Ambivalent State Research Articles

In/dependence, Intergenerational Uncertainty, and the Ambivalent State: Perceptions of Old Age Security in India

This essay examines competing perspectives on old age security within contemporary Indian families and society. Ideas and policies concerning old age security are intricately connected to broader cultural meanings and values—surrounding personhood, the life course, family moral systems, and perceptions of the very nature and identity of a wider society and nation. The family in India has long been viewed as the central site of ageing and elder care, yet there is a widespread perception that family-centred elder care is on the decline. Market-based options such as for-pay old age homes are on the rise among the solvent urban middle classes, along with discourses emphasising the need for older individuals to rely on themselves. At the same time, recent parental care legislation and limited state-funded social security programs emphasise that family care is best. Confronting such developments, this essay explores competing Indian perspectives on: where is the best site of elder care: the family, the market, the state, or the individual? The aim is not only to illuminate important values, practices and policies being contested and fashioned in India today, but also to subject ostensibly a-cultural international models of old age security to cross-cultural scrutiny.

Turkish Immigrants’ Hopes and Fears around Return Migration

AbstractThis paper seeks to understand the process by which immigrants decide whether or not to return to their home countries. It aims to analyse the potential for return migration rather than the actual migration process. Empirically, it is based on the narratives of 30 Turkish immigrants living in the United States. The findings indicate that: (1) multiple controllable and uncontrollable, micro‐ and macro‐level factors in both the home and the host countries interact over time to tip the scales towards – or away from – return migration; and (2) most immigrants live in a perpetual state of ambivalence about whether or not to engage in return migration. These findings are discussed, and implications are presented for both practice and policy.

Pause-and-Stop: The Effects of Osmotic Stress on Cell Proliferation during Early Leaf Development in Arabidopsis and a Role for Ethylene Signaling in Cell Cycle Arrest

Despite its relevance for agricultural production, environmental stress-induced growth inhibition, which is responsible for significant yield reductions, is only poorly understood. Here, we investigated the molecular mechanisms underlying cell cycle inhibition in young proliferating leaves of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana when subjected to mild osmotic stress. A detailed cellular analysis demonstrated that as soon as osmotic stress is sensed, cell cycle progression rapidly arrests, but cells are kept in a latent ambivalent state allowing a quick recovery (pause). Remarkably, cell cycle arrest coincides with an increase in 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate levels and the activation of ethylene signaling. Our work showed that ethylene acts on cell cycle progression via inhibition of cyclin-dependent kinase A activity independently of EIN3 transcriptional control. When the stress persists, cells exit the mitotic cell cycle and initiate the differentiation process (stop). This stop is reflected by early endoreduplication onset, in a process independent of ethylene. Nonetheless, the potential to partially recover the decreased cell numbers remains due to the activity of meristemoids. Together, these data present a conceptual framework to understand how environmental stress reduces plant growth.

Guilty Pleasure or Pleasurable Guilt? Affective Experience of Impulse Buying in Hedonic-Driven Consumption

Consumption of hospitality products and services is often driven by hedonic motivations. However, the affective aspect of consumption experience is not well understood in the current hospitality literature. This study explores consumers’ dynamic affective experience in a particular consumption situation—impulse buying. Results of this experimental study suggest that impulse buying leads to a state of cognitive and affective ambivalence. Specifically, cognitive ambivalence (the tension between beliefs about self-indulgence and beliefs about self-control) is positively related to affective ambivalence (a mixed feeling of positive and negative affect). Affective ambivalence is linked to consumers’ normative evaluation of impulse purchases. The results suggest that affective ambivalence manifests itself in two subtly but qualitatively different affective states: “guilty pleasure” and “pleasurable guilt.” Important managerial implications of the findings are also discussed.

Compassion Focused Therapy for People with Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar affective disorder arises from major dysregulations in various affect and drive systems and constitutes a major mental health problem. Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) was developed from a neuroscience and evolutionary approach and pays particular attention to affect regulation. It therefore lends itself to both the analysis of bipolar disorders and offers potentially important interventions. This article will explore the applications of CFT to the understanding of bipolar disorder and development of compassion-focused interventions. Clients with Bipolar Disorder (BD) face a range of complex recovery challenges, including the need to work with mood instability, the fear of relapse, and the experience of potentially complex states of ambivalence associated with engaging with manic states and medication use. Recovery efforts of people with BD are frequently hampered by a tendency to strive for high standards, which can lead to difficulties with the pacing of recovery, and the presence of an attacking self-to-self relational style, which can have a powerful negative impact on the ability to cope with setbacks. Within this article, processes associated with BD, as understood by the modified Behavioral Activation System dysregulation theory (Urosevic, Abramson, Harmon-Jones, & Alloy, 2008) and social rank theory (Gilbert, McEwan, Hay, Irons, & Cheung, 2007) are described, along with details of how Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) can be used to help clients to strengthen their soothing systems, which is viewed as a key step in rebalancing mood states. Bipolar disorder is a serious illness, with a lifetime prevalence of approximately 0.8% (Johnson, 2004). As BD is recognized on the basis of historical information, unless revised in light of further information, a diagnosis tends to be lifelong (Mansell, Powell, Pedley, Thomas, & Jones, 2010). BD is understood to exist in two forms, type I in which a person has experienced a clear episode of mania, or a mixed episode involving aspects of depression and mania, and type II, which is identified if a person has experienced an episode of hypomania, and one or more episodes of depression (Johnson, 2004). It is generally, although not totally, accepted that BD exists on a continuum of severity.

Death squads or self-defense forces?: how paramilitary groups emerge and challenge democracy in Latin America

This title presents a triad of factors fostering death and destruction among civilians. In an era when the global community is confronted with challenges posed by violent nonstate organizations - from FARC in Colombia to the Taliban in Afghanistan - our understanding of the nature and emergence of these groups takes on heightened importance. Julie Mazzei's study offers a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics that facilitate the organization and mobilization of one of the most virulent types of these organizations, paramilitary groups (PMGs). Mazzei reconstructs in rich historical context the organization of PMGs in Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico, identifying the variables that together create a triad of factors enabling paramilitary emergence: ambivalent state officials, powerful military personnel, and privileged members of the economic elite. Nations embroiled in domestic conflicts often find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place when global demands for human rights contradict internal expectations and demands for political stability. Mazzei elucidates the importance of such circumstances in the emergence of PMGs, exploring the roles played by interests and policies at both the domestic and international levels. By offering an explanatory model of paramilitary emergence, Mazzei provides a framework to facilitate more effective policy making aimed at mitigating and undermining the political potency of these dangerous forces.

Liberalism, authoritarianism and the politics of decisionism in Thailand

By examining different Thai regime forms over the last 30 years this paper attempts to show how an uneasy co-existence between liberal and authoritarian forces has impacted on the exercise of power and regime form. Arguing that the persistence of authoritarian power in the military and the monarchy is central to understanding the nature of Thailand's ambivalent state, it moves to a contemporary analysis of ‘decisionist politics’.

Virtue, Mixed Emotions and Moral Ambivalence

AbstractAristotelian virtue ethics invests emotions and feelings with much moral significance. However, the moral and other conflicts that inevitably beset human life often give rise to states of emotional division and ambivalence with problematic implications for any understanding of virtue as complete psychic unity of character and conduct. For one thing, any admission that the virtuous are prey to conflicting passions and desires may seem to threaten the crucial virtue ethical distinction between the virtuous and the continent. One recent attempt to sustain this distinction – considered in this paper – maintains that the contrary-to-virtue emotions and desires of the virtuous (by contrast with those of the continent) must relinquish their motive power as reasons for action. Following some attention to the psychological status of feelings and emotions – in particular their complex relations with cognition and reason – this paper rejects this solution in favour of a more constructive view of emotional conflict.

Obama and the Media

Barack Obama (now President) and the media during his campaign for the presidency was akin to predicting the sudden twists and turns of a turbulent weather system. In both cases, so much depended on the time and the place of observation, and the extent to which the forecasters knew what they were talking about. Like a storm, Obama's path was far from predictable, thereby leaving the media in a state of flux and ambivalence.

A Bequest of Her Own: The Reinvention of Elizabeth Bowen

complete the work before her death, she asked her agent and executor Spencer Curtis Brown to see that the book got published. On his visit to her in the hos pital, just before her death in February, 1973, she repeated her instructions.1 In these essays, Bowen attempts both to come to terms with her personal inheri tance, and to keep her literary reputation intact. It is here that she offered her comments on the critical studies emerging on her work: While appreciative of the honour done me and of the hard work involved, I have found some of them wildly off the mark. As if to complete the thought, she threw out a chal lenge that laid claim to anything anyone else might have to say about her or her writing: If anyone must write a book about Elizabeth Bowen, why should not Elizabeth Bowen? (PC 62). That claim is by now substantial: in the more than three decades since her death, her writing has spawned a remarkably wide range of reactions, both academic and popular. These responses?and Bowens anticipation of them? touch on a central conundrum of literary criticism: how does the writer influ ence what is said or not said about her? In posterity, Bowens reputation has bat tled with the lingering perception of her as a 'minor' figure whose work is most often read as a charming but dated embodiment of traditional literary and social values.2 Her work has lingered in a state of critical ambivalence, not unlike the one she herself inhabited. Writing of what happens to a book after it has been published, she describes the cable between the author and her words being cut; thereafter, the work embarks upon an unforeseeable life of its

A State of Ambivalence: The Feminist Movement in Singapore (Book Review)

SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthropology, sociology, and history.

A State of Ambivalence: The Feminist Movement in Singapore (review)

A State of Ambivalence: The Feminist Movement in Singapore (review)

The Identity of Communication Research

Let me warn you first: Any account of a state of a discipline is limited in scope and is biased. It is limited because the field grows faster than the capacity of the average scholar to process and digest new information and thus keep an overview. And it is— by default—biased because people differ in what they think is good and what they think is relevant research, thus disagreeing on what is the ‘‘right way to scientific knowledge.’’ I believe there is a right way but not everyone in this room will share it. Thus, as scholars, we still help to confirm one of the earliest hypotheses in communication research: that predispositions shape the perception of reality. Why should we be different from our subjects in experiments? Therefore, take cognitive dissonance theory as my major excuse for the following. I have organized my talk in theses and countertheses because this reflects best the ambivalent state of our field.

Two is the Beginning of the End: Peter Pan and the Doctrine of Reminiscence

This article considers J.M. Barrie’s satirical treatment of the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence in Peter Pan, and how Barrie’s work both honors and undercuts it. It will first analyze the Platonic notion of the doctrine of reminiscence in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807). It will then show its influence on Victorian literature in the depiction of the exalted perception and moral purity of children, and how Barrie satirizes these ideals by underscoring the ignorance and savage qualities of the children in Peter Pan. The essay will also explore the portrayal of the Eden of childhood in Wordsworth’s poem (as influenced by Plato), and how Barrie subverts this utopia by presenting a dystopic world where Darwinian principles rule. Like Darwin, Barrie argues for a natural rather than a divine origin of species and demonstrates the struggle for existence in a profoundly disturbing way. Finally, the essay will contemplate the subject of immortality and how, far from being an idealized condition as in Wordsworth’s poetry, it is a far more ambivalent state in Peter Pan.

Psychological Models of Time: Arrows, Cycles and Spirals

This article examines the models of time presented by Yamada and Kato (2006) and Rudolph (2006). Although we agree with Yamada and Kato that the subjective experience of time is not linear and homogeneous, we argue that cyclical models of time are not good models of representing normative ontogenetic development. We also critically examine Rudolph’s suggestion that the experience of time is derived from a succession of discrete acts of attention and ‘states of ambivalence’ that interpolate between the discrete acts of attention.

The Fullness of Time

In this speculative article, I question the postulation of homogeneity in models of time intended for use in developmental, social or cultural psychology. After surveying extant models, I propose a new kind of model, which is highly inhomogeneous and one-dimensional only in a global sense: locally such a model can be very ‘full’. My aim is to capture in mathematical form one common hypothesis about psychological time (that it reckons ‘acts of attention’), somewhat amplified by a further claim (that these acts are interpolated by states of ambivalence), and to do so precisely enough that the resulting models can be used effectively in further collaborations between mathematicians and psychologists

Implicit ambivalence from attitude change: An exploration of the PAST model.

Traditional models of attitude change have assumed that when people appear to have changed their attitudes in response to new information, their old attitudes disappear and no longer have any impact. The present research suggests that when attitudes change, the old attitude can remain in memory and influence subsequent behavior. Four experiments are reported in which initial attitudes were created and then changed (or not) with new information. In each study, the authors demonstrate that when people undergo attitude change, their old and new attitudes can interact to produce evaluative responses consistent with a state of implicit ambivalence. In Study 1, individuals whose attitudes changed were more neutral on a measure of automatic evaluation. In Study 2, attitude change led people to show less confidence on an implicit but not an explicit measure. In Studies 3 and 4, people whose attitudes changed engaged in greater processing of attitude-relevant information than did individuals whose attitudes were not changed.

Sur la question de l’ironie et de la mort dans la schizophrénie : le cas Hervé

Using the case of Hervé as a basis for his study, the author has emphasized the importance of the subjective attitude that is inherent to schizophrenic irony. This irony can be clinically detected in negativistic remarks, in the schizophrenic state of ambivalence, in mannerism, and it appears to be both a means of defence against a reality that is too close – the reality of death, for example – but also as a solution whereby the Other is kept at a “reasonable” distance, so that it does not pose a threat. This “private language” should borne in mind, and the therapist should react accordingly if he does not wish to become involved in the dual (and duel) relationship that the schizophrenic patient might attempt to introduce during treatment sessions.

Besuch vom Mittagsdamon: Philosophie der Langeweile

Decher, Friedhelm. Besuch vom Mittagsdamon: Philosophie der Langeweile. Luneburg: Klampen, 2000.257pp. euro14.00 paperback. Wenig Dinge werden so oft genannt, ohne wirklich gekannt zu sein, als die Langeweile, remarks an unnamed writer in 1854. What was true then-boredom the highly familiar yet unexamined phenomenon-is by and large still true today. Its marginal research status notwithstanding, there is by now, though often gone unnoticed, a sizable and multi-disciplinary body of scholarship on this elusive entity. While Enlightenment's mainstream therapeutic discourse on boredom as a univocal psychic disorder of lack continues to be influential, several studies of the last three decades have begun to question its anthropological assumption and developed alternative conceptualizations, such as boredom as a complex and ambivalent state of mind, a historical phenomenon, a cultural construct of modernity, a mode of social interaction and communication, an integral part of the bourgeois ideology of the (male) subject, and a polysemous aesthetic signifier. As a result, boredom has emerged as a theoretical problem, while the practical hope to cure it has waned. What better time for philosophy then to commence the examining work, its Arbeit am Begriff. However, contemporary academic philosophy has rarely taken up the challenge, and the present monograph is, alas, no exception. Whereas its main title, an allusion to both the Biblical trope of the demon of noontide and R. Kuhn's seminal literary history of ennui, conjures up the dreadfulness of the topic, the easy chair image on the jacket betrays its cozy modus operandi: philosophy of boredom as usual. Methodologically, Decher's philosophy amounts to little more than a hermeneutics of ideas which, save for a gloss on the premodern acedia tradition, covers European thought on boredom from the late seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Equally traditional is the inquiry's theoretical framework, as outlined in the first chapter. Along the theory/practice division, it sets out to explore two principal questions. First, Was ist, in der Begrifflichkeit der philosophischen Tradition des Abendlandes gesprochen, das 'Wesen' der Langeweile? (19), and second, what are the remedies for boredom, and is there a cure for it? In this dual approach, as well as the study's organizing trope of illness, Decher unwittingly follows the Enlightenment heritage for which understanding boredom has primarily been a therapeutic issue. Moreover, what appears to be a recognition of the postmodern critique of essentialist thought, turns out to be a mere typographical concession. That boredom might not have a fixed and homogeneous essence, a point of debate in scholarship, is not an issue for this philosopher. The essentialist presumption is linked to the other fundamental premise that boredom is a transhistorical, universal affliction. Even though this position has been a bone of contention, the author is satisfied with anecdotal evidence, abstaining from any serious debate. Taking his cues from the introspective descriptions the Enlightenment engendered, Decher isolates the phenomenological nature of boredom in familiar terms: a negative feeling of psychic emptiness, a sense of nothing, and a paralysis of vitality. But that is not the ultimate essence of boredom. An existential interpretation, Heideggerian avant la lettre and in circulation since the Romantic trope of world ennui, brings it to the fore: boredom reveals the pure Faktizitat (19) of Dasein and nothingness as a conditio humana. Let alone that this definition is too broad, a similar claim could be made about anxiety or depression, so what exactly is said here? Maybe nothing disguised as profundity. Perhaps that human life as such has no all-encompassing, a priori meaning. Possibly, that boredom marks a boundary between intelligibility and nonintelligibility or, in traditional terminology, between culture and nature. …

A gestalt‐experiential perspective on resistance

The authors present background on the gestalt-experiential understanding of resistance, conceptualized to be either resistance to awareness or resistance to contact. The authors discuss why they do not use the term resistance and describe the phenomena as a client's self-protective attempt to avoid the anxiety necessitated by change. Such resistant behaviors occur outside a client's awareness and often result in an ambivalence or conflict about change. The authors also describe using in-session experiments as a way to engage with the client in exploring such a state of ambivalence or conflict. Finally, they respond to the case studies presented elsewhere in this issue and propose intervention strategies consistent with the gestalt-experiential perspective.