scholarly journals A Well-Protected Social Participant I, II, and III

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Thomas

Photo-lithographs, paper.My research is interested in how definitions and labels pertaining to mental illness permeate into a broader social context. I discovered that when an individual has been marked with a particular diagnosis, two distinct identities are formed as a means of protection from stigma. Using David Hume’s theory of Personal Identity, I concluded that each of these identities served a specific purpose for the individual and, while they fluctuated depending on the situation, stayed isolated from one another. The two identities consisted of a fortuitous public and socially acceptable façade, and a private, vulnerability indulged form beneath.

1974 ◽  
Vol 124 (580) ◽  
pp. 221-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Hill

It is a paradox that during the years of psychosocial development each man has to achieve an identity, a role in which he can feel secure, and yet poets and philosophers tell us that man is forever seeking to diminish the isolation which a personal identity imposes. Without the development of a personal identity and a role in life the individual remains a social isolate, a dependent parasite or a social deviant. Yet, once achieved, identity brings a new awareness of separateness from others and a need to merge the self with others, to identify with someone or something else. This would seem to be a main objective of love. It has been said that human love is the supreme act of communication with another, a merging of identity, and poets speak of communicating with nature or with God in like terms. Romantic and sacred literature abound in metaphors and images describing the bliss which such activity offers. If it is true that while we have a need to develop a sense of personal selfhood, an identity and a role, we have a further need to diminish the separateness such awareness imposes, how do we go about it? The contemporary answer is, of course, by communication, by relating to others. The better the communication we have with others, the greater our sense of belongingness, the less the pain of individual isolation. It is not necessary to emphasize that a cardinal feature of all severe mental illness is either a loss or a distortion of the individual's communicative capacity. But I would like to emphasize that the debate as to whether failure of communication is either a cause, or an association, or a consequence of mental illness is not my theme.


2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Nebojša Šarkić ◽  
Dalibor Krstinić ◽  
Katarina Petrović

The right to the personal name represents the most important expression of a personal identity, as well as an absolute subjective right of every individual. Furthermore, the individual is, through the personal name, distinguished in the known and social context, and it is also the means through which the state identifies its subjects. Without the existence of the personal name, the life within a community would be unimaginable, which means that this type of individualization is as old as the very human society. Nevertheless, through time, the means of such an individualization have been changed. Today, in Republic of Serbia, the personal name consists of a surname by which the belonging to a certain family community is expressed, and a name through which he/she is individualized within that community. The question of a personal name in our country is regulated by the Family Law and it is guaranteed by the Constitution. Given the importance of the personal name, the aim of this paper will be to demonstrate the important questions pertaining to the personal name, as well as the Family Law norms, by which it is regulated within the lawful context of Republic of Serbia.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhea M Howard ◽  
Annie C. Spokes ◽  
Samuel A Mehr ◽  
Max Krasnow

Making decisions in a social context often requires weighing one's own wants against the needs and preferences of others. Adults are adept at incorporating multiple contextual features when deciding how to trade off their welfare against another. For example, they are more willing to forgo a resource to benefit friends over strangers (a feature of the individual) or when the opportunity cost of giving up the resource is low (a feature of the situation). When does this capacity emerge in development? In Experiment 1 (N = 208), we assessed the decisions of 4- to 10-year-old children in a picture-based resource tradeoff task to test two questions: (1) When making repeated decisions to either benefit themselves or benefit another person, are children’s choices internally consistent with a particular valuation of that individual? (2) Do children value friends more highly than strangers and enemies? We find that children demonstrate consistent person-specific welfare valuations and value friends more highly than strangers and enemies. In Experiment 2 (N = 200), we tested adults using the same pictorial method. The pattern of results successfully replicated, but adults’ decisions were more consistent than children’s and they expressed more extreme valuations: relative to the children, they valued friends more and valued enemies less. We conclude that despite children’s limited experience allocating resources and navigating complex social networks, they behave like adults in that they reference a stable person-specific valuation when deciding whether to benefit themselves or another and that this rule is modulated by the child’s relationship with the target.


Author(s):  
Jet Gabrielle Sanders ◽  
Yoshiyuki Ueda ◽  
Sakiko Yoshikawa ◽  
Rob Jenkins

Abstract Background Recent experimental work has shown that hyper-realistic face masks can pass for real faces during live viewing. However, live viewing embeds the perceptual task (mask detection) in a powerful social context that may influence respondents’ behaviour. To remove this social context, we assessed viewers’ ability to distinguish photos of hyper-realistic masks from photos of real faces in a computerised two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) procedure. Results In experiment 1 (N = 120), we observed an error rate of 33% when viewing time was restricted to 500 ms. In experiment 2 (N = 120), we observed an error rate of 20% when viewing time was unlimited. In both experiments we saw a significant performance cost for other-race comparisons relative to own-race comparisons. Conclusions We conclude that viewers could not reliably distinguish hyper-realistic face masks from real faces in photographic presentations. As well as its theoretical interest, failure to detect synthetic faces has important implications for security and crime prevention, which often rely on facial appearance and personal identity being related.


2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick A. R. Jones ◽  
Helen C. Spence-Jones ◽  
Mike Webster ◽  
Luke Rendell

Abstract Learning can enable rapid behavioural responses to changing conditions but can depend on the social context and behavioural phenotype of the individual. Learning rates have been linked to consistent individual differences in behavioural traits, especially in situations which require engaging with novelty, but the social environment can also play an important role. The presence of others can modulate the effects of individual behavioural traits and afford access to social information that can reduce the need for ‘risky’ asocial learning. Most studies of social effects on learning are focused on more social species; however, such factors can be important even for less-social animals, including non-grouping or facultatively social species which may still derive benefit from social conditions. Using archerfish, Toxotes chatareus, which exhibit high levels of intra-specific competition and do not show a strong preference for grouping, we explored the effect of social contexts on learning. Individually housed fish were assayed in an ‘open-field’ test and then trained to criterion in a task where fish learnt to shoot a novel cue for a food reward—with a conspecific neighbour visible either during training, outside of training or never (full, partial or no visible presence). Time to learn to shoot the novel cue differed across individuals but not across social context. This suggests that social context does not have a strong effect on learning in this non-obligatory social species; instead, it further highlights the importance that inter-individual variation in behavioural traits can have on learning. Significance statement Some individuals learn faster than others. Many factors can affect an animal’s learning rate—for example, its behavioural phenotype may make it more or less likely to engage with novel objects. The social environment can play a big role too—affecting learning directly and modifying the effects of an individual’s traits. Effects of social context on learning mostly come from highly social species, but recent research has focused on less-social animals. Archerfish display high intra-specific competition, and our study suggests that social context has no strong effect on their learning to shoot novel objects for rewards. Our results may have some relevance for social enrichment and welfare of this increasingly studied species, suggesting there are no negative effects of short- to medium-term isolation of this species—at least with regards to behavioural performance and learning tasks.


Author(s):  
Jakub Čapek ◽  
Sophie Loidolt

AbstractThis special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question (as suggested by thinkers such as MacIntyre, Ricœur and Taylor). These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: (a) debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; (b) questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and (c) the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective.


2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Lyons

By some estimates, more than half of prison inmates in America have a drug or alcohol problem (Mumola and Karberg 2006). Existing models of treatment for these individuals, both inside and outside prison, have typically focused on the individual addict. These interventions often neglect the users' families and communities, and view poverty and marginalization as tangential to recovery—which is seen instead purely as an individual, internal process. This perspective defines addiction as a brain disease, and emphasizes the need of recovering addicts to learn new skills and to take personal responsibility for their actions and lives (Committee on Addictions of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 2002). These models, though a marked improvement over the idea of drug addiction as a moral failing, place an over-riding emphasis on the individual at the expense of the economic and social context.


Author(s):  
Robbie Duschinsky ◽  
Sarah Foster

The theory of mentalizing and epistemic trust introduced by Peter Fonagy and colleagues at the Anna Freud Centre has been an important perspective on mental health and illness. This book is the first comprehensive account and evaluation of this perspective. The book explores 20 primary concepts that organize the contributions of Fonagy and colleagues: adaptation, aggression, the alien self, culture, disorganized attachment, epistemic trust, hypermentalizing, reflective function, the p-factor, pretend mode, the primary unconscious, psychic equivalence, mental illness, mentalizing, mentalization-based therapy, non-mentalizing, the self, sexuality, the social environment, and teleological mode. The biographical and social context of the development of these ideas is examined. The book also specifies the current strengths and limitations of the theory of mentalizing and epistemic trust, with attention to the implications for both clinicians and researchers.


2001 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen L. Rebeiro

Occupational therapists have become increasingly concerned with factors beyond the individual which impact occupational performance. Several recent models propose that the environment is a significant influence on occupational performance and upon its meaningfulness. An in-depth, qualitative study was conducted which explored the meaning of occupational engagement for eight women with mental illness (Rebeiro & Cook, 1999). This study yielded several important insights about the environment, which have recently been replicated by Legault and Rebeiro (2001) and Rebeiro, Day, Semeniuk, O'Brien, and Wilson (In Press). Participants suggested that environments that provide opportunity, and not prescription are more conducive to fostering occupational performance. Participants further suggested that an environment that provides Affirmation of the individual as a person of worth, a place to belong, and a place to be supported, enables occupational performance over time. A series of research studies indicated that the social environment is an important consideration in planning therapeutic interventions which aim to enable occupation. Implications for occupational therapy practice, education and research are offered


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