A Phenomenological Analysis of the Invisibility Syndrome

Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to explore 10 African American men's perceptions of invisibility. Participants perceived invisibility as an extra unwarranted burden that is accompanied by feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, and anger. Participants also coped with invisibility by finding safe havens within the Black community. Implications for counselors are discussed. Se empleó el análisis interpretativo fenomenológico para explorar las percepciones de invisibilidad de 10 varones Afroamericanos. Los participantes percibían la invisibilidad como una carga extra injustificada que va acompañada de sentimientos de desesperanza, ansiedad y rabia. Los participantes también afrontaban la invisibilidad encontrando refugio entre la comunidad Negra. Se discuten las implicaciones para consejeros.     

No Right to Resist? Elise Reimarus's Freedom as a Kantian Response to the Problem of Violent Revolt

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth‐century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom (1791). Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way that opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently “just” nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, nonviolent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man.     

Domestic Abuse as Terrorism

A number of philosophers and feminist authors have recently equated domestic abuse with the ubiquitous and ill‐defined concept of “terrorism.” Claudia Card, for instance, argues that domestic abuse is a frequently ignored form of terrorism that creates and maintains “heterosexual male dominance and female dependence and service” (Card 2003). Alison Jaggar, in a recent article, also concludes that an acceptable definition of terrorism will find rape and domestic violence to be terrorist acts (Jaggar 2005). Yet there seem to be several obstacles to any simple appropriation of the term “terrorism” for cases of domestic abuse. In this paper I will address what I take to be three significant problems that might be raised with regard to any attempt to identify domestic abuse as an act of terrorism. These problems include the fact that a) definitions of terrorism usually require clear political motivations, b) definitions of terrorism normally require that the terrorist intend to create a climate of terror, and c) adopting the term terrorism for cases of domestic abuse might appear simply inappropriate or unhelpful. I will argue, however, that each of these possible objections can be answered effectively and that domestic abuse rightly falls under the rubric of terrorism.     

Substance-related disorders among juvenile offenders: what role do psychopathic traits play?

Substance use disorders are associated with psychopathy, a personality disorder that is heterogeneous in both adults and youth; secondary variants of psychopathy with comorbid psychopathology and primary variants without comorbidity show distinct correlates and outcomes. In adult criminal populations, secondary variants report greater substance abuse compared with primary variants. The primary aim of this study is to replicate and extend these findings to a juvenile offender population. Compared with primary variants of juvenile psychopathy, secondary variants (a) reported significantly more frequent substance use--particularly alcohol--within the 6 months prior to incarceration (d = .43), (b) were almost twice as likely to abuse substances while incarcerated, and (c) were more likely to be diagnosed with a current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., text rev.; DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 2000) substance use disorder. Practical implications for working with justice-involved youth are discussed.     

Unpicking the semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease: qualitative changes with disease severity

Despite a vast literature examining semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD), consensus regarding the nature of the deficit remains elusive. We re-considered this issue in the context of a framework that assumes semantic cognition can break down in two ways: (1) core semantic representations can degrade or (2) cognitive control mechanisms can become impaired. We hypothesised and confirmed that the nature of semantic impairment in AD changes with disease severity. Patients at mild or severe stages of the disorder exhibited impairment across various semantic tasks but the nature of those deficits differed qualitatively for the two groups. Commensurate with early dysfunction of the cognitive control, temporoparietal-frontal-cingulate network, characteristics of deregulated semantic cognition were exhibited by the mild AD cases. In contrast, the severe AD group reproduced features of additional degradation of core semantic representations. These results suggest that spread of pathology into lateral anterior temporal lobes in later stage AD produces degradation of semantic representations, exacerbating the already deregulated system. Moreover, the dual nature of severe patients' impairment was highlighted by disproportionately poor performance on tasks placing high demand on both conceptual knowledge and control processes--e.g., category fluency.     

Inferring facts from fiction: reading correct and incorrect information affects memory for related information

People can acquire both true and false knowledge about the world from fictional stories. The present study explored whether the benefits and costs of learning about the world from fictional stories extend beyond memory for directly stated pieces of information. Of interest was whether readers would use correct and incorrect story references to make deductive inferences about related information in the story, and then integrate those inferences into their knowledge bases. Participants read stories containing correct, neutral, and misleading references to facts about the world; each reference could be combined with another reference that occurred in a later sentence to make a deductive inference. Later they answered general knowledge questions that tested for these deductive inferences. The results showed that participants generated and retained the deductive inferences regardless of whether the inferences were consistent or inconsistent with world knowledge, and irrespective of whether the references were placed consecutively in the text or separated by many sentences. Readers learn more than what is directly stated in stories; they use references to the real world to make both correct and incorrect inferences that are integrated into their knowledge bases.     

Aging, parafoveal preview, and semantic integration in sentence processing: Testing the cognitive workload of wrap-up

The current study investigated the degree to which semantic-integration processes ("wrap-up") during sentence understanding demand attentional resources by examining the effects of clause and sentence wrap-up on the parafoveal preview benefit (PPB) in younger and older adults. The PPB is defined as facilitation in processing word N + 1, based on information extracted while the eyes are fixated on word N, and is known to be reduced by processing difficulty at word N. Participants read passages in which word N occurred in a sentence-internal, clause-final, or sentence-final position, and a gaze-contingent boundary-change paradigm was used to manipulate the information available in parafoveal vision for word N + 1. Wrap-up effects were found on word N for both younger and older adults. Early-pass measures (first-fixation duration and single-fixation duration) of the PPB on word N + 1 were reduced by clause wrap-up and sentence wrap-up on word N, with similar effects for younger and older adults. However, for intermediate (gaze duration) and later-pass measures (regression-path duration, and selective regression-path duration), sentence wrap-up (but not clause wrap-up) on word N differentially reduced the PPB of word N + 1 for older adults. These findings suggest that wrap-up is demanding and may be less efficient with advancing age, resulting in a greater cognitive processing load for older readers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Counseling in the Philippines: Past,Present, and Future

The history of colonization and persistent attempts at self‐governance in the Philippines parallel the beginnings of counseling in the country, which were largely influenced by the United States. Because of the Guidance and Counseling Act of 2004 and the Psychology Act of 2009, counseling is on its way to professionalization and regulation. Counseling is growing in depth and credibility, as evidenced by applications in practice that are not only indigenous but powerfully relevant.