Autism—What Does Gender Have to Do With It?

The relationship between gender and autism is an underexplored topic, and one in which the psychoanalytic literature on gender is relevant. The therapist examines her failing to have understood the importance of gender issues for an autistic male child and his family and the ramifications of this oversight to help in the development of “gender creativity” (Ehrensaft, 2016). The gender issues included an initial absence of gender (the meaning of which will be clarified), a subsequently emerging wish to be a girl, and then a powerful, in part reactive wish to be a male. This case highlights the early sensory issues in the development of gender, dyadic work with parents in the treatment sessions, countertransference reactions related to gender, and the relevance of thinking psychoanalytically about neurodevelopmental disorders.     

Stress and Cytokine Effects on Learning: What Does Sex Have to Do With It?

Many studies have alluded to sexually dimorphic changes in behavior following stress. Although many have suggested that these changes are a function of stress-induced changes in learning and memory, there are questions regarding whether performance in those learning and memory tasks are influenced by stress-induced changes in drive more than in actual learning and memory processes. We used the classically conditioned eyeblink response (CCER) to determine whether slowed learning following stress in females can be explained by changes in unconditional response (UR) amplitude, a sign of a stress-induced shift in sensory reactivity. In addition, we had a second treatment group injected with the pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-1beta to serve as an interoceptive stress condition, a physiological stressor with minimal stimulation to the animal. Replicating the work by Shors and colleagues, we found that stressed female rats had slower acquisition of the conditioned response (CR), but we also found that an IL-1beta injection leads to a slowing of CR acquisition. However, in both cases, UR amplitude was lower in the treatment groups. We followed up these results by testing sensory reactivity through the acoustic startle response (ASR), where the magnitude of the ASR was marginally, but nonsignificantly, reduced by the same dose regimen of IL-1beta. Together, these experiments suggest that tailshock stress and immune signaling (IL-1beta) reduce sensory reactivity and the saliency of the stimuli used in the CCER, leading to slower learning in female rats.     

The Psychopath: What's Love Got to Do with It?

The archetypal figure of the psychopath has always been fascinating, even numinous, and terrifying. We know him as the headline-making serial killer, shameless fraud, or charming con artist, but we are not as well aware of him as an inner aspect of the psyche, a cold, implacable figure that can do horrific deeds but also act as a protection against them. We each have a natural and strong resistance to recognizing such a figure in our own psyches, but the old adage is true: It takes one to know one, and such knowledge is our best defense against its destructiveness.

The psychopath as an individual has been called by many names since the syndrome was first identified more than 200 years ago, each new appellation reflecting the attitude of the culture toward it. But following Manfred Bleuler's and then Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig's work on the psychopathic personality, the argument for understanding the psychopath as congenital and incurable seems as convincing as when it was put forward decades ago.

But now the characteristics of the psychopathic attitude are visible everywhere in collective American culture, even epidemic: in politics, commerce, technology, and in psychology itself. Eros is conspicuous by his absence in more and more areas of public life and discourse.

The future of our species is endangered by a psychopathic lack of reflection on the ways in which psychopathic institutions and technologies work insidiously to erode our capacity for Eros and thus our capacity for relatedness, deep emotion, and human love.     

Individualism and Collectivism: What Do They Have to Do With Counseling?

The author defines individualism and collectivism before examining how they are integral parts of the counseling process for clients and counselors. Although individualism has been assumed to be the norm for the counseling culture in the United States, recent work notes the influence of collectivism on professionals and clients in the counseling system. El autor define el individualismo y el colectivismo antes de examinar cómo ellos son partes esenciales del proceso que aconseja para clientes y consejeros. Aunque el individualismo se haya asumido para ser la norma para la cultura que aconseja en los Estados Unidos, el trabajo reciente nota la influencia del colectivismo en profesionales y clientes en el sistema que aconseja.     

Diagnostic Decision Making: Do Counselors Delay Final Judgments?

Although there is a theoretical, empirical rationale warranting the delay of diagnostic decision making, it is unknown whether this debiasing strategy is actually implemented in counseling practice. This study investigated whether counselors delayed their diagnostic decisions in a setting that allowed them the option of doing so. Clinical records were selected from a counselor training center at a large midwestern university and coded for delayed diagnostic decision making. Three pairs of chi‐square analyses were performed. Results indicated that delayed diagnostic decision making occurred to a greater extent than immediate diagnostic decision making across counselor‐client dyads, counselors, and clients.     

Women,Ethnicity, and AIDS: What's Love Got to Do with It?

This paper examines the usefulness of relationships as the critical factor in preventing AIDS for women of color. An analysis is offered of the conceptualization of issues, as well as the prevention measures and safe-sex strategies developed for gay men versus women's HIV/AIDS incidence rates. The discussion of similarities demonstrates that gender and culture play a role in the disproportionate negative impact affecting the health status of women of color. The compounding factor of poverty is considered essential to the complex situation in the ethnic minority community, resulting in a lack of public concern and a lack of community responsiveness to these women. Finally, several challenges for health researchers are presented including the need to adopt cultural sensitivity in research efforts, include researchers with an understanding of the ethnic community's perspective, and develop clearer guidelines for risk assessment.     

Lived Religion and Family Therapy: What Does Spirituality Have to Do with It?

This review examines fundamental and methodological issues concerning the cross-disciplinary efforts of family therapists to involve spirituality in their clinical practice. Training requirements, challenges, and limitations are discussed. It is suggested that the construct lived religion is the best starting point for this work. Lived religion is a term that addresses the real, lived, experiential, and intimate dimensions of our religious life. It is also tied to a variety of academic disciplines that can guide and deepen thought. Significant problems and limitations are identified with the term spirituality. It is suggested that if clinicians continue to prefer spirituality as a construct, that it be seen as a form or expression of lived religion. This way the links to various discipliines are maintained and idiosyncratic efforts will be minimized. Methods that attempt to integrate spirituality and family therpay are also found to be lacking. For nearly a half century American divinity schools have developed various co-relational methods which foster more respectful and productive discourse calling for the goals and objectives of mental health and religion to be equally value and maintained. In this way the piftalls of reductionism, or oversimplification, and anti-institutional bias can be lessened.     

Do Childhood Emotional Lability and ADHD Symptoms Have Shared Neuropsychological Roots?

Emotional Lability (EL) is a source of impairment in multiple mental disorders of children, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It has been proposed that the overlap between EL and ADHD symptoms is the result of common neuropsychological deficits. The aim of the present study was to test this hypothesis by using a multi-method approach. In a mixed sample of 61 children (49 community sample and 12 children with an ADHD diagnosis) aged between 8 and 12 years, we examined the relationship between parental reports of ADHD and EL, real-time children’s emotional expressions in an experimental context, children’s performance on neuropsychological tasks and parental ratings of neuropsychological functioning. Parental EL ratings were significantly predicted by task-based reaction time variability and by questionnaire measures of Self-Direction & Organization and Arousal Regulation. Parental EL ratings were also significantly related to both ADHD symptom dimensions. After controlling for shared neuropsychological factors, ADHD symptoms no longer predicted parental EL ratings. Neuropsychological task performance was not significantly related to real time emotional expressions. However, positive emotional expressions were significantly predicted by higher parental ratings of Cognition and negative emotional expressions by parental ratings of low Effort engagement – accounting for some of the correlation with ADHD symptoms. The current results highlight the plausible role of cognitive energetic processes in explaining the EL and ADHD symptom association.

     

Forecasting and Ethical Decision Making: What Matters?

This study examined how the number and types of consequences considered are related to forecasting and ethical decision making. Undergraduate participants took on the role of the key actor in several ethical problems and were asked to forecast potential outcomes and make a decision about each problem. Performance pressure was manipulated by ostensibly making rewards contingent on good problem-solving performance. The results indicated that forecast quality was associated with decision ethicality, and the identification of the critical consequences of the problem and consequences for others were associated with both higher quality forecasts and more ethical decisions. In addition, the identification of a larger number of consequences was negatively associated with ethical decision making. Performance pressure did not impact forecast quality or ethicality of decisions. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Doping: Just Do It?

This paper provides a new philosophical argument against the lifting of the ban on doping in sports. It makes several assumptions for the sake of argument, one of which is, ironically, the moral justification of the lifting of the ban on sports doping. It is, then, a reductio ad absurdum against the claim that said ban should be lifted. Following this is a preliminary discussion concerning how doping athletes ought to be punished given that there ought to be a ban on doping due to the implausibility of the position to lift said ban. Considerations from responsibility and punishment theories are brought to bear in order to discern which punishments are most fitting for those athletes caught doping in designated clean sports competitions.     

What's Wrong With Methodism?

I distinguish between two theses, DPJ and DGP. DPJ asserts that one's justification for accepting particular epistemic propositions positively depends on one's being justified in believing general epistemic principles. DGP claims that one's justification in believing general epistemic propositions positively depends on one's being justified in believing particular epistemic propositions. I claim that methodism accepts DPJ and rejects DGP and particularism accepts DGP and rejects DPJ. I argue that we should reject DGP and methodism roughly because these views imply that many of us do not know epistemic propositions that we do know. This point is made by Roderick Chisholm in The Problem of the Criterion and challenged by Robert Amico. I consider Chisholm's arguments and Amico's objections. Finally, I argue that even if we reject DPJ and methodism, we need not embrace particularism, since we could reject both DPJ and DGP.     

What's Wrong With Indispensability?

For many philosophers not automatically inclined to Platonism, the indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical objectshas provided the best (and perhaps only) evidence for mathematicalrealism. Recently, however, this argument has been subject to attack, most notably by Penelope Maddy (1992, 1997),on the grounds that its conclusions do not sit well with mathematical practice. I offer a diagnosis of what has gone wrong with the indispensability argument (I claim that mathematics is indispensable in the wrong way), and, taking my cue from Mark Colyvan's (1998) attempt to provide a Quinean account of unapplied mathematics as `recreational', suggest that, if one approaches the problem from a Quinean naturalist starting point, one must conclude that all mathematics is recreational in this way.     

Forgiveness: Who Does It and How Do They Do It?

Forgiveness is a suite of prosocial motivational changes that occurs after a person has incurred a transgression. People who are inclined to forgive their transgressors tend to be more agreeable, more emotionally stable, and, some research suggests, more spiritually or religiously inclined than people who do not tend to forgive their transgressors. Several psychological processes appear to foster or inhibit forgiveness. These processes include empathy for the transgressor, generous attributions and appraisals regarding the transgression and transgressor, and rumination about the transgression. Interpreting these findings in light of modern trait theory would help to create a more unified understanding of how personality might influence forgiveness.