Ethical Issues in Consultation,Associate Professor and Director

Consulting relationships differ from traditional counseling and psychotherapeutic relationships in several fundamental ways. These differences require special consideration in evaluating ethical questions and conflicts, identifying ethical parameters within any given situation, and using existing ethical guidelines in determining appropriate courses of action. Currently, formal guidelines specific to the practice of consultation are not available, and existing codes of ethics for the helping professions provide only limited guidance for consultation practice. Consequently, consultants bear a heavy personal responsibility for the consequences of their professional decisions and actions. In this article the author reviews several important ethical issues relevant to consultation and examines their implications for consultation practice.     

Differential age effects for case and hue mixing in visual word recognition

The authors compare older adults' lexical-decision data with younger adults' data reported in P. Allen, A. F. Smith, et al. (2002). On the basis of their work, it was proposed that consistent-case wordswould be processed by the faster holistic (magnodominated) stream, but that mixed-case words would be processed by the slower analytic (interblob-dominated or blob-dominated) steams. Hue mixing was predicted to have no effect on consistent-case performance, but mixed-hue/mixed-case words were predicted to be recognized faster than monochrome/mixed-case words. Younger adults showed the predicted results, but older adults did not. These results suggest that holistic central processes are maintained, but that older adults exhibited an analytic decrement     

Adolescent Suicidal Risk: Psychological,Problem Solving,and Environmental Factors

This study examined the life stress and problem-solving interactional model of suicide proposed by Clum, Patsiokas, and Luscomb (1979) . Thirty-three hospitalized suicidal adolescents were compared with 21 adolescents hospitalized for other psychiatric problems and with 89 controls. The assessment battery was composed of psychological measures, problem-solving measures, and environmental and family measures. The discriminant analyses revealed that the suicide group could be discriminated from the psychiatric control group but not from the high school control group. Unexpectedly, life stresses did not contribute to the identification of current suicide risk. The results suggest the importance of assessing suicide risk at the time of admission to minimize any subsequent changes in the risk group.     

Hemispheric lateralization of bilaterally presented homologous visual and auditory stimuli in normal adults, normal children, and children with central auditory dysfunction

Two experiments were conducted to examine the performance of normal adults, normal children, and children diagnosed with central auditory dysfunction presumed to involve the interhemispheric pathways on a dichotic digits test in common clinical use for the diagnosis of central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) and its corresponding visual analog. Results of the first experiment revealed a significant right ear advantage (REA) for the dichotic listening task and a left-visual-field advantage (LVFA) for the corresponding visual analog in normal adults and children. In the second experiment, results revealed a significantly larger REA in the children with CAPD as compared to the normal children. Results also revealed a reversed cerebral asymmetry (RVFA) for the children with CAPD on the visual task. Significant cross-modal correlations suggest that the two tasks may reflect, at least in part, similar interhemispheric processing mechanisms in children. Findings are discussed in relation to differential diagnosis and modality-specificity of CAPD.     

In the beginning was the familiar voice: personally familiar voices in the evolutionary and contemporary biology of communication

The human voice is described in dialogic linguistics as an embodiment of self in a social context, contributing to expression, perception and mutual exchange of self, consciousness, inner life, and personhood. While these approaches are subjective and arise from phenomenological perspectives, scientific facts about personal vocal identity, and its role in biological development, support these views. It is our purpose to review studies of the biology of personal vocal identity—the familiar voice pattern—as providing an empirical foundation for the view that the human voice is an embodiment of self in the social context. Recent developments in the biology and evolution of communication are concordant with these notions, revealing that familiar voice recognition (also known as vocal identity recognition or individual vocal recognition) has contributed to survival in the earliest vocalizing species. Contemporary ethology documents the crucial role of familiar voices across animal species in signaling and perceiving internal states and personal identities. Neuropsychological studies of voice reveal multimodal cerebral associations arising across brain structures involved in memory, emotion, attention, and arousal in vocal perception and production, such that the voice represents the whole person. Although its roots are in evolutionary biology, human competence for processing layered social and personal meanings in the voice, as well as personal identity in a large repertory of familiar voice patterns, has achieved an immense sophistication.     

Attentional bias towards angry faces in trait-reappraisal

Emotion regulation (ER) strategies differ in when and how they influence emotion experience, expression, and concomitant cognition. However, no study to date has directly compared cognition in individuals who have a clear disposition for either cognitive or behavioural ER strategies. The present study compared selective attention to angry faces in groups of high trait-suppressors (people who are hiding emotional reactions in response to emotional challenge) and high trait-reappraisers (people who cognitively reinterpret emotional events). Since reappraisers are also low trait-anxious and suppressors are high trait-anxious, high and low anxious control groups, both being low in trait-ER, were also included. Attention to angry faces was assessed using an emotional dot-probe task. Trait-reappraisers and high-anxious individuals both showed attentional biases towards angry faces. Trait-reappraisers’ vigilance for angry faces was significantly more pronounced compared to both trait-suppressors and low anxious controls. We suggest that threat prioritization in high trait-reappraisal may allow deeper cognitive processing of threat information without being associated with psychological maladjustment.