Meaning in life and adjustment to daily stressors

People perceive their life as meaningful when they find coherence in the environment. Given that meaning of life is tied to making sense of life events, people who lack meaning would be more threatened by stressful life events than those with a strong sense of meaning in life. Four studies demonstrated links between perceptions of life’s meaningfulness and perceived levels of stress. In Study 1, participants with lower levels of meaning in life reported greater stress than those who reported higher meaning in life. In Study 2 and Study 3, participants whose meaning in life had been threatened experienced greater stress than those whose meaning in life had been left intact. In Study 4, anticipation of future stress caused participants to rate themselves higher on the quest for meaning in life. These findings suggest that perceiving life as meaningful functions as a buffer against stressors.     

Uses of guilt in the treatment of dehumanization

It is likely that under the impact of impending Nazism, aggression theory in late Freud, as presented in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), left the entirety of guilt to self‐punishment, thus retracting his view that love functions in the superego as remorse and restitution. This change however, essentially withdraws provision for treating victims of abuse, violence and terror. This paper proposes a paradigm shift that reframes Freud's late instinct theory into a theory of dehumanization by recovering reparative and relational components of guilt. This reframe has major implications for the position taken with regard to the role of witnessing and the moral imperative in recovery from dehumanizing experience, which orthodox psychoanalytic theory has essentially bypassed. It is propose that victim treatment, as case examples illustrate, reformulates guilt as drawing on the life instincts to revivify victims’ humanity through analytic witnessing and acknowledgment. Indeed, unless breaches of humanity are confronted by a witness, the life instincts stay merely rhetorical, if not contradictory, by leaving the death instincts to grow unseen and, thus, unopposed. A two‐fold formulation of guilt may better address and redress disorders of dehumanization, whereby ‘death guilt’ (under the sway of aggression) signifies the orthodox, irrevocable guilt of self‐reproach for the bad we may have done, and ‘life guilt’ (under the sway of a moral imperative) the redeemable guilt for the good we have still to do.     

Moral Philosophers as Ethical Engineers: Limits of Moral Philosophy and a Pragmatist Alternative

Ever since Kant, moral philosophers have been more or less animated by the mission of discovering inescapable law‐like rules that would provide a binding justification for morality. Recently, however, many have started to question (a) whether this is possible and (b) what, after all, this project could achieve. An alternative vision of the task of moral philosophy starts from the pragmatist idea that philosophizing begins and ends in human experiencing. It leads to a view where morality is seen as a “social technology” that aims to make living together possible, and strengthens people's capability to live a good life within a society. The role of moral philosophy is, accordingly, to develop our moral tools further. Moral philosophers become ethical engineers who use their expertise in ethical topics to criticize existing “moral technology” and construct new concepts, tools, and theories that better answer the current challenges for living a good life.     

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE: A PSYCHOANALYTIC AND FAMILY‐LIFE‐CYCLE VIEW OF EMERGING ADULTHOOD IN THE FILM

The period during which grown children leave home and establish a new, self‐supporting family is called emerging adulthood. This paper uses psychoanalytic concepts and family‐life‐cycle theory to analyze the film Rebel without a Cause ( 1955 ) as a dramatic example of three families going through this phase. Freud's ( 1910 ) rescue‐motif of the child trying to save an endangered peer to repay his parents for having been nurtured is also characteristic of this period and is considered practice for parenting the next generation. Proximate conflict and support enable two of the film's families to continue the path to reproduce themselves.     

A portable defense of the Procreation Asymmetry

Abstract

The Procreation Asymmetry holds that we have strong moral reasons not to create miserable people for their own sakes, but no moral reasons to create happy people for their own sakes. To defend this conjunction against an argument that it leads to inconsistency, I show how recognizing ‘creation’ as a temporally extended process allows us to revise the conjuncts in a way that preserves their intuitive force. This defense of the Procreation Asymmetry is preferable to others because it does not require us to take on controversial metaphysical or metaethical commitments – in other words, it has the theoretical virtue of portability.     

Using Therapeutic Riding as an Intervention for Combat Veterans: An International Classification of Functioning,Disability, and Health (ICF) Approach

The aim of the study was to examine the effects of therapeutic horseback riding on posttraumatic stress symptoms, quality of life, and functioning of combat veterans using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) as a framework. Fifty-one veterans and active duty service members participated in an 8-week therapeutic riding program. The study findings revealed clinically significant decrease in PTSD symptoms, improved social functioning, vitality, less interference of emotions on daily activities, and increased participation. Qualitative themes discovered included improved confidence, trust, acceptance of self and others, and gratitude. Qualitative and quantitative data linked to the ICF components.     

Parents’ adjustment following the death of their child: Resilience is multidimensional and differs across outcomes examined

We examine whether the previously reported commonness of resilience to significant adversity extends to parents’ death of a child. To examine our research questions, we apply growth mixture models to longitudinal data from 461 parents in the HILDA study who had experienced child loss. The proportion of parents manifesting resilience were 44%, 56%, 21%, 32%, and 16% for life satisfaction, negative affect, positive affect, general health, and physical functioning, respectively. Only 5% were resilient across all five indices, whereas 28% did not show a resilient trajectory across all outcomes. Social connectedness, anticipating comfort when distressed, and everyday role functioning were the strongest predictors of resilient adaptation. Findings underscore that resilience is not a unidimensional construct.Words: 115.