Two Languages, One Vocabulary

Two cultures (scientific and clinical) speaking different theoretical languages reside in psychology. The categorical structure of scientific language is based on sensorially, linearly, and analytically formatted cognitive processes (common sense). The categorical structure of the clinical language is formatted for cognitive processes accommodating nonsensory, nonlinear information about purposive personality processes. Clinically and scientifically oriented psychologists have difficulty communicating with one another because of underlying paradigmatic differences in their languages. Unfortunately, both cultures use the same sensory-system–based vocabulary, which leads to the unwitting and confusing assumption that they are speaking the same language.     

Two Is Better Than One

ABSTRACT— Psychologists too often rely on only one source of evidence to affirm the validity of a construct. However, they usually do not know all the conditions that can produce the evidence they gather. Hence, the inference is often limited to the data gathered and does not generalize to other categories of information. Examples of this habit are presented along with the suggestion that all social scientists should affirm the utility of their concepts with more than one class of information.     

Anxiety Predicts Increases in Struggles with Religious/Spiritual Doubt Over Two Weeks,One Month,and One Year

Struggles with religious/spiritual (r/s) doubt occur when uncertainty, questions, and hesitancy about aspects of r/s beliefs and experiences become a source of conflict. Cross-sectional research suggests that doubt-related struggles correlate with anxiety, yet no studies have investigated the temporal patterning of the associations between these constructs. We employed three large samples (Ns = 268, 527, 292) to examine concurrent and prospective associations between struggles with r/s doubt and anxiety over three time frames: 2 weeks, 1 month, and 1 year. Analyses revealed that (a) each construct exhibited high cross-temporal stability; (b) there were moderate, positive concurrent associations between anxiety and doubt-related struggles; (c) anxiety predicted increases in doubt-related struggles over each time frame; and (d) there was mixed evidence regarding whether doubt-related struggles predicted changes in anxiety over time. The discussion focuses on how anxiety may begin to undermine confidence in one’s r/s worldview, thus destabilizing one’s r/s beliefs.     

Two Careers, One Employer: Couples Working for the Same Corporation

Advances in career development research require scholars to move from analysis of the career paths of individuals to a life course approach to the interlocking career paths of couples. Increasingly, not only are U.S. workers married to other workers, but significant numbers of couples work for the same employer. Drawing on a subsample of employees in dual-earner households in five corporations in upstate New York (and their spouses), this study examines both the direct and indirect effects of being a coworker on career development, work circumstances, and spillover. Being part of a coworking couple positively predicts men's job prestige, tenure, and commitment to work (in terms of working long hours, heavy workload, etc.). These effects, as well as spillover, are most pronounced for younger men without children. For wives, coworking corresponds with increased income and increased spillover between work and family, especially for younger coworking women without children.     

One Goddess,Two Goddesses,Three Goddesses More: Recent Studies of Hindu Feminine Divinities

International Journal of Hindu Studies -     

Two Therapists and One Client: Problems in Comparison

This paper is a response to Robb’s analysis of Ellis’ and Dryden’s sessions held with “Jane” in the summer of 1994. As Robb noted, these consecutive sessions with the same client make for interesting, and clarifying, comparisons. My analysis considers Robb’s overview of REBT and where I believe it diverges from the position of Ellis. It also considers why Ellis used the strategy he did with “Jane” and compares and contrasts the assumptions that Ellis and Dryden seem to be making during their respective sessions. It ends with a brief summary of the two approaches and some general comments about the nature of psychotherapy.     

The Deaths of One Conceptual Metaphor in Two Languages

This title refers to what I see as the state of synonymy between the word “husbandry” in English and the word se 嗇 in Chinese. There are points of striking similarity, not only in the meaning and usage of these two words, but also in the changes in their usage over time, and I have found a comparative study of the etymology of these two words to be mutually illuminating. The similarity and potential for mutual analysis between these two case studies speaks to the universality of metaphor in thought and its expression, as well as the influence of shared experiences, such as agricultural practices, on how we talk about ideas that are more abstract. In English, the idea of a general practice of husbandry derived from the idea of the husbandman or farmer in Late Medieval English (C13th onwards). A more abstracted sense of husbandry, understood as an attitude that may be applied to abstract and intangible objects is witnessed in Shakespeare’s sonnets in the C16th. This sense of husbandry, the husbandry of intangible resources, is also precisely the sense that is developed by a small and specialised group of writers in China represented by texts dating from the pre-Qin period to the Eastern Jin dynasty, following a similar progression from agricultural to ever more metaphorical senses of the practice of husbandry. The similarity of the process through which these abstracted meanings developed from concrete usage in both cases makes the pair mutually illustrative as I hope to show in this paper.     

Two Factor Additive Conjoint Measurement with One Solvable Component

This paper addresses conditions for the existence of additive separable utilities. It considers mainly two-dimensional Cartesian products in which restricted solvability holds w.r.t. one component, but some results are extended to n-dimensional spaces. The main result shows that, in general, cancellation axioms of any order are required to ensure additive representability. More precisely, a generic family of counterexamples is provided, proving that the (m+1)st order cancellation axiom cannot be derived from the mth order cancellation axiom when m is even. However, a special case is considered in which the existence of additive representations can be derived from the independence axiom alone. Unlike the classical representation theorems, these representations are not unique up to strictly positive affine transformations, but follow Fishburn's (1981) uniqueness property. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.     

One Hidden Object,Two Spatial Codes: Young Children's Use of Relational and Vector Coding

An important characteristic of mature spatial cognition is the ability to encode spatial locations in terms of relations among landmarks as well as in terms of vectors that include distance and direction. In this study, we examined children's use of the relation middle to code the location of a hidden toy, using a procedure adapted from prior work on spatial cognition in gerbils (Collett, Cartwright, & Smith, 1986). Children of 4 and 5 years searched for a hidden toy in a large-scale environment. They were trained to find the toy with either 2 or 1 landmark present. On subsequent trials we altered the number and locations of the landmarks to determine how children represented the location of the toy. With 2 landmarks present during the initial training trial, the children coded both the middle location and the distance and direction from the toy to the landmarks. With 1 landmark present during the training trial, the children coded the location in terms of distance and direction to the single landmark. Our results shed light on seemingly inconsistent prior findings in both human and nonhuman species and indicate that both relational and vector coding are present in young children.     

One Question,Two Answers: Rabbinic Responsa as Legal Advocacy in the Medieval Islamic World

Jewish law has long faced the problem of individual litigants seeking multiple answers to a single halakhic question in order to select what they found to be the most favorable ruling. In this article, I examine the role that forum shopping for legal opinions played in the Jewish community of the medieval Islamic world. Individuals often made recourse to multiple juristic authorities, whether those authorities were leaders serving the geonic academies of Babylonia and the land of Israel or local jurists. I discuss some of the strategies the geonim and local jurists used to reduce competition between judicial rulings and how local judges utilized the various responsa composed on their behalf by these authorities or presented to them by litigants to bolster their case before the Jewish court. In so doing, I aim to refine our understanding of the social and legal role of rabbinic responsa in the medieval Islamic world by suggesting that this literature served as expert testimony to support one side or the other in a particular case rather than as the definitive record of the court’s ruling in that case.     

Neural Recruitment and CognitiveAging: Two Hemispheres Are Better Than One, Especially as You Age

Several neuroimaging studies have reported that older adults show weaker activations in some brain areas together with stronger activations in other areas, compared with younger adults performing the same task. This pattern may reflect neural recruitment that compensates for age-related neural declines. The recruitment hypothesis was tested in a visual laterality study that investigated age differences in the efficiency of bihemispheric processing. Letter-matching tasks of varying complexity were performed under two conditions: (a) matching letters projected to the same visual field (hemisphere) and (b) matching letters projected to opposite visual fields (hemispheres). As predicted by the recruitment hypothesis, older adults generally performed better in the bilateral than unilateral condition, whereas younger adults showed this pattern onlyfor the most complex task. We discuss the relation between these results and neuroimaging evidence for recruitment, and the relevance of the present bihemispheric advantage to other evidence for age-related changes in interhemispheric transfer.