The institution of the institutional practice of psychology: health care reform and psychology's future workforce

Implications for the future of professional psychology are discussed and related to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, patient-centered health care homes and accountable care organizations, and the growing importance of interprofessional competencies in health care. The need for increased information about the psychology workforce is related to the history of the institutional practice of psychology and how that data must be used to plan for the supply of psychologists required to meet the service demands of the changing health care system. Several challenges to the field of psychology are offered, along with steps that must be taken by the profession to prepare for increased institutionally based health care services in the future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).     

Family therapy alone is not enough or the dirty story of Dorian

When serious malfunctioning of an individual occurs in a secondary system (school, hospital, rehabilitation center, dormitory setting), the tendency often is to focus on the family as both the cause of the malfunctioning and the arena of intervention. Many times, family therapy alone is not enough because a parallel destructive constellation has formed around the Identified Patient in the secondary system as well and the symptoms catalyze that system's own maladaptive patterns. Often the IP is caught in the web of rigid pathological patterns of interactions between the two systems. A unique model of conjoined intersystemic intervention for dealing with such resistance to change is presented.     

The story of this special issue on critical perspectives in work and organizational psychology

In this editorial, we tell the story of how the Special Issue on Critical Perspectives in Work and Organizational Psychology (CWOP) came about, how it fits within the broader agenda of building a critical community within Work and Organizational Psychology, and how future research and thought may be inspired by the collection of critical papers related to work and organizational psychology. We introduce the term “criticalizing” as a key concept in how the Special Issue was developed by the editorial team and the authors. Criticalizing moves beyond fixed static notions of “critical” scholarship toward a process of engaging in more fluid, expansive, and creative perspectives on the scholarship within work and organizational psychology. We illustrate how the set of papers within the Special Issue engages in such criticalizing of the field and offer new ways of thinking about and researching relevant topics in work and organizational psychology.     

Parasite stress is not so critical to the history of religions or major modern group formations

Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) central hypothesis is that strong in-group norms were formed in part to foster parochial social alliances so as to enable cultural groups to adaptively respond to parasite stress. Applied to ancestral hominid environments, the story fits with evolutionary theory and the fragmentary data available on early hominid social formations and their geographical distributions. Applied to modern social formations, however, the arguments and inferences from data are problematic.     

Gods and REMS: The implications of recent dream research for the psychology of religion

Throughout history dreams have been primarily the province of religion. People in many cultures have looked to dreams as sources of spiritual insight and divine revelation. The relationship between traditional religious views of dreams and modern psychological views of dreams has long interested psychologists of religion—for dreams are a uniquely fertile subject for comparing religious and psychological understandings of human experience. In recent years there have been many revolutionary discoveries in dream research, discoveries that have taken us far beyond the seminal works of Freud, Jung, and the early sleep laboratory researchers. This essay describes the work of three leading contemporary dream researchers (neurophysiologist J. Allan Hobson, psychologist Stephen LaBerge, and anthropologist Barbara Tedlock) and evaluates the implications of their findings for our understanding of the religious dimensions of dreams. The essay concludes with some reflections on the valuable role of dream study in the psychology of religion. The primary claim is that recent dream research can make important contributions to current psychology of religion discussions about such issues as interdisciplinary inquiry, hermeneutics, the cross-cultural study of religious experience, the cultural and religious context of modern psychology, and the practical concerns of pastoral counselors.This essay is based on a paper presented on November 25 at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Kansas City, Missouri.     

Reflections on the recent history and the present challenges of personality psychology

The recent history of personality psychology is rapidly reviewed with the aim of indicating significant cues of the progress which has taken place and of the problems which are still pending. In this regard, a three-stage model of progress provides the arguments which introduce personality psychology into the domain of ‘complexity’. Readmission of individual differences in the investigation of basic processes, attention to marginal perturbances in between non-significant deviations, and use of circumplex models to make sense of multiple facets of phenomena are indicated as viable avenues to the complexity of personality psychology.     

The moral of the story: The importance of applying an ethics lens to the teaching of positive psychology

In a short-time positive psychology has progressed into a scientific and multidisciplinary field of enquiry. It is now necessary for positive psychology to develop clear practice standards which will be collectively endorsed and upheld by members and those undergoing training in positive psychology. Teachers of positive psychology are in a prime position to disseminate ethical knowledge. Moreover, the objectives of ethics and positive psychology are closely aligned in their focus on achieving optimal outcomes; hence, the pairing of the two is ideal. Consequently, it would be ironic if positive psychology did not explicitly embrace ethical standards in guiding those training for a future in positive psychology. As a professional entity, positive psychology needs to provide more direction and encouragement for teachers, students, scholars and practitioners of positive psychology, and in time, this should be codified and discussed in positive psychology university degrees to promote consistency among its future members.     

The assessment of cognitive procedural learning in amnesia: why the tower of Hanoi has fallen down

The Tower of Hanoi has been widely accepted as an evaluation of cognitive procedural learning in amnesia but inconsistent findings have raised questions about the nature of the learning process involved in this task. This article presents the performance of a hippocampal amnesic, MS, who, showing poor learning across daily sessions of a formal evaluation, subsequently solved the puzzle through spontaneous use of a declarative-level strategy (the odd-even rule), suggesting that his primary approach to the task was the deployment of declarative solution-searching strategies. The presented data suggest normal learning within daily sessions, but subnormal learning across daily sessions due to the forgetting of acquired declarative information. It is suggested that tasks that are potentially solvable by an algorithm or rule, as is the Tower of Hanoi, be regarded as inappropriate for use in cognitive procedural assessments.     

Holistic thinking is not the whole story: alternative or adjunct approaches for increasing the accuracy of legal evaluations

There are a number of very helpful, but often underutilized, principles and procedures that can augment decision making in clinical and legal settings. Psychologists often restrict their range of decision-making strategies and options--at the cost of maximizing diagnostic and predictive accuracy--in part as the result of "ontological-epistemological one-worldedness" (O-E O-W). However, no philosophical, logical, or scientific necessity demands strict consistency between views regarding the nature of psychological phenomena and views about how to best assess or learn about those phenomena. Relaxing this unnecessary and largely psychologically-based O-E O-W may promote greater comfort with and utilization of the methods that are discussed in this article for increasing judgmental accuracy.     

The role of meaning in inflection: why the past tense does not require a rule

How do we produce the past tenses of verbs? For the last 20 years this question has been the focal domain for conflicting theories of language, knowledge representation, and cognitive processing. On one side of the debate have been similarity-based or single-route approaches that propose that all past tenses are formed simply through phonological analogies to existing past tenses stored in memory. On the other side of the debate are rule-based or dual-route approaches which agree that phonological analogy is important for producing irregular past tenses (e.g., think-->thought), but argue that regular past tenses (e.g., walk-->walked) are generated via a +ed rule and that a principled account of regular inflection can only be given by recourse to explicit rules. This debate has become a crucial battleground for arguments concerning the necessity and importance of abstract mental rules, embracing not only language processing, but also the of nature cognition itself. However, in centering on the roles of phonological similarity and rules, the past tense debate has largely ignored the possible role of semantics in determining inflection. This paper presents five studies that demonstrate a striking and decisive role of semantic similarity in inflection. In fact, semantic factors appear to be more important in inflection than the grammatical considerations put forward by the dual-route account. Further, these new findings provide a new way of discriminating between the claims of single-route (similarity-based) and dual-route (rule-based) approaches. It appears that inflection is carried out through analogical reminding based on semantic and phonological similarity and that a rule-based route is not necessary to account for past tense inflection.     

Attention and the processing of emotional words and names: not so special after all

Abstract— Previous research has suggested that a person's own name or emotionally charged stimuli automatically "grab" attention, potentially challenging limited-capacity theories of perceptual processing. In this study, subjects were shown two digits surrounding a word and asked to make a speeded judgment about whether the parity of the two digits matched. When the subject's own name was presented on a few scattered trials, responses were markedly slowed (replicating a previous study). However, in a subsequent block of trials in which half the words were the subject's name, the slowing did not occur. The same slowing occurred (but even more fleetingly) when an emotionally charged word was presented between the digits. When the name was embedded among multiple distractor words, it ceased to slow reaction times. The results suggest that perceptual analysis of high-priority stimuli is subject to the usual capacity limitations of other stimuli, but when enough capacity is available for a high-priority stimulus to be perceived, a transient surprise reaction may interrupt ongoing processing.     

The development of adaptive competence: Why cultural psychology is necessary and not just nice

I argue that developmental psychologists need to view cultural approaches to cognitive development as necessary and not just nice. Cultural psychology enables one to study problems one otherwise might not be able to study and also to identify solutions to problems that might be obscured or even distorted if one looked only at results within a single culture (usually, one’s own). I describe work my colleagues and I have done around the world addressing specific problems such as what does it mean to be adaptively intelligent in various cultures, how does illness affect intellectual functioning, and what do people even mean by “intelligence” in different cultures. The results show that cognitive development can be fully understood only if one looks beyond one’s own cultural boundaries and preconceptions. The article further argues that a theory of successful intelligence can be a useful way of studying phenomena of intellectual development within a cultural framework.     

The effects of attributions of intent and apology on forgiveness: When saying sorry may not help the story

Despite the oft-cited positive effects of an apology on forgiveness, forgiveness does not always follow. In three studies we tested the ironic notion that, following an interpersonal transgression, an apology following an attribution of intent might further hinder, rather than benefit, the forgiveness process. The findings of three studies were systematically replicated and supported our primary prediction that, following attributions of intent, saying sorry does not always lead to forgiveness. When offenders intentionally committed a transgression, forgiveness was less likely following an apology. However, when offenses were unintentional, forgiveness was more likely following an apology. We also showed that these effects were explained by participants’ impression of the transgressor.