Failures,Fathers, and Fetal Fortunes: Reply to Commentaries by Avgi Saketopoulou and Jeanne Wolff Bernstein

This reply focuses on three themes highlighted in discussions by Avgi Saketopoulou and Jeanne Wolff Bernstein: “failure” in working with severely disturbed individuals, the structural fragility born of the ablation of the paternal, and Nina Farhi's notion of “annealed identifications.”     

The Confluence of Psychiatric Symptoms and Neurodegenerative Disease: Impact on Genetic Counseling

Hereditary neurodegenerative diseases can present with a psychiatric prodrome that overlaps with psychiatric symptoms that are not primary to these diseases. When individuals present for predictive testing while experiencing such symptoms, clinicians including genetic counselors, must proceed with caution and evaluate each situation on a case-by-case basis. Legitimate reasons may exist for moving forward with testing. Additionally predicting the consequences of testing is unrealistic so that the clinicians must do their best to prepare patients for both positive and negative results. A multidisciplinary team following the Huntington disease protocol remains the gold standard care for predictive testing for such patients. We discuss 3 case histories that demonstrate the complex nature of genetic counseling and testing in the presence of psychiatric symptoms, whether emanating from the disease itself or the results of living in an affected family.     

Effects of parental expectations and cultural-values orientation on career decision-making difficulties of Chinese University students

This study examined the effects of cultural-values conflict and parental expectations on the career decision-making difficulties of university students in three cities in China (Beijing, Wuhan, and Hong Kong, N = 1342). The Multidimensional Scales of Individual Traditionality and Modernity (Yang, Yu, & Ye, 1989) were used as a measure of cultural-values conflict and cultural orientation. The Living-Up-to Parental Expectation Inventory (Wang & Heppner, 2002) was used to measure parental expectations. The Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire (Gati & Saka, 2001) was used as a dependent measure. It was found that levels of cultural-value conflict were associated with higher levels of career decision-making difficulties for students in the Chinese Mainland cities but not for students in Hong Kong. Perceived parental expectations and perceived self-performance in the expected areas were found to be predictive of career decision-making difficulties. Cultural-value orientation, especially endorsement of Chinese traditional values, was found to moderate the relationship between parental expectation and career decision-making difficulties. Theoretical, research and practical implications of findings were discussed.     

An antinomy of political judgment: Kant,Arendt, and the role of purposiveness in reflective judgment

This article builds on Arendt’s development of a Kantian politics from out of the conception of reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Arendt looks to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful to explain how political thought can be conceived. And yet Arendt describes such Kantian reflection as an empirical undertaking that justifies itself only in relation to the abstract principle of the moral law. The problem for such an account is that the autonomy of the moral law appears to be at odds with the social cohesion of Kantian political life. The ensuing contradiction can be deemed the antinomy of political judgment. Kant’s conception of reflective judgment offers such an inquiry considerably more to work with than Arendt uncovers. In particular, the regulative principle of the purposiveness of nature that is shown to direct all reflection can be seen to offer the solution to this antinomy.     

Judgments of communicative intent in conversation

In conversation people make specific statements that are intended to accomplish some particular social action (e.g., to praise, criticize or sympathize). To communicate effectively, people must consensually perceive the intentions of each other’s messages. In this research we examined the degree of consensus in judgments of communicative intent. Participants engaged in separate, brief conversations with three friends, watched videotapes of their interactions, and judged the communicative intent of 6 randomly selected statements. Observers also judged these statements under one of three conditions: audio-visual, audio, or text. Analyses showed that participants agreed strongly in their judgments of intent and that observers also agreed in their judgments, but not as much as participants.     

A Case that the Field of Psychotherapy Is Closed-Minded to Revolutionary New Ideas

The case is that, with regard to revolutionary new ideas, the field of psychotherapy (a) has a glaring absence of indicators of open-mindedness; (b) is distinctly and conspicuously closed-minded; (c) this closed-mindedness is extreme, and differentiates the field from many other fields; and (d) the field is essentially barricaded against knowing that it is so conspicuously closed-minded. The fanciful and unrealistic revolution would be for the field to become open-minded. Invitations are extended to any psychotherapists with a spark of open-minded possibilities.     

What Revolution Would You Like to See In the Field of Psychotherapy? Introduction

Contributors to a theme issue were invited to address two questions: (a) What revolution would you like to see in the field of psychotherapy? (b) What makes it revolutionary? That is, how and why is it revolutionary? In a spirit of helping contributors do their job, an attempt is made to clarify the meaning of a revolutionary new idea in the field of psychotherapy by identifying components that do not especially belong, and by proposing components that can be thought of as defining the proposed meaning.     

ON THE IMMEDIACY OF PHONETIC PERCEPTION

Abstract— If, as we believe, language is a specialization alt the way down to its roots, then perception of its consonantal elements should be immediately phonetic, not as in the conventional view, a secondary translation from percepts of an auditory sort. Supporting observations come from an experiment in which formant transitions that distinguish [da] and [gal were presented as sinusoids and combined with a synthetic syllable made of resonances, thus causing the auditory system to treat these acoustically incoherent parts as different sources Evidence for the source difference was varied by changing the intensity of the sinusoids relative to the remainder of the syllable. Over the greater part of a 60-dB range, listeners accurately identified the consonants, indicating that they had integrated the stimuli according to a coherence that existed only in the phonetic domain. At the lowest intensities, indeed, the consonants were accurately identified, even though the whistles—the normal responses to the sinusoids—were not. There followed then a range over which perception was duplex. Both consonants and whistles were accurately identified At the highest intensities, phonetic integration failed, but accurate perception of the whistles was maintained. That the phonetic percept was present when as auditory counterpart was absent, and vice versa, is evidence that the phonetic percept is independent of its auditory counterpart and not a translation from it, as is the fact that the two percepts followed very different courses in response to the experimental variable.     

Communication Differences Between Physicians and Their Patients in an Oncology Setting

The physician-patient relationship has critical importance in the quality of medical care, especially in the oncology setting. Of particular interest over the past two decades has been the communication between physicians and their patients. It is understood that communication is related to patient and physician satisfaction as well as other medical outcomes. However, despite this interest and attention, investigators have only recently begun to assess the communication between physicians and patients from the patient's point of view. Additionally, previous investigations have primarily relied upon retrospective reports of the interaction from patients or physicians. The current investigation assessed physician–patient communication in an oncology setting, both as it was occurring and following the interaction. The units of analysis included participant ratings as well as those of trained observers. Findings revealed that physicians and patients disagree as to the valence of the messages which transpired. Additionally, results suggest that it is the patients who distort the messages in the positive direction. Research and clinical implications of this disagreement and positivity bias are discussed.