Be All That You Can Be: Enhancing Human Performance1

Key findings and conclusions from a landmark study conducted by a National Research Council Committee are discussed. The 12‐year study was divided into 4 phases that covered topics of individual, small group, and organizational performance. Concentrating primarily on techniques with strong claims for enhancing performance, the committee found little support for some (e.g., sleep learning, meditation, parapsychological techniques, hypnosis, total quality management) and stronger support for others (e.g., mental practice, expert modeling, cooperative learning, team training, practice to optimize transfer of cognitive and social skills). Insights were also obtained about the roles of expectancy effects, belief perseverance, emotions, thought suppression, and organizational cultures. The article highlights the continuing contributions made by committee members in such areas as transfer, expert modeling, self‐efficacy, mental practice, organizational design and enhanced performance, and conflict resolution.     

Death and Dying in Camus' The Plague

ABSTRACT: Albert Camus' allegorical novel The Plague provides meaningful insight into the process of death and dying. As with other literary masterpieces the author shares with his audience his concern with and knowledge of the vicissitudes of the human condition. In The Plague Camus employs the reactions and responses of a community and its citizenry to an epidemic of the bubonic plague as a symbolic representation of the individual's grappling with death and dying. His main themes are those of separation and exile, despair and despondency, and helplessness and hopefulness.     

Alcott's Little Women: A Study in Death and Dying

This article examines one approach to helping counselor trainees and clients gain insight into the death and dying process and its stages, and supports the use of literature as a counseling tool for helping clients confronted with the death or dying experience.     

Skiing and its Discontents: Assessing the Turist Experience from a Psychoanalytical,a Neuroscientific and a Sport Philosophical Perspective

Abstract

This article addresses the question whether skiing as a nature sport enables practitioners to develop a rapport with nature, or rather estranges and insulates them from their mountainous ambiance. To address this question, I analyse a recent skiing movie (Turist, 2014) from a psychoanalytical perspective (skiing as a quest for self-knowledge and as therapy) and from a neuro-scientific perspective (ski resorts as laboratory settings for testing physical and psychic responses to a variety of cues). I conclude that Jean-Paul Sartre’s classical but egocentric account of his skiing experiences disavows the technicity involved in contemporary skiing as a sportive practice for the affluent masses, which actually represents an urbanisation of the sublime, symptomatic for the current era (the anthropocene).     

Reading and Writing: Psychoanalytical Treatment in a Case of Paranoia

Difficulties encountered in clinical work with psychoses require psychoanalytical approaches different from those used for treating neurosis. The authors use a clinical case of a paranoiac patient to highlight the role played by writing, drawing, and painting in the psychoanalytical treatment of psychosis. They also discuss the role of the reader-analyst in this patient’s transferential process, which led to the emergence of a new subjectivity.     

Symbols and Similarity: You Can Get Too Much of a Good Thing

A method for eliciting extended explanations was used to evaluate predictions from the “theory-theory” account of developing psychological reasoning. Children were repeatedly asked to explain the actions or emotions of story characters with false beliefs. Questioning elicited false belief attributions in half of 3-year-olds (Study 1, N = 16, age M = 3;6) and most 4-year-olds who failed belief prediction tasks (Study 2, N = 30, M = 4;5). In Study 3, 30 prediction failers (M = 5;1) gave significantly more false belief explanations for emotions than for actions. Across the studies, desire and emotion explanations emerged early and often, reflecting the primacy of these constructs in the children's understanding of psychological causality. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for developmental mechanism.     

What You Don't Know Can Help You: The Ethics of Placebo Treatment

Is it permissible for a doctor or nurse to knowingly administer a placebo in a clinical setting? There is certainly something suspicious about it: placebos are typically said to be ‘sham’ treatments, with no ‘active’ properties and so giving a placebo is usually thought to involve tricking or deceiving the patient who expects a genuine treatment. Nonetheless, some physicians have recently suggested that placebo treatments are sometimes the best way to help their patients and can be administered in an honest way. These physicians conclude that placebo treatments are a perfectly acceptable, and ethically unproblematic, mode of treatment. While I grant the common idea that placebos are deceptive is correct, I argue that widespread misunderstandings concerning why this is so has led proponents of placebo treatments to respond to the charge of deception in a way that misses the mark entirely. My goal in this paper, then, is to develop a precise conception of what makes something a placebo, which in turn will clarify the central charge concerning the ethics of placebo treatment, viz. that it is deceptive.     

Sandman,Lars, A Good Death,On the Value of Death and Dying

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

大渐弥留的混沌之态：评《生死有时》一书

在人类命运共同体遭受一场前所未有的大疫威胁之际,上海教育出版社及时地推出了《生死有时》一书。尽管其副标题发问的要点是“美国医院如何型塑死亡”,但这个问题的尖锐性指向几乎是所有的重症医学实践。大疫将人之死的个体性纳入到一个疾病全球化的视野,《生死有时》并没有讨论重大公共卫生危机导致的世界性灾难,然而也能让我们联想到一个存在主义意义的危机问题。那就是大渐弥留的混沌之态。在此书中,涉及生命末端期的混沌问题包括：尊严死何以可能？旨在尊重患者主体性的生前预嘱是否可行？针对重症患者的医疗措施应该何时从常规治疗过渡到临终关怀？

     

"嫁主里面的人"——乡村基督徒姻亲结合的宗教社会学观

乡村社会出现越来越多基督徒与基督徒的姻亲结合,我们通过基督教经典<圣经>投射的神与基督徒、基督徒家庭结构、婚姻行为、婚姻观念的统计,结合婚礼发挥的姻亲结合认同、基督徒群体团结的功能分析,探析基督徒姻亲结合表达的宗教及社会需求所在:乡村基督徒姻亲结合,是信徒构建神圣与世俗秩序的宗教需求,同时,宗教关系的血亲化、家族化,满足了作为基督徒的村民对熟人社会再造的社会需求.     

Why You Can't Kick the Bucket as You Slowly Die: Verbs in Idiom Comprehension

Idiomatic phrases differ in their degree of analyzability. Some idioms are highly decomposable with their parts independently contributing to their overall figurative meaning (e.g. pop the question) while other idioms are nondecomposable with parts that do not contribute to their idiomatic meaning (e.g. kick the bucket). Nonetheless, even the parts of nondecomposable idioms might have a role in determining what they specifically mean. For example, the verb kick, in kick the bucket implies a quickness or suddenness to the death such that kick the bucket means to die suddenly rather than to die slowly. We report the findings of three experiments showing, in different ways, how the action of the verb contributes to the overall figurative meaning for some nondecomposable idioms. Together, these studies suggest that even nondecomposable idioms are not truly frozen as, at least, part of their overall figurative meanings are shaped by the particular verbs used in these phrases.     

论临终者关系生命中的死亡价值建构

通过阐述当今中国死亡价值日渐消解所致苦难,指明死亡价值建构的重要性,挖掘中华传统生死观的底蕴,探讨死亡价值建构的可行性;将关系生命理念引入安宁疗护领域,将其与中华传统生死观对话,总结具有中华文化特色的临终者关系生命向度,并分析关系生命对于临终者死亡价值建构的意义;基于此,聚焦安宁疗护领域,探讨如何通过维护临终者关系生命来帮助其建构死亡价值,以期为构筑和发展具有中华文化特色的安宁疗护照护体系贡献理论和实践智慧。

     

So You,My Children,Can Have a Better Life: A Cambodian American Perspective on the Phenomenology of Intergenerational Communication about Trauma

We address this question: How do Cambodian American young adults come to know about their family’s experiences of trauma? Using a social constructivist critical ideological approach, we developed a phenomenological model describing intergenerational communication about trauma (IGCT) in Cambodian American families. We found IGCT to be an interactional process in which younger and older generations each played a role. IGCT was influenced by the availability of multiple sources of information and opportunities for learning, interpersonal connectedness between the generations, emotional distress tolerance, and having motivation to empathically learn and share. When these factors were abundant, direct interactive IGCT was more likely. When wanting, the IGCT was more disrupted and incoherent, filled with emotionally charged silence and lead to negative attributions. IGCT was a dynamic process that could change over time to accommodate developmental change. Limitations of the findings, clinical implications, and future directions are discussed.