Public Attitudes Toward Life and Death

Opinion trends in this country indicate sharp divisions in publicsentiment over a number of life-taking actions. While legalabortion and capital punishment clearly head the list, a numberof other issues have gained national attention in recent years.The present paper explores the structure of belief systems givingrise to normative conflicts of this kind. Of particular interestis the notion of a "pro-life" or other generic life orientation(e.g., the alleged "right-to-die" orientation of those who favor"mercy killings" in the case of terminally ill patients) asa possible explanation for public attitudes toward specificissues such as suicide and euthanasia. The present analysisassesses the empirical claims associated with such a model.The results offer qualified support for the existence of genericvalue orientations as revealed by public attitudes toward legalabortion, suicide, euthanasia, and capital punishment.     

The solipsist patient

The aim of this paper is to widen the clinician's understanding of a narcissistic type, the solipsist (one alone with the self) who is treatable because he or she is the healthiest of narcissists yet a challenge to psychotherapy because the solipsist allows no one to be with him or her. Countertransference is discussed as a primary factor for the therapist to understand and control. The handling of the transference is seen as the key to therapeutic success and is illustrated by case examples.     

The "Positivity Bias" inEvaluations of Public Figures:Evidence Against Instrument Artifacts

The "positivity bias" is a term used to describe the consistentfavorable evaluation of public figures found in surveys overthe past 40 years. This paper explored several possible artifactualexplanations for this bias,focusing on the survey instrumentitself. Two experiments varied the labeling and ordering ofscale endpoints, the affective value of the initial contextevaluated, and the presence or absence of a prestigious jobtitle associated with the nameof the public figure. None ofthe variations produced significantly different levels of positivitythan the standard control condition used in each experiment.RichardR. Lau is a graduate student in social psychology at the Universityof California, Los Angeles. David O. Sears is Professor of Psychologyand Political Science at UCLA. Richard Centers is Professorof Psychology at UCLA. This research was supported in part byGrant #SOC73-09153 A03 from the National Science Foundationto David O. Sears. The authors wish to expess their thanks toMark Williams, who did most of the coding and checking involvedin the survey.