Debate,Prophecy, and Revolution: Notes on Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt

In Prophecy without Contempt, Cathleen Kaveny argues that prevailing scholarly approaches to religious and public discourse misunderstand the actual complexity of moral rhetoric in America. She endeavors to provide a better account through study of the role the Puritan jeremiad has played. Kaveny then offers a normative case for deliberative public moral discourse and the limited exercise of prophetic denunciation. I argue that Kaveny's distinction between deliberation and prophetic denunciation is overdrawn. They are ideal types that elide other rhetorical forms. Moreover, both deliberative discourse and prophetic denunciation assume a social contract or shared tradition. Healthy moral discourse requires revolutionary rhetoric to interrogate and break traditions that are themselves morally compromised.     

Gender Role Traits Among Individuals with Social Anxiety Disorder

The present study investigated differences between individuals with and without social anxiety disorder (SAD) in instrumentality and expressiveness, personality traits traditionally linked to the male and female gender roles, respectively. Based on evolutionary and self-discrepancy theories, it was hypothesized that individuals with SAD would score lower on instrumentality and report a discrepancy between their perceived and ideal level of instrumentality compared to control participants. Sixty-four patients with SAD and 31 non-anxious control participants completed a battery of questionnaires, including ratings of their perceived and ideal gender role attributes and current psychosocial distress. Results supported the hypotheses, and provided initial evidence that a discrepancy between perceived and ideal instrumentality may be linked to social anxiety severity, depression and lower quality of life. No differences were detected between groups in expressiveness. The present findings suggest that individuals with SAD perceive themselves to be deficient in instrumentality. They also suggest that increasing instrumentality among individuals with SAD may be beneficial for treatment.     

Biography as an Art Form: The Story of Helen Flanders Dunbar,M.D., Ph.D., B.D., and Med. Sci. D

Helen Flanders Dunbar (1902–1959) was a physician, medieval and Renaissance scholar, theologian, and founder of the American Psychosomatic Society and its journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Her contributions are not currently well known but deserve recognition from all those involved or interested in the dialogue between medicine and spirituality. This essay explores Dunbar’s personal history and professional achievements. It focuses particular attention on a feminist perspective regarding her life and work. It will conclude with a discussion of how biography, as an art form, transforms both author and audience. This essay was originally presented as the Second Annual J.R. Williams Memorial Lecture on Spirituality and Medicine at the Tulane School of Medicine in fall 2013.     

Evaluation of a Booster Intervention Three Years After Acute Treatment for Early-Onset Disruptive Behavior Disorders

This study examines the impact of a brief booster treatment administered 3 years after the delivery of an acute treatment in a group (n?=?118) of clinically referred boys and girls (ages 6 to 11) originally diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) or Conduct Disorder (CD). At the conclusion of the acute treatment and three-year follow-up period (i.e., study month 42), the sample was re-randomized into Booster treatment or Enhanced Usual Care and then assessed at four later timepoints (i.e., post-booster, and 6-, 12- and 24-month booster follow-up). Booster treatment was directed towards addressing individualized problems and some unique developmental issues of adolescence based on the same original protocol content and treatment setting, whereas the Enhanced Usual Care condition involved providing clinical recommendations based on the assessment and an outside referral for services. HLM analyses identified no significant group differences and few time effects across child, parent, and teacher reports on a broad range of child functioning and impairment outcomes. Analyses examining the role of putative moderators or predictors (e.g., severity of externalizing behavior, dose of treatment) were likewise non-significant. We discuss the nature and implications of these novel findings regarding the role and timing of booster treatment to address the continuity of DBD over time.     

The Appearance‐Change Instruction Does Not Improve Line‐up Identification Accuracy

In many jurisdictions, police instruct a witness, before presenting a photo line‐up, that the suspect's appearance may be different in the photo than it was at the time of the crime. The experiments reported here examine the impact of this ‘appearance‐change instruction’ (ACI), exploring its effects with different crimes, perpetrators, line‐ups, and different phrasings of the ACI. The data indicate that the ACI increases witnesses' willingness to make a choice from a line‐up but does not increase accuracy. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Zones of Proximal Emotional Development — Psychotherapy Within a Neuroaffective Perspective

This article outlines a conceptual framework for assessing personal and emotional functions of a person’s zone of proximal emotional development. The framework is based on the integrative theory Neuroaffective Developmental Psychology (NADP), which brings together attachment theory, neuropsychology, developmental psychology, and trauma theory. Within the NADP framework, this article describes a way of understanding children’s normal emotional mental organization and of examining how this mental organization may be developed or disturbed by relational issues. It also describes how a child’s mental organization can be disturbed and thus, without intervention, disturb the child’s personality development on a lifelong basis. The article presents three case vignettes, describing three children growing into adolescence with three different attachment patterns and suggested individually tailored intervention plans for each of them, relevant and useful for clinicians working with vulnerable children and families. Because the nervous system retains its plasticity throughout life, attachment is not necessarily an unchangeable pattern. That is why we as clinicians should develop psychotherapeutic methods and a research-based way of determining “what works for whom” by assessing the zone of individual proximal emotional development. The text outlines the characteristics of NADP and how it can be used to structure an intervention plan.