Non-directive counselling in a general practice

Many patients in general medical practice are not ill in the physical sense, but bring their unhappiness to the surgery. An experiment is described in which a counsellor was attached to a general practice in north London, to help to deal with problems of this kind.     

Non-directive play therapy as a means of recreating optimal infant socialization patterns

The paper proposes that non-directive play therapy recreates conditions similar to those created between a carer and infant during normal development. By the heightening in therapy of essentially normal developmental processes the child with harmful or inadequate relationship experiences is enabled to rework and reintegrate these into normal interactiv patterns. Ways are reviewed in which non-directive play therapy exemplifies important attachment properties in an individual's primary relationships, and recreates healthy carer-infant patterns of interaction such as topicsharing, face-to-face interactions, mutuality and symbolic play, in order to bring about therapeutic change. This primary corrective function is similar to other responsive therapeutic approaches, but it is argued that a particular strength of non-directive play therapy lies in its inherent flexibility and responsiveness to the individual child, which resembles normal infant socialization with a sensitive carer.     

对消化道菌群的探索进展及启示

在人类的消化道中寄居着大量的菌群,它们对人类的生长、发育、消化、吸收、营养和免疫等多方面产生着影响。随着现代科学技术的进步与发展,对消化道菌群的培养和鉴定取得了丰硕成果。目前已了解到消化道菌群失调有可能导致多种疾病,而益生菌能够起到维护人类健康的作用。对消化道菌群的探索将带给我们更多深刻的启示。     

The role of beneficence in clinical genetics: Non-directive counseling reconsidered

The popular view of non-directive genetic counseling limits the counselor's role to providing information to clients and assisting families in making decisions in a morally neutral fashion. This view of non-directive genetic counseling is shown to be incomplete. A fuller understanding of what it means to respect autonomy shows that merely respecting client choices does not exhaust the duty. Moreover, the genetic counselor/client relationship should also be governed by the counselor's commitment to the principle of beneficience. When non-directive counseling is reexamined in light of both these principles, it becomes clear that there are cases in which counselors should attempt to persuade clients to reconsider their decisions. Such attempts are consistent with non-directive counseling because, while respecting the clients' decision-making authority, they insure that clients act with full knowledge of the moral consequences of their decisions.     

The underachieving advance directive: recommendations for increasing advance directive completion

Advance directives have failed to achieve a substantial completion rate nationwide despite prior efforts. We hypothesize that the continued low completion rate itself inhibits their utility and application. In this commentary we recommend linking the completion of advance directives to the time when health insurance is initiated or renewed by amending the Patient Self Determination Act. This would relocate the time and locus of their completion from the emotional turmoil of hospital admission and acute illness to a more equanimous time when family and others can be consulted and involved. Moreover actuating increased utilization may require non-coercive incentives as well as education. Amending the Patient Self Determination Act to require providing advance directive forms at the initiation of healthcare insurance in conjunction with educational and/or incentives could be more effective than the current arrangements.     

Salesperson directive modification intention: a conceptualization and empirical validation

Salespersons represent an important and challenging set of employees for organizational management. Given frequently high autonomy levels and varied job roles, boundary spanning agents have ample opportunity and motivation to modify/ignore organizational directives. Based on a multi-theoretical perspective, this research sets forth a three-dimensional conceptualization of directive modification intentions and develops and empirically tests a scale designed to better explain this phenomenon while empirically validating its occurrence. Results indicate that boundary spanners have three distinct and relatively stable motivations for modifying/ignoring organizational directives, including customer-, organization-, and self-focused motivations, and that each motivation may potentially relate differently to important antecedent and outcome variables. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Every world can see a reflexive world

Let be the class of frames satisfying the condition

Causation in a timeless world

This paper offers a new way to evaluate counterfactual conditionals on the supposition that actually, there is no time. We then parlay this method of evaluation into a way of evaluating causal claims. Our primary aim is to preserve, at a minimum, the assertibility of certain counterfactual and causal claims once time has been excised from reality. This is an important first step in a more general reconstruction project that has two important components. First, recovering our ordinary language claims involving notions such as persistence, change and agency and, second, recovering enough observational evidence so that any timeless metaphysics is not empirically self-refuting. However, the project of investigating causation in a timeless setting has a greater relevance than its application to timeless physical theory alone. For, as we show, it can be used to model the assertibility conditions of causal claims more generally.     

Time in a one-instant world

Many philosophers hold that ‘one-instant worlds’—worlds that contain a single instant—fail to contain time. We experimentally investigate whether these worlds satisfy the folk concept of time. We found that ~50% of participants hold that there is time in such worlds. We argue that this suggests one of two possibilities. First, the population disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, with there being a substantial sub-population for whom the presence of neither an A-, B-, nor C-series, is necessary for time, and hence those folk have a radically more minimal concept of time than has been attributed to them by philosophers. Or, second, the population do not disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, but disagree about what it takes for a world to fail to contain even a C-series.     

Psychoanalysis in a changing world

The author reflects, in this opening speech of the IPA Berlin Congress, on some changes in the world, in Germany and in psychoanalysis in the 85 years that have elapsed since the previous congress in Berlin, in 1922. He emphasizes important developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice, research and applications to understand several wider realms. He also stresses the importance of psychoanalysis for the current discussion on the transgenerational effects of traumatic events, and connects all these aspects with the theme of the Congress-remembering, repeating and working through.     

Psychotherapy in a neoliberal world

The neoliberal regime has significant consequences for the psychotherapies. In particular, the idea that individuals is deserving of support from society and government when they need it – for example in managing the inevitable stresses of the life cycle – is being displaced by an ideology of total individual responsibility. Psychotherapies framed around relational conceptions of the self find themselves particularly out of key with this dominant way of thinking. Governmental approaches to developmental needs become more instrumental, measurement-oriented and ‘disciplinary’ in this situation. Market incentives and disciplinary sanctions are introduced to ensure that institutions and their personnel conform to governmental directives. There is pressure on psychotherapists to adapt to this instrumentalised environment to survive. However, ‘expressive individualisation’ was also stimulated by the cultural liberation of the 1960s, and survives alongside the ‘possessive individualism’ of neoliberalism. This alternative culture has not been entirely suppressed, and therapies continue to be sought which offer the possibility of self-understanding and growth, although the pressure is for such therapies to become luxury goods. What is at risk under neoliberalism is the idea that society should support the self-development and self-understanding of all its citizens, as an aspect of a modern kind of democratic citizenship.     

Belief in an unjust world: when beliefs in a just world fail

Belief in a just world, where people get what they deserve, has been hypothesized to underlie a variety of psychological phenomena (Lerner, 1965). Close inspection of individual difference measures of this belief, however, has indicated repeatedly that just world beliefs are not a unidimensional construct. The purpose of this investigation was to elaborate upon the conceptualization of unjust world beliefs as a related but separate construct from just world beliefs. In two studies, the Unjust World Views scale (UJVS) was developed and its reliability and validity examined. The UJVS demonstrated acceptable reliability and validity and accounted for more variability in related outcomes than just world beliefs. Further, belief in an unjust world was related to defensive coping, anger, and perceived future risk. These findings contribute to theory development and suggest that a belief in an unjust world may serve a self-protective function. Clinical implications are discussed as unjust world views also were found to be potentially maladaptive.     

Indigenous theorizing in a complex world

Indigenization in psychology leads to modes of theorizing based within local knowledge communities and defined in terms of culturally relevant criteria. The present study offers a conceptualization of the social psychology of science in terms of complexity theory. The value of alternative choices in advancing psychological knowledge is shown by a knowledge landscape whose shape depends on the diversity of paradigms within the community. Dominance by a single paradigm (such as a Western world view) leads to a single-peaked landscape where advances in knowledge are judged using only the criteria of that paradigm. Here, the most effective form of working is incremental step-by-step research; but this ignores the historical context of the indigenous community and runs the risk of promoting a kind of psychology that is irrelevant to its values and priorities. Indigenization is presented as a complexification of the knowledge community building on a diversity of world views, leading to a rugged, multiple-peaked knowledge landscape. Four features of working on rugged landscapes are examined: path dependence, showing the importance of history for shaping the direction of research; fostering research progress through seeding of multiple starting points; the benefits of locally dense networks within knowledge communities; and the role of policy-makers in tuning knowledge landscapes. Examples are drawn from the development of indigenous psychology within a number of countries.