Some highs and lows of hylomorphism: on a paradox about property abstraction

Philosophical Studies - We defend hylomorphism against Maegan Fairchild’s purported proof of its inconsistency. We provide a deduction of a contradiction from SH+, which is the...     

The functional independence of trait self-knowledge: commentary on Sakaki (2007)

In a recent paper, Sakaki (2007) proposed that Klein and Loftus's conclusion that semantic and episodic trait self-knowledge are functionally independent (e.g., Klein, Babey, & Sherman, 1997; Klein & Loftus, 1993a; Klein, Loftus, Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992b) was based on questionable assumptions and not supported by the available evidence. In this paper we show that Sakaki (2007) has misinterpreted our position on the independence of self-knowledge, omitted mention of large portions of the relevant research at odds with her contention, and conducted her studies with procedures we explicitly warned against due to interpretive ambiguities associated with their use.     

Adding motivational interviewing to exposure and ritual prevention for obsessive-compulsive disorder: an open pilot trial

Exposure and ritual prevention (EX/RP) is an efficacious treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but high dropout rates and variable treatment adherence limit its effectiveness. Motivational interviewing (MI) has shown promise as an adjunct to symptom-focused treatments for improving treatment adherence and outcomes. The authors developed a manual integrating MI with EX/RP, consisting of three information-gathering/motivational enhancement sessions and 15 EX/RP sessions with an optional MI module to be used as needed. Six patients with moderate to severe OCD symptoms (Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale [Y-BOCS] score> or =16) underwent treatment. Five showed a decrease in their baseline Y-BOCS scores and an increase in their quality of life, with three achieving an excellent response (i.e. Y-BOCS< or =12 at Session 18). The authors briefly describe the motivational strategies used in the six cases and suggest that integrating MI with standard EX/RP is a promising method to increase and sustain patient engagement with EX/RP. Challenges in combining these treatments and maintaining the integrity of each as well as limitations of the study are discussed.     

Cumulating Evidence about the Social Animal: Meta‐Analysis in Social‐Personality Psychology

Like most scientific fields, social‐personality psychology has experienced an explosion of research related to such central topics as aggression, attraction, gender, group processes, motivation, personality, and persuasion, to name a few. The proliferation of research can be a monster unless it is tamed with the scientific review strategy of meta‐analysis, literally analyses of past analyses that produce a quantitative and empirical history of research on a particular phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to outline the basic process and statistics of meta‐analysis, as they pertain to social‐personality psychology. Meta‐analysis involves: (i) defining the problem under review; (ii) gathering qualified reports and putting their findings and methods into a database, (iii) analyzing that database, and (iv) interpreting the results and reporting them. Use of meta‐analytic strategies has paralleled the knowledge explosion in social‐personality psychology, but must be used and consumed with careful discernment if the cumulated evidence about the social animal, Homo sapiens, is to have maximal value.     

Cognitive-behavior therapy for depressed cancer patients in a medical care setting

Major depression is the most common psychiatric disorder among cancer patients and is associated with decreased quality of life, significant deterioration in recreational and physical activities, relationship difficulties, sleep problems, more rapidly progressing cancer symptoms, and more metastasis and pain relative to nondepressed cancer patients. Although some research has explored the utility of psychological interventions with cancer patients, only one study to date has explored the potential benefits of cognitive-behavior therapy among cancer patients with well-diagnosed depression. Addressing this gap in the literature, this study represents an open clinical trial to assess the effectiveness of a brief Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment for Depression (CBTD) among depressed cancer patients in a medical care setting. Results revealed strong treatment integrity, good patient compliance, excellent patient satisfaction with the CBTD protocol, and significant pre-post treatment gains across a breadth of outcome measures assessing depression, anxiety, quality of life, and medical outcomes. These gains also were associated with strong effect sizes and generally maintained at 3-month follow-up. Behavioral activation interventions, especially when paired with cognitive techniques, may represent a practical medical care treatment that may improve psychological outcomes and quality of life among cancer patients. Study limitations and future research directions are discussed.     

Brief motivational intervention with homeless adolescents: evaluating effects on substance use and service utilization.

A brief motivational intervention with 117 homeless adolescents was evaluated using a randomized design and 3-month follow-up. The intervention was designed to raise youths' concerns about their substance use, support harm reduction, and encourage greater service utilization at a collaborating agency. The study was designed to strengthen initial promising results of an earlier study (P. L. Peterson, J. S. Baer, E. A. Wells, J. A. Ginzler, & S. B. Garrett, 2006). Several modifications in the clinical protocol were included to enhance engagement with the intervention. Analyses revealed no significant benefits for intervention participants when homeless youths' substance use rates were compared with those of control participants. Service utilization during the intervention period increased for those receiving the intervention but returned to baseline levels at follow-up. Participants reported overall reductions in substance use over time. Differences between sampling methods for the current and previous study are discussed, as are the limitations of brief interventions with this population. Future research needs to elucidate mechanisms of change and service engagement for highly vulnerable youth.     

Inhibition of return and object-based attentional selection

Visual attention research has revealed that attentional allocation can occur in space- and/or object-based coordinates. Using the direct and elegant design of R. Egly, J. Driver, and R. Rafal (1994), the present experiments tested whether space- and object-based inhibition of return (IOR) emerge under similar time courses. The experiments were capable of isolating both space- and object-based effects induced by peripheral and back-to-center cues. The results generally support the contention that spatially nonpredictive cues are effective in producing space-based IOR at a variety of stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and under a variety of stimulus conditions. Whether facilitatory or inhibitory in direction, the object-based effects occurred over a very different time course than did the space-based effects. Reliable object-based IOR was only found under limited conditions and was tied to the time since the most recent cue (peripheral or central). The finding that object-based effects are generally determined by SOA from the most recent cue may help to resolve discrepancies in the IOR literature. These findings also have implications for the search facilitator role that IOR is purported to play in the guidance of visual attention.     

Aggression, psychopathy and free will from a cognitive neuroscience perspective

This article considers the notion of free will in the context of aggression and psychopathy research. The philosophical literature is very briefly considered to determine under what assumptions free will can be considered to exist. However, as the issue of free will is very difficult to address directly, the prime focus of this article is on issues raised in the philosophical debate, that may be empirically tractable and that are relevant to the understanding of psychopathy. Specifically, the following issues are considered: (1) The distinction between automatic and controlled processing; (2) Impairment related to automatic processing in individuals with psychopathy; and (3) Impairment related to controlled behavior in individuals with psychopathy. It is concluded that, while there is not a direct mapping of the automatic versus controlled processing dichotomy on to the reactive versus instrumental aggression dichotomy, some overlap can be considered. As such, it is possible to consider that certain episodes of reactive aggression might be considered to occur in the absence of free will. However, instrumental aggression, at least from a compatibilist perspective, must involve free will.     

Spontaneously hypertensive, Wistar Kyoto and Sprague-Dawley rats differ in their use of place and response strategies in the water radial arm maze

This study further characterises the use of mnemonic systems in the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR), which is frequently used as a rodent model of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The objective of this study was to assess the preference of male SHR, Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) and Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats for a place or response strategy when trained on an ambiguous T-maze task, and also to examine whether all strains acquired information about both strategies during ambiguous training, regardless of their preferred strategy. In the first experiment, SHR and WKY showed a preference for a response strategy on the ambiguous T-maze task; in contrast, SD displayed a preference for a place strategy. In the second experiment, all strains demonstrated that they learned information about both the response and place strategies during ambiguous training. However, on a conditioned place preference test SHR did not display as strong a preference for the place arm as WKY and SD. This finding supports previous research in a conditioned cue preference test, in which SHR did not display a preference for the cue associated with the platform. These observations that the strains differ with respect to behavioural strategy in a learning task suggest that they differ in the underlying neural circuitry that serves goal-directed behaviour, and are consistent with SHR having deficits associated with the nucleus accumbens.