Efficacy of neurostimulation to treat symptoms of Mal de Debarquement Syndrome. A preliminary study using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation

Mal de debarquement syndrome (MdDS) is a rare and poorly understood condition of perceived continual motion. Using a multiple‐case design (n = 13; 8 f; 63.5 ± 12.6 years), this study investigated the efficacy of eight 20‐min sessions, over 4 weeks, of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the dorsolateral pre‐frontal cortex. Compared to sham, rTMS demonstrated improvement in balance and confidence in daily living activities. rTMS shows promise for the treatment of MdDS. However, larger trials with longer intervention periods are required.     

Affirmation and Care: A Feminist Account of Bullying and Bullying Prevention

Despite the amount of attention that activists, educators, psychologists, and the media place on bullying and bullying prevention, there has been no sustained philosophical reflection on bullying, nor has there been a feminist analysis of the growing literature on bullying. This essay seeks to satisfy those two needs. The first section is a broad introduction to the literature on bullying. I define bullying and distinguish it from teasing, sassing, roughhousing, and other more benign interactions. I also outline two common solutions to bullying: zero‐tolerance policies and “ecological” interventions. The second section uses feminist ethics of care to analyze the effectiveness of each approach. I argue that ecological approaches to bullying are preferable to zero‐tolerance policies because they operate on a relational model of the self and identity‐formation. I elaborate a notion of affirmation as the mechanism that stabilizes and solidifies our sense of self across time. I then use affirmation to analyze three things: why people bully one another, the specific harm inflicted by bullying, and why ecological approaches are more effective in reducing bullying. The third section uses my account of affirmation to critique the scientism and troublingly gendered assumptions that underlie much of the work on bullying.     

Facilitation of attitude formation through communication: how perceived source expertise enhances the ability to achieve cognitive closure about complex environmental topics

Attitudes on which people have achieved cognitive closure are better predictors of future attitudes and behavior than open attitudes. In two experiments, we found that factors in communication (source identity, source consensus) can enhance people's ability to achieve cognitive closure on complex environmental topics through an increase in perceived source expertise. Results showed that participants perceived higher levels of source expertise and felt better able to achieve cognitive closure on the environmental technology of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) when the information source had an expert identity compared to a non‐expert identity. The communication of consensus by the information source increased the level of expertise ascribed to the non‐expert source, resulting in an enhanced ability to achieve closure.     

Medical psychotherapy consultation: psychoanalytic psychiatry for the patient and professional

An NHS Mental Health Trust Medical Psychotherapy Consultation Service using psychoanalytic psychiatry to help the patient and professional is described. The Consultation Service established in 2000 is offered to secondary acute and community mental health teams and primary care. The service was evaluated as a basis for regional and national development. Between 2006 and 2013, 87 consultations from 210 were sampled to ascertain demographic and diagnostic profiles and outcomes of the consultation process. We conducted an online survey of local consultant psychiatrists’ views about the service, and undertook a thematic analysis of the free text comments. We also conducted a survey of members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Medical Psychotherapy Faculty to ascertain whether similar consultation services existed elsewhere in the UK and had been evaluated. The Leeds model of psychoanalytic consultation – a ‘consultation sandwich’ – is described. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the work of consultation is seen as an extension of the dynamic field of the analytic situation. This paper develops the concept of a bastion – an omnipotent reserve in and between the patient and professional derived from adhesive identifications leading to stuck relationships. The adhesive identification in the patient and professional acts like a ‘grievance glue’ – a mutual manifestation in a last bastion of painful limitations not faced, losses not grieved.     

Fairness as “Appropriate Impartiality” and the Problem of the Self-Serving Bias

Garrett Cullity contends that fairness is appropriate impartiality (See Cullity (2004) Chapters 8 and 10 and Cullity (2008)). Cullity deploys his account of fairness as a means of limiting the extreme moral demand to make sacrifices in order to aid others that was posed by Peter Singer in his seminal article ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’. My paper is founded upon the combination of (1) the observation that the idea that fairness consists in appropriate impartiality is very vague and (2) the fact that psychological studies show the self-serving bias is especially likely to infect one’s judgements when the ideas involved are vague. I argue that Cullity’s solution to extreme moral demandingness is threatened by these findings. I then comment on whether some other theories of fairness are vulnerable to the same objection.     

Practicing Possibilities: Parents’ Explanations of Unusual Events and Children’s Possibility Thinking

Young children tend to judge improbable events to be impossible, yet there is variability across age and across individuals. Our study examined parent–child conversations about impossible and improbable events and links between parents’ explanations about those events and children’s possibility judgments in a reasoning task. Regression analyses revealed that parents’ speculation about potential mechanisms for improbable events during a parent–child book-sharing activity predicted children’s possibility judgments for similar events in an individual task and accounted for more of the variance than children’s age. Also, parents’ skepticism regarding mechanisms for impossible events was negatively correlated with children’s judgments about the possibility of improbable events. Additionally, children’s overall causal justifications for their judgments were correlated with parents’ talk about speculative mechanisms. Results suggest the importance of conversation with parents for young children’s developing understanding of the distinction between impossible and improbable.     

Earthquake Aftershock Anxiety: An Examination of Psychosocial Contributing Factors and Symptomatic Outcomes

This study examined the direct and indirect effects of cognitions and anxiety associated with aftershocks on psychological symptoms (anxiety, depression, acute stress) and daily functioning (general and relationship). Participants were 600 adults from Christchurch, New Zealand. Data collection was approximately four months after the fatal 2011 earthquake. Path analysis was used for modelling. Socioeconomic status was directly associated with appraisals of uncontrollability of response to aftershocks. These cognitions were directly related to aftershock anxiety, which heightened general anxiety, depression, and acute stress symptoms. These symptoms were directly associated with relationship and general life dysfunction. Aftershock anxiety plays a significant role in ongoing psychological distress associated with earthquakes.