What's the difference between ambivalent and vacillating?

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.

Vacillating


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Vacillate
  • (a.) Inclined to fluctuate; wavering.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Significant associations were found in the relationship of suicide potential to verbal attack by spouse (p = .03), vacillation in the last two weeks (p = .02), and vacillation since the first serious discussion of divorce (p = .02).
  • (2) On reversed sequences they vacillated between reproducing the events as modeled and "correcting" them to canonical order.
  • (3) Culture conditions may provide an environment that permits proliferating glial cells to vacillate in their selection of a specific lineage.
  • (4) Trump had criticised Obama for vacillation and weakness.
  • (5) Relations between the White House and Congress have vacillated between close coordination one moment and leaving the other in the dark the next.
  • (6) Traditionally, NGOs vacillate between guilt and hope in their communications.
  • (7) Stuck between the cultist Friends of Radio 3 and Global Radio’s sprightly three-times-the-size Classic FM, the network vacillates between populist copying and public service broadcasting stodge.
  • (8) When first confronted by Arab political revolutions, Britain vacillated, reluctant to abandon useful and grubby friendship with corrupt regimes.
  • (9) Later she acquiesced in Ronald Reagan's decision to bomb Gaddafi, and famously told George Bush senior not to go wobbly on her as he vacillated over ousting Saddam's forces, which had invaded Kuwait.
  • (10) Chancellor George Osborne has made it even harder for small businesses to compete against multinationals by cutting the corporate tax rate, and presided over a collapse in business investment, particularly in the hugely promising 'green sector', which has suffered hugely from the government's inept vacillating on energy policy.
  • (11) He isn't, as Miliband is accused of being, weak, vacillating, unadventurous and academic.
  • (12) Much of his work in the last half of his life, and much of his continuing happiness, was inspired by Penny the second, whose enormous strengths of decency and determination creatively challenged his own vacillation and reluctance to make moral judgments.
  • (13) As one works through the stressful event, the victim vacillates between intrusion and avoidance, with the magnitude of those oscillations being much stronger at first.
  • (14) Major procedures included object permanence, vacillation, memory for locations and pictures, and reaction to unfamiliar adults and to separation.
  • (15) In Study 2, conducted four-months after Study 1, stable pairs (20 maintained mutual, MM) and vacillating ones (six growing mutual, GM; 11 decayed mutual, DM) were selected.
  • (16) Mitt Romney has expressed qualified concern about climate change over the years, and then vacillated about how much of it is human-caused and whether we should try to do anything about it.
  • (17) In the space of just a few weeks Moscow has been making the weather on the crisis – by seizing the initiative where the US and others have vacillated and failed.
  • (18) The cast of The Five vacillated between feigned solemnity and jocular NFL pregame oafishness.
  • (19) Most patients showed little denial throughout the period of observation, but more vulnerable patients tended to vacillate between denial and acceptance.
  • (20) Gerwig played the vacillating temptress in Hannah Takes the Stairs , the long-distance lover in Nights and Weekends , a jittery scream queen in the Duplass brothers’ Baghead .