The Viability of Structural Family Therapy in the Twenty-first Century: An Analysis of Key Indicators

This paper examines the degree to which structural family therapy has adapted effectively to client families and professional demands of the twenty-first century. A review of the current professional literature was conducted to assess the structural model’s continued clinical relevance, how the model has changed in adapting to contemporary social and professional contexts, and whether or not the integrity of the model’s core proposition has been eroded or confounded as a result of adaptive changes.     

Executive abilities in children with congenital visual impairment in mid-childhood

The role of vision and vision deprivation in the development of executive function (EF) abilities in childhood is little understood; aspects of EF such as initiative, attention orienting, inhibition, planning and performance monitoring are often measured through visual tasks. Studying the development and integrity of EF abilities in children with congenital visual impairment (VI) may provide important insights into the development of EF and also its possible relationship with vision and non-visual senses. The current study investigates non-visual EF abilities in 18 school-age children of average verbal intelligence with VI of differing levels of severity arising from congenital disorders affecting the eye, retina, or anterior optic nerve. Standard auditory neuropsychological assessments of sustained and divided attention, phonemic, semantic and switching verbal fluency, verbal working memory, and ratings of everyday executive abilities by parents were undertaken. Executive skills were compared to age-matched typically-sighted (TS) typically-developing children and across levels of vision (mild to moderate VI [MVI] or severe to profound VI [SPVI]). The results do not indicate significant differences or deficits on direct assessments of verbal and auditory EF between the groups. However, parent ratings suggest difficulties with everyday executive abilities, with the greatest difficulties in those with SPVI. The findings are discussed as possibly reflecting increased demands of behavioral executive skills for children with VI in everyday situations despite auditory and verbal EF abilities in the typical range for their age. These findings have potential implications for clinical and educational practices.     

The interaction between duration, velocity and repetitive auditory stimulation

Repetitive auditory stimulation (with click trains) and visual velocity signals both have intriguing effects on the subjective passage of time. Previous studies have established that prior presentation of auditory clicks increases the subjective duration of subsequent sensory input, and that faster moving stimuli are also judged to have been presented for longer (the time dilation effect). However, the effect of clicks on velocity estimation is unknown, and the nature of the time dilation effect remains ambiguous. Here were present a series of five experiments to explore these phenomena in more detail. Participants viewed a rightward moving grating which traveled at velocities ranging from 5 to 15°/s and which lasted for durations of 500 to 1500 ms. Gratings were preceded by clicks, silence or white noise. It was found that both clicks and higher velocities increased subjective duration. It was also found that the time dilation effect was a constant proportion of stimulus duration. This implies that faster velocity increases the rate of the pacemaker component of the internal clock. Conversely, clicks increased subjective velocity, but the magnitude of this effect was not proportional to actual velocity. Through considerations of these results, we conclude that clicks independently affect velocity and duration representations.     

Building blocks of bias: Gender composition predicts male and female group members’ evaluations of each other and the group

The present research examined how a group's gender composition influences intragroup evaluations. Group members evaluated fellow group members and the group as a whole following a shared task. As predicted, no performance differences were found as a function of gender composition, but judgments of individuals’ task contributions, the group's effectiveness, and desire to work with one's group again measured at a 10-week follow-up were increasingly negative as the proportion of women in the group increased. Negative judgments were consistently directed at male and female group members as indicated by no gender of target effects, demonstrating that men, simply by working alongside women, can be detrimentally affected by negative stereotypes about women. Implications for gender diversity in the workplace are discussed.     

Grief Counseling: An Investigation of Counselors' Training,Experience, and Competencies

Grief is prevalent in counseling, but little is known about the current status of counselors’ preparation and competencies to provide effective care. This exploratory study surveyed counselors (N= 369) on grief training, personal and professional experiences with grief, and grief counseling competence. Multiple regression analyses found training and experience were statistically significant predictors of competence. The strong relationship between variables suggests these concepts may be understood as synonymous. Implications for training, practice, and research are discussed.     

Agnosticism gone awry: Why developmental robotics must commit to an understanding of embodiment and shared intentionality

We argue that developmental robotics, in its integration of developmental psychology and robotics, has the potential to encounter unexpected and unexamined conceptual difficulties. In particular, the various uses of embodiment and shared intentionality single out certain robots and behaviors as more or less relevant for the modeling of social cognition. As these terms have relatively orthogonal histories, there is no account for how their use will interact to shape methodology. We provide a brief discussion of how they may do so. Moreover, theorists often avoid explicit endorsement of some use or another. Although this agnosticism is understandable, we use the model of Dominey and Warneken (2011) as an illustrative example of why it is potentially dangerous. While Dominey and Warneken have succeeded in encouraging theorists to adopt clearer formulations of shared intentionality, their model suffers from important difficulties in interpretation, which, we argue, are a consequence of their uses of embodiment and shared intentionality respectively.     

The unbearable ideology of genius

Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics, by James Gleick, New York/London: Pantheon/Little Brown, 1992, 532 pages, hb £18.99     

Individual and Group Meaning: Exploring the Reciprocal Relation

Abstract

Group construct systems were defined through application of a group construct grid that elicited types of groups in which an individual had participated or closely observed. The Group Grid was administered at the beginning and the end of a 4-month graduate class. The meanings of groups to participants were interpreted by examining changes in Group Grids over time and in relation to high and low levels of group performance. The meaning of individuals to the group was assessed by peer evaluations given at the end of the project. High and low levels of peer evaluation were then predicted by an individual's Group Grid measures. The most consistent findings were that greater variation in application regarding types of groups and characteristics about groups showed strong associations with both high levels of group performance and high levels of peer evaluation. Suggestions are given for future research     

Redemptive Prose: Richard Wright’s Re-authoring of the Patricidal Urtext

The pen is mightier than the sword! This adage, written by English playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton, is a concise declaration that calls attention to the potency of the written word. By no means the exclusive preserve of the political revolutionary (e.g., Marx and Engel’s Manifesto of the Communist Party) nor of the theological reformer (e.g., Luther’s The Ninety-Five Theses), the mighty pen is also an instrument used by persons who seek either to effect or to experience a change in a number of diverse, and sometimes more personal, issues. As readers, we often ignore that many authors may be working through their own turmoil—whether psychological, spiritual, or otherwise—when they clasp the pen to put their thoughts to paper. How, then, do authors use the pen as a therapeutic tool to remedy their inner wounds, the unseen trauma often caused by various “psychosocial swords”? This article offers a particularized response to this inquiry by investigating the pain of paternal abandonment and the restorative efficacy of filial wisdom evinced in Richard Wright’s novels Black Boy and The Long Dream. It is my contention that Wright’s redemptive prose presents convincing evidence that the pen, as an instrument of restoration, is indeed mightier than any sword used to sever those inalienable relationships (e.g., the father-son dyad) that give sustenance to and are therefore an essential part of one’s selfhood.     

Remarks on counterpossibles

Since the publication of David Lewis’ Counterfactuals, the standard line on subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents (or counterpossibles) has been that they are vacuously true. That is, a conditional of the form ‘If p were the case, q would be the case’ is trivially true whenever the antecedent, p, is impossible. The primary justification is that Lewis’ semantics best approximates the English subjunctive conditional, and that a vacuous treatment of counterpossibles is a consequence of that very elegant theory. Another justification derives from the classical lore than if an impossibility were true, then anything goes. In this paper we defend non-vacuism, the view that counterpossibles are sometimes non-vacuously true and sometimes non-vacuously false. We do so while retaining a Lewisian semantics, which is to say, the approach we favor does not require us to abandon classical logic or a similarity semantics. It does however require us to countenance impossible worlds. An impossible worlds treatment of counterpossibles is suggested (but not defended) by Lewis (Counterfactuals. Blackwell, Oxford, 1973), and developed by Nolan (Notre Dame J Formal Logic 38:325–527, 1997), Kment (Mind 115:261–310, 2006a: Philos Perspect 20:237–302, 2006b), and Vander Laan (In: Jackson F, Priest G (eds) Lewisian themes. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004). We follow this tradition, and develop an account of comparative similarity for impossible worlds.