Necessity and Opportunity: the 1-Year Master’s ABA Program at Auburn University

The Auburn University Master of Science program in Applied Behavior Analysis was designed to accommodate not only the requirements of the Behavior Analyst Certification Board for approved course sequences and practicum training, but unavoidable limitations in faculty and other resources. These limitations were incompatible with the more traditional 2-year curriculum model, so a 1-year program was designed that met the necessary conditions. This article describes the resulting academic and practicum curriculum, the key funding mechanisms that allowed the program to develop, and the opportunities and benefits that this model afforded.     

Aberrant Parasympathetic Stress Responsivity in Pure and Co-Occurring Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) are highly comorbid; we know little, however, about the shared physiological features of these disorders. In the present study, we examined whether aberrant parasympathetic stress responsivity represents a transdiagnostic process in MDD, GAD, and co-occurring MDD-GAD. Adult women diagnosed with MDD only, GAD only, and co-occurring MDD-GAD and never-disordered controls (CTLs) completed a standardized laboratory task that involved anticipating, confronting, and recovering from a social stressor. Participants’ levels of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) were measured to index parasympathetic responses. The three clinical groups combined (participants with MDD only, GAD only, and co-occurring MDD-GAD) exhibited a similar pattern of RSA responsivity that differed significantly from that of the CTL group. Specifically, whereas CTL participants exhibited a sharp decrease in RSA when confronting the stressor and a sharp increase in RSA when recovering immediately following the stressor, the clinical participants exhibited a blunted response pattern that involved weaker fluctuations in RSA when confronting and recovering from the stressor. There were no significant differences among the three clinical groups in RSA responses. Interestingly, clinical and CTL participants did not differ in self-reported fluctuations in negative emotional arousal. Finally, for clinical participants patterns of RSA reactivity to the acute stressor were associated differentially with trait rumination and worry as maladaptive forms of emotion regulation. These findings support the formulation that aberrant parasympathetic stress responsivity is a shared feature of MDD, GAD, and co-occurring MDD-GAD that is characterized by diminished reactivity to and recovery from stress.     

Believing in a personal just world helps maintain well-being at work by coloring organizational justice perceptions

Justice is a core fundamental theme for individuals in organizations. This study suggests that believing the world is just where one gets what one deserves, and deserves what one gets, is an important personal resource that helps maintain well-being at work. Further, it suggests that personal belief in a just world, but not general belief in a just world, exerts its influence on well-being through increasing overall justice perceptions of the work environment. Using two waves of data drawn from a large random sample of working adults in Switzerland, results showed that personal belief in a just world at time 1 indeed augmented perceptions of overall organizational justice, and this in turn increased job satisfaction at time 2, that is, 1 year later. As expected, this effect was only evident for personal and not general belief in a just world, highlighting personal belief in a just world as an important yet largely overlooked resource for the work context, and suggesting the need to consider individual’s beliefs about justice as drivers of overall organizational justice perceptions.     

The Sounds of Sentences: Differentiating the Influence of Physical Sound,Sound Imagery,and Linguistically Implied Sounds on Physical Sound Processing

Both the imagery literature and grounded models of language comprehension emphasize the tight coupling of high-level cognitive processes, such as forming a mental image of something or language understanding, and low-level sensorimotor processes in the brain. In an electrophysiological study, imagery and language processes were directly compared and the sensory associations of processing linguistically implied sounds or imagined sounds were investigated. Participants read sentences describing auditory events (e.g., “The dog barks”), heard a physical (environmental) sound, or had to imagine such a sound. We examined the influence of the 3 sound conditions (linguistic, physical, imagery) on subsequent physical sound processing. Event-related potential (ERP) difference waveforms indicated that in all 3 conditions, prime compatibility influenced physical sound processing. The earliest compatibility effect was observed in the physical condition, starting in the 80–110 ms time interval with a negative maximum over occipital electrode sites. In contrast, the linguistic and the imagery condition elicited compatibility effects starting in the 180–220 ms time window with a maximum over central electrode sites. In line with the ERPs, the analysis of the oscillatory activity showed that compatibility influenced early theta and alpha band power changes in the physical, but not in the linguistic and imagery, condition. These dissociations were further confirmed by dipole localization results showing a clear separation between the source of the compatibility effect in the physical sound condition (superior temporal area) and the source of the compatibility effect triggered by the linguistically implied sounds or the imagined sounds (inferior temporal area). Implications for grounded models of language understanding are discussed.     

READING WILLY WONKA IN THE ERA OF ANTI-THINKING

Whether encountered as a movie or novel, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a childhood staple of postwar Anglophone culture. Originally published in 1964, Dahl’s story of “Willie Wonka” is a morality tale for our times addressed by the present essay in relation to the precariousness, violence, intergenerational faith, and materialist fantasies reflective of contemporary life in the early twenty-first century. Compensating for the precarity of contemporary life’s impoverishment as assumptions of societal stability are overthrown, this chronicle of the Bucket family details: envious desire validated by large group chosen trauma; authoritarian enslavement of inferior, colonized peoples with murderous, industrial-level human experimentation; toward gratification of the greedy fantasy of unlimited sweetness under the sway of lethal identification with the aggressor.     

Respect the technique: Status-based respect increases minority group social cohesion with majority groups,while also increasing minority collective action tendencies

The present work explores the implications of respect for social change. Social change can be achieved via improved attitudes between minority and majority groups (i.e., social cohesion) or via action taken by minority groups (i.e., collective action). Recent work suggests that the social cohesion route to social change, in particular an emphasis on commonality, may be incompatible with the collective action route to social change. We suggest that social-cohesion strategies rooted in status-based respect may allow for social cohesion and collective action. We experimentally investigated the relative effects of a majority group communicating status-based respect and commonality, as compared to a control, on minority group members’ social cohesion with the majority group and willingness to engage in collective action. Status-based respect increased positive attitudes toward a majority group, relative to commonality and control, but was also associated with increased collective action tendencies. Implications for social change are discussed.     

Beyond Anti-thinking: Psychoanalysis as Politics*

This paper discusses the political nature of psychoanalytic audacity in an era of fake news and disinformation as receptive populations accustom themselves to societal and political misrepresentations of anti-thinking. Against the aggressive rise of anti-thinking that cauterizes individual and societal registration of precarity, the ideological foundation of psychoanalytic inquiry is in the freeing of that which emotionally and ideationally, has felt to be impenetrable, making such contents and expressions available for clarification within the consensual understandings between two very different individuals. Psychoanalysis, in its dyadic pairing, its regularity of meetings, and its continuous action of recognizing what is obscure or hidden, is the heir to the Enlightenment motto, “aude sapere” the ongoing act of daring to question (Kant, 1784). Operating against defensive foreclosure, psychoanalysis conditions the toleration of painful states of mind toward contingent consideration of the causes and effects from which productive future action might be considered. The dyadic engagement of psychoanalytic participants operates as a unitary political organization in witness of the human condition, from within which what was unthinkable becomes nameable, and what is named becomes spoken in clarification of anti-thinking’s foreclosures.