Dwelling in Possibility: Response to Willock and Cornell

This response to the commentaries by Drs. Willock and Cornell explores themes raised in their commentaries related to regression, containment, and unconscious processes in analyses that feature intergenerational trauma. In addition, this response seeks to elaborate on how a psychoanalyst and patient might respond clinically to the “errand” presented to them by previous generations that “haunt” the treatment as ghosts.     

The use of response cost to treat spitting by a child with autism

We evaluated the extent to which noncontingent access to one or multiple items and the contingent removal of a specific item decreased a young boy's spitting. Results indicated that the boy's spitting did not decrease when he was given noncontingent access to multiple, alternative stimuli or to a toy radio. By contrast, when the toy radio was removed contingent on spitting, the rate of the boy's spitting decreased to zero or near‐zero levels. Similar results were produced in the boy's special education classroom. Follow‐up sessions conducted 2 and 4 months later indicated that the reduction in the boy's spitting persisted across time. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Response repetition as an error‐correction procedure for sight‐word reading: A replication and extension

We evaluated the effects of response repetition (RR) as an error‐correction procedure for increasing sight‐word reading for four individuals using a multiple baseline design. The results for each participant showed that correct responding increased following the introduction of the RR procedure. In addition, responding for three of four participants showed evidence of stimulus generalization, response generalization, or both. Likewise, we found that comparable behavior changes were produced when a participant's paraprofessional implemented RR in a typical classroom. These findings are briefly discussed in terms of procedures that promote behavior acquisition and generalization via negative reinforcement. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The utility of the AusEd driving simulator in the clinical assessment of driver fatigue

Several driving simulators have been developed which range in complexity from PC based driving tasks to advanced "real world" simulators. The AusEd driving simulator is a PC based task, which was designed to be conducive to and test for driver fatigue. This paper describes the AusEd driving simulator in detail, including the technical requirements, hardware, screen and file outputs, and analysis software. Some aspects of the test are standardized, while others can be modified to suit the experimental situation. The AusEd driving simulator is sensitive to performance decrement from driver fatigue in the laboratory setting, potentially making it useful as a laboratory or office based test for driver fatigue risk management. However, more research is still needed to correlate laboratory based simulator performance with real world driving performance and outcomes.     

Hoisted by their own petards: Philosophical positions that self-destruct

Philosophers have not resisted temptation to transgress against the logic of their own conceptual structures. Self-undermining position-taking is an occupational hazard. Philosophy stands in need of conceptual therapy.The author describes three conceptions of philosophy: the narcissistic, disputatious, and therapeutic. (i) Narcissistic philosophy is hermetic, believing itself to contain all evidence that can possibly be relevant to it. Philosophy undertaken in this spirit has led to defensive, monadically isolated positions. (ii) Disputatious philosophies are fundamentally question-begging, animated by assumptions that philosophical adversaries reject. (iii) The intention of therapeutic philosophy is to study philosophical positions from the standpoint of their internal consistency, or lack of it. In particular, its interest is in positions that either compel assent, because they cannot be rejected without self-referential inconsistency, or self-destruct because self-referential inconsistency cannot be avoided. The article's focus is on the latter. Several examples of self-undermining positions are drawn from the history of philosophy, exemplifying two main varieties of self-referential inconsistency: pragmatical and projective.     

A factorization procedure for finite algebras

A procedure is developed for decomposing any finite algebra into a minimal set of maximally independent simple homomorphic images, or factors, of the algebra. The definition of admissible sets of factors is made in relation to the congruence lattice of the algebra, and generalises the notion of an irredundant reduction in a modular lattice. An algorithm for determining all possible sets of factors of a given finite algebra is derived and an index for measuring the degree of independence of factors is defined. Applications of the technique to finite algebraic models within the social psychological domain are presented and include factorizations for certain semigroups of binary relations and for a class of finite semilattices.     

Rapid recovery from aphasia: a detailed language analysis

The paper presents a daily analysis of the language recovery of a patient who was globally aphasic at the time of her first observation and who had recovered language, as measured by the Western Aphasia Battery, at the time of her discharge 14 days later. The paper emphasizes the relatively regular growth of normal syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic features coupled with similar regular decreases in aphasic features. Observations of both phenomena are necessary to describe language recovery.