On paradoxes and the experience of duality

Abstract

Opposing attitudes, emotions, or perceptions of self and other that set the stage for experiences of duality influence our interactions and self–other schemas. The experience of duality that has been conceptualised as “conflict,” “self state,” and “paradox" in psychoanalytic theory has been extensively considered, particularly in terms of its manifestation in transference–countertransference relations and in the analytic material from patients' experiences. They have not, however, been compared and contrasted as entities that lead to similar kinds of experience. Scant attention has been paid, moreover, to paradox as a mental organisation that underlies certain experiences of duality. The concept of paradox has thus been emphasised and developed in this paper.     

Experiences of stereotyping among individuals employed in selected South African organisations

This study investigated the effects of stereotypes among individuals working in selected South African organisations. The participants were 336 employees within the following sectors: banking (n?=?40), higher education institutions (n?=?72), mining (n?=?63), municipalities (n?=?24), nursing (n?=?4), police services (n?=?20), schools (n?=?85), and the restaurant industry (n?=?28). Data were collected using open ended interviews, and thematically analysed. The findings indicated that stereotypes influence individuals on three different levels: cognitive, behavioural, and emotional levels. Predominantly, participants reported that they mostly react in a cognitive manner when confronted with stereotypes.     

The Routledge companion to religion and film

This paper concerns U.S. evangelical Christian mission practice in the Muslim world. Interests in and support for mission work among Muslims have increased – shifts that evangelical church leaders and missiologists attribute to the impacts of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed – and the short-term segment, which fuses voluntarism, tourism and evangelism, represents the newest paradigm in these undertakings. While the overall popularity of short-term mission is recognised by scholars and church leaders, its role in mediating interactions between Christians and Muslims has received little attention. This paper documents short-term mission engagement with Islam by showing how Islam is represented by agencies and how volunteers interact with Muslims. I argue that styles of representing and engaging with Islam, while arising from a range of theological orientations, are also products of changing contexts and practices of mission, both the routinisation of short-term mission and the expanded opportunities for mission under rubric of faith-based development. This paper is based on research in Southern California between 2009 and 2012, including visual and textual content analyses of sending agencies' websites and guidebooks, and interviews with 57 short-term mission participants.     

Psychological biases of individual investors and financial satisfaction

Traditional finance theory is based on the principle of maximization of utility and explains how choices are made by rational people. Although the theory provides numerous insights, observation of actual behavior of people was seen to be different from what the theory predicted. The homo economicus is in reality a homo sapien who has emotions and beliefs that help to filter the content from his or her environment. These beliefs and preferences that arise due to cognitive limitations, presence of emotions, and various psychological motives guide or bias his or her decisions. Much literature states that the biases should be corrected as they negatively impact financial behaviour and individual's well‐being. However, evolutionary psychology considers biases as design features of human mind. Thus, biases are not always bad, as at times, these biases can help the individual investor to choose the best course of action from the multiple possibilities and enable committing the less costly mistakes, thereby helping the individual to achieve satisficing behaviour. This paper aims to explore the investor biases and see whether they are related to the financial satisfaction of the individuals. Financial satisfaction is the measure of satisfaction with one's financial situation. The results showed that overconfidence bias, reliance on expert bias, and self‐control bias have a positive and significant association with financial satisfaction levels. Association of a few other biases with financial satisfaction was also observed under certain control conditions. This study provides further insights on investor behavior and paves the way for various possibilities for future research.     

Narrative expectations in financial forecasting

How do people form expectations about the future? We use amateur and expert investors' expectations about financial asset prices to study this question. Three experiments contrast the rational expectations assumption from neoclassical economics (investors forecast according to neoclassical financial theory) against two psychological theories of expectation formation—behaviorally informed expectations (investors understand empirical market anomalies and expect these anomalies to occur) and narrative expectations (investors use narrative thinking to predict future prices). Whereas neoclassical financial theory maintains that past public information cannot be used to predict future prices, participants used company performance information revealed before a base price quotation to project future price trends after that quotation (Experiment 1), contradicting rational expectations. Importantly, these projections were stronger when information concerned predictions about a company's future performance rather than actual data about its past performance, suggesting that people not only rely on financially irrelevant (but narratively relevant) information for making predictions but erroneously impose temporal order on that information. These biased predictions had downstream consequences for asset allocation choices (Experiment 2), and these choices were driven in part by affective reactions to the company performance news (Experiment 3). There were some mild effects of expertise, but overall the effects of narrative appear to be consistent across all levels of expertise studied, including professional financial analysts. We conclude by discussing the prospects for a narrative theory of choice that provide new microfoundational insights about economic behavior.     

Le travail collectif à l’épreuve des restructurations organisationnelles

The ergonomic analysis of work (Daniellou, 1996; Wisner, 1996) and especially the psychological analysis of real working activity (Leplat, 2000) allow investigating the main factors of work situations. The objective is to show the influence on the nursing representations of psychiatric services that are restructured, of the initial working situations, the projects, the restructuring models. The analyses assess the nursing representations of psychiatric services that are restructured, the projects, the restructuring models, the real working activity. The data show impacts of collective work and restructuring models, especially the damaging consequences of fusions. The results enable the authors to discuss from the points of views of theory, methodology and interventions.     

Religious coping in highly religious psychiatric inpatients

This study among highly religious psychiatric patients in a mental hospital in the Netherlands focused on the following issues: their religious and spiritual beliefs and activities; their religious coping activities, measured using Pargament's three coping styles and a positive religious coping scale; the influence of religious coping on psychological and existential well-being; and the predictive value of general religiousness, as compared with religious coping activities, regarding psychological and existential well-being.

For this population of inpatients, religion had a positive influence on their ways of dealing with mental problems; religious coping was positively correlated with existential and psychological well-being. General religiousness as well as religious coping were positively correlated with existential well-being, whereas psychological well-being primarily was predicted by positive religious coping.

Results are discussed in the context of theoretical notions of religious coping, addressing in particular the positive influence of religious beliefs, relying on God, religious activities and religious social support in psychological and existential times of crisis.