Head movement during listening turns in conversation

In five subjects, head movement during conversation was monitored by polarised light goniometry, and recorded alongside speech and a signal proportional to peak amplitude of sound waves (peak loudness). Kinematic properties of listeners' head movements, such as amplitude, frequency and cyclicity, differentiated various conversational functions. That is, they were function-specific: symmetrical, cyclic movements were employed to signal yes, no or equivalents; linear, wide movements anticipated claims for speaking; narrow linear movements occurred in phase with stressed syllables in the other's speech (ynchrony movements); and wide, linear movements occurred during pauses in the other's speech. That, it is argued, bears upon the relation between thesignalling of communicative intentions and the synchronisation of interactional rhythm. Thus, the former appears to determine the timing and tempo of responses such as yes and no, while the latter determines the regulation of synchrony movements. The manner in which these factors interact in other conversational functions and their theoretical implications are discussed.     

KNOWING TOO MUCH ABOUT OTHERS: MODERATORS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EAVESDROPPING AND RAPPORT IN SOCIAL INTERACTION

This study examined the association between a partners ability to eavesdrop on nonverbal cues and an actors feelings of rapport during interaction, as well as neuroticism and self-monitoring as moderators of this effect. Eavesdropping ability was defined as lower sensitivity to cues of the face, a source of overtly displayed emotions, relative to sensitivity to cues of the body, a source of leakage of covert or hidden emotions. Results showed that actors felt less rapport the higher their partners eavesdropping. High neuroticism actors were especially likely to feel worse about their interaction and themselves when their partners were good at eavesdropping. In both instances, the eavesdroppers nonverbal behavior seems to have mediated the associations to a small degree.Both authors contributed equally to this paper. This research was supported by a Mary Switzer Research Fellowship to Tickle-Degnen from the National Institutes of Disability and Rehabilitation Research of the US Department of Education, a Sargent College of Boston University Accelerated Research Grant, and funding from the American Occupational Therapy Association, Inc., the American Occupational Therapy Foundation, and Boston University through the Neurobehavioral Rehabilitation Research Center for Scholarship and Research.     

Notions of equal,or equivalent,opportunities

We formulate and study three concepts of equity designed to capture certain notions of equal, or equivalent, opportunities. The central concept is that of a family of choice sets. Given such a family , a feasible allocation z is alternatively required to be such that (i) there is B such that each agent i maximizes his satisfaction in B at z _i , (ii) there is B such that each agent i is indifferent between z _i and the maximizer of his satisfaction in B, (iii) for each agent i there is B _i such that z _i maximizes agent i's satisfaction in the union of the B _j and z _i is in B _i . Most of the standard concepts of equity can be obtained as particular cases of these general definitions by appropriately choosing . We identify conditions on guaranteeing that the resulting allocations be efficient. We apply the definitions to economies with only private goods, and to economies with public goods.This is a revised version of an earlier paper circulated under the title of Notions of equal opportunities. Early drafts were presented at the Conference on Economic Models and Distributive Justice, held in Bruxelles and Namur, January 1987, and at the Public Choice Society meeting in Tucson, Arizona, March 1987. The author thanks the participants, in particular T. Schwartz, for their comments, and NSF for its support, under grant No. 85 11136 and 88 09822. The suggestions of two anonymous referees, D. Diamantaras, L. Gevers, and H. Konishi are also gratefully acknowledged.     

Choice,freedom, and freedom of choice

This paper argues in favour of a distinction between freedom and freedom of choice – a distinction that economists and political philosophers have so far either ignored or drawn wrongly. Drawing the distinction correctly may help to resolve a number of disputes in contemporary political philosophy and non-welfarist normative economics regarding the so-called preference-based account of freedom and the relevance, to judgements about freedom, of degrees of similarity between agents options. The paper begins by setting out three much discussed axioms for the measurement of freedom (of choice?) originally put forward by Pattanaik and Xu. It is suggested that the problems these axioms give rise to can be solved by distinguishing correctly between freedom and freedom of choice. The paper then sets out definitions of freedom, choice and freedom of choice, justifying these in philosophical terms and arguing their superiority to alternative definitions. Finally, on the basis of these definitions and with reference to Pattanaik and Xus axioms, it is shown that an agent can enjoy freedom without enjoying freedom of choice, and that she can enjoy an increase in one of these without enjoying an increase in the other. For their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I should like to thank Keith Dowding, Martin van Hees, Matthew Kramer, Marco Negri, Serena Olsaretti, Olof Page, Mario Ricciardi, Alan Ritter, Hillel Steiner, Kotaro Suzumura and audiences at seminars in Manchester, Palermo, Pavia and Oxford. I am grateful to the Italian Ministry for Higher Education (MURST) and the Italian National Research Council (CNR) for funding that facilitated the completion of the paper.     

Brief Communications: Treating Problem Gamblers: A Residential Therapy Approach

The Gordon House Association (GHA) is the UK's only specialist and dedicated residential facility for problem gamblers. This paper describes the GHA therapeutic programme which is centred round a nine-month period of residency. Progression through the programme is described by overviewing each of the phases. These are initial assessment and five distinct phases comprising coping with today (Phase One), coping with yesterday (Phase Two), coping with change (Phase Three), coping with tomorrow (Phase Four), and coping on my own (Phase Five). These phases are themselves underpinned within the GHA core therapeutic approach which is also described.     

Only sane: Autistic barriers in “boring” patients

This paper addresses needs of patients whom Winnicott called boring. Although often functioning well in the work world, they lack a rich inner life and a capacity for intimacy. Thus, psychotherapy is particularly problematic for them. To develop a model for working with this group of patients, the authors elaborate the concept of autistic barriers from British object relations theory, and suggest a changing role for the therapist in four successive phases of the treatment.     

Gentleman bountiful: Repairing the patriarch

Illustrating a patient's use of the transference as a play-ground... an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from one to the other is made (Freud, 1914), the author presents the case of a man in his late fifties attempting to transcend former male role stereotypes. Using the therapist as a transitional object, this patient experimented, both in therapy and in his social activities, with various patterns in relationships with women, becoming increasingly aware of his dominating benevolence and his concommitant denial of dependency needs. Several new ways for viewing both masochistic and acting-out behaviors are proposed, ways that lead to therapeutic responses tending to convert both to reparative regressions.     

When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language: Judith Butler and the Question of Matter

Judith Butler's analysis of corporeal matters offers an exemplary account of the hidden political agenda within the very grain of representation and discourse. This essay, however, argues that language and its political implications are even more complex and curious than Butler concedes. The author contests the conflation of writing with Culture, as if Culture is the constitutive and enclosed space of productivity and transformation. She argues that the question of Nature has not been provoked in Butler's analysis but answered and dismissed much too quickly. The author extends the problematic of writing to biology and suggests that Nature is literate.     

A Culturally Salient Polish Emotion: Przykro ['Pshickro]

The author analyzes, on the basis of naturally occurring examples, the Polish word przykro, which, she argues, plays an important role in Polish emotion talk. She compares and contrasts this word with its closest English counterparts, such as hurt, offended, sorry, and sad, and she shows how each of these English words differs in meaning from the Polish key word przykro. To be able to show, clearly and precisely, what these differences are, she relies on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), based on a set of empirically established lexical and grammatical universals. In doing so, she seeks to demonstrate the explanatory power of the proposed methodological framework (the NSM semantic theory). At the same time the author shows how language-specific lexical categories such as the Polish word przykro are linked with a culture's core values. She also shows the cultural implications of the lexical category hurt in Anglo culture, and discusses the cultural implications of the absence of a word like przykro in English, and of a word like hurt in Polish.     

Assessing success and decisiveness in voting situations

In this paper we propose a simple model for measuring success or decisiveness in voting situations. For an assessment of these features two inputs are claimed to be necessary: the voting rule and the voters behavior. The voting rule specifies when a proposal is to be accepted or rejected depending on the resulting vote configuration. Voting behavior is summarized by a distribution of probability over the vote configurations. This basic model provides a clear common conceptual basis for reinterpreting different power indices and some related game theoretic notions coherently from a unified point of view.The authors would like to thank to M. Braham, M. Machover, N. Megiddo and F. Steffen, for their comments, and to J. F. Mertens for pointing out a misstatement, in all cases referring to previous versions of this paper. This research has been supported by the DGES of the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura under project PB96-0247, by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under project BEC2000-0875, and by the Universidad del País Vasco under project UPV/EHU00031.321-HA-7918/2000. The first author also acknowledges the financial support from a postdoctoral grant from the Basque Government (2000–2001) and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under the Ramón y Cajal Program.     

Gender and Community Context: An Analysis of Husbands’ Household Authority in Rural Guatemala

Drawing on research about womens autonomy, gender, and development, and Latin America, I analyze individual, household, and community-level factors associated with husbands sole authority with regard to four household issues: (1) money management; decision-making about (2) food purchases, (3) medicine purchases, and (4) health providers. The results point to how husbands authority varies across household issues and how the dynamics of authority differ with regard to money management and the other decision-making issues studied. This study found that husbands authority varied not only by individual characteristics but also by community features and thus adds to efforts to represent more fully how context matters to household gender relations.     

The coming revolution of biotechnology: A critique of Buttel

Frederick Buttel was one of the pioneers in studying the social impacts of biotechnology, claiming originally that it will involve profound changes in social structure. Recently Buttel turned around his argument proposing that, rather than revolutionary, biotechnology is more a substitutionist technological form to be applied to declining sectors of the economy than an epoch-making technology. This paper provides both external and internal critiques of Buttel's new position based on the concept of the third technological revolution, looking at the impact of new technologies as a global and interrelated phenomenon, and not on an individual case-by-case basis. The concluding section suggests the necessity of bringing into the analysis those living in the Third World: 60% of this population lives from agriculture and will be affected by the deployment of agricultural biotechnologies, whether through substitutionism or through totally new products.     

Text,competence and logic: An exercise

Professional medical practice, like other organizational conduct, relies upon records which document transactions between members and their clientele. Medical practitioners employ a set of conventions providing for the systematic recording and interpretation of medical record cards that forms a social organization underlying the records cards' ordinary usage. In this paper we examine these conventions and develop a computer program which captures elements of their structure and use. By doing so we illustrate one way in which sociological analysis can contribute to the design of intelligent systems. We also suggest that the emerging discipline of Artificial Intelligence might find recent developments in sociology pertinent to its concerns.     

Privacy and privilege: Patients', professionals', and the public's rights

Conflict between the individual's right to privacy and the public's right to know is increasing as insurance companies and other third parties are demanding more information about patients and clients and data banks are storing it for retrieval and later use. Social workers are ethically bound to protect the privacy of their relationships with patients and clients and the confidentiality of their communications. But there are situations in which the obligation to society is deemed greater than the individual's right to privacy, and even in states in which their patients' and clients' communications are granted privilege by law, the social worker can be required by law to divulge confidential information or risk being held in contempt of court. This paper will discuss the individual's right to privacy, privilege and its exceptions, and present examples of court decisions related to these issues.     

Queering Identities: The Roles of Integrity and Belonging in Becoming Ourselves

This article presents a picture of the complexities and contradictions in the daily lives of people in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire who identify as, or are identified as, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender queer, questioning, and allied people (LGBTQQA). In this study, the author uses a grounded theory approach to focus on the Create Our Destiny conference. Clear patterns emerged, such as the importance of coming out, labels, and gender identity. A common theme underlying these areas was the tension people experienced between seeking a sense of belonging and maintaining their personal sense of integrity. This study shows that people in the Seacoast want to be fully and wholly themselves, or as the author represents their interests, to strive toward singularity. The author argues that striving towards singularity requires people to grapple with their unexamined codes and principles, such as those pertaining to compulsory heterosexuality and gender duality, by increasing and valuing self-awareness and reflexivity.     

Inclusive Governance and “Minority” Groups: The Role of the Third Sector in Wales

Following the establishment of a national legislature in Wales in 1999 the third sector has entered into a pioneering cross-sectoral partnership with the Welsh government. This paper presents the results of a research project that has studied the new structures of devolved governance through the expectations and participation of voluntary organizations representing three marginalized or minority groupings: women, disabled people, and those from an ethnic minority background. The findings reveal that despite varying levels of expectation expressed by minority voluntary groups, active engagement of minority groups in policy making has been a feature of the Assembly's first months. Nevertheless, formidable challenges face both sectoral partners in the new system of governance, not least in creating organizational structures that facilitate partnership working in the devolved polity.     

“FOB” and “Whitewashed”: Identity and Internalized Racism Among Second Generation Asian Americans

An analysis of 184 in-depth interviews with grown children of Korean and Vietnamese immigrants finds that the racial beliefs, meanings, and stereotypes of the mainstream society shape how they think about coethnics, generate local identities, and deflect stigma from themselves. We examine the terms FOB (Fresh Off the Boat) and whitewashed that were commonly deployed to denigrate coethnic others as too ethnic or too assimilated while casting those at the bicultural middle as the normals. We describe how this system of intraethnic othering serves as a basis for sub-ethnic identities, intraethnic social boundaries, and the monitoring and control of social behavior. We draw on the concept of internalized racial oppression in framing our findings.     

The making of race in colonial Malaya: Political economy and racial ideology

The conventional interpretation of the race problem in Peninsular Malaysia (Malaya) is founded upon the supposedly inevitable frictions between ethnic communities with sharply divergent cultural traditions. In this view, assimilation between the indigenous Malay population and the descendants of immigrants from China and India was always a remote possibility. In this paper I argue that modern race relations in Peninsular Malaysia, in the sense of impenetrable group boundaries, were a byproduct of British colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prior to 1850, inter-ethnic relations among Asian populations were marked by cultural stereotypes and occasional hostility, but there were also possibilities for inter-ethnic alliances and acculturation. Direct colonial rule brought European racial theory and constructed a social and economic order structured by race. A review of the writing of observers of colonial society provides a crude test of this hypothesis.     

A quantitative theory of preferences: Some results on transition functions

We investigate a general theory of combining individual preferences into collective choice. The preferences are treated quantitatively, by means of preference functions (a,b), where 0(a,b) expresses the degree of preference of a to b. A transition function is a function (x,y) which computes (a,c) from (a,b) and (b,c), namely (a,c)=((a,b),(b,c)). We prove that given certain (reasonable) conditions on how individual preferences are aggregated, there is only one transition function that satisfies these conditions, namely the function (x,y)=x·y (multiplication of odds). We also formulate a property of transition functions called invariance, and prove that there is no invariant transition function; this impossibility theorem shows limitations of the quantitative method.Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation.     

Re-Figuring Marked Bodies on the Borders: Breast Cancer and “Femininity”

The author discusses writings by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kathleen Martindale, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Rosenblum on their experiences with breast cancer, and explores their articulations of the impact mastectomy has had on their sense of femininity in relation to their own identities and body images, and in relation to cultural expectations, and how others perceive them. Their identification of the body as socially produced, and as a site of contestation and multiple struggles, offers a strategic site from which to engage with the violent gender-inflected notion of the ideal female body. Themes addressed include: the process of writing embodied experience to make it real, the body's role in the process of identity formation, the culturally constructed significance of appearance to the individual's sense of femininity, the value of the female body in a capitalistic society, and heterosexism in society and in the health care system.