Lay Perceptions of Psychotherapists in South Africa

The study investigated South African layperson perceptions of psychotherapists. Participants were 10 males and 25 females (Whites = 23, Blacks = 10, Coloreds = 2; age range 20 to 59). Semi structured interviews were used to study expectations, attitudes and stereotypical beliefs and behavior towards psychotherapists. Laypersons perceived psychotherapists negatively, and would personally not want any assistance from psychotherapists.     

Professional Ethics of Psychologists and Physicians: Mortality,Confidentiality, and Sexuality in Israel

Clinical psychologists' and nonpsychiatric physicians' attitudes and behaviors in sexual and confidentiality boundary violations were examined. The 171 participants' responses were analyzed by profession, sex, and status (student, resident, professional) on semantic differential, boundary violation vignettes, and a version of Pope, Tabachnick, and Keith-Spiegel's (1987) ethical scale. Psychologists rated sexual boundary violation as more unethical than did physicians (p<.001). Rationale (p<.01) and timing (p<.001) influenced ratings. Psychologists reported fewer sexualized behaviors than physicians (p<05). Professional experience (p<.01) and sex (p<.05) were associated with confidence-violating behavior. Overall, 78% of the sample reported attitudes or behaviors associated with boundary violations. The behavior violations were correlated (r=.49). Actual violators rated vignette violators more leniently than did nonviolators (p<.01).     

Secular Psychotherapists and Religious Clients: Professional Considerations and Recommendations

Traditional psychotherapy has often failed to meet the needs of religiously committed clients. Because many potential clients have religious as well as secular concerns, secular psychotherapists must become more empathic and competent in treating religious individuals. In this article the author argues that efforts toward consciousness raising as well as fundamental changes in professional training programs are necessary to accomplish this goal. Recommendations are offered for counselor educators and mental health service providers.     

Navigators and Captains: Expertise in Clinical Ethics Consultation

The debate about what constitutes the discipline of ethics and who qualifies as an ethics consultant is linked unavoidably to a debate that is potentiated by the reality of a rapidly changing and high-stakes health care consultation marketplace. Who we are and what we can offer to the moral gesture that is medicine is shaped by our fundamental understanding of the place of expert knowledge in the transformation of social reality. The struggle for self-definition is particularly freighted since clinical ethics consultation aspires to be more than academic contemplation. Two recent books (Ethics Consultation by John La Puma and David Schiedermayer and The Health Care Ethics Consultant: A Practical Guide, edited by Francoise Baylis) exemplify the two most popular but most widely divergent positions on these issues. We argue that while useful, neither book addresses fully the particular and distinct role of the professional ethicist.     

The Narratology of Lay Ethics

The five narratives identified by the DEEPEN-project are interpreted in terms of the ancient story of desire, evil, and the sacred, and the modern narratives of alienation and exploitation. The first three narratives of lay ethics do not take stock of what has radically changed in the modern world under the triple and joint evolution of science, religion, and philosophy. The modern narratives, in turn, are in serious need of a post-modern deconstruction. Both critiques express the limits of humanism. They do not imply, however, that these narratives should not be taken seriously. In particular, the enduring presence of three ancient narratives in laypeople’s symbolic thought is highly significant in terms of the role that the logic of the sacred keeps playing in the workings of modern societies. Lay people’s implicit understanding of how modern technology tends towards catastrophe and apocalypse provides the strongest argument for taking these narratives seriously.     

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: A Case Study in Contested Ethics and the Public Uses of Professional Expertise

This article offers both an appreciative and critical review of Bandy Lee’s (ed.) book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. The book raises important questions about the ethical conundrum presented by a profession code of ethics containing both the Goldwater Rule’s requirement for practitioners to avoid diagnosis of public figures with whom they have no therapeutic relationship, and the Duty to Warn, which impels them to provide warnings when the risk of danger is suspected. Lee and her colleagues use their expertise in mental health to apply the criterion of dangerousness to the publically observable actions and behaviors of Trump. Authors also address the so called “Trump effect,” or the impact of the intersection between presidential pathologies and societal norms, including the rise of white nativist discourse. After assessing the book, the article considers its theological themes and implications for pastoral and practical theologians.     

Narratives of Mastery and Resistance: Lay Ethics of Nanotechnology

This paper contributes towards a lay ethics of nanotechnology through an analysis of talk from focus groups designed to examine how laypeople grapple with the meaning of a technology ‘in-the-making’. We describe the content of lay ethical concerns before suggesting that this content can be understood as being structured by five archetypal narratives which underpin talk. These we term: ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’; ‘kept in the dark’; ‘opening Pandora’s box’; ‘messing with nature’; and ‘be careful what you wish for’. We further suggest that these narratives can be understood as sharing an emphasis on the ‘giftedness’ of life, and that together they are used to resist dominant technoscientific and Enlightenment narratives of control and mastery which are encapsulated by nanotechnology.     

Israel Scheffler's Ethics: Theory and Practice

Evincing his not uncritical allegiance to pragmatic philosophy, Isreal Scheffler's notion of ethics and its role in education is one which attempts to dissolve inherited distinctions in the field. For Scheffler's ethics, aimed always at justifiable conduct, is conduct guided by rationality, powered by emotion, responsive the needs of it agents community, learned through moral education, practiced habitually, and ultimately justified by individual commitment to action. Scheffler's primary desideratum is to arrive at an ethics that is justifiable because it is reasonable and so can gain our commitment.     

The Ethics of Mandatory Personal Psychotherapy for Trainee Psychotherapists

Although the psychotherapist's personal psychotherapy has received considerable research attention in recent years, little systematic investigation of the ethical issues involved has been published. This article provides a rigorous interrogation of mandatory personal psychotherapy (MPP) as a training requirement for mental health professionals, a topic that remains ethically contentious. The article begins with a discussion of why MPP is an explicitly ethical issue, before debating the ethics of MPP under six questions, each worded to capture a salient ethical issue relevant to the appropriateness of making personal treatment a mandatory training requirement. Using principle, virtue, and care ethics perspectives, the arguments for and against MPP are critically investigated. The article concludes with an ethical position statement.     

Engaging Narratives and the Limits of Lay Ethics: Introduction

How can one discover the ethical issues associated with nanotechnologies? One heuristic is to tend closely to the ethical reflections of lay publics and the ways in which these are informed by experience with technological innovation, technology governance, and the (broken) promises of visionary science and technology. A close collaboration between social scientists and philosophers took this heuristic to its limits: On the one hand, it achieved remarkably fine–grained insights into public reflection about nanotechnologies. On the other hand, a philosophical analysis of these reflections makes apparent that there is a profound disconnect between the lay ethics rooted in public talk and the ethical and normative commitments that are embedded in nanotechnological research programs and practices. Accordingly, critical engagement with the ways in which ordinary people try to make sense of nanotechnologies constitutes a novel heuristic for the discovery of ethical issues. This introduction and the subsequent four papers show this heuristic at work.     

Ethics and neonatology in Israel.

Israel is a country of controversies: with high-quality medical care available to all and a high antenatal detection rate of congenital anomalies followed by abortion, the incidence of infants born with malformations has been reduced dramatically in the last decade. On the other hand, religious and strong traditional ethnic attitudes on fertility have led to a world record rate of ARTs and multiple births, which have increased the incidence of VLBW infants and the long-term handicap that follows their survival.     

Expertise, Democracy, and Applied Ethics

Is expertise in applied ethics compatible with individual autonomy and democratic self-governance? This depends on whether a ‘tracking condition’ is satisfied for expert claims about issues in applied ethics. This condition requires that, when expert deliberations are properly conducted they ‘track’ the courses of reasoning that the experts’ clients would themselves have undertaken if they had (perhaps subject to certain conditions) considered the matters for themselves. Pluralism of the kind thematised by Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire suggests that the tracking condition typically will not be satisfied and, hence, that whatever experts are praticising in applied ethics they are doing it contrary to democratic principles of autonomy and self-government. The implications of this result are sketched and some standard objections briefly considered.     

专长发展与职业发展视域下的教师心理

教师的成长心理已成为教育心理学研究的一个重要领域。近十几年来,从认知心理学视角进行的教师教学专长发展心理的研究,以及从职业心理学视角进行的教师心理特征与心理健康的研究已取得很多有价值的成果。在分析国内外已有研究的基础上,为进一步推进我国教师心理研究提出了几点建议。     

The Health Professional Ethics Rubric: Practical Assessment in Ethics Education for Health Professional Schools

A barrier to the development and refinement of ethics education in and across health professional schools is that there is not an agreed upon instrument or method for assessment in ethics education. The most widely used ethics education assessment instrument is the Defining Issues Test (DIT) I & II. This instrument is not specific to the health professions. But it has been modified for use in, and influenced the development of other instruments in, the health professions. The DIT contains certain philosophical assumptions (??Kohlbergian?? or ??neo-Kohlbergian??) that have been criticized in recent years. It is also expensive for large institutions to use. The purpose of this article is to offer a rubric??which the authors have named the Health Professional Ethics Rubric??for the assessment of several learning outcomes related to ethics education in health science centers. This rubric is not open to the same philosophical critiques as the DIT and other such instruments. This rubric is also practical to use. This article includes the rubric being advocated, which was developed by faculty and administrators at a large academic health science center as a part of a campus-wide ethics education initiative. The process of developing the rubric is described, as well as certain limitations and plans for revision.     

Professional Virtue and Professional Self-Awareness: A Case Study in Engineering Ethics

This paper articulates an Aristotelian theory of professional virtue and provides an application of that theory to the subject of engineering ethics. The leading idea is that Aristotle’s analysis of the definitive function of human beings, and of the virtues humans require to fulfill that function, can serve as a model for an analysis of the definitive function or social role of a profession and thus of the virtues professionals must exhibit to fulfill that role. Special attention is given to a virtue of professional self-awareness, an analogue to Aristotle’s phronesis or practical wisdom. In the course of laying out my account I argue that the virtuous professional is the successful professional, just as the virtuous life is the happy life for Aristotle. I close by suggesting that a virtue ethics approach toward professional ethics can enrich the pedagogy of professional ethics courses and help foster a sense of pride and responsibility in young professionals.     

Bulimia Nervosa: Professional and Lay People's Beliefs About the Causes

This study examined the explanatory models of bulimia nervosa (BN) held by members of professionals in the medical, psychological, and allied health fields; the general public; and female university students. The participants (N = 787) were presented with 44 potential causal explanations for BN and were asked to rate the importance of each in the development of this condition on a 5‐point rating scale (“unimportant” to “extremely important”). Principal component analysis identified four causal components. These were interpreted as corresponding to (1) socio‐cultural pressure, (2) eating and dieting practices, (3) family dynamics, and (4) psychological vulnerability. A high degree of consistency in the mean ratings for the four causal components was observed among the professional groups. However, important differences were found between the professional and the lay respondents in their beliefs about the role of socio‐cultural pressure, eating and dieting practices, and family dynamics in the development of BN. The congruence in beliefs among the professionals groups would contribute to the ease of interdisciplinary collaboration required in the multi‐modal treatment approach to BN. However, the differences observed between the professional and lay groups may have implications for educational and preventative strategies for BN.     

Professional and Lay Religious Leaders' Beliefs and Knowledge About Older People:

This study was designed to survey professional and lay religious leaders' knowledge and beliefs about the elderly and to determine the effect of a planned learning experience (PLE)on professional and lay leaders' beliefs and knowledge about the elderly. There were 64 subjects in the study: 26 professionals and 38 lay leaders. The professionals' knowledge about the elderly increased significantly after the PLE. Lay leaders' knowledge did not increase. Lay leaders' positive beliefs increased significantly after the PLE. Neither professional nor lay leaders' negative beliefs were significantly different after the PLE.     

应用伦理学、伦理知识与生活之道

应用伦理学的程序共识论者根本否认应用伦理学提供伦理专门知识的可能性,但西方伦理学家认为,应用伦理学可提供关于道德推理的专门知识,应用伦理学家可通过伦理委员会等制度化的机构而发挥专家的作用.但应用伦理学更重要的作用在于通过哲学反思和社会批判而昭示一种正当的生活方式.