What's the difference between ambivalent and blithe?

Ambivalent


Definition:

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In doing so they are often supported by their parents who as well assume an ambivalent attitude towards therapy.
  • (2) We interpret this exaggerated positive attitude as an attempt to overcome inner fears, doubts and ambivalences.
  • (3) Partners to the drug-treated mice showed a decrease in the occurrence of offensive ambivalence and of the element "rattle".
  • (4) But also the functionalism does not offer a complete psychological theory: there is an ambivalence concerning the secondary qualities and also concerning intentionality.
  • (5) This component of a more comprehensive study of Houdini focuses on the unusual reification of his family romance fantasies, their endurance well beyond the usual boundaries in time, their kinship with mythological themes, and their infusion with the ambivalence that is often addressed toward the true parents.
  • (6) The whole proves his introversion, ambivalence, hypersensitivity, obstinancy, anxieties, behavioral anomalies, a life rich in fantasies and his underestimation of his own literary work.
  • (7) I thought: this is a country of law and they will help me get my rights.” She is so fond of the child she looked after for 18 months that she feels ambivalent about any possible prosecution of the parents, her ex-employers.
  • (8) It was noted that apart from these two factors, these drinking drivers were equally ambivalent in their attitudes toward alcoholism and the alcoholic when compared to the norm group.
  • (9) They were called 'the give-uppers', 'the clenchers', 'the refocusers' and 'the ambivalents'.
  • (10) Of the 133 pregnancies that ended in childbirth, 59.4% of the mothers felt that the refusal had been completely justified, 24.8% were ambivalent, and 15.8% felt that the refusal had been unjustified.
  • (11) Even many faculty members, including the school's president, Sister Mary Tracy, were ambivalent about the need to let go a competent and popular teacher.
  • (12) Responses of avoidant, ambivalent and controlling groups showed elements of the same organization revealed in reunion behaviour.
  • (13) O'Donnell cautions against adopting an absolute rule of always disclosing everything, and acknowledges the difficulties of coping with patient ambivalence on the issue.
  • (14) The opening lines of Hill's first completed (but second to be published) novel, Fell of Dark (1971), were clearly prophetic: "I possess the Englishman's usual ambivalent attitude to the police.
  • (15) They found, in men: an inability to abandon fertility as lost (with denial of sterility); ambivalence, castration anxiety and a feeling of being excluded from the mother-child symbiosis with later acceptance of loss of fertility and (sometimes excessively) identification with the "mother".
  • (16) Results indicated that psychiatric patients (N = 66): a) viewed both parents more negatively than did members of a matched sample of 66 normal subjects; b) expressed significantly greater ambivalence regarding both parents than did normal subjects; and c) described both parents at a more primitive conceptual level than did normal subjects.
  • (17) The method to overcome the resistance to dental attention due to anguish is to establish a good relation-ship between the dentist and the patient, a good management of the ambivalent feeling of the child and the elimination of the phenomenon of transference.
  • (18) When controlled for sex, additional symptom differences were found for female schizophrenics; blacks were more often excited, ambivalent, rigid and dysphoric.
  • (19) Transsexuals who had not undergone surgery, although it had been offered to them providing they fulfilled the usual requirements, were classified into various subgroups, measured according to their attitude towards sex reassignment surgery: they were transsexuals with an unaltered wish for surgery, transsexuals who were ambivalent towards surgery (hesitating patients), and transsexuals who had relinquished their wish for surgery and lived in the initial gender role.
  • (20) These feelings of ambivalence, emotional instability, and sometimes even hostility toward the surgeon make the male aesthetic patient more of a psychological risk than the female aesthetic patient.

Blithe


Definition:

  • (a.) Gay; merry; sprightly; joyous; glad; cheerful; as, a blithe spirit.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) On Wednesday, the ire of the marchers was focused on all those Lib Dems who blithely signed the NUS's anti-fees pledge ("I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative" – yesterday, Nick Clegg limply said that he "should have been more careful" than to put his name to it).
  • (2) Instead, the spending review blithely asserted "couples with children must work 24 hours per week between them" in order to get a credit that is worth up to an annual maximum of £3,870.
  • (3) Last month, for example, the Daily Telegraph's Peter Oborne bemoaned their "devastating" fate, in a piece worth quoting at reasonable length, if only to prove that the idea of an out-of-touch elite blithely wreaking havoc is not the preserve of hard-bitten lefties.
  • (4) This is why, you see, people with rucksacks pummel all those in their immediate vicinity with their giant sacks as they trundle on their way, whacking them about as they blithely move about trains, pavements or any other public area.
  • (5) These films were a blithe rebuttal of the critic Edward Said’s insight that, in a novel like Mansfield Park, the “English” story necessarily concealed the story, located elsewhere but inextricable from the main narrative, of a West Indian sugar plantation.
  • (6) Click here for the Magic in the Moonlight trailer Compared with the gloomy ruminations on ageing and aspiration that characterised the well-received Blue Jasmine, which won Cate Blanchett an Oscar , this is Allen going back to the knockabout farce and blithe May-December couplings that populate his lighter films.
  • (7) This narrative is a form of manufacture of innocence to mask a great crime: what your script blithely calls "the detainee program".
  • (8) Here lies our greatest risk, one insufficiently appreciated by those who so blithely accept the tentacles of corporation, press and state insinuating their way into the private sphere.
  • (9) When he arrived at the venue and was confronted by a motley horde of fans, tipped off by a tweet, instead of sidling in the back to pace about alone in a corridor, like a normal human would, Fry blithely faced the crowd, chatting and signing autographs.
  • (10) She says she "naively stumbled into the campaign", starting the petition on Change.org, which she found through a Google search, and setting her target at a blithely optimistic 1m signatures.
  • (11) I have a concern that there are too many of them – and most will gather dust on shelves, and hospitals will go blithely on as they always have.
  • (12) But they blithely ignore the fact that wealth isn't being created under the existing broken economic model.
  • (13) Mr Osborne can hardly not know this, but he continues blithely to define living within our means as a government challenge, rather than a wider challenge to the entire public and private sector.
  • (14) Yes, when we all had the blithe assumption that houses would always rise in value, that bankers were always going to get £3m bonuses.
  • (15) In a fascinating recent article the economist Tyler Cowen pointed out the problem with blithe assumptions about a better future – they miss out on the history of what actually happened in the great industrial transformations of the past.
  • (16) Phone jammed to her ear, laptop open on her knee, she was blithely conducting a conference call while wearing highlighter foils.
  • (17) The original sin of the euro-enthusiasts was to settle the politics first and then blithely assume that the economics would sort themselves out.
  • (18) This distinction, popularised by Michael Ignatieff in the mid-1990s, has received much debate, which Bragg blithely ignores.
  • (19) It’s just interesting that home advantage – the chance to build a rapport with local audiences; familiarity with local culture, etc – is being blithely squandered.
  • (20) But clearly there is a difference between blithely hurtling into catastrophe and trying to lead a party away from it.