How Do You Get Where You Want to Be When You Don't Know Where You Want to Be?

I tell the story of my own development from the childhood of a psychiatrist's daughter in wartime Britain, through a brief career in family medicine, to the position of a member of the Independent tradition in British psychoanalysis. As well as having psychoanalysts from different theoretical orientations in my family, I became confused during my training by the different strands of thought and technique taught and promulgated in the British Psychoanalytical Society. For some time after qualification, I took the lonely path of listening mostly to my patients' material as the prime source of understanding mental suffering. It was only after a few years that I was satisfied at being able to connect psychoanalytic theory with what I heard in the consulting room, and following this was further able to explore different strands of psychoanalytic thinking to reach my own position.     

You Want to Know the Truth? Then Don't Mimic!

ABSTRACT— Mimicry facilitates the ability to understand what other people are feeling. The present research investigated whether this is also true when the expressions that are being mimicked do not reflect the other person's true emotions. In interactions, targets either lied or told the truth, while observers mimicked or did not mimic the targets' facial and behavioral movements. Detection of deception was measured directly by observers' judgments of the extent to which they thought the targets were telling the truth and indirectly by observers' assessment of targets' emotions. The results demonstrated that nonmimickers were more accurate than mimickers in their estimations of targets' truthfulness and of targets' experienced emotions. The results contradict the view that mimicry facilitates the understanding of people's felt emotions. In the case of deceptive messages, mimicry hinders this emotional understanding.     

Why Don't Continents Move? Why Don't People Change?

People don't change because they can't, don't want to, don't know how, or don't know what to change. The transtheoretical model provides an integ-rative model for understanding reasons for not changing, as well as readiness to change. Stages and levels of change guide therapists in their work in helping clients change. Clients in the precontemplative stage typically cannot change without special help. Those in the contemplation stage are not sure they want to change. Those in the preparation stage are afraid they do not know how to successfully change. The levels of change help guide therapists and clients on what to change.     

Why Don't You Just Show Me? Performance interviews for skill‐based promotions

Despite the high skill levels needed to cope with complex technical systems and the pace of technological change, there remain persistent skill gaps in the United States workforce. Organizations are increasingly relying on skill‐based programs to encourage and foster employee skill development. Unfortunately, many questions remain about how to make skill‐based promotions. Drawing from research on performance testing and structured interviewing, as well as work that examines broader issues of performance prediction and candidate reactions, we outline the development and empirical test of a performance interview that can be used for skill‐based promotions. Such interviews allow employees to demonstrate their skills on the job, and thus may be more accepted by employees. We first discuss seven design principles that form the conceptual foundation for the performance interview, followed by the specific steps practitioners can follow to develop a performance interview. Finally, using a sample of 230 auto parts manufacturing employees, we provide empirical evidence for the high reliability, validity, and positive candidate reactions to the performance interview.     

How Do You Say Nature?: Opening the Design Space with a Knowledge Environment

In this paper, we describe a design study on how families in Los Angeles experience nature, with a particular focus on how using alternative formats for research analysis and presentation can enrich a design research inquiry. Conducted in Pasadena, CA as a part of Super Studio, the year-long design research class emphasized knowledge building and sharing through design methods of analysis, exhibition, and concept prototypes. After conducting interviews and engaging participants with probes, the class built the results into an open-ended knowledge environment. The main observation from the exhibition – that Angelenos have a limited vocabulary for describing nature and their interaction with it – helped to define the opportunity for design intervention that created connection points between Angelenos and nature. There are few attempts to describe how probe returns evolve into design concepts. Showcased is a process that depends on the unique affordances of design as the vehicle for discovery and invention.     

Don't You Know Me Well Enough Yet? Comparing Reactions of Internal and External Candidates to Employment Testing

Employment tests, once primarily focused on screening external applicants, are increasingly used for decisions involving internal candidates (e.g., promotions or lateral transfers). The current study examines differences between internal and external candidates in reactions to an online selection test. Results indicate that internal candidates perceived a general lack of advance information regarding the assessment. However, they were considerably more likely to recommend the organization to others as compared with external candidates. Candidate status also moderated several reactions–outcomes relationships. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for organizations and directions for future research on internal candidate reactions are proposed.     

Am I You?

It has been suggested that a rational being stands in what is called a “second-personal relation” to herself. According to philosophers like S. Darwall and Ch. Korsgaard, being a rational agent is to interact with oneself, to make demands on oneself. The thesis of the paper is that this view rests on a logical confusion. Transitive verbs like “asking”, “making a demand” or “obligating” can occur with the reflexive pronoun, but it is a mistake to assume that the reflexive and the non-reflexive use exhibit the same logical grammar. The thesis that they do is in part motivated by the assumption that to show that my relation to you bears the same form as my practical self-relation is to show that, fundamentally, you are not an object for me to think about and act on, but a subject with whom to think and act together. I argue, to the contrary, that if my addressing you exhibited the same form as a relation I could literally be said to stand in to myself, then the nexus between us would be such that I am irretrievably alienated from you. To allow the possibility of addressing oneself is to assume one of the following accounts of the second-person pronoun. Either one has to follow R. Heck and conceive it as a merely linguistic phenomenon whose content can be analyzed in terms of “the person to whom I'm now speaking”; or one has to internalize the second person and follow Ch. Korsgaard in taking its prior use to be entirely within and independent of its linguistic expression. But to account for the idea of mutual recognition requires a third view according to which address is an act of mind sui generis for which linguistic expression is essential.     

Can You Say Condom?: It Makes a Difference in Fear-Arousing AIDS Prevention Public Service Announcements1

The study investigated the effect of adding a recommendation to use condoms to fear-arousing AIDS public service announcements (PSAs) on subjects’ intentions to use condoms and taking of free condoms. Sexual content of the AIDS PSA and subject gender were also varied. A sample of 112 men and 107 women rated the effectiveness of 1 of 8 fear-arousing AIDS PSAs. Four PSAs ended with a message to “Use condoms to reduce the risk. For more information call_____.” An identical set of PSAs ended with only the telephone number for more information. Results showed that the recommendation had no effect on intentions to use condoms. However, men exposed to a fear-arousing PSA with the recommendation took significantly more condoms than men in the no-recommendation condition. Men also took significantly more condoms than women in the recommendation condition. The results are interpreted in terms of the AIDS risk reduction model (Catania, Kegeles, & Coates, 1990).     

Does Having a Say Matter Only if You Get Your Way? INstrumental and Value-Expressive Effects of Employee Voice

Research shows that employees can have process control, decision control, or both, over work outcomes. Process control refers to the extent to which workers have a chance to express their opinions about decisions. Decision control refers to any actual degree of influence over the decision that is made. Both variables have been shown to affect procedural justice, a sense of fairness about how things are done at work, and eventual outcome satisfaction. Some claim that process control has its effect because it contributes to workers' feelings of control over the decision or outcome--the instrumentality perspective. Others claim that process control has an independent effect on procedural justice that is not mediated by perceptions of decision control--the value-expressive approach. These theorists believe that workers value having their opinion heard, independent of any increase in decision control. We present a study that examines these models in a work setting. Structural equation analyses revealed that process control did have a significant direct effect on procedural justice: having a say is not completely dependent on getting one's way. Process control also had a smaller, but still significant, indirect effect on procedural justice that was mediated by decision control. Congruence with prior research and future research implications are discussed.     

‘To Whom Say You Your Pater Noster?’: Prayer on the Eve of the Scottish Reformation

In 1551, a resident English Dominican, Richard Marshall, sparked a fierce controversy in St Andrews, Scotland, by arguing in a sermon that the Lord’s Prayer, the ‘Our Father’, should be prayed to God only and not to the saints. According to John Foxe, the dispute led to much cursing, a regional synod, and one Franciscan fleeing the city in disgrace. The St Andrews quarrel was one of many controversies about prayer in sixteenth-century Europe. Why was prayer such a contentious topic? Scottish prayer controversies revealed a fundamental struggle between traditional and reformist views over the value of ritual in relating to God. Protestants like George Wishart, Catholic reformers like Marshall and Archbishop John Hamilton, and more radical ‘devotional humanists’ like the poet, Sir David Lindsay, proclaimed new understandings of prayer that undermined the structures of traditional devotion by pitting the personal and vernacular aspect of prayer against priestly Latin ritual.     

Did You Say He Has a Hitler Mustache?: Analytic Vulnerability and Destabilization in the Face of Trauma

This paper looks at analytic vulnerability and destabilization through a detailed clinical example. There are different ways in which we may be vulnerable with our patients. In this paper I describe the raw and sudden vulnerability of allowing ourselves to be in a place of not knowing when both patient and analyst are unable “to see.” I describe an experience in which I lose my ability “to see,” both literally and metaphorically, while in session with a patient who is unable “to see” because she has dissociated her experience of loss and her experience of a sense of danger when in the presence of her stepfather. I link this clinical experience to the patient’s dissociated feelings and to my history of intergenerational trauma as well to current cultural violence and hate.     

What Does Islam Say About Dieting?

Dieting is very important to maintain a healthy and peaceful life. Today, most of the health problems are related with dieting. Thus, the modern health science recommends a number of suggestions regarding dieting for better health such as learning the five basic food groups (grains, vegetables, fruits, dairy, and meat); eating three times a day; decreasing the amount of fat; increasing the amount of fruits, vegetables and grains; including an adequate amount of iron; and avoiding excessive rich food, salt, sugar, and fat. Religion can also play a vital role for our good health and lifestyle. The main concern of this paper was to present an analytical justification regarding what Islam as a religion advocates about dieting along with the modern food and nutrition sciences.