Prioritarianism for Variable Populations

Philosophical discussions of prioritarianism, the view that we ought to give priority to those who are worse off, have hitherto been almost exclusively focused on cases involving a fixed population. The aim of this paper is to extend the discussion of prioritarianism to encompass also variable populations. I argue that prioritarianism, in its simplest formulation, is not tenable in this area. However, I also propose several revised formulations that, so I argue, show more promise.     

Internet-delivered assessment and manipulation of anxiety-linked attentional bias: Validation of a free-access attentional probe software package

It recently has been established within the laboratory that the attentional probe methodology not only can sensitively assess the threat attentional bias associated with anxiety vulnerability, but also can be configured to yield training tasks capable of modifying emotional vulnerability by manipulating such attentional selectivity. In order to appraise and exploit the potential practical applications of such procedures, it is desirable that clinical investigators without specialist equipment should become able to deliver such tasks within field settings. The present research program involved development of a fully customizable attentional probe software package, that delivers assessment and training versions of the probe task across the Internet. Two experimental studies served to validate the assessment and training efficacy of resulting probe task variants, completed remotely by GAD sufferers and nonclinical populations using their own computers. We advise fellow researchers how to freely download this software package for use within their own investigations.     

Deployment‐Related Benefit Finding and Postdeployment Marital Satisfaction in Military Couples

Extensive research has evaluated potential negative effects of military deployments on romantic relationships. Comparatively few studies have examined potential positive effects of such deployments. In stressful situations, benefit finding (BF) has been found to be linked with better functioning on both individual and interpersonal levels. This study reports on deployment‐related BF in a sample of 67 male service members (SMs) who deployed at least once since 9/11/2001 and their wives. Couples completed measures of marital satisfaction at baseline (an average of 1 year postdeployment) and follow‐up 4–6 months later. At follow‐up, SMs also provided data on symptoms of posttraumatic stress, and both partners provided reports of deployment‐related BF. Multivariate path analysis controlling for SMs' PTSD symptom severity revealed that wives' BF was positively associated with increases in SMs' relationship satisfaction. These findings suggest that wives' responses to deployment may be more influential than SMs' responses to deployment on military couples' relationships. This pattern indicates that support for spouses during deployments is essential; furthermore, such support should include an emphasis on trying to facilitate personal growth in spouses.     

Self‐analysis and the development of an interpretation

In spite of the fact that Freud's self‐analysis was at the centre of so many of his discoveries, self‐analysis remains a complex, controversial and elusive exercise. While self‐analysis is often seen as emerging at the end of an analysis and then used as a criteria in assessing the suitability for termination, I try to attend to the patient's resistance to self‐analysis throughout an analysis. I take the view that the development of the patient's capacity for self‐analysis within the analytic session contributes to the patient's growth and their creative and independent thinking during the analysis, which prepares him or her for a fuller life after the formal analysis ends. The model I will present is based on an over lapping of the patient's and the analyst's self‐analysis, with recognition and use of the analyst's counter‐transference. My focus is on the analyst's self‐analysis that is in response to a particular crisis of not knowing, which results in feeling intellectually and emotionally stuck. This paper is not a case study, but a brief look at the process I went through to arrive at a particular interpretation with a particular patient during a particular session. I will concentrate on resistances in which both patient and analyst initially rely upon what is consciously known.     

Poorer divided attention in children born very preterm can be explained by difficulty with each component task,not the executive requirement to dual-task

Children born very preterm (VP, ≤ 32 weeks) exhibit poor performance on tasks of executive functioning. However, it is largely unknown whether this reflects the cumulative impact of non-executive deficits or a separable impairment in executive-level abilities. A dual-task paradigm was used in the current study to differentiate the executive processes involved in performing two simple attention tasks simultaneously. The executive-level contribution to performance was indexed by the within-subject cost incurred to single-task performance under dual-task conditions, termed dual-task cost. The participants included 77 VP children (mean age: 7.17 years) and 74 peer controls (mean age: 7.16 years) who completed Sky Search (selective attention), Score (sustained attention) and Sky Search DT (divided attention) from the Test of Everyday Attention for Children. The divided-attention task requires the simultaneous performance of the selective- and sustained-attention tasks. The VP group exhibited poorer performance on the selective- and divided-attention tasks, and showed a strong trend toward poorer performance on the sustained-attention task. However, there were no significant group differences in dual-task cost. These results suggest a cumulative impact of vulnerable lower-level cognitive processes on dual-tasking or divided attention in VP children, and fail to support the hypothesis that VP children show a separable impairment in executive-level abilities.     

Understanding the Sexuality of Infants Within Caregiving Relationships in the First Year

Infants’ innate joyful sexuality in the 1st year, as well as parental sexuality, are relatively neglected in models of clinical work with infants. We offer a developmental perspective that pays close attention to the body of the infant, in contrast to some psychoanalytic theories that view infantile sexuality as phantasy. With greater awareness of the infant’s body as sexual, therapists could develop a more resonant countertransference and become more aware of the experiences of the infant as subject. Some symptomatic difficulties are described, and the relevance for psychotherapeutic intervention with adults is indicated.     

Children’s success at detecting circular explanations and their interest in future learning

These studies explore elementary-school-aged children’s ability to evaluate circular explanations and whether they respond to receiving weak explanations by expressing interest in additional learning. In the first study, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds (n = 53) heard why questions about unfamiliar animals. For each question, they rated the quality of single explanations and later selected the best explanation between pairs of circular and noncircular explanations. When judging single explanations, 8- and 10-year-olds, and to some extent 6-year-olds, provided higher ratings for noncircular explanations compared to circular ones. When selecting between pairs of explanations, all age groups preferred noncircular explanations to circular ones, but older children did so more consistently than 6-year-olds. Children who recognized the weakness of the single circular explanations were more interested in receiving additional information about the question topics. In Study 2, all three age groups (n = 87) provided higher ratings for noncircular explanations compared to circular ones when listening to responses to how questions, but older children showed a greater distinction in their ratings than 6-year-olds. Moreover, the link between recognizing circular explanations as weak and interest in future learning could not be accounted for solely by individual differences in verbal intelligence. These findings illustrate the developmental trajectory of explanation evaluation and support that recognition of weak explanations is linked to interest in future learning across the elementary years. Implications for education are discussed.     

Chickadees discriminate contingency reversals presented consistently,but not frequently

Chickadees are high-metabolism, non-migratory birds, and thus an especially interesting model for studying how animals follow patterns of food availability over time. Here, we studied whether black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) could learn to reverse their behavior and/or to anticipate changes in reinforcement when the reinforcer contingencies for each stimulus were not stably fixed in time. In Experiment 1, we examined the responses of chickadees on an auditory go/no-go task, with constant reversals in reinforcement contingencies every 120 trials across daily testing intervals. Chickadees did not produce above-chance discrimination; however, when trained with a procedure that only reversed after successful discrimination, chickadees were able to discriminate and reverse their behavior successfully. In Experiment 2, we examined the responses of chickadees when reversals were structured to occur at the same time once per day, and chickadees were again able to discriminate and reverse their behavior over time, though they showed no reliable evidence of reversal anticipation. The frequency of reversals throughout the day thus appears to be an important determinant for these animals’ performance in reversal procedures.