Families created through surrogacy arrangements: parent-child relationships in the 1st year of life

Findings are presented of a study of families created through surrogacy arrangements. Forty-two surrogacy families were compared with 51 egg-donation families and 80 natural-conception families on standardized interview and questionnaire measures of the psychological well-being of the parents, the quality of parent-child relationships, and infant temperament. The differences that were identified between the surrogacy families and the other family types indicated greater psychological well-being and adaptation to parenthood by mothers and fathers of children born through surrogacy arrangements than by the natural-conception parents.     

Verbalizing facial memory: criterion effects in verbal overshadowing

This article investigated the role of the recognition criterion in the verbal overshadowing effect (VOE). In 3 experiments, people witnessed an event, verbally described a perpetrator, and then attempted identification. The authors found in Experiment 1, which included a "not present" response option and both perpetrator-present (PP) and perpetrator-absent (PA) lineups, an increased reluctance to identify a person from both lineup types after verbalization. Experiment 2 incorporated a forced-choice procedure, and the authors found no effect of verbalization on identification performance. Experiment 3 replicated the essential aspects of these results. Consequently, the VOE may reflect a change in recognition criterion rather than a changed processing style or alteration of the underlying memory trace. This conclusion was confirmed by computational modeling of the data.     

Is the learn unit a fundamental measure of pedagogy?

We propose a measure of teaching, the learn unit, that explicitly describes the interaction between teachers and their students. The theoretical, educational research, and applied behavior analysis literatures all converge on the learn unit as a fundamental measure of teaching. The theoretical literature proposes the construct of the interlocking operant and embraces verbal behavior, social interaction, and translations of psychological constructs into complex theoretical respondent-operant interactions and behavior-behavior relations. Research findings in education and applied behavior analysis on engaged academic time, opportunity to respond, active student responding, teacher-student responding, student-teacher responding, tutor-tutee responding, tutee-tutor responding, and verbal episodes between individuals all support a measure of interlocking responses. More recently, research analyzing the components of both the students' and teachers' behavior suggests that the learn unit is the strongest predictor of effective teaching. Finally, we propose applications of the learn unit to other issues in pedagogy not yet researched and the relation of learn units to the verbal behavior of students.     

Evaluation of a Combined Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Interpersonal Process Group in the Psychotherapy Training of Clinical Psychologists

It is now widely acknowledged that both content and process elements of psychotherapy play a part in client treatment outcomes. Despite this, there are pressures on Australian clinical psychology training programs to teach evidence‐based approaches in a relatively short time frame. Producing clinical psychology graduates who have an adequate level of competence in evidence‐based practice and meeting the demands of professional accreditation requirements can mean that less time is available to teach the process elements of psychotherapy. The aim of this study was to conduct a preliminary evaluation of a clinical psychology psychotherapy training program that combines an interpersonal process group with a cognitive behavioural therapy training model that incorporates self‐reflection and self‐practice. Eleven participants who participated in the training in 2008 completed the Counseling Self‐Estimate Inventory at pre‐ and post‐training. Significant improvements on the majority of the subscales of this inventory were found. A separate sample of nine trainees and clinical psychology registrars who also previously completed the program attended individual interviews in 2010 aimed at gaining their perspective regarding various aspects of the program. Self‐practice of cognitive behavioural therapy techniques was found to be important in the identification and management of trainees’ own core beliefs, and to their appreciation of how challenging this process may be for clients. The interpersonal process group was described by participants as enhancing their competency as psychotherapists. Common themes included the experience of anxiety and a high level of emotion, and understanding how this experience might be similar for clients; increased self‐awareness; and increased competence in process issues. Many participants believed the process and content components of training were equally important to their development as psychotherapists.     

Gregory the Great’s Metaphor of the Physician of the Heart as a Model for Pastoral Identity

The identity of the Roman Catholic priesthood remains in serious crisis. Scholars have called for a return to traditional sources to find possible solutions, including the Early Church Fathers and the Hebrew Bible. Following Oden, this article further explores Pope Gregory the Great’s The Book of Pastoral Rule and his ideals regarding pastoral identity. Of unique importance is his notion of the pastor as a “physician of the heart,” unrecognized previously as central to his project.     

Smelling lessons

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to correct this ‘tunnel vision’ by considering other modalities. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. The focus of this paper is olfaction. In this paper, I consider the question: does human olfactory experience represents objects as thus and so? If we take visual experience as the paradigm of how experience can achieve object representation, we might think that the answer to this question is no. I argue that olfactory experience does indeed represent objects—just not in a way that is easily read from the dominant visual case.     

Strengthening Connections: Functional Connectivity and Brain Plasticity

The ascendancy of functional neuroimaging has facilitated the addition of network-based approaches to the neuropsychologist’s toolbox for evaluating the sequelae of brain insult. In particular, intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) mapping of resting state fMRI (R-fMRI) data constitutes an ideal approach to measuring macro-scale networks in the human brain. Beyond the value of iFC mapping for charting how the functional topography of the brain is altered by insult and injury, iFC analyses can provide insights into experience-dependent plasticity at the macro level of large-scale functional networks. Such insights are foundational to the design of training and remediation interventions that will best facilitate recovery of function. In this review, we consider what is currently known about the origin and function of iFC in the brain, and how this knowledge is informative in neuropsychological settings. We then summarize studies that have examined experience-driven plasticity of iFC in healthy control participants, and frame these findings in terms of a schema that may aid in the interpretation of results and the generation of hypotheses for rehabilitative studies. Finally, we outline some caveats to the R-fMRI approach, as well as some current developments that are likely to bolster the utility of the iFC paradigm for neuropsychology.