Interpersonal Functioning in Borderline Personality Disorder Traits: A Social Media Perspective

This is the first study to demonstrate interpersonal difficulties associated with borderline personality disorder (BPD) features in the domain of social media. Using crowdsourcing, we presented participants with a battery of questions about their recent social media use, and then assessed their BPD features using the short form of the Five-Factor Borderline Inventory. The results revealed that individuals with higher BPD trait scores reported posting more often on social media, as well as a higher incidence of experiencing regret after posting on social media, and of deleting or editing their posts. They also report a higher degree of importance of social media in their social behavior and daily routines. These results highlight the pervasiveness of interpersonal difficulties associated with BPD features even in the non-clinical population, and demonstrate that these difficulties are also observable in social media behavior. Our findings may provide a starting point for research using data from social media to illuminate the cognitive and emotional processes underpinning the interpersonal difficulties associated with BPD features, and to inform and assess therapeutic interventions

Interacting mindreaders

Could interacting mindreaders be in a position to know things which they would be unable to know if they were manifestly passive observers? This paper argues that they could. Mindreading is sometimes reciprocal: the mindreader's target reciprocates by taking the mindreader as a target for mindreading. The paper explains how such reciprocity can significantly narrow the range of possible interpretations of behaviour where mindreaders are, or appear to be, in a position to interact. A consequence is that revisions and extensions are needed to standard theories of the evidential basis of mindreading. The view also has consequences for understanding how abilities to interact combined with comparatively simple forms of mindreading may explain the emergence, in evolution or development, of sophisticated forms of social cognition

Goal Slippage: A Mechanism for Spontaneous Instrumental Helping in Infancy?

In recent years, developmental psychologists have increasingly been interested in various forms of prosocial behavior observed in infants and young children—in particular comforting, sharing, pointing to provide information, and spontaneous instrumental helping. We briefly review several models that have been proposed to explain the psychological mechanisms underpinning these behaviors. Focusing on spontaneous instrumental helping, we home in on models based upon what Paulus (Child Development Perspectives 8(2):77–81, 2014) has dubbed ‘goal-alignment’, i.e. the idea that the identification of an agent’s goal leads infants to take up that goal as their own. We identify a problem with the most well-known model based upon this idea, namely the ‘goal contagion’ model. The problem arises from the way in which the model specifies the content of the goal which is identified and taken up. We then propose an alternative way of specifying the content of the goal, and use this as a starting point for articulating an alternative model based upon the idea of alignment, namely the ‘goal slippage’ model. By elucidating the difference between goal contagion and goal slippage, we contribute to the articulation of experimental criteria for assessing whether and when the mechanisms specified by these two models are at work

Social exclusion of older persons: a scoping review and conceptual framework

As a concept, social exclusion has considerable potential to explain and respond to disadvantage in later life. However, in the context of ageing populations, the construct remains ambiguous. A disjointed evidence-base, spread across disparate disciplines, compounds the challenge of developing a coherent understanding of exclusion in older age. This article addresses this research deficit by presenting the findings of a two-stage scoping review encompassing seven separate reviews of the international literature pertaining to old-age social exclusion. Stage one involved a review of conceptual frameworks on old-age exclusion, identifying conceptual understandings and key domains of later-life exclusion. Stage two involved scoping reviews on each domain (six in all). Stage one identified six conceptual frameworks on old-age exclusion and six common domains across these frameworks: neighbourhood and community; services, amenities and mobility; social relations; material and financial resources; socio-cultural aspects; and civic participation. International literature concentrated on the first four domains, but indicated a general lack of research knowledge and of theoretical development. Drawing on all seven scoping reviews and a knowledge synthesis, the article presents a new definition and conceptual framework relating to old-age exclusion

Differential impacts of migration on the family networks of older people in Indonesia: a comparative analysis

Distance migration has long been familiar to Indonesians, given the country’s size and multi-island geography. Current transnational movement further extends this experience, as one of several movement options. Longitudinal demographic and anthropological study of three Indonesian communities provides comparative evidence of the structure and variation of movement, with particular reference to impacts of younger people’s migration on the older generation. The gradual expansion of network migration over ever-greater distances reveals local dynamics that underlie a more general historical process. The norm is one in which a network balance is struck between the activities of elders and their children, some of whom are living nearby, whilst others live at varying distances away. Significant material advantages of remittances and other support are more likely to accrue to members of higher socio-economic strata, and to those with more cohesive kin networks. In poorer strata, distance migration tends to provide one of a number of supports that enable families to survive, but not to improve their situation substantially. Remittances from transnational migrants, as with internal distance migration, are important chiefly as expressions of network solidarity. One of their principal requirements is usually the continuing role of elders’ own active network contributions