Ways of thinking about being: Explorations in ontology

This paper briefly explores Merleau-Ponty's notions of body subject and flesh in order to draw out some of the implications of his work for an understanding of key aspects of non-Western worldviews, notably that of Australian aboriginal people. Focusing specifically on the concept of materiality, I argue that its elaboration as flesh in Merleau-Ponty's work constitutes an important conceptual link with non-atomistic accounts of being and world, accounts characteristic of some indigenous peoples. Writing as a non-aboriginal and a relative newcomer to the study of aboriginal beliefs, I address the issue of possible contributions such understandings may make to solutions to problems we face in future both as individuals and as educators.     

Predicting Divorce among Newlyweds from the First Three Minutes of a Marital Conflict Discussion

This study tested the hypothesis that how a discussion of a marital conflict begins--in its first few minutes--is a predictor of divorce. The marital conflict discussion of 124 newlywed couples was coded using the Specific Affect Coding System, and the data were divided into positive, negative, and positive-minus-negative affect totals for five 3-minute intervals. It was possible to predict marital outcome over a 6-year period using just the first 3 minutes of data for both husbands and wives. For husbands this prediction improved as the groups diverged in the remaining 12 minutes; for wives the prediction remained equally powerful for the remaining 12 minutes as it had been in the first 3 minutes.     

Overcoming the Problems of ‘Difference’ in Education: Empathy as ‘Intercorporeality’

In this paper I am concerned with the notion of empathy and its capacity for overcoming the problem of difference in social life. The concept of empathy has a long history in the Western philosophic tradition but has become discursively submerged in recent times. I am particularly interested in what philosophies of the body may contribute to our understanding of empathy. Psychoanalytic feminism provides some insights. However I identify Merleau-Ponty's conception of body-subject and the intersubjective encounter as offering a potentially more fruitful account of empathy.     

Self-enhancement by social comparison: a prospective analysis

A longitudinal investigation showed that self-enhancement by social comparison (assessing whether people perceive themselves more positively than they perceive others) was prospectively related to an increase in self-reported adjustment, controlling for the effects of narcissism. Better adjustment, including higher self-esteem, was not prospectively related to an increase in self-enhancement. The investigation also included a diary period, allowing the assessment of intrasubject covariation between daily reports of self-esteem and daily reports of perceived challenge and daily events (positive or negative). High (compared to low) self-enhancers were less likely to report lower self-esteem under higher challenge and less likely to report higher self-esteem under positive events.     

Visibility distances with halogen and conventional headlights

Abstract.— Using visibility distance as a criterion, halogen and conventional continental European high and low-beam headlights were compared in a series of field experiments. On high-beam without opposing light the halogen headlights offered about 25% longer visibility distances than the conventional headlights. With both opposing cars using low-beam there was a slight advantage (<5 m) in favour of halogen headlights. The optimal dipping distance was a function of high-beam system (intensity) rather than low-beam system. Small differences in aiming, atmosphere etc. caused larger differences in visibility distance than did the headlight system.     

The cross-modal matching of brightness to loudness by children

According to Stevens' explanation of cross-modal matching, the recruitment-like effects of masking seen in intramodal loudness judgements should be reflected in a brightness-to-loudness matching task. In an experiment with child observers, this failed to occur. The results are explicable in terms of category mediation of the cross-modal, but not the intramodal, task. In support of this account, it is shown that cross-modal judgements are unaffected by explicit category mediation. However, intramodal judgements, explicitly mediated in the same way, produce a pattern of results similar to those obtained in the cross-modal task. The experiments suggest that cross-modal matching does not provide a useful test of loudness recruitment in the bilaterally hearing impaired.