Addressing disparities: The impact of a lesbian,gay, bisexual,and transgender graduate counselling course

Background: Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals experience serious mental health disparities and treatment inequities. Counsellor education has been identified as both a contributing factor to these problems as well as an ameliorating mechanism to address these inequalities. Aim: The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the impact of an LGBT‐affirmative counselling course. Method: A total of 23 students enrolled in a graduate LGBT counselling course were administered the Sexual Orientation Counselor Competency Scale (SOCCS, Bidell, 2005) and the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Affirmative Counseling Self‐Efficacy Inventory (LGB‐CSI, Dillon & Worthington, 2003) pre‐ and post‐course. In addition, a comparison group of 23 matched counselling students was obtained from an existing data source in order to make further assessments of the course's effectiveness. Those in the comparison group were not enrolled in the LGBT course, but were administered the SOCCS at analogous time intervals. Results: After completing the LGBT course, enrolled students demonstrated significant improvements regarding their sexual orientation counsellor competency and self‐efficacy. In addition, these students showed significant gains in SOCCS scores versus those in the comparison group. Implications: Results from this study show the positive effect a full‐credit LGBT psychotherapy course can have on graduate counselling students' sexual orientation counsellor competency and self‐efficacy. The findings also indicate that such a course can significantly impact counselling skills, a facet of LGBT cultural competency found to be the most attenuated. Findings are discussed in conjunction with LGBT‐affirmative counsellor training and clinical practice.     

Seventh Graders' Academic Achievement,Creativity, and Ability to Construct a Cross‐domain Concept Map — A Brain Function Perspective

This study proposes an interactive model of cross‐domain concept mapping with an emphasis on brain functions, and it further investigates the relationships between academic achievement, creative thinking, and cross‐domain concept mapping. Sixty‐nine seventh graders participated in this study which employed two 50–minute instructional sessions. The findings suggest that (a) the seventh graders may lack the awareness or ability to integrate knowledge and make connections between their learning and life experiences; (b) creative thinking, academic learning and concept mapping share similar capacities; and (c) cross‐domain concept mapping, which fosters cross‐domain information integration and connections between learning and life experiences, can be an efficient mental tool in understanding a student's creative thinking and academic learning.     

Brain bases of morphological processing in Chinese‐English bilingual children

Can bilingual exposure impact children's neural circuitry for learning to read? To answer this question, we investigated the brain bases of morphological awareness, one of the key spoken language abilities for learning to read in English and Chinese. Bilingual Chinese‐English and monolingual English children (N = 22, ages 7–12) completed morphological tasks that best characterize each of their languages: compound morphology in Chinese (e.g. basket + ball = basketball) and derivational morphology in English (e.g. re + do = redo). In contrast to monolinguals, bilinguals showed greater activation in the left middle temporal region, suggesting that bilingual exposure to Chinese impacts the functionality of brain regions supporting semantic abilities. Similar to monolinguals, bilinguals showed greater activation in the left inferior frontal region [BA 45] in English than Chinese, suggesting that young bilinguals form language‐specific neural representations. The findings offer new insights to inform bilingual and cross‐linguistic models of language and literacy acquisition.     

Philosophy of Education: Aim,Theory, Common Sense,and Research – Richard Pring

Books reviewed: Philosophy of Education: Aim, Theory, Common Sense, and Research. By Richard Pring. London: Continuum, 2004. viii + 280 pages. ISBN 08264‐7239‐7.     

Effects of nutritional supplements on aggression,rule‐breaking,and psychopathology among young adult prisoners

Objective: In an earlier study, improvement of dietary status with food supplements led to a reduction in antisocial behavior among prisoners. Based on these earlier findings, a study of the effects of food supplements on aggression, rule‐breaking, and psychopathology was conducted among young Dutch prisoners. Methods: Two hundred and twenty‐one young adult prisoners (mean age=21.0, range 18–25 years) received nutritional supplements containing vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids or placebos, over a period of 1–3 months. Results: As in the earlier (British) study, reported incidents were significantly reduced (P=.017, one‐tailed) in the active condition (n=115), as compared with placebo (n=106). Other assessments, however, revealed no significant reductions in aggressiveness or psychiatric symptoms. Conclusion: As the incidents reported concerned aggressive and rule‐breaking behavior as observed by the prison staff, the results are considered to be promising. However, as no significant improvements were found in a number of other (self‐reported) outcome measures, the results should be interpreted with caution. Aggr. Behav. 36:117–126, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions,Departments, and General Education – Barbara E. Walvoord

Books reviewed: Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education. By Barbara E. Walvoord. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey‐Bass Publishers, 2004. xiii + 144 pages. ISBN 0‐7879‐7311‐4.     

Welfare,Autonomy, and the Autonomy Fallacy

In this article, I subject the claim that autonomous choice is an intrinsic welfare benefit to critical scrutiny. My argument begins by discussing perhaps the most influential argument in favor of the intrinsic value of autonomy: the argument from deference. In response, I hold that this argument displays what I call the ‘Autonomy Fallacy’: the argument from deference has no power to support the intrinsic value of autonomy in comparison to the important evaluative significance of bare self‐direction (autonomous or not) or what I call ‘self‐direction tout court’. I defend the claim that the Autonomy Fallacy really is a fallacy, and show that my examination of the argument from deference has wider reverberations. Once we clearly distinguish between autonomy and self‐direction tout court, it becomes much less plausible to say that autonomy of itself is an intrinsic welfare benefit.     

Cultural influences on body dissatisfaction,body change behaviours,and disordered eating of Japanese adolescents

We administered a paper‐and‐pencil questionnaire to 133 female and 99 male Japanese high school students 13–18 years old (M = 15.9, SD = 1.57) from the Kansai area to examine cultural influences on their body image and body change behaviours. Our aim was to ascertain the independent and combined influences from traditional Japanese, modern Japanese, and Western values. Cluster analyses identified four ‘acculturative’ groups: ‘anti‐modern’, ‘traditional’, ‘pro‐modern/anti‐traditional’, and ‘pro‐Western/anti‐Japanese’. Pro‐modern and pro‐Western adolescents were most dissatisfied with their bodies, and pro‐Western adolescents were also most likely to attempt weight loss. The results demonstrate the value of assessing cultural interactions in Japan along three dimensions.     

The Self‐Evidencing Brain

An exciting theory in neuroscience is that the brain is an organ for prediction error minimization (PEM). This theory is rapidly gaining influence and is set to dominate the science of mind and brain in the years to come. PEM has extreme explanatory ambition, and profound philosophical implications. Here, I assume the theory, briefly explain it, and then I argue that PEM implies that the brain is essentially self‐evidencing. This means it is imperative to identify an evidentiary boundary between the brain and its environment. This boundary defines the mind‐world relation, opens the door to skepticism, and makes the mind transpire as more inferentially secluded and neurocentrically skull‐bound than many would nowadays think. Therefore, PEM somewhat deflates contemporary hypotheses that cognition is extended, embodied and enactive; however, it can nevertheless accommodate the kinds of cases that fuel these hypotheses.     

In judo,Randori (free fight) and Kata (highly ritualized fight) differentially change plasma cortisol,testosterone, and interleukin levels in male participants

Two forms of competitive encounters namely Randori (free fight) and Kata (highly ritualized fight) were studied in 22 professional male judo fighters. The dyadic, symmetrical (in terms of body weight and fighting ability) encounters were videotaped to assess relationships between agonistic behavior and individual variations in plasma levels of testosterone (T), cortisol (C) and interleukins (IL‐6 and IL‐1β) measured before and after the competition. Unremarkably, winners showed longer attack but devoted less time to defensive behaviors when compared to losers. T increased only during Randori but the individual pre‐ and post‐competition T levels recorded in such fights were strongly correlated with the corresponding measures in the Kata for the same individuals. Interestingly, the pre‐ and post‐Randori competition T levels were higher in losers than in winners and T variations positively correlated with the frequencies of attacks and with the duration of defensive postures. The T response shows individual variation and seems to reflect evaluation of the likelihood of winning or losing. Both Randori and Kata induced a marked C increase, although the pre‐ and post‐Randori hormonal titers were higher than those found for the Kata. IL‐6 significantly increased between the pre‐ and the post‐Randori competition, but no such changes occurred during the Kata. No correlations were found between individual pre‐ and post‐competition C and IL‐6 and IL‐1β levels in either Randori or Kata. This suggests that C and cytokine release are unrelated to emotional or cognitive perception of the possible outcome of fighting but are a consequence of general motor activity. Martial arts appear to provide good human models to understand: (a) the relationships between conflict, hormones and the immune system and (b) the relationships between mood and physiological responses to competitive aggression. Aggr. Behav. 32:1–9, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Feminist Political Theory without Apology: Anna Doyle Wheeler,William Thompson,and the Appeal of One Half the Human Race,Women

Anna Doyle Wheeler was a nineteenth‐century, Irish‐born socialist and feminist. She and another Irish‐born socialist and feminist, William Thompson, produced a book‐length critique in 1825, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women: Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery: In Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill's Celebrated “Article on Government,” to refute the claims of liberal philosopher James Mill in 1820 that women did not need to be enfranchised. In so doing the Appeal undermined the philosophical credibility of Mill's liberal utilitarianism. The Appeal exposed the hypocrisy of the language of contract (whether social, sexual, or marriage) by showing that men's freedom and claims to rights presupposed the unfreedom and sexual subjugation of women. The article argues that the Appeal was an original formulation of feminist political theory that still retains its relevance in the twenty‐first century.     

Accentuating the positive: The gendered identities of male problem‐drinkers,and the questions these pose for the counselling profession

Background: Few published studies have addressed the male experience of alcohol dependency. Aim: This paper seeks to address this deficiency and to highlight aspects of the male experience relevant to the counselling and psychotherapy profession. Methods: Six men in recovery from alcohol dependency participated in semi‐structured interviews. Findings: A grounded theory analysis elicited five core categories, Beginning to Drink, Paying for Gain with Pain, Reaching Rock Bottom, Struggling to Recover and Leading a New Life. Despite the pain they had experienced, participants' narratives were matter‐of‐fact and goal‐oriented. Low self‐esteem was expressed indirectly. Conclusions: These findings are consistent with socialisation models of alcoholism. Counsellors, and the wider profession, must be alert for the male under‐reporting of emotional distress.     

The Perceiver's Share: Realism, Scepticism, and Response Dependence

Abstract: Response‐dispositional (RD) properties are standardly defined as those that involve an object's appearing thus or thus to some perceptually well‐equipped observer under specified epistemic conditions. The paradigm instance is that of colour or other such Lockean “secondary qualities”, as distinct from those—like shape and size—that pertain to the object itself, quite apart from anyone's perception. This idea has lately been thought to offer a promising alternative to the deadlocked dispute between hard‐line ‘metaphysical’ realists and subjectivists, projectivists, social constructivists, or hard‐line anti‐realists. A chief source text is Plato's Euthyphro, where the issue is posed in ethical terms: do the gods infallibly approve virtuous acts on account of their divine moral omniscience or are virtuous acts just those the gods approve? Among the areas proposed as amenable to an RD approach are epistemology, ethics, political theory, and philosophy of mathematics. It is claimed that by making due allowance for the involvement of normalised or optimised human responses one can steer a course between the twin poles of an objectivist realism that places truth beyond our cognitive grasp and an epistemic conception that confines truth within the limits of humanly attainable proof, knowledge, or verification. Here I argue—on the contrary—that RD approaches can be shown to offer nothing more than a variant of the same old realist versus anti‐realist dilemma. That is, they work out either as a trivial (tautologous) claim that ‘truth’ simply equates with ‘best judgement’ in the ideal (quasi‐objective) limit or as the claim—advanced by anti‐realists like Michael Dummett—that we cannot form any adequate conception of objective (recognition‐transcendent) truths. After looking at this issue in various contexts of debate, I conclude that one useful (if pyrrhic) outcome is to demonstrate the non‐availability of any middle‐ground stance. We are left with the strictly unavoidable choice between a realist or objectivist approach and one that assimilates truth to the consensus of accredited best opinion. This latter amounts to a roundabout, elaborately qualified version of the anti‐realist case.     

The effects of length and transposed‐letter similarity in lexical decision: Evidence with beginning,intermediate, and adult readers

Do length and transposed‐letter effects reflect developmental changes on reading acquisition in a transparent orthography? Can computational models of visual word recognition accommodate these changes? To answer these questions, we carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment with Spanish beginning, intermediate, and adult readers (N=36, 44, and 39; average age: 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively). Target words were either short or long (6.5 vs. 8.5 letters), and transposed‐letter primes were formed by the transposition of two letters (e.g. aminal–ANIMAL) or by the substitution of two letters (orthographic control: arisal–ANIMAL). Children showed a robust length effect (i.e. long words were read slower than short words) that vanished in adults. In addition, both children and young adults showed a transposed‐letter priming effect relative to the control condition. A robust transposed‐letter priming effect was also observed in non‐word reading, which strongly suggests that this effect occurs at an early prelexical level. Taken together, the results reveal that children evolve from a letter‐by‐letter reading to a direct lexical access and that the lexical decision task successfully captures the changing strategies used by beginning, intermediate, and adult readers. We examine the implications of these findings for the recent models of visual word recognition.     

Post‐Secularism,Secular Theology,and the Names of the Real

This article disputes the common view of religious and secular as oppositional terms. Our contemporary world is post‐secularist, because secularism is a modern ideology that imagines a strict separation of the religious and the political, where religion becomes a purely private affair. This situation is compromised by the “return” of religion in political terms. Constructively, following Jacques Lacan, we can say that secular theology concerns the Real; and with François Laruelle, we can think about a non‐theology that complements what he calls non‐philosophy. Finally, I speculate on three names of the Real: energy, capital, and nomos.     

Investigating the relationship between past contraceptive behaviour,self‐efficacy,and anticipated shame and guilt in sexual contexts among Norwegian adolescents

What are the relationships between self‐efficacy when communicating to the partner about use of contraception, stopping undesired intercourse, and perceived self‐conscious emotions in sexual contexts? How does past contraceptive behaviour influence perceived self‐efficacy? These research questions were studied among 399 10th grade students with coital experience in the county Nordland in Norway. Two dimensions of perceived emotional responses were identified in a hypothetical situation related to communicating to the partner about use of contraception, namely Shame and Emotional intimacy. Two dimensions were also identified with regard to anticipated emotional responses in a hypothetical situation related to stopping undesired intercourse: Guilt and responsibility and Emotional intimacy. Most of the boys and girls reported that they would react with positive emotions in both hypothetical situations. Path models were constructed with the affective dimensions and self‐esteem as mediating variables between past contraceptive behaviour and contextual self‐efficacy. Past behaviour influenced communication self‐efficacy indirectly via Shame, and Shame had a direct effect upon self‐efficacy. Guilt and responsibility had a direct effect upon stop‐self‐efficacy. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Care,Narrativity, and the Nature of Disponibilité

This paper attempts to make more explicit the relationship between narrativity and feminist care ethics. The central concern is the way in which narrativity carries the semantic load that some accounts of feminist care ethics imply but leave hanging. In so doing, some feminist theorists of care‐based ethics then undervalue the major contribution that narrativity provides to care ethics: it carries the semantic load that is essential to the best care. In this article, I defend the narrative as the central medium though which we make sense of and communicate our lives and their attendant hopes and cares. More than just working with the narrative of the cared‐for, caring is about investing in the narrative of the cared‐for in order to meet the needs of this cared‐for and how this narrative might turn out. I will further demonstrate how the attitude of caring or investing in a narrative would amount to what Gabriel Marcel has described as the attitude of disponibilité.     

Aggressive behavior,related conduct problems,and variation in genes affecting dopamine turnover

A number of dopamine‐related genes have been implicated in the etiology of violent behavior and conduct problems. Of these genes, the ones that code for the enzymes that influence the turnover of dopamine (DA) have received the most attention. In this study, we investigated 12 genetic polymorphisms in four genes involved with DA functioning (COMT, MAOA and MAOB, and DβH) in 179 incarcerated male Russian adolescents and two groups of matched controls: boys without criminal records referred to by their teachers as (a) “troubled‐behavior‐free” boys, n=182; and (b) “troubled‐behavior” boys, n=60. The participants were classified as (1) being incarcerated or not, (2) having the DSM‐IV diagnosis of conduct disorder (CD) or not, and (3) having committed violent or nonviolent crimes (for the incarcerated individuals only). The findings indicate that, although no single genetic variant in any of the four genes differentiated individuals in the investigated groups, various linear combinations (i.e., haplotypes) and nonlinear combinations (i.e., interactions between variants within and across genes) of genetic variants resulted in informative and robust classifications for two of the three groupings. These combinations of genetic variants differentiated individuals in incarceration vs. nonincarcerated and CD vs. no‐CD groups; no informative combinations were established consistently for the grouping by crime within the incarcerated individuals. This study underscores the importance of considering multiple rather than single markers within candidate genes and their additive and interactive combinations, both with themselves and with nongenetic indicators, while attempting to understand the genetic background of such complex behaviors as serious conduct problems. Aggr. Behav. 36:158–176, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Emotions,Decisions, and the Brain

This article presents a commentary on the Appraisal‐Tendency Framework (ATF) developed by Lerner and her colleagues. The article explores ways by which the ATF can be extended including (a) incorporating elements from other frameworks, (b) incorporating the role of arousal, (c) exploring individual‐difference factors, and (d) examining the neural correlates of some of the key elements of the ATF. The article concludes with a discussion of the promise that decision neuroscience offers to further enrich an already exciting and thriving area of research in emotion and decision making.     

The Holy Spirit in EG,TTL, and CTC: The Pneumatological Impulse for Christian Mission

This article examines the correspondence in the pneumatological impulse for mission among three documents: Evangelii Gaudium (EG), Together towards Life (TTL), and The Cape Town Commitment (CTC). This consonance in EG, TTL, and CTC is significant given the dissonance on theological and missiological perspectives across the representing ecclesial bodies since the mid‐20th century. Following a review of pneumatology in these three documents, the paper proposes a forward‐looking trajectory to a more expansive view of the Spirit's ever‐mysterious operations in the church, in missions, and in the world.