Psychology's tendency to focus on confirmatory analyses before ensuring constructs are clearly defined and accurately measured is exacerbating the generalizability crisis. Our growing use of digital behaviors as predictors has revealed the fragility of subjective measures and the latent constructs they scaffold. However, new technologies can provide opportunities to improve conceptualizations, theories, and measurement practices.

This paper reports on the findings of a study that considered how anxiety might function to organise nurses’ practice. With reference to psychoanalytic theory this paper analyses field notes taken during a series of nursing change‐of‐shift handovers. The handover practices analysed met all the criteria for a ritual, as understood in psychoanalytic theory, and functioned to alleviate anxiety in the short term while symbolically expressing a forbidden and unknown knowledge. We argue that the handover ritual contained certain prohibitions, yet allowed (...) some expression of the prohibited knowledge in a disguised way. The prohibition concerned how the patient affected the nurse, that is, moved the nurse to love and hate the patient. We argue that this prohibition is expressed, in disguise, via the displacement of affection for the patient onto other nurses and through negative stereotyping of some patients. We also argue that these prohibitions of the handover mirror broader prohibitions within nursing, and thus the rituals of the handover become an expression of how professional prohibitions are enacted in practice. We conclude that the important implicit function of the handover ritual is to keep anxiety at bay, thereby enabling the nurse to commence practice rather than being immobilised by the effect of potentially overwhelming anxiety. (shrink)

In this volume, Stephen M. Gardiner and David A. Weisbach present arguments for and against the relevance of ethics to global climate policy. Gardiner argues that climate change is fundamentally an ethical issue, since it is an early instance of a distinctive challenge to ethical action, and ethical concerns are at the heart of many of the decisions that need to be made. Consequently, climate policy that ignores ethics is at risk of.

The nurses’ relationship to knowledge has been theorised in a variety of different ways, not the least being in relation to medical dominance. In this study, the authors report on one of the findings of a case study into nurses’ anxiety informed by psychoanalytic theory. They argue that the nurse’s subjection to the knowledge of the other health professional, inclusive of the doctor, can be a transference arising in the context of anxiety for the nurse. Grasped by anxiety, the nurse (...) finds their own knowledge insufficient and in this moment can operate a transference to their non‐nursing colleague, who obligingly, responds. This transference is not present in the change‐of‐shift handover report though, when the other’s knowledge is suspect, even open to derision. Thus, this reference to the knowledge of the other is not consistently present in nursing and can be seen to be just one way that nurses organise themselves in relation to anxiety. Therefore, those wanting to break down the medical dominance of the nursing profession might consider other ways nurses might organise themselves in relation to anxiety, so that the political dominance of the other is not reinforced via transference to that other. (shrink)

Crocker concludes that international and regional progress are closely interrelated. Universalists and ethnocentrists must converge to "think and act globally, regionally, nationally, and locally.".

Development ethicists from one society may help understand and evaluate social change in another society. After examining several types of such cross-cultural assessments, the author argues that insider-outsider hybrids are the most promising cross-cultural dialogue partners.

The Rhetorical Presidency, with its critique of Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power, exemplifies the sectarian strife that sometimes marks presidency studies. Yet Tulis’s own layered‐text metaphor, in which the rhetorical presidency is superimposed upon the earlier constitutional office, also suggests how different approaches to the presidency can build upon each other. To the most foundational approach—the constitutional level of analysis—can be added historical, institutional, organizational, and operational layers. This pyramidal model places Neustadt’s operational analysis in an appropriate position: subordinate, but still (...) valuable. (shrink)

Research has suggested an increase in loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, but much of this work has been cross-sectional, making causal inferences difficult. In the present research, we employed a longitudinal design to identify loneliness trajectories within a period of twelve months during the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium (N = 2106). We were particularly interested in the potential protective role of self-compassion in these temporal dynamics. Using a group-based trajectory modelling approach, we identified trajectory groups of individuals following low (11.0%), (...) moderate-low (22.4%), moderate (25.7%), moderate-high (31.3%), and high (9.6%) levels of loneliness. Findings indicated that younger people, women, and individuals with poor quality relationships, high levels of health anxiety, and stress related to COVID-19, all had a higher probability of belonging to the highest loneliness trajectory groups. Importantly, we also found that people high in two of the three facets of self-compassion (self-kindness and common humanity) had a lower probability of belonging to the highest loneliness trajectory groups. Ultimately, we demonstrated that trajectory groups reflecting higher levels of loneliness were associated with lower life satisfaction and greater depressive symptoms. We discuss the possibility that increasing self-compassion may be used to promote better mental health in similarly challenging situations. (shrink)

Care work straddles the divide between activities performed out of love and those performed for pay. The tensions created for workers by this divide raise questions concerning connections between recognition and redistribution. Through an analysis of mobilization among childcare workers, we argue that care workers can address redistribution and recognition simultaneously through vocabularies of both skill and virtue. We conclude with a discussion of strategies to overcome the false dichotomy between recognition and redistribution.

Care work straddles the divide between activities performed out of love and those performed for pay. The tensions created for workers by this divide raise questions concerning connections between recognition and redistribution. Through an analysis of mobilization among childcare workers, we argue that care workers can address redistribution and recognition simultaneously through vocabularies of both skill and virtue. We conclude with a discussion of strategies to overcome the false dichotomy between recognition and redistribution.

Questions about what experts need to know to facilitate their collaboration in interdisciplinary situations are usually answered with proposals concerning the technical methods, epistemic ground rules, and explanatory theories that one applies “across” disciplines, just as such methods, rules, and theories are applied “within” a discipline. However, phenomenology offers something better. Instead of following the traditional route of looking for general conditions that apply to collaborative practice, phenomenology turns to what actually happens in collaborative experience and shows that success is (...) not just a function of applied procedures, even when they are in play. Instead, individual experts seem to rediscover their ability to keep their thoughts and concepts looser, more informal, and open-endedly responsive to the situation—just as they did when they first began to shape unfamiliar circumstances into a regionally shared practice—only now with potentially interdisciplinary circumstances as their experienced phenomenon. By cultivating an awareness of how it is with life prior to its being variously studied, exploited, or harnessed to explanatory theories and essentialist ideas, they remain open to becoming expert collaborators, just as they are already regional experts. An example of this process is given from the authors’ recent field research. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Sex, Drugs, Death and the Law: An Essay on Human Rights and Overcriminalization. By David A. J. Richards. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982. xii + 316 pp. $26.95.

Among the most enduring taboos, those related to the human body are the most enduring, throughout history. Be it its re/presentation of exploration, it constituted for most cultures and epochs a very sensitive subject, ever evolving and changing, but perennially raw and open to debate and discussion. With the advent of new technologies sustaining and infiltrating society, the body is seen, explored and represented in new ways that can be, simultaneously, interpreted either as transgressive or respectful of taboos, depending on (...) the point of view or the current social norms. The question is: are we able to transcend transgression of taboos through our work or are we still far from achieving it? Our tools are computer-generated simulations based on patient-collected data. Building our arguments on Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic (1973) analysis, we approach the evolution of our own research as a ‘case study’. In the age of the life-support, stem-cell therapy and 3D organ printing, is computer simulation mimicking or mirroring organic life and phenomena, or is it creating a debatable simulacrum? From reducing the human body to a series of equations that lead to depersonalization and loss of self, to tailored modelling based on patient-collected biological data, the computer simulations took a variety of guises. At each point of the way, confronting the taboos, conventions and through controlled transgressions of established rules, we strived to transcend all historic limitations and update, adjust and fine-tune the technology and its uses to better suit the clinicians’ pursuits. (shrink)

This work resulted from a conference held in 2003 that was jointly sponsored by the Rockefeller Archive Center and Quinnipiac University. Drawing upon perspectives from history, philosophy, and the social sciences, as well as public health and medicine, the authors in this volume examine and critique the role of Foundations, most prominently the Rockefeller Foundation, in promoting and expanding the development of Western medicine around the world during the 20th century. The first half of the book examines the historical involvement (...) of philanthropic foundations in public heath, basic medical research, and related social and political issues. These studies range from an examination of the Rockefeller's Foundation's anti-malaria campaigns to the involvement of Foundations in promoting eugenic ideology and population control. The second half of the book considers current situations in which philanthropic foundations are active in promoting public health and westernized medicine, including consideration of the fight against AIDS in Africa, the resurgence of tuberculosis as a major public health threat, and the ongoing war against malaria. Finally, the book concludes with thoughts on the future of health, disease, and public health by Peter C. Goldmark, Jr., a former president of the Rockefeller Foundation. By considering issues of public health and health policy from a wide range of perspectives, this book seeks to contribute both to our understanding of the past successes and failures of growing dominance of Westernized medicine over global health, and to consider present and future possibilities for improving the delivery of health services to the population of the world. (shrink)