The tunnel effect,Gibson's perception theory,and reflective seeing

Summary Subjects can have continuous visual experience of an object's movement across a display though the movement's middle phase takes place behind an opaque screen. The present article considers explanatory issues pertaining to this so-called, tunnel effect, with special reference to Gibson' s perception theory and the visual activity that I have been calling reflective seeing. Among the issues discussed are the following. (a) In the tunnel experiments, I suggest, there occur both persisting perception, as Michotte held, and persistence perception, as Gibson held. The subjects pick up stimulus information that allows visually experiencing the object's going out of sight at one edge of the screen and coming back into sight at another edge of the screen; the subjects have visual experience of the continued existence and movement of the object while it is out of sight. Moreover, persistence of perceptual experience is involved: when the object goes out of sight, the subjects' visual experience of its movement goes on. (b) I also argue that the tunnel effect is a phenomenon of both straightforward and reflective seeing. Adopting a phenomenal attitude, as one does when reporting one's perceptual experience, one still sees movement taking place on the other side of the screen, as one does in straightforward seeing. However, whereas straightforward seeing does not give inner awareness of visual experience, the subjects in the tunnel experiments report visually experiencing the object's movement while also visually experiencing the opaque screen in front of it as opaque. I argue that these reports, and those about the object's going out of and coming back into sight, must be based on the kind of visual experience that is part and product of reflective seeing.     

Increasing husbands' involvement in domestic labor: Issues for therapists

As a result of the dramatic increase in women's participation in the work force, more relationship therapists are seeing couples who are dissatisfied with how domestic labor is divided in their homes. Although, this issue may seem therapeutically straightforward, there are many aspects which make its renegotiation surprisingly problematic and complex. This article is an effort to delineate some of these issues such as engaging men in therapy, exploring emotional issues connected with housework, and the mechanism of gatekeeping. Also included is a therapeutic framework for addressing client concerns about domestic responsibilities.     

Providing a Transcultural Genetic Counseling Service in the UK

This paper uses a broad definition of culture to explore the practice of transcultural genetic counseling through three case studies. The first case involves a White genetic counselor seeing an Asian family, the second, an Asian genetic counselor seeing an Asian family and the third, a hearing genetic counselor seeing a culturally Deaf client. Boundaries, transference and countertransference reactions are considered within each transcultural encounter and the author of each case reflects in detail on their role in the client interaction and their impact on the transcultural dynamic. The cases are used to illustrate some cultural beliefs or characteristics that may challenge the genetic counselor’s expectations. The value of identifying and interpreting these differences to facilitate useful clinical work is considered. The paper debates, where possible, whether it is helpful to culturally match genetic counselor and client.     

12- and 18-month-old infants follow gaze to spaces behind barriers

Infants follow the gaze direction of others from the middle of the first year of life. In attempting to determine how infants understand the looking behavior of adults, a number of recent studies have blocked the adult's line of sight in some way (e.g. with a blindfold or with a barrier). In contrast, in the current studies an adult looked behind a barrier which blocked the child's line of sight. Using two different control conditions and several different barrier types, 12- and 18-month-old infants locomoted a short distance in order to gain the proper viewing angle to follow an experimenter's gaze to locations behind barriers. These results demonstrate that, contra Butterworth, even 12-month-old infants can follow gaze to locations outside of their current field of view. They also add to growing evidence that 12-month-olds have some understanding of the looking behaviors of others as an act of seeing.     

A third language in therapy: deconstructing sameness and difference

The paper draws on recent research and the first author’s personal story to show what happens when the language difference between therapist and client is brought to mutual awareness in the therapy room. Individual lived experiences of migrant psychotherapists and counsellors and the issues that arise in therapy practice when the practitioners use their second language as the means of communication with clients are explored. The notion of a third language – a dynamic communication system that is a result of developing a professional identity through a second language – is introduced. Unlike the psychoanalytic third, it is often conscious and may be used either defensively or purposefully as a concrete third point of reference in the intersubjective encounter. The paper explores how the concept of a ‘Third Language’ can be used as a tool to negotiate perceived sameness or difference in therapeutic encounters and to build a common language with a client, both literally and metaphorically. The study featured in the paper has implications for practice, theory and research.     

Therapist Self-as-Context and the Curative Relationship

This article discusses how the way the therapist relates to his or her personal responses to client material during the session contributes to making the relationship with the client an effective tool for treatment. Ideas from third wave behavior therapy are used to describe aspects of therapist involvement in the relationship and modes of therapist awareness of inner responses. In two vignettes, negative client reactions to an intervention bring problematic therapist material to the fore. Both cases highlight how the stories the therapists spun about themselves as professionals and persons could easily have limited their effectiveness in responding to the material. The vignettes also illustrate how clinicians can overcome personal meanings and judgments to access a more productive mode of interacting with the feelings a critical incident in the relationship evokes in them. It is argued that observing their own content from a psychological distance makes it possible for clinicians to use their feelings without getting caught up in them. These same feelings may then help the therapist perceive how the incident relates to the client’s daily life problems. The therapist’s engagement in a sense of self-as-context is described as a therapeutic stance that provides the psychological distance needed to help overcome alliance ruptures and other potential gridlocks and which may transform the therapist’s inner response to client content into a tool for addressing important client issues.     

Counselling adults who were abused as children: Clients' perceptions of efficacy, client-counsellor communication, and dissatisfaction

Despite the amount of clinical material relating to adults who were abused as children, there is a dearth of research which has examined the effectiveness of counselling such clients. In order to examine the perceived efficacy of counselling with this client group, a total of 53 in-depth interviews were undertaken with a sample that included adults abused as children who had received counselling, counsellors working with this client group, and counselors-who-were-abused-as-children. The findings indicate that there are many similarities in what abused clients and the general client population judged to be helpful and unhelpful factors in counselling. However, certain aspects of the counsellor-client relationship appear to have specific impacts and meaning for an abused client group, especially when they have little prior knowledge or experience of counselling. Data are presented relating to clients' evaluations of counselling. These illustrate clinically relevant issues in relation to communication and experiences of dissatisfaction. One conclusion from the study is that in terms of their responses to counselling, it is simplistic for adults who were abused as children to be categorisied as a unitary group. Nevertheless, there are certain aspects of counselling with such clients which do merit particular attention if practitioners are to minimise the possibility of counselling being ineffective, unhelpful or, at worst, re-traumarising.     

Care, communication and conversation

The professionalisation of care has resulted in ever increasing specialisation, use of technical innovations and informatisation. This has had consequences for the level and way of involvement of the care provider vis-a-vis the patient. The result has been growing alienation on the part of the patient and flight into non-classical medicine, as well as frustration on the part of medical personnel, likewise with respect to the reactions of patients. A solution is usually sought in more communication. This might be styled the professional answer to alienation and frustration, whereby 'the human factor', it is hoped, can be better accounted for. Enhanced communication implies two elements: 1) to better cater for the feelings of patients by trained communicators, i.e. more openness, more client satisfaction; 2) to better take into account patient rights and to actually implement them. The question is whether measures in terms of communication, geared at enhancing client satisfaction and the implementation of patient rights, are the real answer to the above mentioned alienation and frustration. Perhaps the trouble has deeper reasons and requires taking other dimensions into account such as decency and human dignity, which cannot be captured simply in terms of satisfaction and rights. This would mean that the answer must be sought at a deeper level than communication. This level might be called 'conversation' (using a concept analysed by Michael Oakeshott). In the second part of the paper, the possible relationship between care and conversation will be briefly analysed.     

The Genealogical Search as a Counseling Technique

With selected populations, research into one's family history can serve as a foundation for personal healing, family communication, and personal growth. A framework for using genealogical research in counseling is provided, and a list of questions to guide the search is offered. Potential client issues and characteristics are discussed.     

Seeing a singer helps comprehension of the song’s lyrics

When listening to speech, we often benefit when also seeing the speaker’s face. If this advantage is not domain specific for speech, the recognition of sung lyrics should also benefit from seeing the singer’s face. By independently varying the sight and sound of the lyrics, we found a substantial comprehension benefit of seeing a singer. This benefit was robust across participants, lyrics, and repetition of the test materials. This benefit was much larger than the benefit for sung lyrics obtained in previous research, which had not provided the visual information normally present in singing. Given that the comprehension of sung lyrics benefits from seeing the singer, just like speech comprehension benefits from seeing the speaker, both speech and music perception appear to be multisensory processes.     

Re-enchanting the body: overcoming the melancholy of anatomy

I argue here that Weberian disenchantment is manifest in the triumph of instrumental reason and the expansion of analytic enquiry, which now dominates not simply those sciences upon which medicine depends, but medical practice itself. I suggest ways that analytic enquiry, also referred to here as anatomical reasoning, are part of a particular ideology—a way of seeing, speaking about, and inhabiting the world—that often fails to serve the health of patients because it is incapable of “seeing” them in the moral sense described by Iris Murdoch and others. I use the work of James Elkins and Wendell Berry to call for the recovery of a way of seeing the human body as both other and more than an object of scientific enquiry and social control.     

A descriptive epidemiology of lifetime trauma and the physical health status of older adults

Three issues are evaluated in this study. The 1st involves examining the relationship between exposure to trauma over the life course and physical health status in old age. The 2nd has to do with seeing whether the relationship between trauma and health varies across 3 cohorts of older adults: the young-old (ages 65-74), the old-old (ages 75-84), and the oldest old (age 85 and over). The 3rd issue involves seeing whether the age at which a trauma was encountered is related to health in late life. Data from a nationwide survey of older people (N=1,518) reveal that trauma is associated with worse health. Moreover, the young-old appear to be at greatest risk. Finally, data suggest that trauma arising between the ages of 18 and 30 years, as well as ages 31 to 64 years, has the strongest relationship with current health.     

A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness

Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The outside world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Several lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual "filling in," visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception.     

‘Diverse Epistemologies’, Truth and Archaeology: In Defence of Realism

In a recent journal article, as well as in a recent book chapter, in which she critiques my position on ‘indigenous knowledge’, Lesley Green of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town argues that ‘diverse epistemologies ought to be evaluated not on their capacity to express a strict realism but on their ability to advance understanding’. In order to examine the implications of Green’s arguments, and of Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin’s work in this regard, I apply them to a well-known controversy between Native American (or First Nations) creationism and archaeology. I argue that issues in social justice should be distinguished from issues in epistemology. Moreover, in tightening in this paper the link between knowledge and truth, I attempt to defend science as a ‘privileged way of seeing the world’. The analysis of truth, and of related concepts like reality and ‘the way the world is’, will assume a central role here. I contend that, ultimately, the only coherent and consistent position is a realist view of the pertinent issues and ideas.     

The Venus effect: people's understanding of mirror reflections in paintings

We propose the term 'Venus effect' for a common phenomenon in picture perception. It occurs when a picture shows an actor and a mirror that are not placed along the observer's line of sight, for instance a Venus admiring herself in a small mirror, and when the actor's reflection in the mirror is visible to the observer. In this situation, observers tend to report, incorrectly, that Venus is also seeing herself in the mirror in the same location as the observer. We discuss this using famous paintings as examples.     

Exploring the meaning in meaningful coincidences: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of synchronicity in therapy

Synchronicity experiences (SEs) are defined as psychologically meaningful connections between inner events (e.g. thought, dream or vision) and one or more external events occurring simultaneously or at a future point in time. There has been limited systematic research that has investigated the phenomenology of SEs in therapy. This study aimed to redress this by exploring the process and nature of such experiences from the perspective of the practitioner. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of nine practitioners who reported SEs in their therapeutic sessions (three counsellors, three psychologists and three psychotherapists), and focused on how participants make sense of their experiences of synchronicity in therapy. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to identify three superordinate themes: sense of connectedness, therapeutic process, and professional issues. Findings suggest that SEs can serve to strengthen the therapeutic relationship and are perceived as useful harbingers of information about the therapeutic process, as well as being a means of overcoming communication difficulties, as they are seen to provide insights into the client’s experiencing of themselves and others, regardless of whether or not the SE is acknowledged by the client or disclosed by the therapist.     

Technology and the civil epistemology of democracy

In analogy with Rousseau's concept of ‘civil religion’ as a system of ‘positive dogmas’, ‘without which’, as he observed, ‘a man cannot be a good citizen’, this paper advances the concept of ‘civil epistemology’ as the positive dogmas without which the agents of government actions cannot be held accountable by democratic citizens. The civil epistemology of democracy shapes the citizen's views on the nature of political reality, on how the facts of political reality can be known and by whom. Modern liberal democratic politics assumes that the exercise of political power can be manifest in a visible domain of publicly accessible facts. It rests on the Enlightenment faith in the powers of light and visibility to demystify political power, render political actors more exposed and therefore more honestly accountable and enlist the sense of sight as a vehicle of universal political participation. It is, in this context, that technology has come to play such an important symbolic role in the construction of the particular democratic genre of public action as a political spectacle. Democratic civil epistemology, and technology ‐ in the widest sense of the word ‐ as the prototype of action which can be observed in the field of visual perception, uphold the democratic conception of politics as a view. Together they define political actors as visible performers, journalists as observers (who translate actual seeing into virtual seeing) and the citizens as witnesses.     

The complaining client and the troubled therapist: a discursive investigation of family therapy

In this paper I examine two important issues for family therapy research. I attend to the concept of complaints, highlighting the conversational structure they take in a family therapy setting. I do this by outlining how clients construct their complaints and examining how the family therapist receives them. Data is taken from a corpus containing four different families and two different therapists, and is subjected to discursive analysis in order to provide a rich analysis of not just what is happening in the talk but how it is happening. I conclude that complaints are not received as useful to the therapeutic process, despite their constructed importance to the client, and therefore there are wider implications for therapy and professionals more generally, particularly implications for multi-agency communication.     

Schleiermacher and Spirit Christology: Unexplored Horizons of The Christian Faith

One of the more recent efforts at christological construction has focused on Spirit christology, issuing in sometimes opposing constructions. At first sight, considering Schleiermacher's synthetic approach to the doctrine of the Trinity, one would suspect the irrelevance of his christology for these present efforts. However, an analysis of the convergence between christology and pneumatology in the Glaubenslehre could contribute significantly to this debate. By interpreting the God-consciousness of Jesus as the presence of the Spirit in him and correlating this with the communication of this consciousness as the work of Christ in regeneration and sanctification we achieve an identity between Christ as Spirit-bearer and Spirit-sender (viz. the Redeemer understood according to his 'peculiar activity' and 'exclusive dignity'). By lending a stronger pneumatological bearing to Schleiermacher's theological discourse (picking up the suggestion of Karl Barth) Schleiermacher helps illuminate some of the issues that have arisen in debate over Spirit christology.