The Sweet Hereafter by Atom Egoyan: extreme loss and psychic survival

In a small mountain community of British Columbia a school bus swerves off the road, causing the death of 14 children. Mitchell Stephens, a New York lawyer, immediately enters the fray with the idea of instigating a large‐scale lawsuit to obtain compensation for the victims, making contact with each of the parents who had lost children in the accident. Many are persuaded to join his cause. The lawyer, bombarded by phone calls from his daughter, a drug addict, even turns to Dolores Driscoll, the bus driver, who survived the accident. The latter, however, with the support of her paraplegic husband, refuses to become involved in the lawsuit. Another character who is vigorously opposed to the collective cause is Billy Ansel, a garage owner who had already lost his beloved wife and witnesses the death of his two children from the pick‐up truck in which he is following the school bus. Among the survivors there is, finally, the 14 year‐old Nicole Burnell, who had dreamt of becoming a folk singer and now finds herself paralysed from the waist down. Nicole is initially persuaded by the lawyer and by her parents – in particular by her father Sam, with whom she has had an incestuous relationship – to testify in favour the party seeking compensation, but when she steps into the witness box, realizing that such legal action was misguided, she offers a ‘false’ account of the accident, invalidating the case. Two years after the tragedy of the school bus, Mitchell Stephens bumps into Allison, a friend of his daughter’s, on an airplane and ends up revealing to her some of his painful experiences.     

Clinical models in RET: An advanced model of the organization of emotional and behavioural disorders

Based on Albert Ellis' original ABC model and Richard Wessler's 8-step model, a new model of emotional disturbances is described. The new model attempts to express graphically some important principles of RET theory as well as its recent advancements and innovations. The clinical usefulness of the model, both in the assessment process and in planning therapeutic interventions, is discussed with particular attention to secondary symptoms of emotional disturbances.Cesare DeSilvestri, M.D., is an associate fellow and RET training supervisor of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy, Executive Director and Director of Training of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy (Italy), a guest-professor of clinical psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, State University of Rome, Italy, and is engaged in private practice in Rome and Milano, Italy.     

Voluntary visual attention and phenomenal line length

In 1956, Fraisse, et al. reported subjects judged that lines were longer when voluntary attention was focused on the lines than when attention was distracted from the lines. In the many attempts to repeat these results, none has ascertained whether attention on reported line length was a phenomenal effect. In the present study, 46 subjects were shown as stimuli pairs of horizontal or vertical briefly flashed lines with a fixation cross placed equidistant between the lines but far from each one. A change in color of one arm of the cross was used as a cue to focus subjects' voluntary attention on one line. Analysis showed attention increased the judged length of attended lines. Since this effect of attention also occurred when subjects were absolutely certain they saw the stimulus lines differed in length, this effect indicates that attention increased the phenomenal length of the attended lines. This lengthening was quite small: it involved a maximum mean increase of about .15 in the probability of the comparative response that the attended line was longer. This effect occurred in the horizontal dimension and was almost absent in the vertical dimension. In agreement with data indicating that flashed lines expand phenomenally by activating motion detectors and that focused attention makes neural motion responses increase in amplitude, the present results suggest that focused attention makes attended lines look longer because it makes these lines expand phenomenally more rapidly.     

How the gaze of others influences object processing

An aspect of gaze processing, which so far has been given little attention, is the influence that intentional gaze processing can have on object processing. Converging evidence from behavioural neuroscience and developmental psychology strongly suggests that objects falling under the gaze of others acquire properties that they would not display if not looked at. Specifically, observing another person gazing at an object enriches that object of motor, affective and status properties that go beyond its chemical or physical structure. A conceptual analysis of available evidence leads to the conclusion that gaze has the potency to transfer to the object the intentionality of the person looking at it.     

Referral to group psychotherapy: a retrospective study on patients' personality features associated with clinicians' judgments

This study was designed to explore selected personality features of patients that are associated with clinicians' judgments about whom to refer to dynamic group psychotherapy versus individual therapy. Results suggested that an aspect of patients' adult attachment style, namely level of confidence and level of hostility, may have influenced the clinicians' judgments and decision making about treatment referrals.     

Working memory affects false memory production for emotional events

Whereas a link between working memory (WM) and memory distortions has been demonstrated, its influence on emotional false memories is unclear. In two experiments, a verbal WM task and a false memory paradigm for negative, positive or neutral events were employed. In Experiment 1, we investigated individual differences in verbal WM and found that the interaction between valence and WM predicted false recognition, with negative and positive material protecting high WM individuals against false remembering; the beneficial effect of negative material disappeared in low WM participants. In Experiment 2, we lowered the WM capacity of half of the participants with a double task request, which led to an overall increase in false memories; furthermore, consistent with Experiment 1, the increase in negative false memories was larger than that of neutral or positive ones. It is concluded that WM plays a critical role in determining false memory production, specifically influencing the processing of negative material.     

Attention and perception, memory, and judgment of line length

The literature reports that focused attention alters perceived length of lines. Some tests of this attentional effect require that subjects compare line lengths. This note shows that conceptual confusions inherent in this comparison make the tests invalid.