物质主义者自我概念的特点和相关理论

物质主义的经典研究分别从人格、价值观、目标和需要的角度界定和理解物质主义的相关现象。自我概念一直是贯穿物质主义研究的线索, 但直到最近研究者才试图以它为理论基点统摄与整合已有研究。相关研究表明, 物质主义者对自我的评价较低, 表现为低自尊、权变性自尊; 对自我的认识具有不一致性, 表现为自我概念不清晰、外显-内隐自尊分离、以及自我差距(理想自我与现实自我的差距)。最近出现的两个综合理论——物质主义的自我逃离理论与物质主义的认同目标追求理论提出, 物质主义是个体将物质拥有作为逃避自我的方式或满足自我认同动机的手段。这两个理论弥补了现有物质主义研究缺乏整合性理论的不足。未来研究可以通过借鉴有关自我概念的理论, 超越单纯的物质主义者自我匮乏的思路, 从而做出更大的理论贡献。     

Personality Maturation during the Transition to Working Life: Associations with Commitment as a Possible Indicator of Social Investment

The social investment theory (SIT) proposes that personality maturation is triggered by transitions into age‐graded roles and psychological commitment to these roles. The present study examines the predictions of SIT by focusing on the transition from student life to working life. We analysed three‐wave longitudinal data and compared participants who made the transition into working life (N = 226), participants who combined education with work (N = 387), and participants who did not make the transition at all (N = 287). In contrast to the predictions of SIT, we found no differences in personality maturation between individuals who made the transition into working life and those who did this only partly or not at all. Psychological commitment to work did not explain individual differences in personality maturation for those who made the transition (partly) into working life after controlling for multiple testing. Therefore, the present study did not support the predictions of SIT. © 2019 The Authors European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology     

QUALIA UND PHYSIKALISMUS

Qualia and Physicalism. It is assumed that the following three relations exhaust the possibilities for a physicalist account of qualia: 1. determination, 2. identity, 3. realization. The first relation is immediately rejected because it does not exclude property dualism. The second faces the problem that it is probably impossible to discriminate empirically between the identity thesis and the epiphenomenalist position. The third cannot handle qualia adequately, for qualia are not functional properties and the realization relation is only plausible as a relation between physical realizers and functional properties. Finally, if one attempts to replace multiple realization by multiple identities it is shown that the notion of multiple property identities is unintelligible. The upshot is that if these three relations exhaust the possibilities of a physicalist construal of qualia then physicalism is wrong. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Menarche,Menstruation, and Gender Identity: Retrospective Accounts from Women Who Have Undergone Premenopausal Hysterectomy

Hysterectomy (the surgical removal of the uterus) precipitates the end of menstrual cycles in premenopausal women. In this article I explore whether that premature termination of menstrual function negatively affects women's subjective gender identities. Using the grounded theory research approach, I conducted in-depth interviews with 40 diverse respondents who had undergone premenopausal hysterectomy. These women generally acknowledged that, since the time of menarche, they had closely associated menstruation with their gender identities. However, despite some regrets, respondents' primary reaction was almost unanimous relief that they had ceased menstruating. This finding must be viewed in the context of overwhelming and uncontrollable menstrual pain and bleeding that many respondents had previously experienced. Contrary to expressing remorse that they no longer identified with normal women, who menstruate, most respondents sought to disassociate themselves from the normalized suffering that they perceived is endured by all menstruating women.     

Reconfiguring Older Bodies in the Prison Time Machine

It is by mapping an area that the geographer comes to understand the contours and formations of a place. The place in this case is the prison world. This article serves to map moments in prison demonstrating how old female bodies are performed under the prison gaze. In this article I will illustrate how older women subvert, negotiate, or invoke discourse as a means of reinscribing the normalizing discourses that serve to confine and define older women's experiences in prison. Female elders in prison become defined and confined by regimes of femininity and ageism. They have to endure symbolic and actual intrusions of physical privacy, which serve to remind them of what they were, where they are, and what they have become. This article will critically explore the complexity and contradictions of time use in prison and how they impact on embodied identities. By incorporating the voices of elders, I hope to draw out the contradictions and dilemmas which they experience, thereby illustrating the relationship between time, their involvement in doing time, and the performance of time in a total institution (see Goffman, 1961), and the relationship between temporality and existence. The stories of the women show how their identities are caught within the movement and motion of time and space, both in terms of the time of the real on the outside and within prison time. This is the in-between space of carceral time within which women live and which they negotiate. It is by being caught in this network of carceral time that they are constantly being remade as their body/performance of identities alters within it. While only a small percentage of the female prison population in the United Kingdom are in later life, one has to question why criminological and gerontological literature fail to address the needs of a growing significant minority.     

The Late Life Reconstruction of Selfhood Analyzed in Peter Hall's Film She's Been Away

The film She's Been Away tells the story of an old woman who had been locked in a mental asylum while a teenager, for willfully violating repressive sexual codes. Sixty years later her ward is closed and she moves in with her nephew and his wife. Faced with what appears to be a hopeless situation, she manages to forge a sense of a meaningful closure to a misspent life. Through narrative, story structure, and characterization the film throws into focus coping mechanisms and ego strategies deployed by a triple disadvantaged person (woman, old, and mad) in her ascent to a reconstructed selfhood. As the protagonist ties both ends of her life, and faces the abyss in between she makes genuine adaptive use of so-called regressive, late-life development assets (available to a lesser degree to elderly people in normal life circumstances), primarily the abolition of linear time. Through this abolition she makes reminiscing an actual reality while still maintaining a functional separation between the real and the remembered. Her portrayal is a valuable document for gerontologists as it explores, through artistic imagination and intuition, the workings of an aging mind in search for a meaningful sense of closure.     

The use of genetic test information in insurance: The argument from indistinguishability reconsidered

In the bioethical literature, discrimination in insurance on the basis of genetic risk factors detected by genetic testing has been defended and opposed on various ethical grounds. One important argument in favour of the practice is offered by those who believe that it is not possible to distinguish between genetic and non-genetic information, at least not for practical policy purposes such as insurance decision-making. According to the argument from indistinguishability, the use of genetic test information for insurance purposes should be permitted, because genetic test information is no different from non-genetic medical information in any relevant respect, therefore it would be inconsistent to prohibit the former whilst permitting the latter. This paper discusses and defends this argument and suggests a new, more tenable foundation.     

Identity, narcissism and the emotional core

This paper describes the course of an analysis which demonstrates how borderline and narcissistic functioning can be understood in terms of a struggle with issues of identity. It shows how such functioning can come to exert a profound hold on the individual and why it seems, at times, a matter of life and death to the patient to avoid states of separation from the analyst. The paper suggests that these complex phenomena can be understood, perhaps surprisingly, in the simple terms of the nature of affect itself. The concept of the emotional core is introduced to embody and highlight that which lies beneath both Jungian and Freudian models (offering a potential bridge between the two models)--namely the psyche's essentially affective nature. It is suggested that the emotional core can serve as an organ of perception giving the individual both their primary relation to reality and an emotional attachment to others. This emotional core is understood to function in a narcissistic manner to preference experiences of sameness and in aversion to experiences of difference--a view consonant with Stern's understanding of infant development where the infant is able to distinguish self from other from the beginning of life (as Fordham also held); taking up Stern's terminology, it gives the individual a 'core' sense of being. There is, however, no stable, on-going sense of 'I' associated with this form of functioning as the individual is immersed in the latest affect to enter consciousness (as in the borderline state of mind) and consequently the individual comes to rely intensely on the other to determine their sense of being (the other becomes a self-regulating other in Stern's terms). The development of ego-functioning gives a more stable and on-going sense of 'I' to the individual, giving contact with the broader personality, allowing the individual to be less reliant on the other and orientating them to reality in a way more fitting to their overall needs. The paper describes how consciousness, which is not seen as identical with the ego, moves between the mode of functioning of the ego and that of the emotional core, i.e., shifting in and out of states where projective identification predominates. It elaborates the range of self-experience encompassing spiritual experience and states of disintegration (which are understood to have a similar structure) on one side, to ego-based experience (which can itself be defensive and rigid at times) on the other. It explores the consequences of such a view for analytic technique and relates it to the Jungian view of the self and the Freudian unconscious.     

Demographic characteristics,social competence,and behavior problems in children with gender identity disorder: a cross-national,cross-clinic comparative analysis

This study examined demographic characteristics, social competence, and behavior problems in clinic-referred children with gender identity problems in Toronto, Canada (N = 358), and Utrecht, The Netherlands (N = 130). The Toronto sample was, on average, about a year younger than the Utrecht sample at referral, had a higher percentage of boys, had a higher mean IQ, and was less likely to be living with both parents. On the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), both groups showed, on average, clinical range scores in both social competence and behavior problems. A CBCL-derived measure of poor peer relations showed that boys in both clinics had worse ratings than did the girls. A multiple regression analysis showed that poor peer relations were the strongest predictor of behavior problems in both samples. This study—the first cross-national, cross-clinic comparative analysis of children with gender identity disorder—found far more similarities than differences in both social competence and behavior problems. The most salient demographic difference was age at referral. Cross-national differences in factors that might influence referral patterns are discussed.     

Crossing the Line: Case Studies of Identity Development in First-Generation College Women

In this paper we present four case studies of adult women from working class backgrounds who attended Hillside College (a pseudonym for one of the seven-sister colleges) during the early 1990s. Although research on women has led, over the past few decades, to a more complex picture of the contexts in which women develop their identities, one important context that has been underexplored is social class. Drawing on data from three lengthy interviews with each of our four participants, our purpose was to explore the identity concerns of adult women from working class backgrounds in their experience getting to and attending Hillside College, which has historically been home to the middle and upper social classes. Implications for college retention are discussed.