Understanding and Treating Pain in Ethnically Diverse Patients

A revolution has taken place during the past 25 years in the understanding and treatment of chronic pain. Psychologists have contributed tremendously to this revolution. However, the primary psychological models of pain treatment have failed to adequately integrate the empirical findings and theoretical understanding of the role of ethnic factors. The goal of this paper is to address this problem by demonstrating the importance of understanding ethnic factors in treating pain, providing an overview of ethnic factors in pain, and proposing guidelines for Clinical Psychologists who treat pain patients from ethnically diverse backgrounds.     

The Boundaries of the Analytic Encounter: Clinical and Ethical Dimensions: A Roundtable Discussion: January 15, 1998

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Book Reviews

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

A study of the near-miss involving Weber’s law and pure-tone intensity discrimination

A study of pure-tone intensity discrimination is presented in which amplitude changes are detected in 1000 Hz tone bursts 15–20 msec in duration. The masking function (log detectable increment vs log background intensity) is found to have a slope of 9/10 when calculations are carried out via energy measurements. This near-miss to Weber’s law is in agreement with other data reported in the literature. The masking slope proves to be essentially independent of stimulus duration between 15 msec and 1.5 sec. Our stable slope parameter is interpreted as a detectability restriction generated by “mass-flow” phenomena in the auditory channel. These phenomena are thought to be similar to the fluctuations accompanying a noisy or turbulent stream of events. Pure-tone intensity discrimination is then analyzed as a special case of energy detection.     

Externalism and Authoritative Knowledge of Content: A New Incompatibilist Strategy

Philosophical Studies -