‘Old wine in new bottles’? Relationships between overexcitabilities,the Big Five personality traits and giftedness in adolescents

This study examined the relationship between types of overexcitability (OEs), Big Five dimensions, and giftedness. A sample of intellectually gifted adolescents (N = 132) and controls (N = 103) completed the OEQ-II and the NEO-FFI. As hypothesized, the gifted scored higher than controls on intellectual OE, imaginational OE, and openness to experience but lower on neuroticism. Contrary to expectations, group-related differences were found for sensual OE, but not for emotional OE. Moreover, SEM analysis showed that giftedness moderated the relation of OEs with openness and extraversion. The relations between sensual OE and openness as well as between psychomotor OE and extraversion were stronger in the gifted than in controls. Relationships between sensual, intellectual, imaginational OEs and extraversion turned out to be significant only in the controls.     

Attempting to avoid false memories in the Deese/Roediger—McDermott paradigm: Assessing the combined influence of practice and warnings in young and old adults

On each of five study-test trials, young and old adults attempted to memorize the same list of 60 words (e.g., bed, rest, awake), which were blocked according to their convergence on four corresponding associates. Half of the participants in each age group were given an explicit warning about the DRM paradigm prior to encoding and were asked to attempt to avoid recalling any associated but nonpresented words (e.g., sleep). Lists were presented auditorily at either a fast (1,250 msec/word) or a slow (2,500 msec/word) rate. Without a warning, the probability of veridical recall across trials increased for both age groups; however, the probability of false recall across trials decreased only for young adults. When a warning about false recall was provided, young adults virtually eliminated false recall by the second trial. Even though old adults also used warnings to reduce false recall on Trial 1, they were still unable to decrease false memories across the remaining four study-test trials. Old adults also reduced false recall more with slow than with fast presentation rates. Taken together, these findings suggest that old adults have a breakdown in spontaneous, self-initiated source monitoring as reflected by little change in false recall across study-test trials but a preserved ability to use experimenter-provided warnings or slow presentation rates to reduce false memories.     

Current issues and new directions in psychology and health : What happened to behaviour in the decade of behaviour?

This editorial addresses two key aspects of the investigation of behaviour: the science and the application. On the one hand, researchers and policy makers recognise a need for good scientific evidence about behaviour and behaviour change, but are slow to turn to psychology for such evidence. On the other hand, there is a gap in scientific thinking about behaviour and behaviour change.     

Usage frequencies of complement-taking verbs in Spanish and English: Data from Spanish monolinguals and Spanish—English bilinguals

Verb bias, or the tendency of a verb to appear with a certain type of complement, has been employed in psycholinguistic literature as a tool to test competing models of sentence processing. To date, the vast majority of sentence processing research involving verb bias has been conducted almost exclusively with monolingual speakers, and predominantly with monolingual English speakers, despite the fact that most of the world’s population is bilingual. To test the generality of competing theories of sentence comprehension, it is important to conduct cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing and to add bilingual data to theories of sentence comprehension. Given this, it is critical for the field to develop verb bias estimates from monolingual speakers of languages other than English and from bilingual populations. We begin to address these issues in two norming studies. Study 1 provides verb bias norming data for 135 Spanish verbs. A second aim of Study 1 was to determine whether verb bias estimates remain stable over time. In Study 2, we asked whether Spanish—English speakers are able to learn verb-specific information, such as verb bias, in their second language. The answer to this question is critical to conducting studies that examine when, during the course of sentence comprehension, bilingual speakers exploit verb information specific to the second language. To facilitate cross-linguistic work, we compared our verb bias results with those provided by monolingual English speakers in a previous norming study conducted by Garnsey, Lotocky, Pearlmutter, and Myers (1997). Our Spanish data demonstrated that individual verbs showed significant similarities in their verb bias across the 3 years of data collection. We also show that bilinguals are able to learn the biases of verbs in their second language, even when immersed in the first language environment. Appendixes A–C, containing the bilingual norms discussed in the article, may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Making Sense of the Hands and Mouth: The Role of “Secondary” Cues to Meaning in British Sign Language and English

Successful face-to-face communication involves multiple channels, notably hand gestures in addition to speech for spoken language, and mouth patterns in addition to manual signs for sign language. In four experiments, we assess the extent to which comprehenders of British Sign Language (BSL) and English rely, respectively, on cues from the hands and the mouth in accessing meaning. We created congruent and incongruent combinations of BSL manual signs and mouthings and English speech and gesture by video manipulation and asked participants to carry out a picture-matching task. When participants were instructed to pay attention only to the primary channel, incongruent “secondary” cues still affected performance, showing that these are reliably used for comprehension. When both cues were relevant, the languages diverged: Hand gestures continued to be used in English, but mouth movements did not in BSL. Moreover, non-fluent speakers and signers varied in the use of these cues: Gestures were found to be more important for non-native than native speakers; mouth movements were found to be less important for non-fluent signers. We discuss the results in terms of the information provided by different communicative channels, which combine to provide meaningful information.     

A new Buddhist sect?: The Dhammakāya temple and the politics of religious difference

In this article I explore the politics of the Dhammakāya temple controversy that captivated the Thai public in 1998 and 1999. By looking at the claim that the Dhammakāya temple constitutes a new nikāi, I examine a debate over tradition and innovation, a debate that has implications for modern constructions of sectarianism and of authentic Buddhism within the Thai sangha. I address the following questions: What kinds of innovations in doctrine and practice are acceptable? What constitutes a new nikāi in late modern Thailand? Who decides what is and is not consistent with orthodox Buddhism?     

Putting down roots: the significance of technical adaptations in the therapeutic process with fostered and adopted children‡

Severely neglected and traumatised children have also suffered from a lack of the parental nurturing which is needed for ordinary emotional development to take place. Often their past experiences make them unable to utilise the nurturing that foster and adoptive families try to give them and they are delayed or stuck in their development. In therapy, when the early small signs of new emotional development start to emerge, they may be heralded by technical challenges to the therapist. Two examples are given in this paper, which are discussed in the context of Stern et al.’s ideas about moments of meeting, Winnicott’s concepts about transitional phenomena and playing, and Hurry and her colleagues’ thoughts about the therapist as a developmental object. It is argued that it is important for the therapist to be alert to the possible significance of these technical adaptations in terms of the child’s capacity for new emotional development. These often indicate that a watershed in the treatment has been reached and if positively responded to, that the patient is in the process of ‘putting down roots’ in the ground of the therapeutic relationship and starting to grow across a spectrum of developmental pathways.     

Comparing the accuracy of experimental estimates to guessing: a new perspective on replication and the “Crisis of Confidence” in psychology

We develop a general measure of estimation accuracy for fundamental research designs, called v. The v measure compares the estimation accuracy of the ubiquitous ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator, which includes sample means as a special case, with a benchmark estimator that randomizes the direction of treatment effects. For sample and effect sizes common to experimental psychology, v suggests that OLS produces estimates that are insufficiently accurate for the type of hypotheses being tested. We demonstrate how v can be used to determine sample sizes to obtain minimum acceptable estimation accuracy. Software for calculating v is included as online supplemental material (R Core Team, 2012).     

A new Buddhist sect?: The Dhammakāya temple and the politics of religious difference

In this article I explore the politics of the Dhammakāya temple controversy that captivated the Thai public in 1998 and 1999. By looking at the claim that the Dhammakāya temple constitutes a new nikāi, I examine a debate over tradition and innovation, a debate that has implications for modern constructions of sectarianism and of authentic Buddhism within the Thai sangha. I address the following questions: What kinds of innovations in doctrine and practice are acceptable? What constitutes a new nikāi in late modern Thailand? Who decides what is and is not consistent with orthodox Buddhism?     

Addressing “The criterion problem” in the assessment of aggressive behavior: Development of a new taxonomic system

Aggressive behavior is a highly complex construct that is very challenging to measure. While advancements in the assessment of aggression have been made, some fundamental problems persist. First, the operational definition of aggressive behavior and its various subtypes are frequently misinterpreted and lack sufficient conceptual clarity. Second, due to these definitional problems, assessment instruments frequently correspond to different conceptualizations of aggression. In the present review, we attempt to resolve these limitations by proposing a new taxonomic system of aggressive acts that (a) corresponds to a hybrid definition of aggressive behavior, and (b) increases conceptual clarity between subtypes of aggressive behavior. It is argued that this classification system will permit greater precision in the assessment of aggression and lead to the improvement of theories, diagnostic systems, and clinical interventions.     

‘Pre-crime’, Prevent,and practices of exceptionalism: Psychotherapy and the new norm in the NHS

Section ’26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 places a duty on local authorities and public sector institutions to have ‘due regard to the need to Prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. Accordingly, NHS staff are now required to attend a Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent (WRAP), ensuring they are trained to spot the ideological symptoms and psychosocial vulnerabilities thought to predict extremist activity. In this paper, I suggest that the insertion of counter-radicalisation duties into the work of psychotherapists and other mental health professionals is not simply to be understood as an attempt to forestall and avert extremist activity. Rather, drawing on the work of Georgio Agamben and Judith Butler, I argue it can be viewed as an innovative tactic of governmentality whose technologies of surveillance ensure a culture of conformity in the NHS through which a ‘state of exception’ can be established and normalised. I illuminate this by examining two interrelated aspects of the Prevent duty: one, the decision by the government to embed Prevent within the existing rhetoric and practice of ‘safeguarding vulnerable children and adults’; and two, its discursive representation of the consulting room as ‘pre-criminal space’. I conclude by suggesting that the government’s determination to allow ‘no ungoverned space in which extremism is allowed to flourish’ targets the limits of acceptable speech and so the very conditions for radical thought and critique on which psychotherapy depends.     

Correction to: The role of daily need crafting in daily fluctuations in adolescents’ need-based and affective experiences

Motivation and Emotion -     

Higher realities and the inner self: One quest? Transcendence and the significance of the body in the new age circuit

Can New Age be religious? In this article it is argued that New Age should not be treated as just one meaning system. It is possible to discern several different meaning systems in the New Age networks, even though they share a common language. Before examining whether these meaning systems are religious or, in other words, whether they contain transcendent elements, the concept of transcendence is ‘de‐christianised’. For it is precisely the Christian interpretation, namely the idea that the transcendent reality has to be ‘outside’, that makes the concept useless for the study of New Age meaning systems. The analysis then shows that sometimes there is a higher reality, and sometimes not. Even in one and the same meaning system this difference can occur, since central notions are interpreted in different ways.     

Listening to the Language,Listening to the Words and Listening to the Spaces between the Words: Rhetoric and Pragmatics in the Performance of Christian–Muslim Relations

The article argues for the need to look beyond the texts used within the context of interreligious dialogue, and to focus just as much on the context and the way in which the texts are expected to be heard. It focuses specifically on Christian–Muslim dialogue at an event in Iran where the author was present. By looking at the use of rhetoric and pragmatics within his own contribution to this event, he raises questions about the way in which those contributing to dialogue communicate with the many different audiences involved, and the way in which their messages are received by those audiences. By focussing on this one event, the aim is to show what might be achieved through this kind of analysis and to call for more work to be done in this kind of way.     

The infinite qualitative difference: Sin,the self,and revelation in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Supervision as oversight: A new era in the history of psychoanalytic practice and training?

Taking its cue from Ekstein's analysis of the history of supervision (1960), this article proposes that there is a new historical era emerging in Britain, a phase that could be characterised as the ‘regulatory phase’. It is argued that in the future the clinical supervisor of psychoanalytic work will be positioned as ‘overseer’, with the consequence that what might be overlooked/not seen in the new regulatory climate is the notion of a psychoanalytically informed practice as a practice of the questioning of knowledge and its effects. Further, it considers how the effect of the proposed regulatory framework for psy-practice in the UK elides the current distinction between ‘practitioner/analyst’ and ‘trainee/candidate’. Thus psychoanalytically informed practitioners are re-positioned as candidates for authorisation as state licensed psy-practitioners. A clinical example, based loosely on Freud's account of his analysis of the young female homosexual, draws attention to the specifics and problematics of the competencies for analytic work and its supervision proposed by the Health Professions Council, Skills for Health and research for University College London, which envisages a future role of supervisors as the overseers of standardised interventions.