Medication as object

People experience and treat medication as though it were a person: in other words, as an object. Among the many symbolic meanings attributed to medication, this sort of personification, or object representation, is a meaning that medication is uniquely positioned to contain and convey: imbued with intentionality and influence, medication moves beyond the sphere of static, iconic representation and enters the changeable, dynamic object world of action, aim, and agency. Unlike more generic or stereotypic meanings, object representations attributed to medication may reflect the patient's specific dynamics and object relations. These representations are many and mutable, and take on shifting and overlapping forms that evolve with the analytic process. Medication may represent a third person within the framework of an analytic treatment, expanding the analytic dyad into a triad and offering new transference paradigms to explore. The defensive displacement of transferential qualities and attitudes, or split-off parts thereof, from the analyst onto medication can serve as a powerful resistance to the awareness of the transference to the analyst. Clinical examples illustrate the utility and importance of the analysis of medication as object, for both patient and analyst, with particular attention to the transference.     

Modeling the effects of payoff on response bias in a perceptual discrimination task: bound-change, drift-rate-change, or two-stage-processing hypothesis

Three hypotheses--the bound-change hypothesis, drift-rate-change hypothesis, and two-stage-processing hypothesis--are proposed to account for data from a perceptual discrimination task in which three different response deadlines were involved and three different payoffs were presented prior to each individual trial. The aim of the present research was to show (1) how the three different hypotheses incorporate response biases into a sequential sampling decision process, (2) how payoffs and deadlines affect choice probabilities, and (3) the hypotheses' predictions of response times and choice probabilities. The two-stage-processing hypothesis gave the best account, especially for the choice probabilities, whereas the drift-rate-change hypothesis had problems predicting choice probabilities as a function of deadlines.     

The evolution of the concept of medicalization in the late twentieth century

This article attempts to outline a history of the critique of medicalization that developed in the 1960s in the work of Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, Michael Foucault, and others that was applied in their work to medical and psychiatric theory and practice, the penal system, and public health systems. This article follows the development of Foucault's own work on "governmentality" that emphasized the individualization and internalization of the themes of medicalization and the application of these ideas by his disciples to contemporary medical developments. Finally, the author explores recent historiography in the history of medicine and public health that supports this thesis of individualization that both undermines and reconfigures the older notion of medicalization.     

Bootstrapping conceptual deduction using physical connection: rethinking frontal cortex

The age at which infants can demonstrate the ability to deduce abstract rules can be reduced by more than half, from 21 months to 9 months. The key is to introduce a physical connection between the items to be conceptually related. I argue here that making the same change in how items are presented might also help some preschoolers with learning delays, especially some children with autism. I also suggest that the roles of premotor and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices in deducing abstract rules might have been misinterpreted behaviorally and anatomically. The crucial brain region may be the periarcuate, which partially overlaps both premotor and lateral prefrontal cortex. The cognitive ability made possible by this region might be something far more elementary than previously considered: the ability to perceive conceptual connections in the absence of physical connection.     

Why Managerial Women are Less Happy Than Managerial Men

Women with managerial careers are significantly less satisfied with their life than their male counterparts. Why? In a representative German panel dataset (GSOEP) we find biological constraints and substitutive mechanisms determining the subjective well-being of female managers. Women’s terminated fertility has a negative impact on women’s life satisfaction between the ages of 35 and 45, when managerial careers usually take off. Money and spare time can compensate for this biological difference. But to maintain an equivalent level of happiness, women need to be compensated by much more income for each hour of spare time given up than men do. So, in order to reach better gender equality in leadership positions, women must be either paid higher incomes (on average around 10%) or must be incentivized with more spare time than men. In the conclusion, we speculate on a new mix of carrots and sticks for advanced careers in order to boost female representation in leadership positions.     

Sexual harassment expanded: An examination of the relationships among sexual harassment,sex discrimination,and aggression in the workplace

We hypothesized that sexual harassment is part of a broader behavioral family including aggression and discrimination. We examined whether the relationships between these types of mistreatment can be represented well by a general factor that relates to other workplace variables. Evidence from military datasets showed that sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and workplace aggression can be conceptualized as a more general factor that functioned well in an integrated model of sexual harassment and was experienced differently by men and women. Thus, there is utility in examining these types of mistreatment both together and independently, both for research and prevention purposes.