Tools and Techniques: Typologies,Themes, Preferences,and Interests: Their Vocational Relationships

This article uses Jones' comparative table for the typology of Holland and the Guide for Occupational Exploration to extend the relationships to include the occupational themes and work roles of Jackson and Kuder.     

Creativity,Drugs, Crime,and Education: On Eisenman's Contemporary Social issues: Drugs,Crime, Creativity,and Education

This article reports analyses of the verdicts of various film organizations that annually present awards to motion pictures and investigates whether they award/nominate the same movies in a given year. This research disputes previous findings that reported a high level of agreement between those juries, by the means of reliability analysis and the Cronbach's alpha composite. Arguments were raised for why these earlier findings were flawed and why the use of Cronbach's alpha is problematic. Different aspects of consensus are discussed, after which a new measure (β) is introduced. This is followed by a detailed comparison between particular juries with regard to the percentage share of their decisions that award the most successful (chosen by multiple other juries as well) and the least successful (uniquely awarded) films. This measure shows how often a singular jury decides in line with the others and how much does it stray from the consensus. The article also broadens the theoretical discussions about the reasons for (not) expecting a consensus to arise between various expert juries. It argues that by adopting a cultural economic perspective we become aware of various reasons, most importantly competition between the award events and the juries tend towards a lower level of consensus.     

Depth,Perception, and Action: Past,Present, and Future

This paper examines how images of depth are employed in the psychoanalytic literature and how they illuminate or obfuscate. It examines as well the price of using familiar terminologies to introduce new ideas, a practice more common in psychoanalysis than in many other disciplines. By obscuring the differences between old ideas and new through using the same terminology for both, the sense of adherence and belonging to the psychoanalytic community is enhanced but the ability to see fully the new possibilities for theory and practice to which these new ideas point is constrained. In elaborating on this point, the paper also considers the differences between a past-centered, archaeological model and a model in which older patterns are perpetuated through their repeated consequences, both intended and unintended. In such a model both action and perception are taken into account, as the aim of analysis becomes not just the patient’s internal world but her lived life.     

Sylvia Walsh: Kierkegaard and Religion: Personality,Character, and Virtue

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Salman Akhtar: Good Stuff: Courage,Resilience, Gratitude,Generosity, Forgiveness,and Sacrifice

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Guruitis: Epidemiology,causes, symptoms,and remediation

This article summarizes the current understanding of the condition known asguruitis. A general picture of the etiology, prognosis, and treatment of this illness is presented. Guruitis emerges as a multifactorial, nonlethal, widespread professional disease. The illness essentially involves the idealization of some professional figure who may have varying degrees of closeness with a larger theoretical base or orientation, but whose personal attributes interact with those of the potential victim, thus producing onset of the disease.     

Ethics,Brain Injuries,and Sports: Prohibition,Reform, and Prudence

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the issue of the elimination of sports, or elements of sports, that present a high risk of brain injury. In particular, we critically examine two elements of Angelo Corlett’s and Pam Sailors’ arguments for the prohibition of football and Nicholas Dixon’s claim for the reformation of boxing to eliminate blows to the head based on (a) the empirical assumption of an essential or causal connection between brain injuries incurred in football and the development of a degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); and (b) John Stuart Mill’s rejection of consensual domination (ie voluntary enslavement). We present four arguments to contest the validity of Corlett, Dixon’s and Sailor’s positions. Specifically, we argue that (i) certain autonomy-based arguments undermine paternalist arguments for reform; (ii) the nature of the goods people pursue in their lives might justify their foregoing (degrees of) future autonomy; (iii) Mill’s argument against consensual domination draws on ambiguous and arbitrary distinctions; (iv) the lack of consensus and empirical evidence regarding CTE arising from brain injuries in sport underdetermines calls for reform. We conclude that these proposals for reforming or eliminating sports with high risks of brain injuries are not well founded.     

Visualizing space,time, and agents: production,performance, and preference

Visualizations of space, time, and agents (or objects) are ubiquitous in science, business, and everyday life, from weather maps to scheduling meetings. Effective communications, including visual ones, emerge from use in the field, but no conventional visualization form has yet emerged for this confluence of information. The real-world spiral of production, comprehension, and use that fine-tunes communications can be accelerated in the laboratory. Here, we do so in search of effective visualizations of space, time, and agents. Users’ production, preference, and performance aligned to favor matrix representations with time as rows or columns and space and agents as entries. Overall, performance and preference were greater for matrices with discrete dots representing cell entries than for matrices with lines, but lines connecting cells may provide an advantage when evaluating temporal sequence. Both the diagram type and the technique have broader applications.     

Ecofeminism and Nonhumans: Continuity,Difference, Dualism,and Domination

The dualistic structures permeating western culture emphasize radical discontinuity between humans and nonhumans, but receptive attention to nonhuman others discloses both continuity and difference prevailing between other forms of life and our own. Recognizing that agency and subjectivity abound within nature alerts us to our potential for dominating and oppressing nonhuman others, as individuals and as groups. Reciprocally, seeing ourselves as biological beings may facilitate reconstructing our social reality to undo such destructive relationships.     

Intelligence: genetics, genes, and genomics

More is known about the genetics of intelligence than about any other trait, behavioral or biological, which is selectively reviewed in this article. Two of the most interesting genetic findings are that heritability of intelligence increases throughout the life span and that the same genes affect diverse cognitive abilities. The most exciting direction for genetic research on intelligence is to harness the power of the Human Genome Project to identify some of the specific genes responsible for the heritability of intelligence. The next research direction will be functional genomics--for example, understanding the brain pathways between genes and intelligence. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) will integrate life sciences research on intelligence; bottom-up molecular biological research will meet top-down psychological research in the brain.     

Imitation: definitions, evidence, and mechanisms

Imitation can be defined as the copying of behavior. To a biologist, interest in imitation is focused on its adaptive value for the survival of the organism, but to a psychologist, the mechanisms responsible for imitation are the most interesting. For psychologists, the most important cases of imitation are those that involve demonstrated behavior that the imitator cannot see when it performs the behavior (e.g., scratching one's head). Such examples of imitation are sometimes referred to as opaque imitation because they are difficult to account for without positing cognitive mechanisms, such as perspective taking, that most animals have not been acknowledged to have. The present review first identifies various forms of social influence and social learning that do not qualify as opaque imitation, including species-typical mechanisms (e.g., mimicry and contagion), motivational mechanisms (e.g., social facilitation, incentive motivation, transfer of fear), attentional mechanisms (e.g., local enhancement, stimulus enhancement), imprinting, following, observational conditioning, and learning how the environment works (affordance learning). It then presents evidence for different forms of opaque imitation in animals, and identifies characteristics of human imitation that have been proposed to distinguish it from animal imitation. Finally, it examines the role played in opaque imitation by demonstrator reinforcement and observer motivation. Although accounts of imitation have been proposed that vary in their level of analysis from neural to cognitive, at present no theory of imitation appears to be adequate to account for the varied results that have been found.     

Pseudo-Guilt: Defense,Transaction, and Resistance

The term guilt is used as an umbrella to cover a variety of feelings and phenomena. The working through of guilt feelings represents one major area of clinical work. Therefore, it is essential that the nuances and variations inherent in the term guilt be well understood. Clarity is particularly important, since the expression of other feelings may masquerade as guilt, sharing the same language and gestures.