Being a Therapist: Contributions of Heidegger's Philosophy and the Buddha's Teachings to Psychotherapy

Is there a place for Heidegger's philosophy and the Buddha's teachings (dhamma) in contemporary psychotherapy? The simple answer is yes. This article explores how the ideas of Being-in-the-world, Openness, Being-With, anticipatory care, letting be and letting go, cultivating a meditative attitude and a beginner's mind—promoted in Heidegger's philosophy, daseinsanalysis, and the Buddha's teachings—inform my approach to therapy and ground my Being as a therapist, and how this embodiment has been received by clients. Some important parallels and differences between Heideggerian and Buddhist ideas and practices are also discussed. Heidegger's philosophy, the Buddha's teachings, and daseinsanalysis provide therapists with important foundations for understanding their roles as cojourneyers with their clients, and embracing this attitude in therapy can make therapy truly a healing, rather than a curing, process.     

The Development of Transitivity of Length in Young Children

This research examined whether developmental changes occur in young children's abilities to learn transitive information. Children 4 years 6 months to 5 years 6 months and 6 to 7 years were asked to learn a series, A > B > C, or a nonseries, A > B, C > D. Younger children took longer to learn the series than the nonseries. Children learning the series correctly answered the inference question, but could not distinguish between situations in which it was possible or impossible to make inferences. The results suggest that there are developmental changes in transitivity abilities and that transitivity is a concept that emerges gradually.     

How you lie affects what you remember

We investigated how telling different types of lies may impact memory. Participants studied pictures of objects, and later lied and told the truth about these and new objects once or multiple times by describing them or by denying they had seen them. Forty-eight hours later, participants were tested on their source memory. Results revealed that participants had good memory for having falsely described a never-seen object, but relatively poor memory for having falsely denied seeing a studied object. These results suggest that telling certain types of lies may make a person more likely to forget having lied. In addition, repeated truthful denials of having seen a picture paradoxically increased false memories for having seen it. Thus, telling the truth does not always prevent the possibility of memory distortion.     

Gender,Low Self-Control,and Violent Victimization

Prior research demonstrates that men generally experience higher levels of violent victimization relative to women. Using a high-risk sample of jail inmates, the present study draws on the core ideas from the self-control and societal norms toward the treatment of women literatures to examine the main and interactive effects of gender and self-control on violent victimization. Results indicate that gender and self-control both exhibit main effects on violent victimization net of control variables and that gender and self-control interact such that the gender gap in violent victimization disappears among men and women with low levels of self-control. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, policy, and future research.     

The Imposter Phenomenon Among Emerging Adults Transitioning Into Professional Life: Developing a Grounded Theory

This study qualitatively explored the imposter phenomenon (IP) among 29 emerging adults who were transitioning into professional life. A grounded theory was developed that described IP, internal and external contributing factors, and IP's effect in terms of performance and affective reactions. Implications for counselors of emerging adults are discussed.     

Reflective minds and open hearts: Cognitive style and personality predict religiosity and spiritual thinking in a community sample

We examined associations between two psychological constructs, analytic cognitive style and the personality facet ‘Openness to Experience’, and several dimensions of religiosity: religious affiliation, strength of faith and spiritual epistemology. In a relatively large (N = 1093), older community sample (M = 55.4 years), analytic cognitive style was associated with a lower probability of affiliating with a religious denomination and a higher probability of possessing strong religious faith. Overall, openness was also associated with a lack of religious affiliation but was positively related to possessing a spiritual epistemology. A path‐analytic model revealed that openness had a positive relationship to both faith and religious denomination that was mediated by spiritual epistemology, but negative direct relationships with religiosity after the meditational effects were taken into account. Taken together, these results extend previous findings on the effect of cognitive style on religiosity and provide a new perspective on the complex relationship between cognitive and personality factors and different dimensions of religiosity. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Infants Understand How Testimony Works

Children learn about the world from the testimony of other people, often coming to accept what they are told about a variety of unobservable and indeed counter-intuitive phenomena. However, research on children’s learning from testimony has paid limited attention to the foundations of that capacity. We ask whether those foundations can be observed in infancy. We review evidence from two areas of research: infants’ sensitivity to the emotional expressions of other people; and their capacity to understand the exchange of information through non-verbal gestures and vocalization. We conclude that a grasp of the bi-directional exchange of information is present early in the second year. We discuss the implications for future research, especially across different cultural settings.     

A Dyadic Perspective on Speech Accommodation and Social Connection: Both Partners' Rejection Sensitivity Matters

Findings from confederate paradigms predict that mimicry is an adaptive route to social connection for rejection‐sensitive individuals (Lakin, Chartrand, & Arkin, 2008). However, dyadic perspectives predict that whether mimicry leads to perceived connection depends on the rejection sensitivity (RS) of both partners in an interaction. We investigated these predictions in 50 college women who completed a dyadic cooperative task in which members were matched or mismatched in being dispositionally high or low in RS. We used a psycholinguistics paradigm to assess, through independent listeners' judgments (N = 162), how much interacting individuals accommodate phonetic aspects of their speech toward each other. Results confirmed predictions from confederate paradigms in matched RS dyads. However, mismatched dyads showed an asymmetry in levels of accommodation and perceived connection: Those high in RS accommodated more than their low‐RS partner but emerged feeling less connected. Mediational analyses indicated that low‐RS individuals' nonaccommodation in mismatched dyads helped explain their high‐RS partners' relatively low perceived connection to them. Establishing whether mimicry is an adaptive route to social connection requires analyzing mimicry as a dyadic process influenced by the needs of each dyad member.