‘Critical psychotherapy,’ ‘postpsychotherapy,’ and the cult of technicism

This paper about the terms ‘critical psychotherapy’ and ‘postpsychotherapy’ argues that the terms ‘critical psychology,’ ‘critical psychiatry,’ and ‘postpsychiatry’ are already in use, and we can see the new terms – ‘critical psychotherapy’ and ‘postpsychotherapy’ – as additions to this already existing family of terms. However, this paper also argues that what is of most importance is not the case for using these new terms, but the tendencies and features these terms might be taken to refer to. The paper begins with an experience the author had while working as a counsellor some years ago. The terms listed above are explored, as are the roots of ‘critical psychotherapy’ in psychoanalysis, before providing an example of how a philosopher’s work might be relevant to psychotherapists.     

Representational Pseudoneglect: A Review

Pseudoneglect, the tendency to be biased towards the left-hand side of space, is a robust and consistent behavioural observation best demonstrated on the task of visuospatial line bisection, where participants are asked to centrally bisect visually presented horizontal lines at the perceived centre. A number of studies have revealed that a representational form of pseudoneglect exists, occurring when participants are asked to either mentally represent a stimulus or explore a stimulus using touch in the complete absence of direct visuospatial processing. Despite the growing number of studies that have demonstrated representational pseudoneglect there exists no current and comprehensive review of these findings and no discussion of a theoretical framework into which these findings may fall. An important gap in the current representational pseudoneglect literature is a discussion of the developmental trajectory of the bias. The focus of the current review is to outline studies that have observed representational pseudoneglect in healthy participants, consider a theoretical framework for these observations, and address the impact of lifespan factors such as cognitive ageing on the phenomenon.     

Perceptual grouping and detection of trial-unique emergent structures by pigeons

Animal Cognition - Detecting global patterns in the environment is essential to object perception and recognition. Consistent with this, pigeons have been shown to readily detect and locate...     

Biological Sex and Psychological Gender as Predictors of Routine and Strategic Relational Maintenance

The current study contributes to 2 growing areas of research: one distinguishes between routine and strategic relational maintenance behaviors, and the other concerns the relative utility of biological sex and psychological gender as predictors of communication behaviors. Specifically, we sought to uncover sex and gender differences in routine and strategic maintenance and to test the relative strength of each as predictors of routine and strategic maintenance. Survey data were collected from 189 individuals in romantic relationships. Results indicated only one sex difference; women use routine openness more than men do. However, femininity was positively associated with the routine use of advice, conflict management, and openness. Masculinity was positively associated with the strategic use of openness and tasks. Femininity was not associated with strategic maintenance, and masculinity was not associated with routine maintenance. The value of distinguishing between sex and gender to explain how individuals function in relationships is discussed.     

Grouping puts figure-ground assignment in context by constraining propagation of edge assignment

Figure-ground organization involves the assignment of edges to a figural shape on one or the other side of each dividing edge. Established visual cues for edge assignment primarily concern relatively local rather than contextual factors. In the present article, we show that an assignment for a locally unbiased edge can be affected by an assignment of a remote contextual edge that has its own locally biased assignment. We find that such propagation of edge assignment from the biased remote context occurs only when the biased and unbiased edges are grouped. This new principle, whereby grouping constrains the propagation of figural edge assignment, emerges from both subjective reports and an objective short-term edge-matching task. It generalizes from moving displays involving grouping by common fate and collinearity, to static displays with grouping by similarity of edge-contrast polarity, or apparent occlusion. Our results identify a new contextual influence on edge assignment. They also identify a new mechanistic relation between grouping and figure-ground processes, whereby grouping between remote elements can constrain the propagation of edge assignment between those elements. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://app.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Accuracy of stereomotion speed perception with persisting and dynamic textures

It has been established that the motion in depth of stimuli visible to both eyes may be signalled binocularly either by a change of disparity over time or by the difference in the velocity of the images projected on each retina, known as an interocular velocity difference. A two-interval forced-choice stereomotion speed discrimination experiment was performed on four participants to ascertain the relative speed of a persistent random dot stereogram (RDS) and a dynamic RDS undergoing directly approaching or receding motion in depth. While the persistent RDS pattern involved identical dot patterns translating in opposite directions in each eye, and hence included both changing disparity and interocular velocity difference cues, the dynamic RDS pattern (which contains no coherent monocular motion signals) specified motion in depth through changing disparity, but no motion through interocular velocity difference. Despite an interocular velocity difference speed signal of zero motion in depth, the dynamic RDS stimulus appeared to move more rapidly. These observations are consistent with a scheme in which cues that rely on coherent monocular motion signals (such as looming and the interocular velocity difference cue) are less influential in dynamic stimuli due to their lack of reliability (i.e., increased noise). While dynamic RDS stimuli may be relatively unaffected by the contributions of such cues when they signal that the stimulus did not move in depth, the persistent RDS stimulus may retain a significant and conflicting contribution from the looming cue, resulting in a lower perceived speed.     

Man Talk: Exploring Sexual Communication Between Fathers and Sons in a Minority South African Community

Sex Roles - Much of what is known about father-child sexual communication is based on studies conducted in North America and more research into under-represented groups is needed. Our exploratory...     

What is this thing called love? Desire,psychotherapy and Plato’s symposium

The platonic dialogue, Symposium, is approached here through client work. This rich and complex text is not rushed through as if the point of a conversation must be its swift and clear termination, rather than how potentially fruitful, generative and transformative it is or may come to be when we reflect or engage in further conversation. This paper suggests that Symposium presents us with two ways of thinking about relating to another, and ends with some remarks about this platonic dialogue and psychotherapy that could, of course, be followed by more conversation.