Self-presentation and gender on MySpace

Within the cultural context of MySpace, this study explores the ways emerging adults experience social networking. Through focus group methodology, the role of virtual peer interaction in the development of personal, social, and gender identities was investigated. Findings suggest that college students utilize MySpace for identity exploration, engaging in social comparison and expressing idealized aspects of the selves they wish to become. The public nature of self and relationship displays introduce feedback mechanisms by which emerging adults can legitimize images as associated with the self. Also, male–female differences in self-presentation parallel, and possibly intensify, gender norms offline. Our study suggests that social networking sites provide valuable opportunities for emerging adults to realize possible selves; however, increased pressure for female sexual objectification and intensified social comparison may also negatively impact identity development. A balanced view, presenting both opportunities and drawbacks, should be encouraged in policies regarding youth participation in social networking sites.     

Emotions,feelings and intentionality

Emotions, I will argue, involve two kinds of feeling: bodily feeling and feeling towards. Both are intentional, in the sense of being directed towards an object. Bodily feelings are directed towards the condition of one's body, although they can reveal truths about the world beyond the bounds of one's body – that, for example, there is something dangerous nearby. Feelings towards are directed towards the object of the emotion – a thing or a person, a state of affairs, an action or an event; such emotional feelings involve a special way of thinking of the object of the emotion, and I draw an analogy with Frank Jackson's well-known knowledge argument to show this. Finally, I try to show that, even if materialism is true, the phenomenology of emotional feelings, as described from a personal perspective, cannot be captured using only the theoretical concepts available for the impersonal stance of the sciences.     

Ethical dilemas for nurses and their emotional implications

Some of the ethical and emotional problems that are presented to nurses are described. Nurses dealing with them are often the same age as medical students who are just starting their training and on qualifying as doctors will be less experienced in dealing with various life-and-death dilemmas than the nurses looking after their patients. It is contended that despite the fact that almost everyone at some time in their lives is going to depend upon a nurse, the subject of nursing and its dilemmas has been largely neglected, particularly by psychoanalytic/psychotherapy training organisations. Training is described which it is hoped would remedy some of the deficiencies of current nurse-training and encourage personal development and growth. It is also suggested that the training of medical students should include a period of nurse experience and training. The power which can be invested in the nurse is also described, along with the corrupting effect this can have on the nurse/patient relationship.     

GRIEF: A NARRATIVE ACCOUNT

Grief is not a kind of feeling, or a kind of judgement, or a kind of perception, or any kind of mental state or event the identity of which can be adequately captured at a moment in time. Instead, grief is a kind of process; more specifically, it is a complex pattern of activity and passivity, inner and outer, which unfolds over time, and the unfolding pattern over time is explanatorily prior to what is the case at any particular time. The pattern of a particular grieving is best understood and explained through a narrative account, and not merely through a causal account, for narrative accounts in such cases have powerful explanatory, revelatory, and expressive powers which causal accounts lack. Although I will not argue for it here, I believe that this view of grief can be generalised to other kinds of emotion. If this is so, then many philosophical accounts of emotion are at fault in identifying emotion with a kind of mental state or event.     

Can Support for Democracy and the Market Be Learned in School? A Natural Experiment in Post-Communist Poland

A new program in civic education was introduced in Poland in 1994 to foster support for democracy and a market economy among youth. This program was based on the active teaching/learning model of education, with frequent student participation in "democratic games" and "market simulations." This paper focuses on a sample of students, ages 14 and 15, who participated in this program and contrasts them with students subjected to the traditional civics program. The main analysis of cross-sectional data (gathered in 1996) reveals two countervailing effects: Relative to students in the control group, students in the treatment group were less likely to take extreme anti-democratic or extreme anti-market positions, and they were less likely to take extreme pro-democratic or extreme pro-market positions. Additional analysis of panel data (1994–1996) supports the conclusion that active participation in civic education results in students' political attitudes regressing toward the mean, that is, in their rejection of extreme stances. These findings not only contradict the no-effect hypothesis but also demonstrate a peculiar, partially intended and partially unintended, impact of civic education in schools on political learning.     

Book reviews

Pseudo‐Problems. How Analytic Philosophy Gets Done, Roy Sorensen, 1993. London, Routledge xi + 291 pp., hb £37.50, ISBN: 0–415–09464X

Changing Tools: Case Studies in the History of Scientific Methodology, Marta Feher, 1995. Adademiai Kiado £23.17, ISBN: 9630567288

Evolutionary Naturalism, Michael Ruse, 1995, London, Routledge pp. 316, hb £35, ISBN 0–415–08997–2

Knowledge and the Body‐Mind Problem: in Defence of Interaction, Sir Karl Popper, 1994 London, Routledge ix+ 158 pp., hb £25; £10.99 pb, ISBN: 0–415–11504–3

Whys and Ways of Science, Peter J. Riggs, 1992 Melbourne University Press ix + 235 pp., £11.95, ISBN: 0522844715

Rethinking Objectivity, Aixan Megill, Ed., 1994 Durham and London, Duke University Press ix +342pp., £43.50, ISBN: 0822314797

Projective Probability, James Logue, 1995 Clarendon Press xiii+ 171 pp., £24.75, ISBN: 0198239599

Self‐motion: from Aristotle to Newton, M. L. Gill & J. G. Lennox (Eds), 1994 Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press xxi + 367 pp., £36.50, ISBN: 0–691–03235–1