Giving Voice to the Experiential Value of Natural Environments

People value natural environments in many different ways. In addition to the various tangible products and benefits that can be produced from a natural environment, people may also find value in their immediate experience of the environment while they are in it. This experiential value is an important aspect of quality of life for many people, but it is often not taken into account in making decisions about managing natural environments. In part, this is because the experiential value of the environment can be difficult for people to express in words. In this article, I explore how first-person methods from experiential and phenomenological psychology may help in giving voice to the ineffable experiential value of natural environments. Drawing on the work of Charles Lewis, Eugene Gendlin, and Kenneth Shapiro, I illustrate how an initially inarticulate, bodily felt sense of the experiential value of a natural environment can be explicated in a way that both expresses and carries forward the implicit sense of value. Such practices might serve as a basis for an environmental decision-making process that incorporates the hard-to-express experiential values of nature.     

The Significance of the Rorschach Method for Consulting Psychology

Abstract

A round-table discussion of the Rorschach test was held at Albany, New York, on May 8, 1937, in connection with the eighth annual meeting of the Association of Consulting Psychologists. There were 32 persons present at this conference with Dr. Bruno Klopfer, of Teachers College, Columbia University, presiding. Dr. Klopfer opened the discussion with a brief survey of the development of the Rorschach method. He presented figures to show the growth of the Rorschach Research Exchange which started with 14 subscribers in the Summer of 1936 and has now reached a total of more than one hundred subscribers in the United States and Europe. He then introduced the various speakers.     

Blocking in Rapid Finger Tapping: The Role of Variability in Proximodistal Coordination

In rapid finger tapping, occasional intertap intervals of about twice the normal length or even longer, called blockings, can be observed. Skilled rapid tapping requires that flexor and extensor activity be timed so that they coincide with certain phases of the finger movement. In the present study, the hypothesis examined was that blockings are associated with a deviation from the proper timing relations between the more proximal signals (electromyographic [EMG] bursts) and the more distal signal (position-time curve of the finger). Participants (N = 8) performed up-and-down tapping. Blockings were compared with the preceding normal tapping cycles; a temporal forward shift of the flexor burst in the time interval between two kinematic landmarks—the lifting of the finger and the reversal of the movement—was found consistently in the blockings The phase shift of the flexor burst relative to the kinematic landmarks did not develop gradually in the course of the tapping cycles that preceded the blocking but was an abrupt deviation, which suggests that blockings occur with an increased likelihood as the extremes of the normal variability of the phase relation are approached.     

Coping among children and adolescents with chronic illness

The present study was aimed to investigate age and gender effects on coping with everyday stressors among children and adolescents with chronic illness and healthy controls. Patients (8–13 years of age) with asthma (n=47), atopic dermatitis (n=52), and cancer (n=57) were compared to healthy controls (n=158) matched by age, gender, and grade. Self-report data on coping with academic and interpersonal stressors were collected. The primary results indicated that coping with everyday stressors was improved in children and adolescents with chronic illness compared to healthy controls. Thus, patients reported less passive avoidance on cross-situational coping and tended to show more situation-specific coping with social and school-related stressors than healthy controls. Additionally, among the clinical groups, patients with atopic dermatitis and cancer scored higher on positive self-instructions than patients with asthma. Conclusively, the results suggest that coping with a chronic illness may lead to more effective coping with everyday stressors. Implications for evaluating coping styles in patients with chronic illness are discussed.     

Die höchste Gottheit bei den kulturarmen Völkern

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Sufficient conditions for the discrimination of motion

When one half of a randomly contoured pattern is displaced in one of four directions between successive exposures, Ss are capable of discriminating the direction of the displacement. Accuracy of discriminating decreases as a function of the relative displacement within the pattern, independent of the visual angle subtended by the pattern. Supplementary data suggest that Ss are unrealistically confident in the accuracy of their discrimination. The results demonstrate that identification of specific contours is not necessary for the discrimination of motion and suggest that some type of correlational process is employed by the visual system in dealing with spatially and temporally displaced patterns.