Biography, Narrative, and Lives: An Introduction

ABSTRACT The purpose of this special issue of the Journal of Personality is to spotlight some of the more fruitful ways in which contemporary personality psychologists are collecting, analyzing, and discerning stories about persons' lives The issue focuses both on current approaches to psychobiography and on new uses of life narratives in social research     

Generativity and Erikson's “belief in the species”

Generativity is the concern for guiding and promoting the next generation through such creative behavior as parenting, teaching, mentoring, leading, and generating products and outcomes that benefit others. Erikson (1963) has argued that in order to be generative in adulthood, people must have a fundamental “belief in the species” or a faith that human progress is possible and worth working toward. The present study focuses on hope and trust concerning the self and others (Erikson's “belief in the species”). In addition, however, the study examines the relation between generativity and personality traits, in this case, dominance, leadership, self-absorption, and nurturance. A sample of 70 adults was administered (1) a series of self-report questionnaires converging on Erikson's idea of belief in the species, (2) a self-report scale assessing generativity, (3) measures of personality traits, and (4) two open-ended measures of generativity requiring subjects to describe life commitments and creative endeavors. The results provide modest support for Erikson's claim of a link between belief in the species and generativity, with significant positive correlations obtained (1) between self-report generativity and two measures of belief in species and (2) between generativity assessed through life commitments and one measure of belief in the species. In addition, the personality trait of nurturance was positively related to all three generativity measures. Problems and issues in the assessment of generativity are discussed.     

工作负载的测量和评定

长期处于应激状态而又适应不良者可导致疾病。人类经常遇到的心理、社会性应激源除了生活事件以外,长期工作负载过重也是其中之一。本文通过对24名在监护病房工作的护士的工作负载的测量介绍了在西方国家常用的工作负载的测量和评定方法。     

The Social Psychology of Caregiving: Physical and Psychological Costs of Providing Support to the Disabled1

The emphasis of much of the existing research on social support-health relationships has been on the availability and impact of support on the recipient, but social psychologists have paid little attention to the costs to the caregiver of providing that support. In an earlier study (Schulz & Decker, 1985), we found that the long-term coping of individuals experiencing chronic disability as a result of spinal-cord injury was facilitated by the availability of a primary support person, or caregiver. In this study we examined the determinants of well-being of the primary caregiver of the middle-aged and elderly spinal-cord-injured persons. Psychological well-being, life satisfaction, and depression were the dependent measures. The availability of social support, social contact, and feelings of control over one's life were important determinants of caregiver well-being, even after controlling for health and income. In addition, the amount of time spent each day assisting the disabled person was a strong independent correlate of depression, and the extent to which the caregiver felt burdened by the victim was significantly and negatively related to life satisfaction. These results are discussed in the context of a comprehensive stress-coping model. Since data were available from both disabled individuals and their primary support persons, we had the unique opportunity to compare the perspectives of both those giving and receiving daily care. We found no relationship in levels of psychological well-being and depression reported by the disabled person and caregiver; however, caregivers attributed to the victims affective levels similar to their own.     

Mental representation from the bottom up

Commonsense psychology and cognitive science both regularly assume the existence of representational states. I propose a naturalistic theory of representation sufficient to meet the pretheoretical constraints of a folk theory of representation, constraints including the capacities for accuracy and inaccuracy, selectivity of proper objects of representation, perspective, articulation, and efficacy or content-determined functionality. The proposed model states that a representing device is a device which changes state when information is received over multiple information channels originating at a single source. The changed state of a representing device is a representation. The unitary information source which would give rise to the information impinging on the representing device, and hence, give rise to the representation, is the content of the representation. The model meets the pretheoretic constraints, and also conforms to available neurobiological data for two invertebrate species.     

Immediate and remote time estimation — A comparison

The influence of the length of time elapsing between the termination of an interval on its estimated duration was tested in three experiments. In the first experiment, 89 subjects performed the W, C, and CW tasks of the Stroop color-word test. The duration of each of these three tasks, which was 10 second in reality, was estimated twice by every subject. Once, immediately upon completion of the task (IE), and a second time 90 seconds later (RE), both under prospective paradigm. The nature of the relationship between task difficulty and its estimated duration was found to be different in IE and RE. A negative relationship was found in IE while in RE no significant difference was found between difficulty levels. In the second experiment it was found that RE's trend was not caused by estimation order. In the third experiment IE and RE were tested under prospective and retrospective paradigms. In the perspective paradigm the results obtained in experiment 2 were replicated. In the retrospective paradigm the relationship between task difficulty and time estimation was, unlike the prospective paradigm, negative in both IE and RE. The significance of the results to time estimation theory was discussed.     

社会应激对成年后进行群体隔离的大白鼠的行为的影响

本文观察了在成年后进行群体隔离的大白鼠与群居鼠在摄食、饮水、睡眠等方面的行为差异。着重观察了社会应激对成年后进行群体隔离的动物的行为的影响,以研究群体隔离时动物的年龄与过去生活经验是不是动物在社会应激时发生的行为改变的关键因素。 结果表明:群居与隔离两种环境对动物摄食、饮水和体重无明显影响,但隔离动物睡眠时间较群居动物短。即使在成年后进行群体隔离、社会应激对隔离动物的摄食、饮水、睡眠和攻击性行为的影响也比群居组明显。但进行群体隔离时动物的年龄和隔离前有较长时间的群居生活经验可大大减轻社会应激时行为反应的强度,也可使适应过程发生得快些。这说明早期环境和过去生活经验的重要性。社会应激影响饮水和摄食的方式随年龄而改变,年龄较大的群居鼠对社会应激的适应可能比年龄较轻的群居鼠差。