Teaching self-modification in an adjustment course

This article reports a project in which students in a college level adjustment course were taught to apply a model of behavior change in order to gain greater control over their own behavior. Pilot data suggest that students found the experience worthwhile, that many of them learned to make substantial changes in their behavior, and that some of them maintained a high degree of transfer to new problems that confronted them after the class had ended. The approach appears to have a great deal of potential for those who would like to extend their counseling beyond the confines of their offices and who would like to combine their counseling and teaching interests.     

Accidentally Factive Mental States

Knowledge is standardly taken to be belief that is both true and justified (and perhaps meets other conditions as well). Timothy Williamson rejects the standard epistemology for its inability to solve the Gettier problem. the moral of this failure, he argues, is that knowledge does not factor into a combination that includes a mental state (belief) and an external condition (truth), but is itself a type of mental state. Knowledge is, according to his preferred account, the most general factive mental state. I argue, however, that Gettier cases pose a serious problem for Williamson's epistemology: in these cases, the subject may have a factive mental state that fails to be cognitive. Hence, knowledge cannot be the most general factive mental state.     

With partners like you,who needs strangers? Ostracism involving a romantic partner

Being ostracized by others threatens the satisfaction of fundamental needs, although less so when individuals first are reminded of a close relationship. What remains unknown is the effect of being ostracized directly by a relationship partner, which may vary depending on attachment security. We examined how a partner's involvement in ostracism affects need satisfaction and relationship evaluations, and explored attachment security. One hundred and twenty‐seven couple members played Cyberball in a between‐subjects experiment manipulating ostracism and partner involvement. Need satisfaction was more strongly affected by the partner's presence (vs. absence). Individuals evaluated their relationship more negatively as a function of partner ostracism and high attachment avoidance. Attachment anxiety was associated with lower need satisfaction. The results highlight relational expectations and influences on belonging needs.     

Self-Knowledge and Rationality

There have been several recent attempts to account for the special authority of self-knowledge by grounding it in a constitutive relation between an agent's intentional states and her judgments about those intentional states. This constitutive relation is said to hold in virtue of the rationality of the subject. I argue, however, that there are two ways in which we have self-knowledge without there being such a constitutive relation between first-order intentional states and the second-order judgments about them. Recognition of this fact thus represents a significant challenge to the rational agency view.