A situational analysis of the relationship between spouse-specific assertiveness and marital adjustment

This study examined the relationship between marital adjustment and spousespecific assertiveness, conceptualized in terms of defense of rights, in a sample of 115 married women, 27 of whom were in a distressed marriage. Subjects indicated their likely behavioral responses in 11 commonly occurring marital conflict situations and provided ratings of the expected effectiveness of their responses, the amount of resentment they would experience in the situations, and the frequency of occurrence of the situations in their marage. Marital adjustment was found to be directly related to response effectiveness and level of assertive responding and inversely related to situational resentment and frequency of transgression by spouse. Surprisingly, the level of assertive responding was less strongly related to marital adjustment than were any of the other principal variables. A multiple regression analysis indicated that the set of experimental variables accounted for 45% of the variance in marital adjustment. All of the principal variables uniquely accounted for significant levels of variance in marital adjustment. Viewed collectively, the results of this study indicate that (1) parameters of marital conflict situations have considerable importance for the marital adjustment of women and (2) explication of the relationship between marital conflict and marital adjustment requires investigation of a variety of behavioral, affective, and contextual variables.     

CONCEPTIONS OF SELF/NO-SELF AND MODES OF CONNECTION Comparative Soteriological Structures in Classical Chinese Thought

This essay examines the ways that the terms “self” and “no‐self” can illuminate the views of classical Chinese thinkers, particularly Confucians such as Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi, and the Daoist thinker Zhuangzi. In particular, the use of the term “no‐self ” to describe Zhuangzi's position is defended. The concepts of self and no‐self are analyzed in relation to other terms within the thinkers' “concept clusters”—specifically temporality, nature, and social roles—and suggestions are given for constructing typologies that sort out the range of meanings of self and no‐self based on the characteristics of the relations among terms within the concept clusters. The essay focuses on the way that the Confucians and Zhuangzi use concepts of self and no‐self, respectively, as soteriological strategies that aim at making connections with larger systems or wholes, and it concludes that different connections are emphasized by the Confucians and Zhuangzi precisely because the various connections are made possible and sustained by different conceptions of self, temporality, nature, and social roles.     

Conceiving Emotions: Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought

In Upheavals of Thought , Martha Nussbaum offers a theory of the emotions. She argues that emotions are best conceived as thoughts, and she argues that emotion-thoughts can make valuable contributions to the moral life. She develops extensive accounts of compassion and erotic love as thoughts that are of great moral import. This paper seeks to elucidate what it means, for Nussbaum, to say that emotions are forms of thought. It raises critical questions about her conception of the structure of emotion, and about her conception of compassion, in particular. Finally, the paper seeks to show how analyzing the structure, as well as the moral value, of the emotions ultimately requires entering the realm of religious ethics.     

"NOT ETHICS, NOT ETHICS ALONE, BUT THE HOLY"

While much has been written about Levinas's conception of ethics, very little has been said about the connection between ethics and holiness in his work. Yet, throughout much of his corpus, Levinas consistently links the two. The first part of my article addresses the important distinction that Levinas establishes between the sacred (le sacré) and holiness (la sainteté). According to Levinas, several influential thinkers conflate these two categories. Holiness, Levinas suggests, represents a kind of antidote to the sacred. The second part examines the various ways that holiness is manifest in ethicality. The key, I suggest, for properly understanding the link between ethical regard and sanctification revolves around an appreciation of Levinas's frequent appeal to the notion of straightforwardness (droiture). For Levinas, the complex relations that bind the self, Other, and God, involve essential conditions of rectitude and uprightness.     

COMPARATIVE ETHICS, A COMMON MORALITY, AND HUMAN RIGHTS

This essay is a brief attempt to summarize and evaluate the contributions that Democracy and Tradition makes to the field of comparative ethics. It is argued that the potential impact of these contributions would be strengthened by engagement with the common morality already imbedded in international human rights norms.     

Filial ethics and judgments of filial behaviour in Taiwan and the United States

Parent-child relationships are fundamental human relationships in which specific norms govern proper parent-child interactions. Such norms, or filial ethics, have been observed in different cultures, including in the United States and Taiwan, but important differences may exist in how filial practices are viewed across cultures. From a traditional view of power as domination over others, if filial relationships are viewed to reflect power differentials between parents and children, actors who follow filial ethics should be viewed as less powerful than actors who do not follow filial ethics for maintaining or enhancing positive parent-child relationships. Alternatively, power can be conceptualized as the ability to meet one's needs (e.g., for communal care and trust), and actors who follow filial ethics should be viewed as more powerful and trustworthy than actors who do not follow filial ethics because they have the ability to maintain or enhance positive parent-child relationships. Based on a power-trust model, we compared American and Taiwanese perceptions of actors in an experiment using vignettes describing filial behaviours. We conducted a path analysis with a sample of 112 American and 74 Taiwanese participants to test the proposed relations. Results showed that both Taiwanese and Americans rated actors more favourably (i.e., as more powerful and trustworthy) when actors behaved according to filial ethics than when they did not. Some cross-cultural differences were also observed: Taiwanese attributed trust-traits to actors who performed filial practices to a larger degree than did Americans. We discuss implications for the implicit nature of filial relationships and conceptualization of power cross-culturally.     

伊斯兰经济伦理思想与阿拉伯国家的现代化

本文以《古兰经》和"圣训"中的有关内容为依据,从经济、伦理、宗教三者的关系为出发点,探讨伊斯兰经济伦理思想的内容及其特点;以现代化理论为依据,分析伊斯兰经济伦理思想与经济现代化的关系问题,其目的在于从经济伦理的视角,探寻阿拉伯国家在现代化道路上受挫的原因;寻求伊斯兰经济伦理思想与现代市场经济发展的契合点。本文认为,在现代化的经济背景下,伊斯兰经济伦理必须经过现代性的改革,才能再次为阿拉伯民族的振兴作出贡献。     

婚姻质量对父母协同养育的影响：基于共同命运模型的跨层中介分析

共同命运模型(common fate model, CFM)是在家庭或二元层面研究中值得信赖的模型, 其更好地解释了亲密关系内在的相互依赖性。本研究基于共同命运模型探讨了家庭整体婚姻质量对父母协同养育程度的影响, 以及教养能力感在两者间的跨层中介作用。采用问卷法分层整群抽取上海市幼儿园中孩子(平均年龄5.14岁, 年龄范围4~7岁)的父亲与母亲参与调研, 分两个时间段(T1, T2; 间隔1年)收集数据, 最终得到650个家庭的父亲、母亲的婚姻满意度问卷(T1), 教养能力感问卷(T2)和协同养育感知问卷(T2)数据进行分析。结果发现: (1)基于共同命运模型, 家庭层面的婚姻质量正向预测家庭层面的支持性协同养育, 并负向预测家庭层面的破坏性协同养育; (2)家庭层面的婚姻质量正向预测父母各自的教养能力感; (3)父母各自的教养能力感正向预测家庭层面的支持性协同养育, 并负向预测家庭层面的破坏性协同养育; (4)父母个人层面的教养能力感在家庭层面的婚姻质量与家庭层面的支持性协同养育和破坏性协同养育起中介作用。总之, 本研究基于追踪数据运用共同命运模型, 并结合家庭层面(婚姻质量和协同养育)和个人层面(教养能力感)探讨了教养能力感在婚姻质量与父母协同养育间的跨层中介效应, 为营造良好的家庭环境提供一定的理论支持与指导意见, 并进一步促进了共同命运模型发展。     

Freud's psychoanalysis: A moral cure

That psychoanalytical treatment in its classical Freudian sense is primarily a moral or ethical cure is not a very controversial claim. However, it is far from obvious how we are to understand precisely the moral character of psychoanalysis. It has frequently been proposed that this designation is valid because psychoanalysis strives neither to cure psychological symptoms pharmaceutically, nor to superficially modify the behaviour of the analysand, but to lead the analysand through an interpretive process during which he gradually gains knowledge of the unconscious motives that determine his behaviour, a process that might ideally liberate him to obtain, in relation to his inner desires, the status of a moral agent. There resides something appealing in these claims. But it is the author's belief that there is an even deeper moral dimension applying to psychoanalytical theory and praxis. Freudian psychoanalysis is a moral cure due to its way of thematizing psychological suffering as moral suffering. And this means that the moral subject – the being that can experience moral suffering – is not primarily something that the psychoanalytical treatment strives to realize, but rather the presupposition for the way in which psychoanalysis theorizes psychological problems as such.     

Freudian modalities of disbelief

This article can be characterized as a ‘rediscovery’ of a notion of psychoanalysis that had disappeared or had been confused by later operations. The authors explore a Freudian notion that has been unjustly misunderstood, especially because of the multiple ways in which ‘Unglaube’ – disbelief – has been translated. We shall establish the archaeology of this term in Freud by extracting its three significant modes. Firstly, paranoiac disbelief designates an unconscious process of the rejection of belief in the subject's first encounter with a sexual reality that is always traumatic. Secondly, the obsessional neurotic's disbelief, which we shall call ‘incredulity’, is a secondary, less radical refusal of belief, one that is different from its paranoiac counterpart. Finally, we shall envision a third – dialectical – type of disbelief, which Freud called ‘act of disbelief’ and which will enable us to approach the fundamental epistemic and ethical stakes for psychoanalysis.