This chapter contains sections titled: Literature and the Moral Life David Lurie Moses Herzog The Category of Orientation.

The intuitive experience of dreaming is that we “see” something with our mind’s eye and react to it. Indeed, dream formation conceptualizations have often focused on the visual image-to-verbal thought direction of causality, inspired by bottom-up models of perception. However, despite being experienced as external to us, the dream environment is internally generated, meaning that dreams are more like imagination than perception. Dream thoughts (experienced with a sense of agency or selfhood) also affect subsequent dream images (experienced as non-agentive or (...) external to one’s self). Thus, oneiric experiences are made up of reciprocal, continuous, moment-to-moment influences between the dream and the dreamer: visual images and verbal, abstract, or otherwise imageless thoughts. During wakefulness, a dreamlike cognitive processing dynamic of ever-changing meaningful image-thought-image momentary associations coupled with reduced agentive control of images may be present to a greater or lesser extent. Non-agentive visual images as a significant driving force in one’s spontaneous mental activity may relate to individual differences in fantasy proneness, suggestibility, dissociative absorption, or imagination tendencies. This feature carries implications for the field of spontaneous thought. Off-task thinking, or mind-wandering, are non-specific labels that may be used to denote internally generated mentation. Considering the tendency for dreamlike associations may represent a specific distinction, which may be relevant for understanding psychopathology. Whereas some individuals may find themselves distracted by abstract or semantic associations (e.g., verbal self-derogatory inner speech), others may find themselves drawn to intrusive—or alluring—visual images, which may interact significantly with their verbal thoughts and associations and even be experienced with decreased sense of agency. This may occur in obsessive-compulsive disorder, dissociative disorders, or maladaptive daydreaming, suggesting that clinicians need to pay attention to their clients’ spontaneous visual imagery. If a picture is worth a thousand words and seeing is believing, psychologists should be curious of how a visual thinking style may impact mental health. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that self-awareness is intertwined with one's awareness of possibilities for action. I show this by critically examining Dan Zahavi's multidimensional account of the self. I argue that the distinction Zahavi makes among 'pre-reflective minimal', 'interpersonal', and 'normative' dimensions of selfhood needs to be refined in order to accommodate what I call 'pre-reflective self-understanding'. The latter is a normative dimension of selfhood manifest not in reflection and deliberation, but in the habits and style of a person’s (...) pre-reflective absorption in the world. After reviewing Zahavi's multidimensional account and revealing this gap in his explanatory taxonomy, I draw upon Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Frankfurt in order to sketch an account of pre-reflective self-understanding. I end by raising an objection to Zahavi’s claim for the primitive and foundational status of pre-reflective self-awareness. To carve off self-awareness from the self’s practical immersion in a situation where things and possibilities already matter and draw one to act is to distort the phenomena. A more careful phenomenology of pre-reflective action shows that pre-reflective self-awareness and pre-reflective self-understanding are co-constitutive, both mutually for each other and jointly for everyday experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Lessons of TheoryJay PariniOne does not have to look far these days to find someone bashing literary theory, and in some respects it deserves it. Joseph Epstein, for one, has almost never tired of picking away at the motives of those who engage in literary theory: “The major impulse of theory was suspicion,” he has said. “In this regard theory gave that portion of the professoriat who came (...) through the sixties unfulfilled, and those younger professors—women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals—who chose to squeeze all they could out of their self-created status of victimhood, a large and lovely outlet for their resentment.” The irony is that one hears in this semi-hysterical cri de coeur the very suspicion that the author is supposedly complaining about. Mr. Epstein, neither female nor gay, apparently feels passed over. Inadvertently, he has become the Victim himself.Literary theory—or just “theory”—has frightened a whole generation of intellectuals into early mental retirement, mostly because they have not the stamina or will to enter into appropriate conversation with their younger colleagues. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the debate over theory has been this extension into the academy of what, in the sixties, used to be called the generation gap; indeed, many of the same dynamics seem to apply, with theorists pitting themselves against all forms of authority. “Never trust anyone under thirty” has been transmogrified into “Never trust anyone who doesn’t appreciate Foucault.”In the seventies, theory moved toward the center of the curriculum at most American graduate schools of literature, and it has remained in place for nearly a quarter of a century. The charge is often heard, perhaps with some justice, that students now spend more time reading [End Page 91] Foucault or Derrida than Shakespeare or Dante, and that this has created an imbalance. But even here, the situation is exaggerated; graduate students do indeed get a heavy dose of theory, yet one sees few undergraduate classrooms in the United States where anything resembling literary theory has displaced the teaching of canonical texts. For the most part what has happened is that the canon has been widened to include texts by previously overlooked writers—usually texts by women or minorities. Such a development hardly threatens to erase or even partially to occlude Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton.The charge that theory is unreadable is, for me, a more important criticism. (There’s a joke I like in this regard: Question: What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist with a mafioso? Answer: An offer you can’t understand.) Jargon has overwhelmed literary criticism to the point where the so-called Common Reader is now fiercely excluded from the conversations that take place in most professional journals and academic conferences, and the consequences of this exclusionary practice are profound. The most obvious effect is that serious literature itself, and thinking about literature and its place in the world, is removed from mainstream consumption. As a result, the general quality of our national discourse—in the arts as well as collateral areas, such as politics—is diminished.This said, I would still argue that an intellectual revolution of sorts has indeed occurred in the last thirty years, and that theory has permanently changed the ways that we—as readers and writers—go about our reading and, yes, our thinking. The peak of the battle over theory passed several years ago; in fact, we seem to have entered a “post-theoretical” moment, and so the time may have arrived for reassessing some of the lessons of theory. This “revolution” is pretty much a literal one: a turning of the wheel. But the wheel has been turning for a long time. Our ways of reading have been challenged almost continuously from the beginning of this century, when the belles-lettres style of criticism popular just after the Great War was dislodged by the philologists, and the philologists were attacked by the literary historians, and the historians were pushed temporarily to one side in the late forties and early fifties by the New Critics. And so forth. The history of criticism is simply a history of overturnings, or absorptions (I rather... (shrink)

This paper examines one of the central objections levied against neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics: the self-absorption objection. Proponents of this objection state that the main problem with neo-Aristotelian accounts of moral motivation is that they prescribe that our ultimate reason for acting virtuously is that doing so is for the sake of and/or is constitutive of our own eudaimonia. In this paper, I provide an overview of the various attempts made by neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists to address the self-absorption objection and argue (...) that they all fall short for one reason or another. I contend that the way forward for neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists is to reject the view that the virtuous agent ought to organize her life in a way that is ultimately good for her, and instead adopt a more expansive conception of her ultimate end, one in which no special preference is given to her own good. (shrink)

The choice of coping style of recruits under psychological stress in the process of military task execution has been an important topic in the promotion of military operations and cohesion of military forces. Taking a positive coping style under psychological stress can help recruits overcome the negative effects of stress and improve military morale and group combat effectiveness. Although soldiers' psychological stress in the process of military mission execution having an impact on coping style has been studied by a large (...) body of literature, very little literature has focused on the mechanism of self-efficacy and social support between recruits' psychological stress and coping style from the person-environment fit perspective. Therefore, this study was conducted to analyze the impact of recruits' psychological stress on coping style through a chain mediation model and to discuss the role of self-efficacy and social support in this relationship. Two waves of survey data were utilized to test the research hypotheses on a sample of 1028 Chinese recruits performing military tasks. The results indicated that recruits' psychological stress negatively impacted positive coping styles and positively correlated with negative ones. In addition, self-efficacy and social support mediated the relationship between psychological stress and positive coping style, and self-efficacy mediated the relationship between psychological stress and negative coping style. More importantly, self-efficacy and social support play the chain mediating effect between psychological stress and positive coping style. (shrink)

In the historiography of the relationship between technology and theoretical science, electrical communication plays an important role. It was by means of mathematical reasoning based on the new theory of electromagnetism that it was first understood how to extend the range of telephony by inserting self-inductance in the line. This paper surveys developments from around 1880 to 1910, at a time when ‘pupinization’ had become a reality and mathematical physics an accepted part of the research strategy of a few advanced (...) companies in the electrical industry. It presents the confrontation of two different styles of engineering science, on the one hand there was the empirical approach and on the other an approach more mathematical in nature. This paper offers some reflections on the nature of ‘counterintuitive technologies’ and the general relationship between science, engineering and technology. (shrink)

Several publications with healthcare professionals, such as psychotherapists, have shown a significant difference in personality styles in practitioners using hypnosis compared to those not using hypnosis. To investigate differences in personality styles, dentists were contacted to participate in a personality-inventory [Personality Style and Disorder Inventory ] online survey. Dentists using hypnosis were compared to dentists not using hypnosis. Results show that hypnosis-practicing dentists score significantly higher in the intuitive/schizotypal ST personality style compared to non-hypnosis-practicing dentists. Female dentists scored (...) significantly higher in intuitive/schizotypal ST and unselfish/self-sacrificing SL in the HYP DGZH sample but only in unselfish/self-sacrificing SL in the NONHYP DENT sample. The percentage of women was similar in both samples. Intuitive/schizotypal ST was found to be the predominant personality style of men who are interested in or use hypnosis, metaphorically so-called “homo hypnoticus.” Within the limitations of this cross-sectional non-interventional observational online-questionnaire study, results expand this notion to the so-called “homo hypnoticus dentalis.” However, further research on the subject is needed to investigate and confirm this personality type in other than the German-speaking DACH countries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual BiographyBruce KuklickDavid S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual BiographyChicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xxiv+291 pp. Notes, Bibliographic Essay, Sources, Students of Richard Hofstadter, Index. $27.50.In the mid-twentieth century Richard Hofstadter was one the finest historians of the United States. Uncommitted to work in primary sources, he was perhaps not at the level of Perry Miller, Vann Woodward, and Edmund Morgan. But Hofstadter had (...) a greater range and wider influence than these men, and the combination of intellectual and political history that he wrote was unique, as was the penetration of his intellect and his appealing sensibility.Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of a Lutheran mother and a father who was a secular Jew. The son went to the local University of Buffalo. While not as impoverished as this biography is inclined to make him, Dick Hofstadter "married up" after he fell in love with Felice Swados, the daughter of a Buffalo Jewish doctor who was also a student at the University. Swados introduced Hofstadter to the Marxist intellectual left of the 1930s, although he was himself a successful and intelligent student leader. In the years after their graduation, the couple had a tempestuous start to their marriage, but over the next several years they built a life in New York City. Felice became the medical columnist for Time; Dick productively completed a doctoral degree in history at Columbia University. They both continued their radical activities. In the late 1930s he was briefly a member of the American Communist Party, although Dick quickly resigned because of the authoritarian nature of the organization. Even then, however, he was more removed and skeptical than Felice, with more of an historian's impartiality and sense of the tragic. Felice's unambiguous commitments moved him, but Dick was, literally, only half-inclined to the Jewish left.Swados died of cancer in 1945, after they had moved to Washington, D.C., where Hofstadter was teaching at the University of Maryland. But a year later the devastated young man obtained a position at Columbia. At the same time he met and married Beatrice Kevitt, another capable woman with literary and editorial talent.In 1948 Hofstadter published what I still think is his masterwork, The American Political Tradition. A series of sharp portraits of leading politicians, [End Page 574] the book owed much to Hofstadter's leftist background. It was indebted to Marxist analyses, or at least to those of the sort promulgated by the great historian, Charles Beard, who saw economics as central to the study of national life. But Hofstadter did not see a clash between capitalists and their opponents in the United States. He viewed the entire tradition of American politicians as committed to a certain kind of exploitative social system, although his book did not quite have the edge suggested by this last phrase. Hofstadter became known as a "consensus" historian who had a monolithic sense of the American experience, although this monolith was not benign as was that of other practitioners of consensus.In the 1950s Hofstadter, now a prominent Columbia faculty member, moved away from some of the economic preconceptions of The American Political Tradition. Instead, in his two other important books, The Age of Reform (1955) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), he brought to bear on the American experience a group of concepts that he took from his study of the social sciences. Overall, these two books undermined his previous materialist interpretation of politics. Instead, Hofstadter found that irrational fears, psychological maladjustments, and concerns about status might motivate leaders and movements more than a rational appraisal of self-interest. In retrospect, this 1950s social science does not appear very enlightening, and so Hofstadter's absorption of it is not to be praised. On the other side, so many of his fellow historians attacked him for his interdisciplinary bent that his generous outreach looks more than daring. Hofstadter's own personal politics shifted, too. He became a staunch if critical defender of the social democratic liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and its impulses in the 1950s and 1960s.In... (shrink)

Recent years have seen a considerable resurgence in the popularity of tattooing and piercing, a development that some have dismissed as a fashionable trend. Others have argued that the relative permanence of such forms of body modification militates against their full absorption into the fashion system. Drawing on interviews with a variety of body modifiers, the article examines this debate, and notes that certain tattooees and piercees appear, in some respects, to regard their tattoos and piercings as decorative accessories. At (...) the same time, however, such corporeal artifacts are approached and experienced as distinct from other, more free-floating products in the `supermarket of style'. Whether or not their meaning is fixed in these terms, tattoos and piercings are employed by some as a form of anti-fashion and as a way of fixing or anchoring the reflexively constructed self. In this sense they share both affinities and differences with other forms of contemporary body project. (shrink)

Parenting styles are considered to have an important influence on the development of individuals and have been associated with empathy. The present study aimed to investigate the self-reported different parenting styles in childhood and adolescence and associated cognitive and affective empathy among offenders. Men incarcerated in prison in Jiangsu Province in China were invited to participate. Each consenting participant was asked to complete the Parental Bonding Instrument to collect information regarding the parenting styles they experienced in childhood (...) and adolescence and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index to evaluate their empathy. A multivariable linear regression analysis was conducted to explore the associations between different parenting styles and the empathy of offenders, and a one-way multivariate analysis of variance and a t-test were used to explore the differences in cognitive and affective empathy with different degrees of parenting styles. The parental care and control factors in childhood and adolescence were significantly more strongly associated with empathy among offenders than the parental encouragement factor. There were different associations between the parental care and control factors and offenders’ empathy depending on whether the parenting styles were consistent or inconsistent. When the parenting styles were consistent, different degrees of parental care had a significant predictive effect on cognitive and affective empathy, while different degrees of parental control were only significantly associated with affective empathy among the offenders. When the parenting styles were inconsistent, different degrees of paternal and maternal control were associated with cognitive and affective empathy among the offenders. Our findings suggest that not only different parenting styles experienced in childhood and adolescence had different predictive effects on empathy among offenders but also the degrees of parenting styles and whether the paternal and maternal parenting styles were consistent or inconsistent may affect the patterns of parenting styles and empathy. Moreover, the parental control factor had a particular influence on empathy among the offenders. Our findings underscore the pressing need for adopting preventive monitoring measures or developing policies to improve parenting styles. (shrink)

ObjectivesA growing number of studies indicate that coping with the experience of a crisis event, which causes a breach in the individual’s fundamental beliefs regarding the world and his/her place in it, can result in posttraumatic growth. Positive emotions can have an undoing effect on negative emotional arousal and broaden an individual’s scope of action, and they can foster posttraumatic growth. This study aimed to examine relations between prioritizing positivity, styles of rumination, coping strategies, and posttraumatic growth.MethodsOne hundred and (...) sixty-four Polish adults took part in the study, filling out questionnaires to measure prioritizing positivity, hope, and self-efficacy. Twelve to fifteen months later, 104 of them accepted the invitation to the second part of the study. The participants reported the intensity of rumination associated with the most critical event in their lives, which took place between the first and second stages of the study and the coping strategies they used. Posttraumatic growth and life satisfaction were also measured.ResultsResults from hierarchical regressions found that higher levels of prioritizing positivity, deliberate ruminations, and religious coping and lower level of intrusive ruminations were associated with posttraumatic growth. The results also indicate that self-esteem was a significant predictor of life satisfaction.ConclusionsThe results of the prospective study confirm that individual differences in prioritizing positivity can relate to a process of posttraumatic growth. Prioritizing positivity was associated with the use of an active coping strategy and deliberate but not intrusive ruminations. Previous studies on the role of prioritizing positivity have focused on the impact on the level of wellbeing of seeking positive emotions in everyday life. Our results show the importance of prioritizing positivity in coping with stress and trauma. These results can be used to design effective psychological intervention techniques to support people experiencing trauma and psychological crises. The results also indicate that life satisfaction has different predictors from posttraumatic growth. (shrink)

Since the very week of September 11, 2001, commentators have remarked on the apparent clairvoyance evidenced in the novelsof the American writer Don DeLillo. DeLillo’s novels have always represented the Twin Towers as gargantuan symbols of latent catastrophe. The towers have been significant to DeLillo as a particularly gargantuan representation of the manner in which modern mass-consciousness expresses itself in the form of material technologies. Throughout his career, DeLillo has described the World Trade Center not only as a physical structure, (...) but as a kind of schematic of the future of the culture that created it. In the lines and angles of the towers, DeLillo seems to discern the “lines of intentionality” inherent in the culture of advanced technology itself, and traces them out to the conclusions toward which they seem to lead. In this paper, I will examine the manner in which DeLillo has “read” the World Trade Center as an architectural confession of a distinctly American wish to negate the human scale, to make the world over as an artificial environment, and to look forward to the surpassing of bodily and social existence. In four novels written before 9/11, DeLillo crafts an image of the World Trade Center as a sculptural representation of America’s own will to self-destruction and in his most recent novel, Falling Man, DeLillo illustrates the kind of existence that lies on the other side of this self-destruction. (shrink)

On Frankfurt's view of free will, in its simplest form, an agent is free just in case her second-order volitions -- those second-order desires she wishes to be effective -- are in accord with her first-order volitions -- those first-order desires that one actually acts upon. That is, an agent has free will just in case she has the desires she wants to have and they are the desires she acts upon. But now consider an agent who lacks free will (...) because her first-order volitions and second-order volitions conflict. Suppose also that, with enough therapy, she could alter her first-order volitions to be in accord with her second-order volitions. So it is true that she can alter her first-order volitions. Still, there is the question of what she should she do. A natural response that a real self theorist might make is that the agent should change her first-order volitions in order to reflect her second-order volitions. But this is not, in principle, the only option available to our agent. Instead of changing her first-order volitions to reflect her second-order volitions, she might also consider simply revising her second-order volitions to fit with her first-order volitions. In fact, since second-order volitions are arguably more reasons responsive, it could turn out for our agent that changing her second-order volitions is actually the most rational option to take. This applies to even the most recent developments of real self, hierarchical, reasons responsive, and even intention embedded accounts of free will. Indeed, there is empirical evidence that people change their conceptions of themselves quite readily in the face of cognitive dissonance of the kind faced by desire conflicts. But this way of attaining free will does not seem to comport with our conception of a free agent. Free will seems too easy to obtain if all that is required is that our second-order volitions are in accord with our first-order volitions, and I see no particularly principled way of arguing that we shouldn't consider changing our second-order volitions instead of changing our first-order volitions. Secondly, this conception of free will is also subject to other counter examples. A person, for instance, may not be able to respect hierarchies due to some personality trait or other, but she might also be the kind of person for whom even were this trait lacking, still would not want to respect hierarchies. Here we have case in which a person's first order volitions and second order volitions coincide, but we do not want to call her free either. Additional evidence that this cannot be the right conception of free will comes from ideas put forth in the literature on practical rationality: I can be in situations in which the only rational action for me to take is to change my desires (MacIntosh), but if we cannot make irrational decisions, and these are understood as decisions to act in ways that go against our current desires, then being in a situation in which I choose to change my current desires should not be possible, thereby challenging any conception of free will that requires the changing of desires, whether first-order or second-order. I conclude, then, that any compatibilist conception of free will of the kind mentioned will be ultimately unsatisfying. (shrink)

Background: This study aimed to examine magical ideation and absorption traits across non-clinical and clinical groups to determine their potential adaptive and maladaptive functions.Method: We enrolled 760 healthy participants from neighboring communities. Moreover, we recruited 318 patients, which included 25, 183, and 110 patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, anxiety disorders, and mood disorders, respectively. Potentially adaptive and maladaptive sociocognitive functions were measured to determine the role of magical ideation and self-absorption in patients with psychiatric disorders.Results: The degree of magical ideation (...) and absorption gradually increased in the following order: anxiety disorders, mood disorders, and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Furthermore, enhanced self-absorption-related enhanced consciousness traits were essential indicators of the presence of self-integration weakness in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.Conclusion: Magical ideation and psychological absorption may be considered as mental model construction functions, which result in both gains and handicaps in social adaptation. (shrink)

The article presents the main types of conflict behaviour with the author’s proposal of their classification. The suggested classification is based on the way in which an individual deals with a partner’s adverse influence on his/her self-interest and welfare in a conflict situation. Four possible ways of coping i.e. attack, amicable settlement, defence, and yielding have been distinguished. On the basis of this behaviour classification, the Conflict Behaviour Questionnaire was compiled and its reliability and validity was assessed.

Every philosophical belief has its presuppositions; no philosopher can operate without them. Some of mine are these: that the expression of a thought and the thought expressed are distinguishable but inseparable; that one’s thought about something and one’s feeling about that something are distinguishable but inseparable; that we humans have a nature but that it consists of psycho-physical dispositions, or capacities, of such vaguely defined sorts and limits that, from a spectator’s point of view, I eschew a priori pronouncements about (...) what human beings can or cannot do and await developments, and that, as an agent, I act in the spirit of Sartre’s self-creating chooser. In short, and skipping the refinements—failures of philosophical nerve—a person, a human being, a philosopher is what he does. (shrink)

The Bellum Hispaniense, often considered alongside the two other pseudo-Caesarian commentarii, the Bellum Alexandrinum and the Bellum Africum, contains the account of Caesar's final battles with Pompey's forces in Spain during 46 and 45 b.c. In terms of its language and style, the BHisp. is certainly the most un-Caesarian of the pseudo-Caesarian Bella. The work abounds in phenomena belonging to different linguistic varieties, and is an important piece of evidence in the process of the standardization of written Latin.

This paper argues that there are two compelling intuitions about conscious experience, the absorption intuition and the ubiquity intuition. The former is the claim that conscious experience consists in intentional absorption in its objects; the latter is the claim that conscious experience ubiquitously exhibits a sense that the mental subject is conscious that she is so conscious. These two intuitions are in tension with each other and it seems no single theory of consciousness can respect both. Drawing on the early (...) work of Sartre, particularly in The Transcendence of the Ego, I argue that an adverbial theory of consciousness comes closest to doing so: it explains the first intuition and respects the phenomenon that the second intuition is supposed to capture. It emerges, therefore, as the theory of consciousness that is the most explanatory overall. The argument of this paper proceeds as follows. The first section describes the distinctive features of an adverbial approach to consciousness. The second describes the first intuition that conscious experience is typically absorbed in the objects of conscious thought whereas the third describes the intuition that our conscious experience is ubiquitously self- aware. I then turn to an examination to a range of views, influenced by Brentano, that try to reconcile these intuitions and argue that none of them succeed. I conclude with a description of how an adverbialism influenced by Sartre. (shrink)

One of the longest standing objections levied against virtue ethics is the Self-Absorption Objection. Proponents of this objection state that the main problem with neo-Aristotelian accounts is that the virtuous agent’s motive is to promote her own eudaimonia. In this paper, I examine Christopher Toner’s attempt to address this objection by arguing that we should understand the virtuous agent as acting virtuously because doing so is what it means to live well qua human. I then go on to defend Toner’s (...) view from two of Anne Baril’s criticisms: that his account is un-Aristotelian, and that his account does not take seriously the importance of the virtuous agent organizing her life in a way that is good for her. In doing so, I pave the way for neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists to develop an adequate response to the self-absorption objection along Toner’s lines. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What is Self‐Sufficiency? The Value of Self‐Sufficiency Objections Concluding Remarks Notes.

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between posttraumatic growth, resilience, positive coping style, and self-efficacy among the primary caregivers of children with developmental disorders in Chongqing, China. A total of 198 primary caregivers aged from 22 to 66 years old, including 155 females and 43 males, were enrolled. The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory, Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale-10, Simplified Coping Style Questionnaire, and General Self-Efficacy Scale were used for data collection. The results found that PTG could be positively predicted by resilience. (...) Positive coping style and self-efficacy mediated the relationship between resilience and PTG. The different levels of PTG were determined by the resident location, monthly income and education of the primary caregivers. The results suggest that it is critical to improve the mental health of the primary caregivers of children with developmental disabilities. Our results also provide a scientific basis for future research. (shrink)

In this text I would like to argue that individualistic culture of today is imbued with a specific notion of the self. Phenomena like life-style blogs, „cult” of celebrities and especially self-realization gurus and literature co-create a discourse on man where self is no longer regarded as an inner essence, substance or existential potency of a man but rather as a tengible and to some extent concrete object. Thus „being oneself” ceases to function as a verb and starts to be (...) a noun – name of a form of psycho-somatic wholeness that we can and should incorporate. As a consequence the self is ultimately brought to a number of styles of living with its rules, worldviews and modes of behavior and ultimately is reified. Becomes a magico-religious object which in anthropological terms can be described as a fetish. (shrink)

This interpretation of the Odyssey challenges conventional readings in a way that recaptures the strangeness in a text that has been colonized by interpretative strategies, interpretations that impose certain cultural and gendered stereotypes. My reading inverts and subverts some of these stereotypes, without claiming to reveal, or aiming to establish, true identities. Rather, my point is that identities are unstable and unpredictable; the main characters in the Odyssey can be understood best by analysing their characteristic style of dealing with these (...) uncertainties. In this light, Odysseus appears as much less stable and much less ‘in control’ than in standard readings. His presumed, and famed, autonomy is shown to be largely a product of self‐deception, deriving from an inability to confront himself. The women in the Odyssey, on the other hand, are stronger characters, both less helpless, and more helpful, than standard readings allow for. Calypso and Circe play a positive role in liberating and educating Odysseus. Penelope, for her part, turns out to be involved in a much more subtle and elusive form of self‐fabrication than Odysseus. Rather than applying stereotypes of cunning' or ‘faithful’, we should understand both Odysseus' and Penelope's actions as the product of their own idiosyncratic way of dealing with contingency, within the bounds set by cultural and natural circumstance. (shrink)

Background: Pediatric COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy hinders the establishment of immune barrier in children. Psychological flexibility may be a key contributing factor to pediatric COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, and self-efficacy and coping style play an important role in the relationship, but the underlying mechanisms remain unknown.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on parents from June 2021 to July 2021. A total of 382 parents were recruited for an online-investigation. Serial mediation models were used to examine whether self-efficacy and coping style mediated in (...) the psychological flexibility-pediatric COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy linkage.Result: Psychological flexibility was negatively related to pediatric COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Coping styles rather than self-efficacy played a mediating role independently. Serial mediation analyses indicated that self-efficacy and coping style co-play a serial mediating role in the association of psychological flexibility and pediatric COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.Conclusion: The present study showed that high psychological flexibility, high self-efficacy, and positive coping style were conducive to the lower pediatric COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. (shrink)

In order to explore the relationship between parent–child attachment, negative emotion, emotional coping style, and self-injury behavior, 662 junior high school students in four junior middle schools in China’s Yunnan Province were investigated using a parent–child attachment questionnaire, adolescent negative emotion questionnaire, emotional coping style scale, and adolescent self-injury behavior scale. As a result, two mediate models were created to explain how parent–child attachment affects self-injury behavior. Negative emotion and emotional coping style play serial mediating roles in mother–child and father–child (...) attachment models, respectively. The results show that negative emotion mediates between self-injury behavior and both father–child and mother–child attachment, while emotional coping style only functions between father–child attachment and self-injury behavior. By means of bootstrap analysis, negative emotion and emotional coping style have serial mediating roles concerning the impact of parent–child attachment on self-injury behavior. By comparison, the father–child and mother–child attachment have different mediating models: the former relies on emotional coping style, while the latter is associated with emotional experiences. This implies that parent–child attachment has different mechanisms in triggering self-injury behavior, which is in line with the hypothesis of attachment specificity. (shrink)

This article is a review of Paul Dumouchel's Emotions which focuses on the two levels of his emotion theory and heuristic. It interprets them both as the expression, in the domain of emotions, of a post-classical conception of nature and science that belongs to the tradition of scientific research on self-organization. Its main thesis, which is also shared by Emotions , is that creativity in nature and science corresponds to a process of coordination.

The article appearing previously in this journal entitled “Styles of Thought on the Continental Drift Debate” (Pellegrini 2019) prompted a response from Weber and Šešelja (2020) which they termed as “a defence of rationalist accounts”. They argue that their self-designated “sophisticated rationalism” explains the closure of the continental-drift debate without being affected by my critiques to rationalist approaches. While ignoring the empirical evidence that shows the complexity of the debate and the necessity to include broader social elements in the (...) analysis (such as scientists denying continental drift even after the plate tectonics theory, others supporting it without being familiarized with the literature), they proclaim to be unconvinced about the analysis of the styles of thought. In order to clarify differences in the approach to the continental-drift historical controversy, I respond here to the criticism my paper drew while discussing the place of rationalism when explaining the acceptance of a theory. I will argue that their distinction between “crude” and “sophisticated” rationalism does not solve the problem of social aspects being left aside by rationalists in view of the acceptance of a theory. I will also argue that in order to understand what leads people to embrace a belief (namely scientists in accepting a theory), the analysis of mere cognitive or epistemic arguments is not enough and it leads to a reductionist explanation as to social behaviour. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the relationship between adult attachment styles and generalized negativistic social beliefs. Two general dimensions of attachment styles, avoidance and anxiety, are considered to be manifestations of an individual’s image of other people and of the self, respectively. We suggest that both dimensions may be a substantial basis for formulating negative beliefs about the social world. Firstly, we believe that a high level of negativistic social beliefs can be positively predicted by the growth of (...) avoidance and anxiety. Secondly, we formulate an expected interaction effect. Although the nature of such an interaction is ambiguous, it may be argued as having a synergistic as well as antagonistic pattern. These hypotheses were tested and supported on a representative sample of adult Poles. (shrink)

In this study we use dual process theory of self-regulation to develop a framework that outlines the mediating and moderating mechanisms explaining the relationship between leader emotional exhaustion and leadership style (transformational leadership and abusive supervision). Using Glomb et al.’s (2011) framework, we identify empathy and negative emotion as mediators that are of particular importance for leaders. In addition, we propose that leader mindfulness moderates these processes to improve leadership style. Using a time-lagged survey of leaders (N = 505) we (...) found that leader empathy and negative emotion mediated the relationships between emotional exhaustion and leadership style. Furthermore, we found that leader mindfulness significantly moderated the indirect effect of leader emotional exhaustion on leadership style through negative emotion. However, leader mindfulness did not moderate the relationship between emotional exhaustion and empathy. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview. Compared to self-identified liberals and conservatives, libertarians showed 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding (...) principle, and weaker endorsement of all other moral principles; 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style; and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. As predicted by intuitionist theories concerning the origins of moral reasoning, libertarian values showed convergent relationships with libertarian emotional dispositions and social preferences. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of personality differences in the organization of political attitudes. (shrink)

Whitehouse's model explains when people engage in self-sacrifice, but not who is most likely to do so. We propose incorporating individual differences, such as cognitive style (one's inclination toward intuition versus deliberation), and argue that individuals who rely on intuition may be more likely to (1) develop group identity fusion after an emotional experience and (2) engage in pro-social self-sacrifice.

This longitudinal study explored patterns of basic psychological needs and self-determined motivation, as well as its association with the teaching style and the physical activity enjoyment in a group of students. The sample consisted of 200 secondary education students (105 girls and 95 boys) aged 11 to 13 years (M= 12.65,SD= 0.79) at the start of the study. Students were assessed twice in a 22 month-period. Descriptive analyses were conducted between major variables at both time points, and to explore the (...) number and nature of clusters, we relied on latent profile analysis. The statistical analyses showed three different patterns: downward, stable and upward, with different outcomes and determinants. The downward pattern was associated with more negative enjoyment and a controlling style, while the upward pattern with more positive enjoyment and autonomy support. This study, which was based on a person-centered approach, provided a bigger picture of the interplay between autonomy, competence, relatedness, self-determined motivation, autonomy/control support, and physical activity enjoyment. (shrink)

According to the most popular versions of the flicker defense, Frankfurt-style cases fail to undermine the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) because agents in these cases are (directly) morally responsible not for making the decisions they make but for making these decisions on their own, which is something they could have avoided doing. Frankfurt defenders have primarily focused on trying to show that the alternative possibility of refraining from making the relevant decisions on their own is not a robust alternative, (...) while generally granting that this alternative cannot easily be eliminated from successful cases of this sort. In a recent issue of this journal, Stockdale (2022) attempts to sidestep the debate concerning robustness and develops a novel kind of Frankfurt-style case in which agents are unable to avoid making the relevant decisions on their own. The fundamental problem with Stockdale’s argument is that it hinges on an implausible conception of acting on one’s own. I help clarify the pertinent sense of what it means to do a thing on one’s own in this context and show that these new cases are unable to overcome the targeted versions of the flicker defense of PAP. (shrink)

Self-presentation is a term that indicates conscious and unconscious strategies for controlling or managing how one is perceived by others in terms of both appearance and comportment. In this article, I will discuss the phenomenology of self-presentation with respect to the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty regarding the visibility of the body within intercorporeal relations through ‘behaviour’ and ‘expression.’ In doing so, I will turn to the work of the Canadian sociologist and social theorist Erving Goffman. Goffman’s account (...) of self-presentation suggests why embodied subjects adopt certain styles of ordered bodily behaviour as determined by the broader social order, giving existential and social significance to the ontological structures of intercorporeal bodily communication. Following Goffman, I will suggest that the embodied subject is continuously—and constitutionally—engaged in implicit and explicit strategies to manage how the body is presented to others. In articulating self-presentation as a feature of intercorporeality, my aim in this article is to use Goffman’s insights to extend Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of bodily communication by demonstrating that bodily communication that is instantiated at the level of intercorporeality is always expressed through social life with its various historical, cultural and linguistic dimensions. (shrink)

This article addresses how it is possible to view Damien Hirst as a brand name. It argues that the brand name is not the mark of an originary relation between producer and product but of a set of highly mediated relations between products. In a discussion of the spot paintings, the process of mediation is seen to contribute to the open-endedness of the relations between products or works established in Hirst’s practice. This open-endedness contributes to the distinctiveness of the Hirst (...) brand name as ‘life as it is lived’ or living-ness. This characterization of the distinctiveness of the Hirst brand name draws attention to the ways in which his practice may be seen as a commentary on contemporary science, in particular the bio-sciences. It is further argued that Hirst does not merely represent himself as a scientist, but as a pharmacist, thus drawing attention to the role of branding in shifts in the processes of creativity, invention and discovery across the arts and sciences. (shrink)

Although Nietzsche scholars have paid close attention to his aphoristic and rhetorical style, few have focused on his practice of writing prefaces. In this paper, I engage in a close reading of Nietzsche’s prefaces and identify five themes present in his earlier and later prefaces: (1) he speaks directly to his readers, (2) he stresses the necessity of slow and careful reading, (3) he encourages readers to trust themselves, (4) he refers to himself as a herald, and (5) he uses (...) combative and polemical language to describe his work. Given these themes, I conclude that Nietzsche’s preface writing project constitutes a practice of self-care as described by Foucault in “Technologies of the Self” and “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.”. (shrink)

Previous research has demonstrated that a positive subjective relationship with God was associated with better mental health outcomes. On the other hand, it has been known that childhood traumas are the strongest risk factors for almost all common mental disorders. For that reason, investigating the relationship between childhood traumas and God image and the factors that mediate this relationship is crucial for the clinical works conducted with the religious clients who report a history of childhood trauma. Based on the Freud’s (...) projection theory, the early researchers investigating the psychological factors underlying the formation of God image proposed that image of parents might mediates the god image. Their studies revealed inconclusive results. As an alternative to the projection theory, some researchers suggested that the God image was self-referenced. Their research showed that high self-esteem was positively related to image of a loving God and negatively related to image of a rejecting God. The studies comparing these two explanations found that God image was more self-referenced than parent referenced. The attachment theory provides a theoritical framework to integrate these two positions. Studies based on the attachment theory revealed that secure attachment was associated with a loving God image while the insecure attachment was related to a distant and controlling God image. The childhood traumas which are the focus of this study are the experiences that are likely to destroy early attachment pattern and lead to an insecure attachment style in which the self, others and in turn God are perceived in a negative way. Majority of the studies examining the link between childhood traumas and God image demonstrated that the individuals exposed to childhood traumas perceived God as distant, cruel, cold, punishing, unjust and frightening in their adulthood. However, the research investigating the impact of childhood traumas on the adult survivors’ God image has mainly focused on Western Judeo-Christian samples. Despite the prevalence of childhood traumas in Muslim communities, Muslim samples are underrepresented. In addition, it was thought that the self-esteem was the most important factor that mediates the relationship between childhood traumas and positive psychological outputs. Many studies supported that childhood traumas were associated with low self-esteem. However, recently, some criticisms were raised to the concept of self-esteem which has some negative consequences like narcissism, self-centeredness, lack of interest and prejudice towards others. Instead, the concept of self-compassion was proposed. The concept of self-compassion includes a nonjudgmental and warm attitude towards oneself in the face of pain and suffering, and evaluating negative life events as being a part of shared human experience. The studies investigating the relationship between childhood traumas and God image have mainly focused on attachment styles and self-esteem as explanatory factors but ignored the concept of self-compassion. For that reason, in this study, we investigated the relationship between childhood traumas and God image and the mediating role of self-compassion in a sample of Muslim Turkish university students. The data was collected through online questionnaires. Five hundred two participants who were reached through the convenience sampling method, completed Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form, God Perception Scale and Self-Compassion Scale Short Form. With PROCESS v3.5 macro extension in IBM SPSS 22, a bootstrapping procedure with 5000 resamples was performed to test mediation models. Findings revealed that all childhood trauma forms predicted negative God image. In addition, all childhood trauma forms predicted low self-compassion level. Finally, mediation analysis showed that self-compassion partially mediated the relationship between all forms of childhood trauma and God image. The results were discussed in the light of existing literature. Many studies have shown that self-compassion-based interventions are highly effective with the clients exposed to traumatic experiences. Based on the findings of the present study, it was emphasized that self-compassion-based interventions would contribute to a more positive God image which is one of the important coping resources after stressful life events for religious individuals. (shrink)

Social distancing has become the most prominent measure many countries have implemented to combat the spread of COVID-19. The aim of the current study was to explore the potential role of empathy and self-construal styles, as individual personality traits, on self-reported social distancing. Participants completed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, the Singelis Self-Construal Scale, and were asked to rate their level of social distancing and how much they endorsed social distancing on a five-point Likert-scale. Across a large and diverse sample, (...) results showed that trait-levels of empathic concern and perspective taking positively correlates with social distancing. However, we did not find evidence to suggest that trait-levels of personal distress correlates with social distancing. We interpret these findings as suggesting that empathy, both its altruistic and cognitive dimensions, plays an important role in motivating people to socially distance and should be emphasized during times of crisis. Furthermore, we suggest that emphasizing a person’s self-distress during times of crisis may not be an effective approach in promotion social distancing policies. We also found that both independence and interdependence self-construal styles positively correlates with social distancing. While we expected the latter result, we did not expect the former. This suggests that more work is needed to fully understand how self-construal styles, along with their cultural level analogs, influences social distancing. Overall, these results provide us with novel multi-national data about the role of individual differences on social distancing tendencies specifically, and human behavior during a global health crisis more generally. (shrink)

The current study examined the impact of parental style on early childhood learning, as well as the role of parental self-efficacy as a mediating factor. In the domains of education and psychology, it is increasingly recognized that parents have a considerable impact on their children’s learning and development. Purposive sampling was used and data was gathered over 3 months from school children’s parents. Hypotheses were tested using smart partial least squares-structural equation modeling software. The findings of the present study reveal (...) that an authoritative parenting style is positively associated with learning outcomes among Chinese students. Moreover, the mediating role of parental self-efficacy has been tested and proved to be a potential mediator between parental style and children’s learning outcomes. High PSE is linked to parents’ adoption of a variety of optimum parenting practices throughout childhood, including maternal sensitivity and responsiveness to children’s needs, warm and affectionate parental behavior, and monitoring. Hence, low PSE has been linked to coercive or harsh parenting as well as a proclivity to give up easily when faced with parental difficulties. In China, further study is needed on the relationship between parenting style, parental self-efficacy, and learning outcome. Future parenting programs could also focus on raising parents’ understanding of the need for both parents’ involvement in expressive activities and mentoring. This could help them boost their parenting self-efficacy even more. Lastly, the implications for parents, children, and teachers are discussed. (shrink)

The study identifies the trends of media education in the post-industrial period, marked by the development of information and communication technologies in the integration and globalization processes. Society needs competent specialists who develop and strive for self-realization in society. The educational process is a phenomenon that covers different spheres of human activity and determines the main aspects of the regulatory and legal framework. The article illustrates innovative styles of media education that are an effective perspective on the formation of (...) ideology in society through the influence of self-consciousness in educational activities. In order to identify the main aspects of media technology in the educational process, we investigated the basic methodological and theoretical foundations based on the generalizations of researchers and scientists. The meaning of the concept of media education and media technology was studied, the evolution of education from the introduction of information and communication technologies in the learning process to the formation of critical thinking and analysis of the information space was investigated. The method of synthesis, analysis was used to define the main concepts of the study. Descriptive method, research and scientific method was used to compile and summarize the results of the implementation of media education as a prospect for the formation of ideology in society through the influence of self-consciousness. (shrink)

Twitter is a linguistic marketplace in which the processes of self-branding and micro-celebrity depend on visibility as a means of increasing social and economic gain. Hashtags are a potent resource within this system for promoting the visibility of a Twitter update. This study analyses the frequency, types and grammatical context of hashtags which occurred in a dataset of approximately 92,000 tweets, taken from 100 publically available Twitter accounts, comparing the discourse styles of corporations, celebrity practitioners and ‘ordinary’ Twitter members. (...) The results suggest that practices of self-branding and micro-celebrity operate on a continuum which reflects and reinforces the social and economic hierarchies which exist in offline contexts. Despite claims that hashtags are ‘conversational’, this study suggests that participatory culture in Twitter is not evenly distributed, and that the discourse of celebrity practitioners and corporations exhibits the synthetic personalization typical of mainstream media forms of broadcast talk. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that significant potential for psychological growth and self-learning exists in independent foreign travel characterized by long periods of movement under challenging conditions and combined with intense cross-cultural contact. I call this style of travel autonomous cross-cultural hardship travel (ACHT). A number of studies regarding the personal effects of travel and cross-cultural contact are reviewed. The relevance of humanistic psychology and transformative learning (TL) theory is also considered. I propose that the psychological benefits of ACHT are (...) found in its capacity to promote a “deepened sense of self” that is paradoxical, emergent, and universal. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between parenting styles and career decision-making difficulties in college students, and uncovered the mediating roles of core self-evaluation and career calling. A total of 1,127 undergraduates were recruited to complete the questionnaires about parenting styles, core self-evaluation, career calling, and career decision-making difficulties. The results showed that: Positive and negative parenting styles could positively predict career decision-making difficulties in college students. Core self-evaluation and career calling mediated the (...) relationship between parenting styles and career decision-making difficulties. Sequential dual mediators only found in which positive paternal and maternal parenting styles predict career decision-making difficulties through core self-evaluation and career calling. Further analysis revealed gender difference in the relationship between parenting styles and career decision-making difficulties. The relation between paternal positive parenting style and career decision-making difficulties was significant in male students, but absent in female students; the relation between maternal positive parenting and career decision-making difficulties and the relation between paternal negative parenting and career calling were significant in female students, but absent in male students; and the relation between career calling and career decision-making difficulties was greater in male than in female. The current study expanded and deepened those existing understandings about the relationship between parenting styles and adolescents’ career decisions, so as to further reveal its internal mechanism and provide more reasonable suggestions and targeted guidance for career counseling. (shrink)