Assessing the Experience of Autonomy in New Cultures and Contexts

This research demonstrates the usefulness of the technique of Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) in the construction of indices of the experience of autonomy, a central construct in Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory of motivation and personality (SDT, 2000) and a construct central to recent controversies on socialization in different cultures. We propose that SSA has two advantages in comparison to correlation tables in the assessment of the experience of autonomy. First, it allows easy identification of items that best capture the various motivations along the relative autonomy continuum postulated by SDT. Second, and more important, it can reveal data patterns that might contribute to theoretical refinement that otherwise might remain unnoticed. These advantages were demonstrated in three Israeli samples: two samples of elementary school children (n = 697 and n = 417), and one sample of high school students (n = 317). Discussion considers ways in which SSA can contribute to the development and refinement of measures and theory pertaining to the experience of autonomy in cultures and contexts not examined so far.

Between Dream Cities and Reality: Personal Narratives of Ex-Soviets in Israel

Domestication of space is a major problem for migrants, particularly when they settle in a geographically remote country with a markedly different climate and culture. This paper analyzes attitudes to city life in the country of origin and in the new homeland in personal narratives of immigrants to Israel from the countries of the former Soviet Union. The material was drawn from in-depth unstructured interviews conducted in 1999–2002 and 2005–2006, and Israeli Russian-language Internet forums. Soviet Jews were predominantly city dwellers, and their immigration stories are permeated with explicit and tacit comparisons of the space of the two countries. The cities of origin are idealized, and their image has disintegrated into hospitable and warm cities of pre-emigration life on the one hand, and unfamiliar, alien cities of post-Soviet period on the other. In Israel many ex-Soviets chose to live in the so-called development towns. Attracted by relatively inexpensive apartments, the newcomers found themselves trapped in places where jobs are scarce and the quality of life has been recently dropping. In reflecting on various towns, interviewees focus on physical and symbolic dimensions, the most frequent being: big–small, center–periphery, exposed–protected, and powerful–weak. In contemporary Russian culture center is associated with job opportunities and entertainment, with high social status and good quality of life. In Israel the opposition center–periphery has retained its significance, yet the whole country is considered by many immigrants as deeply provincial, cut off from the rest of the world and devoid of opportunity for the young, the conviction that is supported by publications in the Russian-language media.

Thinking about the Needy: A Reprise

This article discusses Jan Narvesons Welfare and Wealth, Poverty and Justice in Todays World, and Is World Poverty a Moral Problem for the Wealthy? and their relation to my Thinking about the Needy, Justice, and International Organizations. Section 2 points out that Narvesons concerns differ from mine, so that often his claims and mine fail to engage each other. For example, his focus is on the poor, mine the needy, and while many poor are needy, and vice versa, our obligations may differ regarding the poor than regarding the needy. Also, Narveson invokes a narrow conception of morality as those rules that government or society may compel people to follow. Given a broader, more plausible, conception of morality, many of Narvesons claims actually support my substantive views. Section 3 shows that many of Narvesons claims are relevant to the best means of aiding the needy, but do not challenge the validity of that end. This is true, for example, of his claims about the role of poor governments, the importance of freedom, the undesirability of mere handouts, and the effects of bad economic policies. Section 4 defends the importance of my distinction between acting justly and acting for reasons of justice. It illustrates that on several widely shared conceptions of justice there might be agent-neutralreasons of justice to aid the needy, even if from an agent-relative perspective one would not be acting unjustly if one failed to do so. Section 5 contests Narvesons portrayal of egalitarianism as concerned about inequality of wealth, per se, as insensitive to prior wrongs, and as holding that the worse-off have a right to be made better off at the expense of the well-off. In addition, it rejects Narvesons contention that egalitarians violate impartiality, and aim to impose their personal tastes on others. Section 6 challenges a fundamental assumption underlying Narvesons doctrine of mutual advantage. In addition, it denies that egalitarians are irrational merely because equality can conflict with the pareto principle. More generally, by appealing to impersonal ideals, it challenges the widely held view that the pareto principle is a condition of rationality. Section 7 argues that Narvesons meta-ethical assumptions are controversial, internally inconsistent, in tension with his normative views, and ultimately a version of skepticism. In addition, it challenges Narvesons view about the role intuitions play in moral theory. Section 8 clarifies points where Narvesons discussion of my views may be misleading. Finally, the paper notes the role that moral reasons may play in deliberation and action, but emphasizes the philosophical and theoretical nature of my work. My aim is to determine the moral considerations that are relevant to how people should act regarding the needy. Whether people will actually be moved to so act, for those reasons or otherwise, is another matter.     

工作倦怠的结构研究

工作倦怠是指“在以人为服务对象的职业领域中,个体的一种情感耗竭、人格解体和个人成就降低感的症状”。参考国外知名的工作倦怠问卷,在访谈和开放式调查的基础上,编制了适用于中国文化背景的工作倦怠问卷。探索性因素分析结果表明,工作倦怠问卷由耗竭、人格解体和成就感降低三个因素构成。问卷的信度和效度都达到了心理测量学的要求。     

Finding the space between east and west: the emotional impact of teaching in St Petersburg

The paper describes our experience of teaching analytical psychology to a group of graduates of the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis in St Petersburg, our developing partnership as we struggled to teach and learn, each with our own assumptions, preconceptions and projections about the other, and the emotional impact of our radically different social, intellectual and political histories. We had to be affected to become effective. It draws on contemporary Jungian ideas to unpack the interpersonal dynamics involved when there are culturally different styles of learning, which created a complicated transference/countertransference matrix. We believe we have by now witnessed a process of individuation among our students and at the same time they too have witnessed some change and growth in us.     

Elementary Polyhedral Mereotopology

A region-based model of physical space is one in which the primitive spatial entities are regions, rather than points, and in which the primitive spatial relations take regions, rather than points, as their relata. Historically, the most intensively investigated region-based models are those whose primitive relations are topological in character; and the study of the topology of physical space from a region-based perspective has come to be called mereotopology. This paper concentrates on a mereotopological formalism originally introduced by Whitehead, which employs a single primitive binary relation C(x,y) (read: x is in contact with y). Thus, in this formalism, all topological facts supervene on facts about contact. Because of its potential application to theories of qualitative spatial reasoning, Whitehead's primitive has recently been the subject of scrutiny from within the Artificial Intelligence community. Various results regarding the mereotopology of the Euclidean plane have been obtained, settling such issues as expressive power, axiomatization and the existence of alternative models. The contribution of the present paper is to extend some of these results to the mereotopology of three-dimensional Euclidean space. Specifically, we show that, in a first-order setting where variables range over tame subsets of R ³, Whitehead's primitive is maximally expressive for topological relations; and we deduce a corollary constraining the possible region-based models of the space we inhabit.     

The authoritarian dynamic and Brexit: Understanding the relationship between authoritarianism and wanting to leave the EU

Individual-level authoritarianism is prominent in explanations of preferences for Brexit. We contend that extant accounts have provided an incomplete theoretical and empirical understanding of this relationship. Drawing on the idea of the ‘authoritarian dynamic’, we show that perceptions of the economic/cultural threat of immigration have stronger effects on the pro-Brexit views of individuals with weak authoritarian predispositions (libertarians). At the same time, perceptions of normative threat, which pertain to concerns like loss of faith in or lack of consensus among established authorities, have a greater impact on the pro-Brexit views of individuals with high authoritarian predispositions (authoritarians). These conditional relationships, which have previously gone unacknowledged, are crucial to understanding which individuals are likely to respond to ‘increased threat’ with pro-Brexit attitudes. We demonstrate these relationships with pro-Brexit views using British Election Study longitudinal panel data. The results clarify the conditional impact of threats and authoritarian predispositions on attitudes.     

Feeling at home in contemporary Japan: Space,atmosphere and intimacy

Based on a long-term ethnography inside thirty urban dwellings, this article aims to explore what it means to feel ‘at home’ in contemporary Japan. Ample attention has been paid to the staging of atmospheres in public spaces, but qualitative studies about domestic atmospheres are scarce and the emphasis tends to be on ‘front-stage’ concerns such as hospitality, status, and normativity. By contrast, by focussing on ‘back-stage’ activities such as sleeping, eating, and bathing, this article will show how these bodily practices may generate, assisted by various domestic technologies, an all-encompassing heat that encourages intimate sociality without infringing on individual needs for autonomy and detachment from social demands. More generally, the article argues that by exploring the complex entanglements of ideal and actual atmospheres we might gain a more comprehensive understanding of this expansive, spatial phenomenon and its relationship with intimacy within different cultural contexts.     

The complement of a point subset in a projective space and a Grassmann space

In a projective space we fix some set of points, a horizon, and investigate the complement of that horizon. We prove, under some assumptions on the size of lines, that the ambient projective space, together with its horizon, both can be recovered in that complement. Then we apply this result to show something similar for Grassmann spaces.     

三维空间中视觉空间返回抑制对Simon效应的影响

通过虚拟现实技术构建虚拟三维场景,采用视觉空间返回抑制范式与Simon任务的变式相结合,操纵了目标深度、线索有效性以及空间一致性三个变量,考察三维空间深度位置上视觉空间返回抑制如何影响任务无关的反应表征(Simon效应)。结果发现,(1)三维空间深度位置上存在基于空间的返回抑制效应,且空间返回抑制效应会削减Simon效应;(2)目标出现在远处空间时,线索化条件下的Simon效应显著大于非线索化条件下的Simon效应;(3)目标出现在近处空间时,线索化条件与非线索化条件下的Simon效应之间无显著差异。研究表明,空间返回抑制并不是"深度盲",且目标的空间位置会对空间返回抑制与Simon效应的交互关系产生影响。