.001) reported higher anxiety for Items relating to the death of others especially concerning never being able to communicate with the person again. Our findings show that marital status and gender strongly predict higher levels of death anxiety among New Zealanders. This is probably due to the cultural identity of those sampled.     

Being, <Emphasis Type="Italic">aevum</Emphasis>, and nothingness: Edith Stein on death and dying

This article seeks to present for the first time a more systematic account of Edith Stein’s views on death and dying. First, I will argue that death does not necessarily lead us to an understanding of our earthly existence as aevum, that is, an experience of time between eternity and finite temporality. We always bear the mark of our finitude, including our finite temporality, even when we exist within the eternal mind of God. To claim otherwise, is to make identical our eternity with God’s eternity, thereby undermining the traditional Scholastic argument, which Stein holds, that there is no real relation between the being (and, therefore, (a)temporality) of God and the being of human persons. Second, I will argue that Stein excludes the category of potentiality from her discussion of death as a relation between the fullness or actuality of being and nothingness. In fact, death is more a relation between possibility/potentiality and nothingness than a relation between actual fullness and nothingness. What Stein describes as fullness ought to be read as potential.