Personal Attachment (personal + attachment)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


PERSONAL ATTACHMENT TO BELIEFS

METAPHILOSOPHY, Issue 1 2007
DALE LUGENBEHL
Abstract: There is a tendency in philosophical discussions to see beliefs as belonging to specific people,to see things in terms of "your" belief, or "my" belief, or "Smith's" belief. I call this "personal attachment to beliefs." This mindset is unconscious, deeply ingrained, and a powerful background stance in discussion and thinking. Attachment has a negative impact on the quality of philosophical discussion and learning: difficulties in acknowledging error and changing beliefs, blindness to new evidence, difficulties in understanding new ideas, entrenchment in views, rancorous behavior, and the encouragement of competitive personal contests rather than collaborative searches for the truth. This article investigates the nature of attachment and traces out some of the undesirable consequences for classroom philosophical discussion, thinking, writing, and learning. It presents an alternative model to attachment and offers constructive suggestions for implementing the results of the investigation in the philosophy classroom and elsewhere. [source]


Attachment, decay, and social network

JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, Issue 6 2001
Ronald S. Burt
To study decay in attachment to an organization, I analyse data on women who obtained an MBA from the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business (GSB). I measure attachment in terms of network embedding: an alumna is attached to the GSB to the extent that people close to her graduated from the GSB. Behavioral data corroborate the network data in that alumnae measured to be more attached are more likely to have joined an alumni club and made a financial contribution to the school. The hypothesis is that alumnae attachment will decay over time, more slowly when the school is deeply embedded in an alumna's network, more quickly when disruptive events compete for the alumna's time and energy. As expected, attachment declines across the years after graduation (linearly for the first 20 years to about half its initial level), and decay is inhibited when connections with GSB graduates are embedded in stable relations of family, work, or long-term friendship. Decay is remarkably robust to events after graduation (which account for only 2 per cent of explained variance in attachment). In other words, an alumna's attachment today was largely determined while she was in school. The results should be of practical value to people who design programmes to build personal attachment to organizations, and of theoretical interest to scholars who study such connections. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Effects of a brief intervention on social support and psychiatric morbidity in breast cancer patients

PSYCHO-ONCOLOGY, Issue 4 2002
J. Steven A. Simpson
(1) To cross-sectionally and longitudinally investigate relationships between the availability and adequacy of both close personal attachment and interactional support, and psychiatric morbidity in a sample of early stage breast cancer patients participating in a 6-week psychoeducational intervention. (2) To address the question of directionality in these longitudinal relationships. (3) To investigate the effects of the intervention on levels of social support. Eighty-nine women were enrolled in the study, and randomly assigned to either the treatment or control condition. They were evaluated with the Interview Schedule for Social Interaction (ISSI), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Global Severity Index (GSI) of the Symptom Checklist (SCL) ,90-R, and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (SCID) at three time periods: baseline (pre-intervention), 1 year post-intervention and 2 years post-intervention. Relationships between social support and the psychiatric measures were evaluated both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Cross-sectionally, there were strong associations at each time period between being diagnosed with a DSM-III-R Axis I disorder and having less adequate perceived social support from both close relationships and more distant social ties. Initial levels of psychiatric symptoms on the BDI and GSI were better predictors of later social support than initial social support variables were of later psychiatric symptoms. Participation in the group intervention did not result in changes in social support at 1 or 2 years post-intervention. Cross-sectionally, there was a strong relationship between social support and psychiatric morbidity in these patients with early-stage breast cancer. Longitudinally, it appeared that although social support influenced psychiatric symptomatology somewhat, the influence of psychiatric symptoms on social support was greater. This illustrates the importance of both working to bolster social support and dealing with psychiatric symptomatology in this population. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Attitudes towards globalization and cosmopolitanism: cultural diversity, personal consumption and the national economy

THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2008
Ian Woodward
Abstract One of the widely accepted consequences of globalization is the development of individual outlooks, behaviours and feelings that transcend local and national boundaries. This has encouraged a re-assessment of important assumptions about the nature of community, personal attachment and belonging in the face of unprecedented opportunities for culture, identities and politics to shape, and be shaped by, global events and processes. Recently, the upsurge of interest in the concept of cosmopolitanism has provided a promising new framework for understanding the nexus between cosmopolitan dispositions and global interconnectedness across cultural, political and economic realms. Using data from a representative social survey of Australians this paper investigates the negotiation of belonging under the conditions of globalization. The data tap into attitudes and behaviours associated with a broad gamut of cosmopolitan traits in the domains of culture, consumption, human rights, citizenship, and international governance. They show how cosmopolitan outlooks are shaped by social structural factors, and how forms of identification with humanity and the globe are fractured by boundaries of self and others, threats and opportunities, and the value of things global and local. [source]