The attachment and sexual-mating behavioral systems operate jointly within romantic relationships and their reciprocal influences shape relationship quality and longevity. In line with evolutionary models and social perspectives, substantial evidence indicates that men and women differ in the sex-attachment linkage, such that men are more permissive in their sexual attitudes, adopt a more individualistic and pleasure-centered orientation toward sexuality, and are less likely to connect sexual encounters with emotional bonding relative to women. Men's higher sexual urges may also be related to common beliefs which assume that they are constantly interested in having sex, regardless of contextual cues. However, in the context of ongoing relationships, men's sexual motivations may be attuned to relationship goals and shaped by contextual factors such as their partner's responsiveness, attachment-related insecurities, and relationship duration. In this chapter, I present a more complex and nuanced picture of the sex-attachment linkage in men and discuss the multifaceted nature of their sexual desire within the relationship context. I review findings that demonstrate the role of men's sexual desire in the formation and maintenance of intimate relationships and challenge the common notion of the disconnect between men's sexual motivations and attachment needs. I also discuss the ways in which women's perceived responsiveness may shape men's sexual desire and felt security, especially among insecurely attached men. Furthermore, I review findings on the effect of women's displays of desire on men's attachment-related worries and dilemmas. Finally, I present findings on changes over relationship duration in men's sexual desire in committed, long-term relationships and discuss the importance of considering men's age when examining longitudinal effects of their desire and the extent to which men endorse emotional connection in sexual interactions. I conclude by discussing how men may satisfy relationship-related needs within the sexual arena in different relationship stages.

The formation and maintenance of stable pair-bonds is an important strategy in the human mating repertoire. Ancestral men may have benefited from forming pair-bonds under certain circumstances by increasing offspring success, facilitating paternity certainty, and securing the future sexual access, reproductive resources, and parental investment of their partner. Yet the expected benefits to be gained through maintaining a pair-bond or pursuing alternative strategies, such as emphasizing a short-term mating strategy, switching mates, or pursuing other activities, can be difficult to assess and are ever-changing. The emotion of commitment is argued to act as a superordinate psychological program, coordinating lower-level adaptations to direct attention, process information, and produce behavioral output. Existing social psychological theories of relationship commitment, including attachment theory, interdependence theory, and the investment model, provide a framework for organizing the relevant information in the environment, the reproductive costs and benefits of competing options, and the behavioral strategies appropriate to pursuing different outcomes. In this chapter, I review the features of these models and the empirical evidence each has produced, and attempt to frame each of them in terms of an evolved psychological program for pursuing various reproductive strategies based on environmental cues.

We suggest studying how using social media affects adolescent identity development to understand the mechanism of the impact of social media on adolescent mental health. We present a model of the dual aspect of adolescent identity development – the progression towards the formation of self-evaluated commitments and values and construction of a coherent life story – and discuss how using social media facilitates or hinders processes involved, namely introspection, storytelling, and dialogue. Social media topics include dialogue with a diverse group of people, censorship, the permanence of social media data, potent social norms and values, and emphasis on appearance. Future research should develop methods for studying narratives on social media and establish the adolescent development of a narrative identity. We also suggest examining the affordances of social media platforms and how they affect processes of identity development. The chapter calls for media developers to design social media environments that support identity development.

Whereas links between Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche and revolutionary extremism are debatable, Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism is unquestionable. He saw Nazism as a revolution of the German people to throw off the alien values of liberalism and embrace their collective destiny in an encounter with global technology, the culmination of modernity. To a more radical degree than Marx and Nietzsche, Heidegger rejected everything that happened in history between the ancient Greeks and Germany’s destiny as valueless and totally alienating. He urged Germany to revive the pre-Socratic account of existence as violent strife and thereby resist the relentless working out of Platonic metaphysics in the form of technology, a dynamic for bringing all of existence under the control of rational efficiency. When Nazism failed, in Heidegger’s view by itself succumbing to the technological imperative, he abandoned hope in any political movement or people, forecasting instead a looming global encounter with technology in which all mankind would either become fodder for efficiency or emerge into a new epoch of closeness to all that is, the Shepherd of Being, an either/or choice or eschatological reversal resembling Marx’s dyad of bourgeoisie versus proletariat and Nietzsche’s dyad of Overman versus herd morality.

Government’s task is to achieve the common good. If it takes a long time markets will not do it: banks do not lend beyond the payback time horizon. For better and worse, government acts as the risk taker of last resort. Laissez-faire arose out of the Victorian fossil fuel windfall. But rich societies see beyond the private horizons of business. After WW1 they set to safeguard security by means of infrastructure, healthcare, education, housing, and social insurance. Government authority, alone or in partnership with business, is prone to corruption. The antidote is an independent, expert, and honest civil service. In 1980 politics moved in the opposite direction, imposing business norms and seeking to impose a corporate model on government activity. An opportunistic public–private partnership is no match for pressing social challenges, nor is the academic delusion of self-sufficient free markets. In the face of private impatience, government acts as a commitment agent for society.

In Chapter 7, I describe a committed research praxis where scientists strive to articulate the community-level value commitments that define good science, and to evaluate the degree to which particular scientific activities and products reflect those commitments. I argue that one primary way for psychologists to engage in this sort of committed praxis is by asking questions together in a place. That is, we can subject our work to insistent moral attention through collective and locally situated forms of reflection and responsibility. I suggest that these forms could include reflexivity, transparency, participatory and community-oriented research practices, political, historical, and material analyses of our research traditions and products, resistance to overgeneralized and “scaled” forms of neo-liberal management, and other practices that help anchor research work to the local and communal commitments that justify it.

Underinvestment, overinvestment or mistargeted investment are common across sectors at all development stages. They penalize the poorest when it slows down increase in access rates, all users when it leads to congestion, environmental impacts or low quality, and taxpayers as their costs are passed on to final prices or subsidies. These failures are due to poorly designed processes, corruption and capture of politicians or civil servants, and collusion between service providers. Regulation is often part of the problem because cost-plus/rate-of-return regulation tends to stimulate overinvestment, price/revenue cap regulation tends to result in underinvestment, regulated firms can underinvest to exclude potential entrants, regulatory designs omitting to include service obligations and/or access rules lessen incentives to invest, and some regulatory commitments are unrealistic or non-credible. Regulatory failures and uncertainties increase the risk premia built into the financing cost of investment, contributing to further investment mismatch. Regulation can be part of the solution with the adoption of hybrid price regulation approaches and well-designed access prices and rules.

Chapter 3 proceeds to investigate the concept of enigmatical poetry in the wider context of autonomous art. In ‘Commitment’, an essay written seven years before Aesthetic Theory, Adorno contrasts ‘committed’ literature that perceives art in an ‘extra-aesthetic’ fashion, with ‘drossless works’ that resist the ’spell’ of empirical reality. I therefore engage first with two ‘committed’ works, Tony Harrison’s verse plays THE KAISERS OF CARNUNTUM (1996) and THE LABOURERS OF HERAKLES (1996), in order to focalise Hill’s ruminations over elusive moments of awe and grace in his collection THE ORCHARDS OF SYON (2002). As Hill’s workbooks held in the Brotherton Library indicate, his enigmatical poetry partly responds to Paul Celan’s Atemwende(1967), transforming the Holocaust poet’s later minimalism into Hill’s loquacious assimilation of, and departure from, the modernist antecedent.

Building on Grice’s seminal work on ‘speaker meaning’, this chapter explores three different approaches to meaning in communication in light of how they view the relationship between ‘speaker meanings’ and ‘speaker commitments’: (1) inferential accounts of intentional meaning (stemming from Relevance Theory), (2) normative commitment-based approaches to communication and (3) interactional achievement accounts. It examines how these different perspectives yield different results regarding the meanings that speakers are committed to, held committed to by others or held normatively committed to in virtue of conventions of language use. Finally, it demonstrates how the concept of ‘reflexive accountability’ from talk-in-interaction provides the link in the sociopragmatic toolkit between questions about meaning recovery and the questions of why and how speakers choose to formulate their utterances in different ways for different purposes.

From the late 1930s until at least the mid-1950s, the novel in France provided a crucial form of expression for the eclectic philosophy of atheistic existentialism. The existentialist novel, whose principal proponents were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, acted as a bridge between philosophy and literature to throw the individual into the world to face a metaphysical crisis which ‘reveals’ mortal existence. A quest for freedom and authenticity ensues to stave off bad faith (or the delusion of a fixed and necessary existence), the stakes often heightened by the wartime existential situation of many of these novels. With no recourse to any universal moral precepts, their characters find no neat resolutions to the problems of existence or to their responsibility to others, since the purpose of existentialist literature is not to offer metaphysical consolation but rather to engage its readers actively in the world as it appears in all its ambiguity. Similarly, the existentially committed writer must write for the current era in which they find themselves, not for some projected and idealised posterity. Despite its resolutely humanistic assumptions, the existentialist novel in its various guises sought to face the moral complexities and failures of the mid-twentieth century, resituating the human in an ever-ambiguous life-world.

In this chapter, I review the international relation and international law literature on treaty commitment and treaty compliance highlighting the prominent arguments and findings. In doing so, I unpack the implications of the dominant and central focus on ratification. In this critical review, I recognize the many contributions of existing research and focus on how prominent studies conceptualized and operationalized "commitment" and "ratification." I argue that expanding these concepts will widen and deepen our understanding of the role international human rights plays.