Considering Meta-Analysis,Meaning, and Metaphor: A Systematic Review and Critical Examination of “Third Wave” Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies

In this review, we examine common usage of the term “third wave” in the scientific literature, systematically review published meta-analyses of identified “third wave” therapies, and consider the implications and options for the use of “third wave” as a metaphor to describe the nature of and relationships among cognitive and behavioral therapies. We demonstrate that the “third wave” term has grown in its use over time, that it is commonly linked with specific therapies, and that the majority of such therapies have amassed a compelling evidence base attesting to their clinical and public health value. We also consider the extent to which the “third wave” designation is an effective guide for the future, and we encourage scientific inquiry and self-reflection among those concerned with cognitive and behavioral therapies and the scientific basis of psychotherapy more broadly.     

The graduate program at the University of Dallas

A phenomenological study aimed at exploring the process of becoming physically educated with an interdisciplinary movement consciousness was conducted with the intention of understanding how basic motions, such as reaching and stretching, experienced in kinetic–kinaesthetic discovery may deepen a primordial, Merleau-Pontian connection to the world. A JungleSport climbing-based program with a series of vertical challenges framed the context of this inquiry informed by the overarching question of “What is it like to become physically educated in a way that invites an expanded movement consciousness, from the rudiments of movement function to the somatics of flow?” Implications of this inquiry support an animate curriculum and pedagogical model that purports a simple yet profound notion: that one must move to learn.     

Qualitative Health Research and the IRB: Answering the “So What?” with Qualitative Inquiry

Qualitative inquiry is increasingly used to foster change in health policy and practice. Research ethics committees often misunderstand qualitative inquiry, assuming its design can be judged by criteria of quantitative science. Traditional health research uses scientific realist standards as a means-to-an-end, answering the question “So what?” to support the advancement of practice and policy. In contrast, qualitative inquiry often draws on constructivist paradigms, generating knowledge either as an end-in-itself or as a means to foster change. When reviewers inappropriately judge qualitative inquiry, it restricts the ways health phenomena can be understood. Qualitative inquiry is necessary because it enables an understanding not possible within scientific explanation. When such research illuminates, it can also shed light onto the “So what?” In order to ensure an appraisal of qualitative inquiry congruent with its paradigmatic premises, we suggest the “Illumination Test,” met when findings foster rich understanding of phenomena, resulting in a reflective “aha!”     

Empirical Adequacy and Virtue Ethics

Situationists contend that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. However, it is my contention that there is much confusion over what “empirical adequacy” or “empirical inadequacy” actually means in this context. My aim in this paper is to clarify the meanings of empirical adequacy in order to see to what extent virtue ethics might fail to meet this standard. I argue that the situationists frequently misconstrue the empirical commitments of virtue ethics. More importantly, depending on what we mean by empirical adequacy, either virtue ethics has no need to be empirically adequate or where it does have such a need, the psychological evidence fails to show that it is empirically inadequate. An additional contribution the paper intends to make is to provide a more detailed discussion of the explanatory nature of virtue ethics.     

Teaching World Religions without Teaching “World Religions”

Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self‐consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service‐learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter‐intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.     

Comparative Religious Ethics Among the Ruins

This is a response to the recent essay by Elizabeth M. Bucar and Aaron Stalnaker on “Comparative Religious Ethics as a Field of Study.” I clarify my earlier positions on method and virtue in comparative religious ethics and try to respond to some of the issues that Bucar and Stalnaker raise in regard to my arguments specifically and the field more generally. I argue that while we need not measure the practical impact of scholarly work in comparative religious ethics purely in terms of political or social action, I nevertheless worry that defining the goals of comparative inquiry in terms of the production of bewilderment, intellectual vertigo, or skeptical questions can lead to impressionistic or therapeutic methodological norms. In a similar vein, I refine my earlier position on externalism that acknowledges the impossibility of a purely externalist approach but also notes the desirability of coming to understand others “in their own terms” prior to engaging in the process of transmutation. I also question Bucar and Stalnaker's pessimism about the potential of producing “rigorously convincing ethical theory from the lived experience of regular folk,” suggesting that perhaps we are working with different conceptions of the sociology of knowledge. Finally, I consider whether we are currently in the midst of an epistemological crisis and conclude with some reflections on the rationality of the craft of comparative religious ethics.     

Commentary on “deconstructing difference: Gender,splitting, and transitional space”;

This essay identifies Kohut's major contribution as methodological: that psychoanalytic inquiry entails the sustained empathic immersion in the patient's psychological experience. Kohut's consistent employment of this method enabled him to discover that it was not instinctual drive derivatives but selfobject needs that were central to all psychological relationships. This discovery was the basis for the transformation of analysts’ approach to the “narcissistic”; aspects of a wide variety of disorders—a transformation whose theoretical and therapeutic importance rivals the revolutionary approach taken by Freud to the vicissitudes of psychosexuality and its disturbances. The author describes the major areas of progress in self psychology—much of which centers on the growing recognition that the health and vitality of the self depend on complex relational, or intersubjective, selfobject experiences. He indicates how this recognition is changing our perspectives on transference and countertransference and is improving our ability to respond optimally to our patients. He describes how optimal responsiveness constitutes the guiding principle for therapeutic work, and how it may both constitute, and be different from, “being empathic.”;     

Notes on Psychoanalysis,Psychotherapy and Methodology

Abstract

Technical innovations always carry with them clinical and scientific challenges. The aim of this paper is to provide a context for exploring the consequences of technical innovations for psychoanalysis as an interrelated method of observation, treatment, and body of knowledge about mental functioning. The problems are approached from a methodological perspective because scientific progress requires methodological clarity. The inquiry begins with a methodological investigation of the technical and theoretical consequences of first principles, that is, the consequences of the assumptions and methods we adopt for the kind of data that are obtained by their application and for the theory required to understand and unify the resulting observations. The conclusion suggests that if one organizes a doctor-patient relationship around the clinical-historical and free-association methods with the aim of removing all obstacles to communication, if the understandings that emerge include a full range of dynamic, structural, genetic and adaptive propositions, one is engaged in psychoanalytic inquiry. The circumstances under which Rothstein's technical recommendations enable such understandings to develop are an important topic for future research.     

智者必怀仁？智慧与美德的关系辨析

智慧与美德是独立但相互作用的心理结构。针对其关系,以往哲学家与心理学家基于个人经验和文化观念进行了大量规范性层面的理论思辨,但仍存在理论分歧（线性论、阈值论、从属论）,且缺少以定量方法为主的描述性层面的实证研究,尤其缺乏基于实验的关于“智”与“仁”双向因果关系的探索。未来研究可以借鉴实验伦理学的范式,着眼于研究特定领域、特定情境下智慧与美德之间的双向因果关系,加强中国文化背景下的智慧与美德关系的研究,并探索其潜在的认知神经机制。如何统一智慧与美德关系的“应然”与“实然”的研究,是接下来需要面临的挑战。     

Bourdieu and Derrida on Gift: Beyond “Double Truth” and Paradox

Bourdieu and Derrida share a focus on the ambiguity of the practice of gift relationships already pointed out by Mauss. From Bourdieu’s perspective, the question of gratuity is epistemically futile, as it veils the objective truth of gift-giving, yet ethically and politically relevant, as it refers to a hypocrisy which can be instrumental to enhancing civic virtue and solidarity. Bourdieu’s “scientific humanism,” however, implausibly reduces this ambiguity to interest maximization, and aims to build a solidaristic democracy by means of the generalization of the hypocrisy of gratuity. In turn, by interpreting gratuity as “unconditionality,” Derrida aims not at dissolving, but at dramatizing the ambiguity of gift relationships by turning it into “madness” and an “impossible possibility”. Whereas I agree with Derrida’s insistence on the salience of the requirement of gratuity, his approach can lead to counterintuitive and hubristic consequences. Instead, I suggest some elements of an alternative way of understanding gratuitous gifts as communicative acts irreducible to an economic calculation or circle. From this standpoint, a gratuitous gift can be constituted by certain forms of recognition, emotions, or convictions without for that becoming an “impossibility”.     

“Album V”

“Album V” is an inquiry on aesthetic experience, particularly the perception of analogy in our encounter with works of art. It takes the form of a visual essay comprised of dozens of images culled from a variety of published sources, and montaged together in the form of an “image bank” or photo album. Supplementing this visual essay, “Notes on “Album V”” is a text that reflects on the questions raised by “Album V”. The text describes analogy as a play of correspondences occurring at two levels: correspondences between the sensible forms of which a given artwork is composed; and correspondences between the artwork as a whole, and the experiential forms of the embodied and situated viewer while encountering the artwork. A precondition of this play of correspondences is the “intimacy” that defines all the relationships that constitute existential being-in-the world.     

Moral Seriousness

“Philosophy as a way of life” has its roots in ancient ethics and has attracted renewed interest in recent decades. The aim in this paper is to construct a contemporized image of Socrates, consistent with the textual evidence. The account defers concern over analytical/theoretical inquiry into virtue, in favor of a neo-existentialist process of self-examination informed by the virtue of what is called “moral seriousness.” This process is modeled on Frankfurt’s hierarchical account of self-identification, and the paper suggests an expansion of Frankfurt’s concept of a person to include “full” personhood, in which the apprehended “meaning” of one’s “whole life” is taken as a necessary condition for eudaimonia (meaning of life) and is characterized by phenomenological transcendence. In addition, the importance of the informed scrutiny of a community of philosophers to the self-examination process is discussed.     

Empathy and a Life of Moral Endeavor

Over the course of her career, Jean Harvey contributed many invaluable insights that help to make sense of both injustice and resistance. Specifically, she developed an account of what she called “civilized oppression,” which is pernicious in part because it can be difficult to perceive. One way that we ought to pursue what she calls a “life of moral endeavor” is by increasing our perceptual awareness of civilized oppression and ourselves as its agents. In this article I argue that one noxious form of civilized oppression is what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice.” I then follow Harvey in arguing that one of the methods by which we should work to avoid perpetrating testimonial injustice is by empathizing with others. This is true for two reasons. The first is that in order to manifest what Fricker calls the virtue of testimonial justice, we must have a method by which we “correct” our prejudices or implicit biases, and empathy serves as such a corrective. The second is that there are cases where the virtue of testimonial justice wouldn't in fact correct for testimonial injustice in the way that Fricker suggests, but that actively working to empathize would.     

NATURALISM AND THE CATEGORIES “SCIENCE” AND “RELIGION”: A RESPONSE TO JOSH REEVES

This article is a response to Josh Reeve's “A Defense of Science and Religion.” I begin with the disclaimer that this was not solely my project but a joint enterprise. A common commitment of participants was to make the disciplines of history and theology central to the discussion and explore what new possibilities follows for the field of science and religion. I then address Reeves's two central concerns: first that I am too dismissive of the categories “science” and “religion.” In fact I have not advocated dispensing with these categories, but have insisted than we employ them critically and with a sense of their history. The second concern is that my position on naturalism seems to place me perilously close to advocates of ID or scientific creationism. I deny this, but point out that more work needs to be done, beyond simply invoking methodological naturalism, to clarify the differences between naturalistic and theological approaches to the world.     

A Review of Scientific Progress in Flow in Sport and Exercise: Normal Science,Crisis, and a Progressive Shift

Flow is highly relevant and desirable in sport and exercise. Drawing on ideas from iconic philosophers of science—Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, and Imre Lakatos—we argue that research in this field has followed a pattern of “normal science.” With a series of accumulating criticisms and “anomalies,” we propose flow research is approaching a “crisis point.” We highlight problems with research based on the traditional nine-dimensions conceptualization of flow. Then, drawing on the work of Popper and Lakatos, we offer theoretical and methodological suggestions for developing a more progressive and practically useful theory for researchers and practitioners.     

The purposes of laboratory experimentation and the virtues of deliberate artificiality

Critics of the laboratory experiment have maintained that artificiality (the intrusion into the experiment of “unrealistic” conditions) vitiates any possibility of generalizability beyond the confines of the laboratory. It is argued here that such artificiality in laboratory experimentation is a defect or flaw only within the context of verification and may be a distinct virtue in the context of discovery. Indeed it is argued that social psychological experiments may not be artificial enough when contrasted with the most fruitful experiments in the natural sciences. One purpose of an experiment may be to maximize artificiality deliberately so as to discover regularities that do not presently obtain under the “real” conditions outside the laboratory but which are capable of existing. When such observed laboratory regularities produce potentially beneficial outcomes, an attempt may be made to create the specific artificial laboratory conditions outside the laboratory to benefit mankind. This logic, exceedingly common in the natural sciences, has been virtually ignored in social psychology, even in the laboratory experiment, in favor of “realistic” reproduction of existing or reasonably plausible situations. Theoretical benefits of this additional modality of experimentation are illustrated by two recent developments in psychology.     

Diagnosis by Documentary: Professional Responsibilities in Informal Encounters

Most work addressing clinical workers' professional responsibilities concerns the norms of conduct within established professional–patient relationships, but such responsibilities may extend beyond the clinical context. We explore health workers' professional responsibilities in such “informal” encounters through the example of a doctor witnessing the misdiagnosis and mistreatment of a serious long-term condition in a television documentary, arguing that neither internalist approaches to professional responsibility (such as virtue ethics or care ethics) nor externalist ones (such as the “social contract” model) provide sufficiently clear guidance in such situations. We propose that a mix of both approaches, emphasizing the noncomplacency and practical wisdom of virtue ethics, but grounding the normative authority of virtue in an external source, is able to engage with the health worker's responsibilities in such situations to the individual, the health care system, and the population at large.     

TOWARD A THEOLOGY OF BOUNDARY

Awareness of boundary, both physical and mental, is seen as the beginning of perception. In any account of the world, therefore, boundary must be a ubiquitous component. In sharp contrast, accounts of God within the Christian tradition commonly have proceeded by the affirmation that God is above and beyond boundary as infinite, timeless, and simple. To overcome this “problem of transcendence,” of how such a God can relate to such a world, an eight‐term grammar of boundary is developed to demonstrate how God as Trinity can properly be held to be without boundary yet constitute the ground of a bounded world. This leads to a way of granting theological significance to the origin and development of life. Life is seen to exist in dynamic, intentional relationships between context (“outside”) and intext (“inside”) across permeable boundaries through which an exchange of resources and information takes place for the sake of self‐continuation. Comprehending life's distinctive utilization of boundary in terms of the grammar developed here enables life to be seen not only as a vestige of the Trinity but also, precisely because of this, as a sign and parable of redemption.     

Libido und psychische Energie

The authors investigate different definitions of “psychic energy” and “libido” as well as their critique. With regard to “psychic energy” it is shown that the critique relates in particular to the perspective of Brenner and others and not to Freud's definition. They argue that Freud uses the term “psychic energy” as a synonym for “libido” and not “libido” as a synonym for “psychic energy”. It is assumed that until 1914, Freud related “libido” to manifestations of bodily sexual tensions and afterwards to manifestations of sexual energy in the psychic field. The authors reject this change for epistemological reasons as well as Freud's attempt to use dynamic, economic considerations as an explanatory device. Freud's energy concept is inconsistent with the definition of energy in natural sciences, and, whereas the meta-psychological topographical, dynamic and structural viewpoints have a solid foundation in the representational world to which the psychoanalytic process affords unique access, this is not true of the economic viewpoint. It is claimed that bodily tensions exist in the representational world only in the form of affects, so that the economic viewpoint should, in the authors' opinion, be abandoned in favour of an affective one. In the context of the endeavour to obtain pleasure and avoid unpleasure as adduced by Freud, this viewpoint concentrates on the relationships between affects and the different elements of the representational world, thereby serving as the topoi of meta-psychological investigation dimensions.