			Home About us Contact

Problematic Ways (problematic + way)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	75%

Selected Abstracts

The impact of politeness and relationship on perceived quality of advice about a problem

HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH, Issue 2 2000
DJ Goldsmith
Advice is a common but potentially problematic way to respond to someone who is distressed. Politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987) suggests advice threatens a hearer's face and predicts that the speaker-hearer relationship and the use of politeness strategies can mitigate face threat and enhance the effectiveness of advice messages. Students (N=384) read 1 of 16 hypothetical situations that varied in speaker power and closeness of the speaker-hearer relationship. Students then read 1 of 48 advice messages representing different politeness strategies and rated the message for regard shown for face and for effectiveness. However, neither speaker-hearer relationship nor politeness strategies was consistently associated with perceived threat to face or perceived advice effectiveness. We suggest revisions to politeness theory and additional factors that may affect judgments of face sensitivity and advice effectiveness. [source]

Validation of the UPPS impulsive behaviour scale: a four-factor model of impulsivity

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY, Issue 7 2005
Stephen P. Whiteside
The current study attempts to clarify the multi-faceted nature of impulsivity through the use of the four-factor UPPS Impulsive Behaviour scale. In order to build the nomological network surrounding this scale, the UPPS was administered to individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD), pathological gamblers (PG), alcohol abusers (divided into two groups based on the presence of antisocial features), and a control group. Several of the UPPS scales (e.g. Urgency, lack of Premeditation, and Sensation Seeking) differentiated the BPD, PG, and alcohol abusers with antisocial features from a group of non-antisocial alcohol abusers and a control group. Overall, the UPPS scales accounted for between 7% (pathological gambling) and 64% (borderline personality disorder features) of the overall variance in the psychopathology measures. Individual UPPS scales also made unique contributions to several of these disorders, which may provide insight into which of these personality traits may predispose individuals to behave in maladaptive or problematic ways. The results provide support for the differentiation of impulsivity-related constructs into the current four-factor model. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Tuvalu and Climate Change: Constructions of Environmental Displacement in The Sydney Morning Herald

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 4 2005
Carol Farbotko
Abstract Tuvalu, a place whose image in the ,West' is as a small island state, insignificant and remote on the world stage, is becoming remarkably prominent in connection with the contemporary issue of climate change-related sea-level rise. My aim in this paper is to advance understanding of the linkages between climate change and island places, by exploring the discursive negotiation of the identity of geographically distant islands and island peoples in the Australian news media. Specifically, I use discourse analytic methods to critically explore how, and to what effects, various representations of the Tuvaluan islands and people in an Australian broadsheet, the Sydney Morning Herald, emphasize difference between Australia and Tuvalu. My hypothesis is that implicating climate change in the identity of people and place can constitute Tuvaluans as .tragic victims. of environmental displacement, marginalizing discourses of adaptation for Tuvaluans and other inhabitants of low-lying islands, and silencing alternative constructions of Tuvaluan identity that could emphasize resilience and resourcefulness. By drawing attention to the problematic ways that island identities are constituted in climate change discourse in the news media, I advocate a more critical approach to the production and consumption of representations of climate change. [source]

3.,The Holocaust Sublime: Singularity, Representation, and the Violence of Everyday Life

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2009
Article first published online: 18 FEB 200, John Sanbonmatsu
The world of the concentration camps . . . was not an exceptionally monstrous society. What we saw there was the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society in which we are plunged every day. ,Ionesco1 Abstract It has become common to view mass historical traumas like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Holocaust as singularities,in other words, events of such transcendent, almost metaphysical significance that they exceed intelligibility. Siding with "realist" intellectuals who instead emphasize the rootedness of genocide in the structures of modernity and everyday life, I argue that the discourse of singularity aestheticizes historical trauma in problematic ways. Drawing on Kant's analytic of the sublime, in which the subject, in confronting an awesome or terrifying phenomenon from a position of safety, comes to realize his or her own powers of transcendence and moral superiority, I argue that the holocaust sublime encourages the viewing subject to "face" overwhelming horrors of the past, but without having to confront the subject's actual responsibility for the atrocities of the present. By pitting the extraordinary or "singular" against the banal and everyday, the holocaust sublime thus obscures, rather than reveals, the habits of thought and social structures that make genocidal practices inevitable. [source]