Confusion of Wills: Otto Rank’s Contribution to an Understanding of Childism

Drawing from Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's psychological and psychodynamic study of prejudice as a starting point, this paper explores the phenomenon of childism—namely, the prejudice again children—from a Rankian psychodynamic perspective. Young-Bruehl argues that childism is comparable to prejudices such as anti-Semitism, sexism, and racism, and serves such purposes as the elimination of an individual's personhood, sexual exploitation, and the erasure of identity. Adding to Young-Bruehl's analysis of the social and psychological causes and effects of prejudice against children, this paper will examine the nature and dangers of childism explicit and implicit in the writings of Otto Rank. We will examine the development of creative will in child maturation—a development that childist forms of prejudice may obstruct, inhibit, and compromise. We will see that Young-Bruehl's foundational writing on childism echoes many of the observations and writings of Otto Rank in regard to the prejudice against children, and how such prejudice deeply diminishes, undermines, and fractures our unfolding lives and creative will in a shared world.     

Integration of visual information for saccade production

To foveate a visual target, subjects usually execute a primary hypometric saccade (S1) bringing the target in perifoveal vision, followed by a corrective saccade (S2) or by more than one S2. It is still debated to what extent these S2 are pre-programmed or dependent only on post-saccadic retinal error. To answer this question, we used a visually-triggered saccade task in which target position and target visibility were manipulated. In one-third of the trials, the target was slightly displaced at S1 onset (so-called double step paradigm) and was maintained until the end of S1, until the start of the first S2 or until the end of the trial. Experiments took place in two visual environments: in the dark and in a dimly lit room with a visible random square background. The results showed that S2 were less accurate for shortest target durations. The duration of post-saccadic visual integration thus appears as the main factor responsible for corrective saccade accuracy. We also found that the visual context modulates primary saccade accuracy, especially for the most hypometric subjects. These findings suggest that the saccadic system is sensitive to the visual properties of the environment and uses different strategies to maintain final gaze accuracy.     

Parkinson's disease differentially affects adaptation to gradual as compared to sudden visuomotor distortions

Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have difficulties in movement adaptation to optimize performance in novel environmental contexts such as altered screen cursor-hand relationships. Prior studies have shown that the time course of the distortion differentially affects visuomotor adaptation to screen cursor rotations, suggesting separate mechanisms for gradual and sudden adaptation. Moreover, studies in human and non-human primates suggest that adaptation to sudden kinematic distortions may engage the basal ganglia, whereas adaptation to gradual kinematic distortions involves cerebellar structures. In the present studies, participants were patients with PD, who performed center-out pointing movements, using either a digitizer tablet and pen or a computer trackball, under normal or rotated screen cursor feedback conditions. The initial study tested patients with PD using a cross-over experimental design for adaptation to gradual as compared with sudden rotated hand-screen cursor relationships and revealed significant after-effects for the gradual adaptation task only. Consistent with these results, findings from a follow-up experiment using a trackball that required only small finger movements showed that patients with PD adapt better to gradual as against sudden perturbations, when compared to age-matched healthy controls. We conclude that Parkinson’s disease affects adaptation to sudden visuomotor distortions but spares adaptation to gradual distortions.     

Intolerance of Uncertainty and Anxiety Symptoms: Examining the Indirect Effect Through Anxiety Sensitivity Among Adults with Anxiety-Related Disorders

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - The conceptual overlap between intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and anxiety sensitivity (AS) has gained recent attention, with researchers...     

Evaluating Reasoning in Natural Arguments: A Procedural Approach

Argumentation - In this paper, we formulate a procedure for assessing reasoning as it is expressed in natural arguments. The procedure is a specification of one of the three aspects of...     

Effects of Father-Adolescent and Mother-Adolescent Relationships on Depressive Symptoms among Chinese Early Adolescents

Parent–adolescent relationships play an important role in protecting adolescents from depressive symptoms. However, there are no consistent conclusions about the extent to which fathers and mothers uniquely contribute to adolescents’ depressive symptoms. The present study aimed to acquire knowledge in this research area in two ways. First, this study separated the potential impacts of father–child and mother–child relationships on depressive symptoms in Chinese adolescents. Second, this study used a longitudinal design with nationally representative samples from the China Education Panel Survey. A total of 8794 middle school students in grade 7 completed measures of father–adolescent and mother–adolescent relationships, and depressive symptoms twice (T1 and T2; one-year interval). Results indicated that both positive father–adolescent and mother–adolescent relationships had negative effects on depressive symptoms in female adolescents. However, positive father-adolescent, not mother-adolescent, relationships had a negative effect on depressive symptoms in male adolescents. These findings suggest that positive parent–adolescent relationships could reduce early adolescents’ depressive symptoms, but positive father–adolescent and mother–adolescent relationships might have different protective effects on early adolescents’ depressive symptoms among male and female adolescents in China.

     

Validity and Reliability of the French Versions of the Body Shape Questionnaire

The validity of the 34-item and shortened versions of the Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ) has been evaluated in various languages. To date, only the validity of the 34-item French BSQ scale has been tested in a nonclinical sample. This study assessed the reliability and validity of the 34-item French BSQ and 7 shortened versions in clinical and nonclinical samples. The 34-item French BSQ was administered to 159 obese women with and without binge eating disorders and to 1,169 female undergraduate students. The results suggested that the BSQ–8B was the best French BSQ to use in nonclinical and clinical samples.