Asian Australian acculturation and attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help

Research with 112 Asian Australian university students found that adherence to Asian cultural values inversely predicted attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help. Students completed demographic questions, the Asian Values Scale, the Suinn – Lew Asian Self‐Identity Scale, (which is a measure of acculturation), and the Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale. There was a significant positive relationship between the Asian Australian students' level of behavioural acculturation and their attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help. Significant differences were found between male and female participants in their attitudes, with female participants indicating greater willingness to seek help. Results also demonstrated a significant difference in gender on acculturation level as well as a significant difference in generational status and acculturation level.     

Biases in Visual Attention in Children and Adolescents With Clinical Anxiety and Mixed Anxiety-Depression

Recent research has indicated that anxious adult and child patients and high trait-anxious adults selectively shift attention toward threatening stimuli. The present study extends this research and investigates the content-specificity of the effects in clinically anxious and mixed anxious–depressed children and adolescents. Twenty four generally anxious patients, aged 9 to 18, 19 mixed anxious–depressed patients, and 24 normal controls were comparable with respect to age, sex, verbal IQ, and vocabulary level. The participants carried out an attentional deployment task in which probe detection latency data were used to determine the distribution of visual attention for threat-related and depression-related material. The results showed that clinically anxious children, relative to controls, selectively allocated processing resources toward threat stimuli. However, mixed anxious–depressed children, relative to controls, did not show any attentional bias towards either threat- or depression-related stimuli. Preliminary data on age and gender differences are also presented. The results of this study are discussed in the light of previous research.     

Common fronto-parietal activity in attention, memory, and consciousness: shared demands on integration?

Fronto-parietal activity has been frequently observed in fMRI and PET studies of attention, working memory, and episodic memory retrieval. Several recent fMRI studies have also reported fronto-parietal activity during conscious visual perception. A major goal of this review was to assess the degree of anatomical overlap among activation patterns associated with these four functions. A second goal was to shed light on the possible cognitive relationship of processes that relate to common brain activity across functions. For all reviewed functions we observed a consistent and overlapping pattern of brain activity. The overlap was most pronounced for the bilateral parietal cortex (BA 7 and BA 40; close to the intraparietal sulcus), and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (right BA 9 and left BA 6). The common fronto-parietal activity will be discussed in terms of processes related to integration of distributed representations in the brain.     

Brentano on the individuation of mental acts

This paper aims to present and evaluate Brentano's account of the individuation of mental acts. In his early works, Brentano assimilated mental acts to tropes; however, he encountered difficulties in explaining their individuation, since the usual solutions for the individuation of tropes were not readily applicable to his theory of mental acts. In a later period, Brentano introduced into his psychology what he called the “soul,” and this allowed him to explain the individuation of mental acts. Finally, after his “reistic” turn, he excluded mental acts from his ontology, for he rejected abstracta of any kind, including abstract particulars, and admitted only things, or res (in Latin), that is, concrete particulars; in his late philosophy, there are no “thinkings,” but only “thinkers.” However, he still needed to explain what individuates different thinkers, and this was again the soul. In the conclusion, the paper critically compares the different theoretical options considered by Brentano.     

Therapist attitudes and countertransference as predictors of professional quality of life and burnout among psychotherapists

This study aimed to examine the role of attitudes towards psychotherapy and countertransference dimensions as predictors of professional quality of life and burnout among psychotherapists in Iran. Participants were 259 psychotherapists who worked in mental health centres in Tehran (Iran), and they completed the Professional Quality of Life questionnaire, the Therapist Response Questionnaire and the Therapist Attitudes Scale. Professional quality of life was associated with countertransference dimensions and attitude towards psychotherapy. This study concludes that psychotherapists can benefit from working on their specific countertransference issues and re-evaluating their basic attitudes towards psychotherapy to achieve the highest levels of professional satisfaction. Culture may play a role in a specific therapist's attitude and difficulties in addressing certain aspects of countertransference.     

COGNITIVE PENETRATION,THE DOWNGRADE PRINCIPLE,AND EXTENDED COGNITION

It has been argued that just as, say, prejudice or wishful thinking can generate ill‐founded beliefs, the same is true of experiences. The idea is that the etiology of cognitively penetrated experiences can downgrade their justificatory force. This view, known as the Downgrade Principle, seems to be compatible with both internalist and externalist conceptions of epistemic justification. An assessment of the credentials of the Downgrade Principle is particularly important in view of the fact that not all cases of cognitive penetration are epistemically malignant. There are good and bad cases of cognitive penetration. I argue that a proper assessment of the Downgrade Principle will have to address two fundamental questions. I identify two general ways of responding to these questions and show why they fail. It will be maintained that an explanationist conception of justification has a better chance of accounting for the distinction between good and bad cases of cognitive penetration. The Downgrade Principle is then discussed in the context of the extended cognition thesis (ECT). In particular, I look at the sensorimotor theory of perception, as a way of broadening the scope of (ECT) to include conscious perceptual experience, that sees senses as ways of exploring the environment mediated by different patterns of sensorimotor contingency. I suggest possible ways in which one could distinguish between good and bad cases of cognitive penetration on such a view compatible with the explanationist view of epistemic justification.     

Conceivability and possibility

We often decide whether a state of affairs is possible (impossible) by trying to mentally depict a scenario (using words, images, etc.) where the state in question obtains (or fails to obtain). These mental acts (broadly thought of as ‘conceiving’) seem to provide us with an epistemic route to the space of possibilities. The problem this raises is whether conceivability judgments provide justification-conferring grounds for the ensuing possibility-claims (call this the ‘conceivability thesis’). Although the question has a long history, contemporary interest in it was, to a large extent, prompted by Kripke's utilization of modal intuitions in the course of propounding certain influential theses in the philosophy of language and mind. The interest has been given a further boost by the recent two-dimensional approach to the Kripkean framework. In this paper, I begin by providing a detailed examination of a most recent attempt (due to Chalmers) to defend the thesis and argue that it is unsuccessful. This is followed by presenting my own gloss on Kripke's explanation of the illusions of contingency and I close by raising a general problem intended to undermine the prospects for a successful defense of the thesis.     

Developmental changes during childhood in single-letter acuity and its crowding by surrounding contours

Crowding refers to impaired target recognition caused by surrounding contours. We investigated the development of crowding in central vision by comparing single-letter and crowding thresholds in groups of 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults. The task was to discriminate the orientation of a Sloan letter E. Single-letter thresholds, defined as the stroke width forming the smallest discriminable E, were worse than those of adults (0.83 arcmin) at 5 years of age (1.05 arcmin) but not at older ages (8-year-olds: 0.81 arcmin; 11-year-olds: 0.78 arcmin). The maximum distances over which crowding occurred, as measured in multiples of threshold stroke width, were smaller in adults (2.83) than in the three groups of children, who did not differ from each other (5-year-olds: 7.03; 8-year-olds: 7.84; 11-year-olds: 7.13). Thus, even 11-year-olds are more affected than adults by surrounding contours despite having single-letter acuity that has been mature for several years. The stronger influence of crowding in children may be caused by immaturities in the brain areas beyond the primary visual cortex (V1) where early visual inputs are combined and may contribute to their slower reading speed.     

Rationalizing beliefs: evidential vs. pragmatic reasons

Beliefs can be evaluated from a number of perspectives. Epistemic evaluation involves epistemic standards and appropriate epistemic goals. On a truth-conducive account of epistemic justification, a justified belief is one that serves the goal of believing truths and avoiding falsehoods. Beliefs are also prompted by non-epistemic reasons. This raises the question of whether, say, the pragmatic benefits of a belief are able to rationalize it. In this paper, after criticizing certain responses to this question, I shall argue that, as far as beliefs are concerned, justification has an essentially epistemic character. This conclusion is then qualified by considering the conditions under which pragmatic consequences of a belief can be epistemically relevant.     

Experience and the Space of Reasons: The Problem of Non-Doxastic Justification

It is not difficult to make sense of the idea that beliefs may derive their justification from other beliefs. Difficulties surface when, as in certain epistemological theories, one appeals to sensory experiences to give an account of the structure of justification. This gives rise to the so-called problem of ‘nondoxastic justification’, namely, the problem of seeing how sensory experiences can confer justification on the beliefs they give rise to. In this paper, I begin by criticizing a number of theories that are currently on offer. Finding them all wanting, I shall then offer a diagnosis of why they fail while gesturing towards a promising way of resolving the dispute. It will be argued that what makes the problem of nondoxastic justification a hard one is the difficulty of striking the right balance between a notion of normative justification that is content-sensitive and truth conducive and the possibility of error while acknowledging the fact that our experiences can justify our beliefs in cases we are hallucinating.

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