Who Dares,Speaks: Critical psychotherapy and the poetics of suffering

It is proposed that a critical psychotherapy could be developed by combining ideas from psychoanalysis with concepts from poetics, as Lacan originally suggested. Taking a narrative and personal style, and using examples of two men silenced by trauma and a clinical vignette, the author combines Laplanche’s psychoanalytic concept of fourvoiement with some examples of the poetics of ambiguity as an example of how such a critical psychotherapy could develop. Studying how words express more than their literal meaning is combined with the idea that we are continually going astray from the original decentring concept of the unconscious that Freud introduced to psychotherapy.     

Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism

Entitlement is conceived as a kind of positive epistemic status, attaching to certain propositions, that involves no cognitive or intellectual accomplishment on the part of the beneficiary—a status that is in place by default. In this paper I will argue that the notion of entitlement—or something very like it—falls out of an idea that may at first blush seem rather disparate: that the evidential support relation can be understood as a kind of variably strict conditional (in the sense of Lewis 1973). Lewis provided a general recipe for deriving what he termed inner modalities from any variably strict conditional governed by a logic meeting certain constraints. On my proposal, entitlement need be nothing more exotic than the inner necessity associated with evidential support. Understanding entitlement in this way helps to answer some common concerns—in particular, the concern that entitlement could only be a pragmatic, and not genuinely epistemic, status.     

Associations Among Body Mass Index,Depression, and Family Factors Across Two Generations

In this pilot study, we examined the relationship between health factors, sociodemographic factors, and body mass index (BMI) across two generations (n = 41 parent-child pairs). Generation 1 study variables included parent- and family-focused characteristics and health variables, the Generation 2 variables included child demographic factors, and the outcome variable was youths’ physical health (operationalized as BMI). Regression models revealed that Generation 1 variables, taken together, accounted for 26% of the variance in youth BMI. However, only the parent’s mental health symptoms (i.e., depression symptoms) made a unique contribution to the variance in youth BMI. Logistic regression analysis revealed that the youths’ race and age—but no other demographic factor—were significantly related to youth BMI-for-age. Our findings suggest that youth race, age, and parent mental health are each associated with youth physical health (i.e., BMI), confirming previous study findings that parental factors and demographic factors should be considered when exploring youth health outcomes.     

Confirmatory factor analysis of the NEPSY for younger and older school-age children

Using the standardization sample from the NEPSY, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to examine the factor structure for ages 5 through 12 of the NEPSY sample, as well as for the younger (5 to 8 years, n=400) and older (9 to 12 years, n=400) age bands, to explore possible differences in test structure at different developmental epochs. Using four standard fit indices, results indicated that a 5-factor model was less than adequate for the entire sample and produced negative error variance for the younger and older age groups, making any solutions for the two subgroups inadmissible. A 4-factor model without the Attention/Executive Function subtests produced satisfactory fit statistics for the entire sample and the younger group, but did not fit the data as well for the older group. A 1-factor model did not fit well for the full sample. These results indicated that the structure for the NEPSY is not invariant across development, with the 4-factor model best fitting the data for the younger age group and for the entire school-age sample.     

Quiet eye facilitates sensorimotor preprograming and online control of precision aiming in golf putting

An occlusion protocol was used to elucidate the respective roles of preprograming and online control during the quiet eye period of golf putting. Twenty-one novice golfers completed golf putts to 6-ft and 11-ft targets under full vision or with vision occluded on initiation of the backswing. Radial error (RE) was higher, and quiet eye was longer, when putting to the 11-ft versus 6-ft target, and in the occluded versus full vision condition. Quiet eye durations, as well as preprograming, online and dwell durations, were longer in low-RE compared to high-RE trials. The preprograming component of quiet eye was significantly longer in the occluded vision condition, whereas the online and dwell components were significantly longer in the full vision condition. These findings demonstrate an increase in preprograming when vision is occluded. However, this was not sufficient to overcome the need for online visual control during the quiet eye period. These findings suggest the quiet eye period is composed of preprograming and online control elements; however, online visual control of action is critical to performance.     

Mindfulness reduces the correspondence bias

The correspondence bias (CB) refers to the idea that people sometimes give undue weight to dispositional rather than situational factors when explaining behaviours and attitudes. Three experiments examined whether mindfulness, a non-judgmental focus on the present moment, could reduce the CB. Participants engaged in a brief mindfulness exercise (the raisin task), a control task, or an attention to detail task before completing a typical CB measure involving an attitude-attribution paradigm. The results indicated that participants in the mindfulness condition experienced a significant reduction in the CB compared to participants in the control or attention to detail conditions. These results suggest that mindfulness training can play a unique role in reducing social biases related to person perception.     

The genetics of cognitive impairment in schizophrenia: a phenomic perspective

Cognitive impairments are central to schizophrenia and could mark underlying biological dysfunction but efforts to detect genetic associations for schizophrenia or cognitive phenotypes have been disappointing. Phenomics strategies emphasizing simultaneous study of multiple phenotypes across biological scales might help, particularly if the high heritabilities of schizophrenia and cognitive impairments are due to large numbers of genetic variants with small effect. Convergent evidence is reviewed, and a new collaborative knowledgebase - CogGene - is introduced to share data about genetic associations with cognitive phenotypes, and enable users to meta-analyze results interactively. CogGene data demonstrate the need for larger studies with broader representation of cognitive phenotypes. Given that meta-analyses will probably be necessary to detect the small association signals linking the genome and cognitive phenotypes, CogGene or similar applications will be needed to enable collaborative knowledge aggregation and specify true effects.     

Exploring the Relations Between Parent Depressive Symptoms,Family Religious Involvement,and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms: A Test of Moderation

Building on previous research, the current study examined the relations between parent depressive symptoms, family religious involvement, and adolescent depressive symptoms in a convenience sample of 74 parent‐adolescent dyads of southern U.S. families. We used hierarchical regression analysis to explore whether family religious involvement moderated the relations between parent depressive symptoms and adolescent depressive symptoms. Results indicated that family religious involvement did not have a significant moderating effect for adolescent and parent depression. Implications for counseling practice and directions for future research are discussed.