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This is one of the central chapters of the book. It presents new measures of Attitudes to Family Formation. As in the case with Attitudes to Gender Roles, these were developed first on the basis of the qualitative study and next using factor analysis in the main study. Seven measures emerged which tapped Attitudes to Marriage, Attitudes to Cohabitation, and several dimensions of Attitudes toward being Single. Detailed results are presented for the measures including factor analytic results, percentage distributions for the representative nationwide sample and an analysis of differences among demographic groups. Selected quotes from the qualitative study are also presented to give nuance and an additional perspective to the attitudinal factors. This chapter also presents data on people’s previous cohabiting behaviour and perceptions of the facilitators and constraints to getting married.

While the current Irish birth rate is still high by European standards, at approximately two children per woman, the total fertility rate has nevertheless fallen 50% over the last four decades from approximately four children per woman in 1970 to two children today. This chapter discusses the causes, significance and implications of this and presents results of new measures developed to explore current attitudes to childbearing. Four distinct dimensions emerged through factor analysis, including a Belief in the Necessity of having Children for Fulfilment, Perceived Economic Constraints to having Children, Belief in the Value of Smaller Families, and the Belief that Men want Children as much as Women do. The prevalence of these attitudes in the representative sample is presented as well as differences among groups. Respondents’ ideal, expected and actual family size, as well as discrepancies between these, are also explored.

The purpose of this chapter is to present new empirical research on the Arab Spring and, specifically, to focus on the attitudes of residents of one country in the Middle East towards the Arab Spring. This research was conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has been one of the main migrant destinations in the world for the last two decades. This allows for comparisons regarding attitudes towards the Arab Spring across individuals from different regions of origin such as GCC, South Asia, and Western countries. The attitudes of university students are important because the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has experienced a substantial increase in the 17 to 23 years of age population. Existing reports suggest that, by far, those involved in Arab Spring protests were young individuals. The analysis places particular emphasis on the correlation of attitudes towards the Arab Spring with three key aspects: religiousness, attachment to the GCC countries, and attachment to country of origin.

This chapter investigates the impact of economic vulnerability and economic crisis on political trust, satisfaction with democracy and attitudes towards redistribution. These attitudes are crucial in defining public support for the European model of social capitalism, characterized by the combination of national democratic institutions and extensive welfare provision. Applying regression techniques to a pool of the 2004 and the 2010 rounds of the European Social Survey, the chapter reports three main findings: First, across Europe individuals’ experiences of economic vulnerability and financial strain were associated with lower levels of political trust and democratic satisfaction and with higher levels of support for income redistribution. Secondly, in many countries (but not all), the economic crisis also had negative effects on political trust and democratic satisfaction (but not on attitudes towards redistribution) amongst citizens who did not experience economic hardship directly. Third, these latter indirect effects were particularly strong in Euro zone countries.

Marilynn B. Brewer discusses three of her studies: the first she considers her most underappreciated work, the second received a delayed appreciation, and the third is appreciated but misunderstood. Her most underappreciated contribution was a concept in evolutionary biology, in which she argued that the profound ambivalence between personal self-gratification and self-sacrifice for collective welfare is not a conflict between internal biological motives and external social constraints but rather an internal biological dualism that reflects human evolutionary history as a social species. Her second work was Ethnocentrism and Intergroup Attitudes: East African Evidence, a book on ethnocentric attitudes and intergroup perception in post-colonial East Africa. The book did not garner a reasonable amount of attention in the field of social psychology until more than fifteen years later. Brewer's third work was an article titled “A dual process model of impression formation,”, which describes two distinct modes of processing social information: a category-based (top-down) processing mode and a person-based (bottom-up) processing mode.

This chapter lays out the basic arguments offered by those who support concealed handgun policies, including the threat of mass shootings and other violent crimes, and it details the background debates that emerged in Texas when CHLs were first introduced. Licensing rates over time are analysed, and data on gun ownership and attitudes toward gun policies are discussed. The NRA’s impact on gun culture is examined through an analysis of how the organization constructs threats from above in the form of government overreach and threats from below via crime. It also includes a description of theoretical frameworks related to race, class, gender, and fear of crime that are used in the analysis and of the research methods employed.

Protecting the rights and welfare of research subjects requires consideration of risks in the context of everyday life. As our attitudes about privacy in everyday life change, this chapter argues that so should the regulations that govern privacy protections in human research. Overly cautious restriction on research uses of data and specimens is unnecessary and would slow the progress of beneficial studies that could improve human health and wellbeing.

In a remarkable series of papers, Haugeland lays out what is both a striking interpretation of Heidegger and a compelling account of objectivity and truth. Central to his account is a notion of existential commitment, which insists on the independence of the phenomena from our understanding. This requires the potential for us to change or give up on our understanding of the world in the face of apparently impossible phenomena. Although Haugeland never gives a clear account of existential commitment, he claims that it is fundamentally an individual matter. This, I argue, is a mistake that fails to make sense of the public, shared nature of the objective world. Instead, I offer an initial account of existential commitment as one we undertake jointly, and I analyze it (and the corresponding responsibility) in terms of interpersonal rational patterns of reactive attitudes: emotions like resentment, gratitude, indignation, approbation, guilt, and trust. The upshot is that our existential commitment is not only to a shared, objective world but also to each other such that our ability individually to take responsibility for our understanding of the world is intelligible only in terms of others' being able to hold us responsible for it.

This chapter puts the European findings into comparative perspective by using a national survey from the United States, in which a large section of the ESS 2008 Welfare Attitudes module was replicated. It shows that when it comes to government responsibilities, American attitudes are quite different from the European mean, in that Americans ask for much less responsibility from government for the welfare of citizens. This chapter also used data and theoretical perspective on opinion formation through the use of embedded survey experiments.

Robots designed for sexual interaction present distinctive ethical challenges to received notions of physical intimacy, pleasure, social relationships, and social space. In this chapter, we build upon our recent survey on attitudes toward sex robots with the results from a second, expanded survey that broaches possible advantages and disadvantages of interacting with such robots, both individually and socially. We show that the first study’s results were replicated with respect to appropriate forms, contexts, and uses for sex robots; in addition, we find a systematic concern with how robots might risk harming human relationships. We conclude that ethical reflection on sex robots must include a wider consider-ation of the impact of social robots as a whole, with finer-grained examination of how intimacy and companionship define human relationships.

The Japanese term “ame-jo,” meaning women who date American men, carries a tone of disapproval. Such an attitude persists in Germany and other countries with U.S. bases. It contradicts the attitude of acceptance toward local men who date foreign women. The attitudes of Okinawan women toward their marriages have changed considerably over time. Among interviewees, younger women with higher levels of economic status and education were far less dependent on their husbands than older women. Older women felt more pressure to follow their husbands and adopt American culture while younger women encouraged their husbands to learn about Okinawan culture. Older women worked to help with household expenses while younger women sought jobs to develop careers even if they were still struggling with English. Within their marriages women cited differences in culture, rather than language, as a cause of misunderstandings. Some even said that their lack of complete fluency in English might have helped avoid conflict by preventing them from saying hurtful things. Older women felt more isolated in America, missing the closeness with relatives in Okinawa. But both younger and older women complained about complicated ties to relatives there, preferring their privacy in an “individualistic” America.

Chapter 4 offers a detailed account of the feelings and perceptions of foreign-born and native-born black union members using the SSEU Local 371 Survey. This chapter argues that even if black intraracial differences are subtle, such nuances in attitudes and opinions can greatly influence the US political system. It also includes a qualitative analysis of the genesis of many of these perceptions and feelings of black groups living and working in New York City and of how these opinions affect black perceptions of the American Dream. I find that, although there are varying black ethnic attitudes regarding modes of success and achievement efforts that present distinctive attitudes among black ethnic populations, there is a significant black racial identity present among native-born and foreign-born populations in this country.

This chapter begins the conversation surrounding diverse black ethnic groups in the United States. It introduces the upcoming chapters and discusses why it is important and necessary to observe the opinions and behaviors of black American, Afro-Caribbean, and African groups in the twenty-first century. This chapter dissects the interplay between race and ethnicity for blacks in the United States and how the negotiations with these dual identities affect participation, partisanship, policy attitudes, and feelings toward the American Dream. This chapter also begins a dialogue regarding the different “understandings” of the American Dream by black ethnics by presenting the initial questions surrounding participation, partisanship, perception, and policy questions.

This chapter considers Charcot’s anatomo-clinical method, which correlated the description of recurrent symptomatic complexes with the location of causal lesions through anatomical analysis. As a student visitor Freud encountered Charcot’s demonstration of the ideogenesis of hysterical symptoms under hypnosis. Charcot postulated a functional rather than an anatomical lesion as the provoking cause of hysteria but one he was never able to locate and describe. Freud took Charcot’s model of the hysterical attack but gave priority to its third phase of attitudes passionelles, or “scenes of passionate movement.” Where Charcot had assimilated delayed post-traumatic symptoms to his model of hysteria because of their ideogenic nature, Freud made the reverse move of assimilating the hysterias to the model of traumatic neurosis. Where Charcot had identified the experience of shock in trauma as a form of hypnoid auto-suggestion, that merely precipitated an hereditary hysterical predisposition, Freud marginalized the hereditary dimension and promoted the traumatic to the role of an indispensable specific cause. It was thus the memory of a specific trauma re-enacted in the hysterical attack that gave rise to hysterical paralyses and malfunctions that “behaved as though anatomy did not exist”. Freud identified Charcot’s missing functional lesion with the excessive ‘quota of affect’ attached to traumatic memory that paralyzed specific bodily functions.

This chapter begins Part III of the book, which addresses the other major theoretical perspective on meaning in life, the naturalist view that imperfect ways of living in a purely physical world can be sufficient for meaning. Chapter 9 considers subjective naturalism, the theory that ways of life are meaningful insofar as they are the object of propositional attitudes, e.g., by satisfying desires. The chapter first rejects arguments for subjectivism that come from Richard Taylor, Harry Frankfurt and others, after which it rejects subjectivism itself for having counterintuitive implications regarding which lives count as meaningful. This criticism has been common to make, and so the chapter adds fresh ideas by considering whether less well-known forms of subjectivism, such as the intersubjectivism of Stephen Darwall, can avoid the problem. It concludes that they cannot, and that some notion of objective value is essential for a plausible theory of meaning in life.

Chapter 8 focuses on amateur films that addressed current social issues. Drawing on varied examples discussion explores the periodic trenchant criticisms of amateurs’ neglect of socially relevant topic concerns found within the specialist press and highlights aspects of filmmaking that overtly respond to contemporary issues. While much amateur footage discloses details of time and place, attention focuses here first on films about public health, welfare and housing before and after the start of the National Health Service, as well as the effects of post war urban redevelopment. Shot in hospitals, training centres and in the midst of urban slum clearance, such material varies stylistically from early actuality, topicals and documentaries to the visual reportage of Standard and Super 8mm users, and also the experimentation of post-war cinema, and reflects the changing involvement and interests of younger filmmakers. Issues of morality, violence, pornography, substance abuse and discrimination feature among later amateur productions as do issues of conflict and international insecurity, poverty, and growing up. Choice of topic and its handling denote shifting attitudes too, as seen in films concerning disability and homelessness. While socially engaged film-making represents a relatively small proportion of overall amateur activity, it is too important to ignore.