A Review of Jesus: A Psychological Biography

Capps's book uses historical, sociological, and psychological methods to probe the personal identity and self-understanding of Jesus. This reviewer suggests that historical, sociological, and psychological methods are modes of discourse that are modern forms of myth. Myth is understood as any narrative form that is used, and/or taken for granted, as a way of self-understanding and understanding the world. These disciplines are useful critical tools with which to explore the text and its world, but they do not guarantee knowledge about the past. As modern modes of discourse they create narratives (i.e., myths) about the past, that for us are preferred epistemological pathways. Jesus Christ is the ultimate model of the God-person relationship in the Christian west. Therefore, any serious attempt to render a realistic portrait of Jesus using contemporary modes of describing reality has the possibility of effecting a profound transformation of the images of God and Jesus. This then can transform our own relationship with God. The value of Capps's book is not in any knowledge it might give us about Jesus, but in the transformation it can effect within the reader, and the author, of central religious images. Psychoanalytic and developmental theories are limited in their explanatory effectiveness because they are materialistic and personalistic (reductive). The analytical psychology of Carl Jung and the archetypal psychology of James Hillman are proposed in order to add a transpersonal dimension to Capps's approach to the personality of Jesus.     

A scale of educational-vocational undecidedness: A typological approach

A scale designed to measure and identify antecedents of educational-vocational indecision was administered to a variety of college student groups expected to differ in career-decidedness. Results indicate that the scale is reliable, appears to discriminate career-decided from career-undecided students, and is responsive to interventions designed to alleviate educational-vocational indecision. A factor analysis of the scale yielded four factors: need for structure, perceived external barriers, positive choice conflict, and personal conflict. The instrument has potential for diagnostic, criterion, and conceptual purposes related to career indecision.     

A non-linear model of dynamics: A case of panic

This is a case report of a patient with panic who is on the edge of relapse into alcoholism. It is a case of general theoretical interest, because of the separate phases of containment of his desperation, involving psychopharmacology, sociotherapy, and psychotherapy. It extends the dynamic model into non-linear dynamics, an extension that allows the patient to come to face his amazement at the sudden eruption of unconscious forces, and that allows the psychotherapist to see the therapeutic path of backing up from walking forward, unwittingly, into catastrophe.     

A dynamic view of cultural influence: A review

Static models of culture's influence have given way to a dynamic view, which identifies not only differences across cultures in people's judgments and decisions, but also the situations and conditions in which these differences do or do not appear. Theory and evidence developed from a cognitive psychological perspective underlie this dynamic approach, including research emerging from the “dynamic constructivist” and “situated cognition” models. In the present review, we focus on findings that confirm the utility of this cognitively oriented approach, and briefly discuss the advantages and complementary nature of the “social collective” and neuroscience approaches to understanding culture.     

A Defense of Conduction: A Reply to Adler

In (2013) Jonathan Adler argued that conductive arguments, as they are commonly characterized, are impossible—that no such argument can exist. This striking contention threatens to undermine a topic of argumentation theory originated by Trudy Govier (1979) based on Carl Wellman (1971) and revisited by the papers in “Conductive argument, An overlooked type of defeasible reasoning” (ed. Blair and Johnson, 2011). I here argue that Adler’s dismissal of conductive arguments relies on a misreading of the term ‘non-conclusive’ used in the characterization of this type of reasoning and argument, and that as a result, his refutation fails. However, Adler’s critique raises other questions about conductive arguments that have to be answered.     

A Candidate's Perspective: A Review of Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education by Emanuel Berman

The author reviews Emanuel Berman's book Impossible Training from the perspective of a candidate in psychoanalytic training at The William Alanson White Institute in New York. The author relates aspects of her training experience to issues Berman raises in his article, focusing on and expanding a discussion of key problematic aspects of psychoanalytic training.     

Maintenance of fluency: A review

Three purposes for writing this paper are: to review specific work done on the maintenance of fluency in the post-treatment environment, to abstract and discuss pertinent issues in maintenance, and to present several speculative positions which might account for the relapse phenomenon and stimulate further research.     

俭：心理学的研究视角

俭是一种关于生活方式的信念, 它促使个体为实现长远的目标, 主动地约束自己的欲望, 限制自己的获取, 有节制地使用资源。俭的内涵丰富, 可从目标和手段两方面分析, 其下又可细分为生存性目标和生存性手段, 发展性目标和发展性手段。对俭的形成有多种解说; 适应说、驱动说和特质说分别从外在约束、内部需求和个体特质三个不同的方面进行过解释。俭是个体因素和环境因素共同作用的结果, 同时又对个体的知、情、意、行具有引导作用。未来研究可对培养个体和社会层面俭的意识和行为的条件和可能的方式进行理论探讨, 也可对不同类型的俭可能对应的心理、行为或者脑机制进行实证研究。     

K-Lines: A theory of memory

Most theories of memory suggest that when we learn or memorize something, some drepresentation of that something is constructed, stored and later retrieved. This raises questions like: How is information represented? How is it stored? How is it retrieved? Then, how is it used? This paper tries to deal with all these at once. When you get an idea and want to “remember” it, you create a “K-line” for it. When later activated, the K-line induces a partial mental state resembling the one that created it. A “partial mental state” is a subset of those mental agencies operating at one moment. This view leads to many ideas about the development, structure and physiology of memory, and about how to implement framelike representations in a distributed processor.     

Prior-entry: A review

The law of prior entry was one of E.B. Titchener’s seven fundamental laws of attention. According to Titchener (1908, p. 251): “the object of attention comes to consciousness more quickly than the objects which we are not attending to.” Although researchers have been studying prior entry for more than a century now, progress in understanding the effect has been hindered by the many methodological confounds present in early research. As a consequence, it is unclear whether the behavioral effects reported in the majority of published studies in this area should be attributed to attention, decisional response biases, and/or, in the case of exogenous spatial cuing studies of the prior-entry effect, to sensory facilitation effects instead. In this article, the literature on the prior-entry effect is reviewed, the confounds present in previous research highlighted, current consensus summarized, and some of the key questions for future research outlined. In particular, recent research has now provided compelling psychophysical and electrophysiological evidence to support the claim that attending to a sensory modality, spatial location, or stimulus feature/attribute can all give rise to a relative speeding-up of the time of arrival of attended, as compared to relatively less attended (or unattended) stimuli. Prior-entry effects have now been demonstrated following both the endogenous and exogenous orienting of attention, though prior-entry effects tend to be smaller in magnitude when assessed by means of participants’ performance on SJ tasks than when assessed by means of their performance on TOJ tasks.     

A Japanese View of Dependency:

White American culture celebrates independence, self-reliance, and individual choice as hallmarks of healthy mental and emotional functioning. However, from a feminist perspective, the disproportionate emphasis on independence in American culture reflects the predominance of the white, middle-class, male point of view; appropriate models for health dependency have been neglected. This paper offers an alternative view of dependency from the perspective of Japanese culture. The structure of Japanese society is predicated on subordinating the needs of the individual to that of family or community and interdependency is highly valued. A psychodynamic theory proposed by Doi (1973) is used to explain the role of dependency in Japanese society. The concept of amae is examined as the central organizing dynamic and its influence on Japanese psychotherapy is also discussed. The Japanese emphasis on amae is often misunderstood by Western thinkers and one example of a racist interpretation of Japanese behavior by a prominent Western theorist is critically reviewed. Lastly, some suggestions are made regarding applications of amae psychology to feminist theory and therapy.     

Alcoholism: A conflict of models

Adherents to the traditional model of alcoholism explain alcoholic behavior as a consequence of alcoholism. Alcoholism is identified as an unseen, unmeasured entity inherent in alcoholics. This concept parallels the thinking of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, who believed in an unseen, unmeasurable creator behind the physical world. These traditional approaches contrast with the emergent model of alcoholism and twentieth-century scientific thought. Emergent scientific model adherents explain alcoholic behavior without resort to unseen factors. Since the traditional and emergent scientific models begin with different assumptions, model adherents experience communication difficulties. Future developments with determine which model will dominate the field of alcohol studies and treatment.     

Interactivism: A manifesto

The interactivist model has grown over the last several decades from a narrower initial beginning into an evolving systematic theory and underlying philosophy. It has been induced to do so because the underlying assumptions that framed the beginnings of the model were fundamentally different from those that are dominant throughout psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy. Consequently, the model faced multiple instances of attempting to integrate with literature in neighboring fields, discovering that such integration was not possible because the basic assumptions were not compatible, and having to either give up on the model thus far constructed, or else extend it in a way consistent with those assumptions into those neighboring (and foundational) domains. This manifesto outlines the resultant interactivist framework, presents some of the arguments for its underlying assumptions, and argues that these avoid problems that are fatal for many standard approaches in the literature.     

Integration: A coming of age

Integration is one of the most prevalent contemporary themes in the field of family therapy. This discussion proposes a process-based model of integration which transcends theoretical content. A brief review of integrative efforts in the field of marriage and family therapy is followed by an exploration of issues related to theoretical content. A model for understanding the personal process of integration is developed which articulates a five stage process of integration. Finally, after a brief character development to illustrate the different stages, some initial implications for a process-based model of integration are explored.David J. Moultrup, MSW, LICSW, is in private practice in Arlington, Massachusetts.     

Rape: A Century of Resistance

In this paper, we offer an overview of feminist contributions to the reframing and redefinition of rape over the last century. Topics of discussion include empirical research on rape prevalence that shows a consistent 15% prevalence rate despite continuing rape prevention and education efforts. The effects of sociocultural interventions focusing on legal reforms and psychosocial interventions focusing on rape prevention and education efforts are reviewed. The paper concludes with suggestions for refocusing intervention efforts to include rape prevention training for men, rape resistance training for women, and community-based legal interventions.     

A circle of traits: A perceptual mapping of the NEO-PI-R

The five factor model, a dominant model of personality today, is based on the pre-structuring of test-components and factor analytic (FA) interpretations. These procedures have been criticised, especially FA’s limitation to accurately identify the underlying structure of constructs. This paper examined whether the NEO-PI-R revealed the same trait structures when analysed through alternative statistical procedures. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) was employed alongside FA techniques (N = 384). FA indicated the presence of five factors, but NMDS suggested a more parsimonious arrangement, comprising three (similar to Eysenck’s PEN model), or even two “super structures”. Furthermore, a circular trait arrangement was a reasonable alternative, suggesting that traits can be meaningfully (re)classified based on their kind and their integrative centrality. Over-reliance on FA models might not be the most appropriate approach for a better understanding of personality.     

Prosopagnosia: A reclassification

We report a quantitative investigation of three patients who presented with a profound prosopagnosia. They were tested on a series of tests of face perception, face recognition, and paired associate learning using faces. A patient with marked perceptual difficulties but no difficulty whatever in recognizing faces was tested as a control. The control patient's performance was as bad or worse on the tests of perception of faces, and it is concluded that impaired performance on tests of face perception does not contribute to difficulties in recognizing familiar faces. The major difference between the three prosopagnosic patients was the evidence of covert recognition in two of these cases but not in the third. We use this evidence to argue that the perceptual/mnestic distinction is an inappropriate classification and would suggest instead that the two types may be described in terms either of a disconnection of the face recognition units or of damage to the units themselves.