Natality and mortality: rethinking death with Cavarero

In this article I rethink death and mortality on the basis of birth and natality, drawing on the work of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero. She understands birth to be the corporeal event whereby a unique person emerges from the mother’s body into the common world. On this basis Cavarero reconceives death as consisting in bodily dissolution and re-integration into cosmic life. This impersonal conception of death coheres badly with her view that birth is never exclusively material but always has ontological significance as the appearance of someone new and singular in the world of relations with others. This view of birth calls for a relational conception of death, which I develop in this article. On this conception, death is always collective, affecting all those with whom the one who dies has maintained relations: As such, our different deaths shade into one another. Moreover, because each person is unique in virtue of consisting of a unique web of relations with others, death always happens to persons as webs of relations. Death is relational in this way as a corporeal, and specifically biological, phenomenon, to which we are subject as bodily beings and as interdependent living organisms. I explore this with reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of her mother’s death from cancer. Finally I argue that, on this relational conception, death is something to be feared.     

Categorical priming of famous person recognition: a hitherto overlooked methodological factor can resolve a long-standing debate

The Burton, Bruce and Johnston [Burton, A. M., Bruce, V., & Johnston, R. A. (1990). Understanding face recognition with an interactive activation model. British Journal of Psychology, 81, 361-380] model of person recognition proposes that representations of known persons are connected by shared semantic attributes. This predicts that priming should be observed between persons from the same category, e.g. famous persons with the same occupation. Empirical investigations to date have produced mixed results, and comparison of methods suggests that priming based on shared occupation may have been suppressed by the presence of prime-target pairs representing a stronger relationship of close association. In the present experiment, 72 participants performed a familiarity decision to famous names preceded by close associates or members of the same occupational category. As predicted, categorical priming was observed in the group of participants for whom the same occupation prime-target pairs were presented before the close-associate pairs, but not in the group for whom the two types of relationship were intermixed. Associate priming was significant in both groups. These results are attributed to differing levels of processing of the primes, invoked by participants' observation of the most salient prime-target relationship.     

Premarital Education: An Assessment of Program Efficacy*

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a premarital educational program, with the secondary goal of determining if the structure (conjoint versus group) and the participants’ gender influenced program effectiveness. Data were collected from 29 heterosexual couples. Couples were placed in one of three conditions: (1) premarital education in a group format, (2) premarital education as an individual couple, or (3) the comparison group (no premarital education). The goal of the 8-week intervention was to improve couples’ readiness and preparation for marriage as measured by the PREP-M. The findings suggested that the educational program achieved its stated goal. *The authors would like to acknowledge Aaron Mathney, Dr. Joe Turner, Dr. Kathy Rettig, Sarah DeJean, and Dena Wyum for their assistance with this project.     

What do infants see in faces? ERP evidence of different roles of eyes and mouth for face perception in 9‐month‐old infants

The study examined whether face‐specific perceptual brain mechanisms in 9‐month‐old infants are differentially sensitive to changes in individual facial features (eyes versus mouth) and whether sensitivity to such changes is related to infants' social and communicative skills. Infants viewed photographs of a smiling unfamiliar female face. On 30% of the trials, either the eyes or the mouth of that face were replaced by corresponding parts from a different female. Visual event‐related potentials were recorded to examine face‐sensitive brain responses. Results revealed that increased competence in expressive communication and interpersonal relationships was associated with a more mature response to faces, as reflected in a larger occipito‐temporal N290 with shorter latency. Both eye‐ and mouth changes were detected, though infants derived different information from these features. Eye changes had a greater impact on the face perception mechanisms and were not correlated with social or communication development, whereas mouth changes had a minimal impact on face processing but were associated with levels of language and communication understanding. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What do double dissociations prove?

Brain damage may doubly dissociate cognitive modules, but the practice of revealing dissociations is predicated on modularity being true (T. Shallice, 1988). This article questions the utility of assuming modularity, as it examines a paradigmatic double dissociation of reading modules. Reading modules illustrate two general problems. First, modularity fails to converge on a fixed set of exclusionary criteria that define pure cases. As a consequence, competing modular theories force perennial quests for purer cases, which simply perpetuates growth in the list of exclusionary criteria. The first problem leads, in part, to the second problem. Modularity fails to converge on a fixed set of pure cases. The second failure perpetuates unending fractionation into more modules.     

A survey of university counselling in the united kingdom and some observations on evaluation

Universities were surveyed about their counselling services during 1987 using a postal questionnaire. Information is presented from 44 universities and includes the extent of counselling provision in relation to the number of students, the staffing and accountability of the services, the needs of the clients and how they are met, and some theoretical and professional concerns mentioned by the counsellors. Finally, some observations are made on the need for more systematic evaluation of the services.     

The clinical vignette: Use in teaching and evaluation of group therapists

This paper describes the use of a written vignette as an aid in teaching group psychotherapy. Educators can determine in advance their expectations of the students' understanding of the vignette. Trainees evaluate the salient data, recognize patients' and therapist's contributions to the process, and conceptualize at three levels: intrapsychic, interpersonal and group-as-a-whole. This method supplements the usual training methods, and offers information about both the individual student and the entire class. This approach has an advantage of enabling educators to assess students in a relatively standardized fashion.