Rethinking ‘Don't Blame the Victim’

SUMMARY

The psychology of victims and the dynamics of victimhood have been largely ignored by scholars and clinicians. While in past years the tendency has been to blame victims, more recently the tide has turned. It is now politically incorrect to explore the role of victims in violent systems, as exploring the psychology of victims has become synonymous with blaming the victim. While shying away from blame, this article will explore the familial and cultural origins of victimhood, victims' characteristics, their relationships with the perpetrators, and it will offer a victim typology. As we move from btame to a more complex understanding of violent systems, the perpetuation of these systems in our culture, and the role victims play in these systems, we provide ourselves with better tools to predict and prevent further victimization.     

Hornsby and Baker on the physicalist orthodoxy

I examine some recent claims put forward by L. A. Paul, Barry Dainton and Simon Prosser, to the effect that perceptual experiences of movement and change involve an (apparent) experience of ‘passage’, in the sense at issue in debates about the metaphysics of time. Paul, Dainton and Prosser all argue that this supposed feature of perceptual experience – call it a phenomenology of passage – is illusory, thereby defending the view that there is no such a thing as passage, conceived of as a feature of mind-independent reality. I suggest that in fact there is no such phenomenology of passage in the first place. There is, however, a specific structural aspect of the phenomenology of perceptual experiences of movement and change that can explain how one might mistakenly come to the belief that such experiences do involve a phenomenology of passage.     

Subjective temporal trajectories for subjective well-being

Based on Diener's (Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 542–575.) tripartite model of subjective well-being (SWB), subjective evaluations of past, present, and anticipated future life satisfaction (LS), positive affect (PA), and negative affect (NA) were evaluated in a cross-sectional undergraduate sample. Upward mean trends in subjective trajectories (past?<?present?<?future) were typical, on average, for each SWB component. As predicted, higher levels of present SWB were aligned with greater positive psychological, physical, and interpersonal functioning. In contrast, steeper upward subjective SWB trajectories were associated with greater distress and dysfunction. Of the three SWB components, unique links with indicators of functioning were most consistent for LS trajectories. We conclude that a temporally expanded conceptualization of SWB spanning subjective assessments of past, present, and anticipated future LS, PA, and NA provides a rich framework for studying the structure of SWB and the significance of how people perceive their well-being to be unfolding over time.     

Loving the One You Hurt: Positive Effects of Recounting a Transgression against an Intimate Partner

Intimate partners described a past transgression in which one of them had been a victim and the other a perpetrator and then evaluated each other and their relationship. Participants had been randomly assigned to the perpetrator or victim role. Perpetrators described their actions as more justifiable, perceived greater improvement since the transgression, and were more optimistic about the future of their relationship than were their victims or control participants. The results support the authors' contention that temporal appraisals are an important mechanism enabling people to maintain positive images of themselves and their relationships.     

Memory of Past Beliefs and Actions

Two notions of memory are studied both syntactically and semantically: memory of past beliefs and memory of past actions. The analysis is carried out in a basic temporal logic framework enriched with beliefs and actions.     

Marital conflict: Correlates, structure, and context

Marital conflict has deleterious effects on mental, physical, and family health, and three decades of research have yielded a detailed picture of the behaviors that differentiate distressed from nondistressed couples. Review of this work shows that the singular emphasis on conflict in generating marital outcomes has yielded an incomplete picture of its role in marriage. Recently, researchers have tried to paint a more textured picture of marital conflict by studying spouses' backgrounds and characteristics, investigating conflict in the contexts of support giving and affectional expression, and considering the ecological niche of couples in their broader environment.     

A Reinforcer Pathology perspective on relapse

The Reinforcer Pathology theory proposes conditions under which drugs emerge as excessively preferred reinforcers compared to other available reinforcers among drug users. The theory highlights 2 key variables as important determinants of drug preference: (a) excessive preference for immediate rewards (high discounting of future rewards); and (b) excessive valuation for addictive reinforcers (e.g., drugs). Two iterations of the Reinforcer Pathology theory exist with the latest iteration (i.e., Reinforcer Pathology 2.0) specifying that the temporal window of reinforcer integration (measured by delay discounting) is a determinant of reinforcer value. The 2 iterations of the Reinforcer Pathology theory are described. A novel insight and understanding of abstinence and relapse from a Reinforcer Pathology perspective, limitations, and future directions are discussed. The Reinforcer Pathology theory continues the long-standing efforts to scientifically understand and better define novel concepts and methods to further translational research and improve treatment outcomes. Exploring the complementary relation between the Reinforcer Pathology perspective and other current approaches could have a valuable effect.     

The theory of learning styles applied to distance learning

Distance Education (DE) associated with the use of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) as interaction tools between the student and the educator has become a large research niche spread around the world. Techniques to improve learning effectiveness in VLEs seek to find relation-ships connections between pedagogical advances and educational technological resources available in VLEs. In this context, this work sought to associate the theory of Learning Styles with the behavior of the student of Distance Education, observing their interaction with the Virtual Learning Environment and trying to associate them with their learning style identified by the CHAEA questionnaire. For this purpose, the CHAEA questionnaire was applied to a group of distance learning students and the correlation between their interactions with VLE and their learning styles was verified. The results show that there is no correlation between these elements, which may show, in fact, the lack of coherence between these theories. Seeking a model for data, a linear regression was applied and the results were, then, confirmed.     

Patch choice as a function of procurement cost and encounter rate.

The effects of patch encounter rate on patch choice and meal patterns were studied in rats foraging in a laboratory environment offering two patch types that were encountered sequentially and randomly. The cost of procuring access to one patch was greater than the other. Patches were either encountered equally often or the high-cost patch was encountered more frequently. As expected, rats exploited the low-cost patch on almost 100% of encounters and exploited the high-cost patch on a percentage of encounters that was inversely proportional to its cost. Meal size was the same at both patches. Surprisingly, when low-cost patches were rare, the rats did not increase their use of high-cost patches. This resulted in spending more time and energy searching for patches and a higher average cost per meal. The rats responded to this increased cost by reducing the frequency and increasing the size of meals at both patches and thereby limited total daily foraging cost and conserved total intake.     

Temporal control in rats: analysis of nonlocalized effects from short interfood intervals.

The present experiment analyzed temporal control of postreinforcement pause duration during within-session changes in the criterion for reinforcement (interfood interval, IFI). Analysis of interval-by-interval changes in the pause revealed localized and nonlocalized effects from short intervals that caused specific changes in performance. In Phase 1, rats were presented with five consecutive 15-s IFIs intercalated into a series of 60-s IFIs. The 15-s set decreased the pause in adjacent and more remote 60-s intervals. In Phase 2, two sets of 15-s intervals were intercalated. The spacing between the two sets varied so that 0, 5, 10, or 15 60-s IFIs separated the sets. The postreinforcement pause tracked all changes in the IFI duration, and the localized effect from a short set extended beyond the next interval to the next few 60-s IFIs. Effects from one set, however, did not combine with a second set: Changes in the pause after two sets were the same regardless of the spacing between sets.