Introduction to Judit Mészáros' “Progress and Persecution in the Psychoanalytic Heartland: Antisemitism,Communism, and the Fate of Hungarian Psychoanalysis”

In this introduction, a rationale is developed for why these accounts of the historical movements and catastrophes in psychoanalytic institutional histories are so important. I argue that we need to contextualize theory and practice in political and historical terms, seeing that historical forces shape institutions, the fates of individuals, and the evolution of theory and practice. In particular, I consider the impact of the events in Hungary over nearly 50 years as crucial elements in the eclipse of Ferenczi and his school. I argue that we need to rethink our too-narrow focus on comparative theory and imagine the role of history in the fate of ideas. The impact of fascism and of Stalinism on psychoanalytic work and practitioners is seen here as a necessary element in our understanding of where we are now and from what cultural and historical experiences we have emerged.     

Discussion: Putting our Heads Together; Mentalizing Systems

This discussion reviews the psychoanalytic and developmental psychological theories that utilize nonlinear dynamic systems theory to situate Sperry's paper in its theoretical and historical context. The power of such nonlinear models for clinical work and theories of mind is argued. The essay then argues that the shift in theory entails a shift in ways of clinical writing and that the clinical discussion in the paper does not always feel consonant with the theory. Moving to a model of nonlinearity, intersubjectivity, and uncertainty is likely to entail shifts in conceptualizing and conveying clinical material.     

Contemporary Neuroscience Humanizes: A Look at Cortical Bilateral Asymmetry and How It Got That Way

Exciting research that has surfaced from a host of neuroscience laboratories is presented, and the assumption that they have little to offer human science considered. This includes the sensory substitution work of Bach-y-Rita (1967 Bach-y-Rita , P. ( 1967 ). Sensory plasticity: Applications to a vision substitution system . Acta Neurologica Scandinavia , 43 , 417 – 426 .[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), as well as the phantom pain hypothesis of Ramachandran (2011 Ramachandran ( 2011 ). The tell-tale brain . New York , NY : Norton . [Google Scholar]). These studies are considered atop the theoretical and meta-analytical work in the field of neuropsychiatry by McGilchrist (2009 McGilchrist , I. ( 2009 ). The master and his emissary . New Haven , CT : Yale University Press . [Google Scholar]). McGilchrist's inquiry into split-brain patients has resuscitated the once-dubious debate regarding hemispheric differences in the brain. By considering the latter in light of the evidence of neuroplasticity, global differences in right- or left-brain preference may be understood as analogous and reciprocally influential to patterns of thinking. This dynamic relationship between experience and the brain requires a reconsideration of the status of neuroscience as an exclusively reductive enterprise. Indeed, the laboratories seem to be producing results that have become increasingly difficult to reconcile with their biologically reductive commitments. While the neuroscientists are busy sorting out their results, those who do not share said commitments are free to enjoy the implications these results suggest.     

Factors Affecting the Adequacy and Preferability of Semiparametric Groups-Based Approximations of Continuous Growth Trajectories

Psychologists have long been interested in characterizing individual differences in change over time. It is often plausible to assume that the distribution of these individual differences is continuous in nature, yet theory is seldom so specific as to designate its parametric form (e.g., normal). Semiparametric groups-based trajectory models (SPGMs) were thus developed to provide a discrete approximation for continuously distributed growth of unknown form. Previous research has demonstrated the adequacy of the approximation provided by SPGM but only under relatively narrow, theoretically optimal conditions. Under alternative conditions, which may be more common in practice (e.g., higher dimension random effects, smaller sample sizes), this study shows that approximation adequacy can suffer. Furthermore, this study also evaluates whether SPGM's discrete approximation is preferable to a parametric trajectory model that assumes normally distributed random effects when in fact the distribution is modestly nonnormal. The answer is shown to depend on distributional characteristics of both repeated measures (binary or continuous) and random effects (bimodal or skewed). Implications for practice are discussed in light of empirical examples on externalizing behavior.     

Evaluating Group-Based Interventions When Control Participants Are Ungrouped

Individually randomized treatments are often administered within a group setting. As a consequence, outcomes for treated individuals may be correlated due to provider effects, common experiences within the group, and/or informal processes of socialization. In contrast, it is often reasonable to regard outcomes for control participants as independent, given that these individuals are not placed into groups. Although this kind of design is common in intervention research, the statistical models applied to evaluate the treatment effects are usually inconsistent with the resulting data structure, potentially leading to biased inferences. This article presents an alternative model that explicitly accounts for the fact that only treated participants are grouped. In addition to providing a useful test of the overall treatment effect, this approach also permits one to formally determine the extent to which treatment effects vary over treatment groups and whether there is evidence that individuals within treatment groups become similar to one another. This strategy is demonstrated with data from the Reconnecting Youth program for high school students at risk of school failure and behavioral disorders.     

Visual image retention does not contribute to modulation of event-related potentials by mental rotation

Rotation of a visual image in mind is associated with a slow posterior negative deflection of the event-related potential (ERP), termed rotation-related negativity (RRN). Retention of a visual image in short-term memory is also associated with a slow posterior negative ERP, termed negative slow wave (NSW). We tested whether short-term memory retention, indexed by the NSW, contributes to the RRN. ERPs were recorded in the same subjects in two tasks, a mental rotation task, eliciting the RRN, and a visual short-term memory task, eliciting the NSW. Over both right and left parietal scalp, no association was found between the NSW and the RRN amplitudes. Furthermore, adjusting for the effect of the NSW had no influence on a significant association between the RRN amplitude and response time, an index of mental rotation performance. Our data indicate that the RRN reflects manipulation of a visual image but not its retention in short-term memory.     

The relationship between mental vitality and cardiovascular health

Past measurement of vitality has included both emotional and physical components. Since aspects of physical vitality such as fatigue can be indicative of physical illness, the usefulness of existing measures of vitality to predict health is limited. This research was designed to examine the psychometric properties of a new Mental Vitality Scale and to test its associations with measures of cardiovascular health over the course of 2 years. The measure of mental vitality was administered in a two-part study using three different samples. In part 1, the reliability and validity of the scale was assessed with a student and a clinic sample. In part 2, medical data on mental and physical health were abstracted over a two-year period from 1041 patient records from a multi-specialty medical practice, and mental vitality assessed through a mailed questionnaire. The findings indicate that the Mental Vitality Scale is a valid and reliable questionnaire for measuring this construct. Mental vitality was also associated with reduced odds of several cardiovascular outcomes and prospective analyses suggest that mental vitality may serve a protective function in the development of cardiovascular disease. The results lend support for the importance of mental vitality as a construct that may be relevant for considering resilience in relation to cardiovascular disease.