Mind Your Own Business: Reflective Aretaic Responsibility

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - The distinctive depth and seriousness of moral responsibility is often thought to stem from the seriousness of violating moral obligations. But this raises...     

Analytic listening and the five senses: introduction

This introductory essay, the three papers that follow-by Jonathan Palmer, Forrest Hamer, and Peter Goldberg-and the commentary by Susan Yamaguchi are products of the panel "Analytic Listening and the Five Senses," presented at the American Psychoanalytic Association meeting in San Francisco, June 11, 2011.     

The family empowerment program: an interdisciplinary approach to working with multi-stressed urban families

The family empowerment program (FEP) is a multi-systemic family therapy program that partners multi-stressed families with an interdisciplinary resource team while remaining attached to a "traditional" mental health clinic. The rationale for this model is that far too often, families presenting at community mental health centers struggle with multiple psychosocial forces, for example problems with housing, domestic violence, child care, entitlements, racism, substance abuse, and foster care, as well as chronic medical and psychiatric illnesses, that exacerbate symptoms and impact traditional service delivery and access to effective treatment. Thus, families often experience fragmented care and are involved with multiple systems with contradictory and competing agendas. As a result, services frequently fail to harness the family's inherent strengths. The FEP partners the family with a unified team that includes representatives from Entitlements Services, Family Support and Parent Advocacy, and Clinical Staff from the agency's Outpatient Mental Health Clinic practicing from a strength-based family therapy perspective. The goal of the FEP is to support the family in achieving their goals. This is accomplished through co-construction of a service plan that addresses the family's needs in an efficient and coherent manner-emphasizing family strengths and competencies and supporting family self-sufficiency.     

Prosociality: the contribution of traits, values, and self-efficacy beliefs

The present study examined how agreeableness, self-transcendence values, and empathic self-efficacy beliefs predict individuals' tendencies to engage in prosocial behavior (i.e., prosociality) across time. Participants were 340 young adults, 190 women and 150 men, age approximately 21 years at Time 1 and 25 years at Time 2. Measures of agreeableness, self-transcendence, empathic self-efficacy beliefs, and prosociality were collected at 2 time points. The findings corroborated the posited paths of relations, with agreeableness directly predicting self-transcendence and indirectly predicting empathic self-efficacy beliefs and prosociality. Self-transcendence mediated the relation between agreeableness and empathic self-efficacy beliefs. Empathic self-efficacy beliefs mediated the relation of agreeableness and self-transcendence to prosociality. Finally, earlier prosociality predicted agreeableness and empathic self-efficacy beliefs assessed at Time 2. The posited conceptual model accounted for a significant portion of variance in prosociality and provides guidance to interventions aimed at promoting prosociality.     

Syntactic processing in the human brain: what we know, what we don't know, and a suggestion for how to proceed

For every claim in the neuroimaging literature about a particular brain region supporting syntactic processing, there exist other claims implicating the target region in different linguistic processes, and, in many cases, in non-linguistic cognitive processes (e.g., Blumstein, 2009). We argue that traditional group analysis methods in neuroimaging may obscure functional specificity because of inter-subject anatomical variability (Fedorenko & Kanwisher, 2009). In Fedorenko, Hsieh, Nieto-Castanon, Whitfield-Gabrieli, and Kanwisher (2010) we presented a functional localizer that allows quick and reliable identification of key language-sensitive regions in each individual brain. This approach enables pooling data from corresponding functional regions across subjects rather than from the same locations in stereotaxic space that may differ functionally due to inter-subject anatomical variability. In the current paper we demonstrate that the individual-subjects functional localization approach is superior to the traditional methods in its ability to distinguish among conditions in a brain region’s response. This ability is at the core of all neuroimaging research and is critical for answering questions of functional specialization (e.g., does a brain region specialize for processing syntactic aspects of the linguistic signal), which is in turn essential for making inferences about the precise computations conducted in each brain region. Based on our results, we argue that supplementing existing methods with an individual-subjects functional localization approach may lead to a clearer picture of the neural basis of syntactic processing, as it has in some other domains, such as high-level vision (e.g., Kanwisher, 2010) and social cognition (e.g., Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003).     

What Virtual Twins Reveal About General Intelligence and Other Behaviors

The Fullerton Virtual Twin Study has been assessing the behaviors of an unusual sibship since 1982. Virtual twins (VTs) are same-age, unrelated siblings reared together since infancy. They replicate the rearing situation of twins but without the genetic link, enabling direct assessment of shared environmental effects on behavior. An updated analysis of IQ data, based on an increased sample of 142 VT pairs (7.87 years, SD=8.22), is presented. Intraclass correlations of .28 (IQ) and .11 (subtest profile) indicated modest shared environmental influences on intelligence. Findings from the Twins, Adoptees, Peers and Siblings (TAPS) project that studies virtual twins and other kinships are described.     

Proportionate responses to life events influence clinicians' judgments of psychological abnormality

Psychological abnormality is a fundamental concept in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2000) and in all clinical evaluations. How do practicing clinical psychologists use the context of life events to judge the abnormality of a person's current behaviors? The appropriate role of life-event context in assessment has long been the subject of intense debate and scrutiny among clinical theorists, yet relatively little is known about clinicians' own judgments in practice. The authors propose a proportionate-response hypothesis, such that judgments of abnormality are influenced by whether the behaviors are a disproportionate response to past events, rendering them difficult to understand or explain. Licensed, practicing clinical psychologists (N = 77) were presented with vignettes describing hypothetical people's behaviors (disordered, mildly distressed, or unaffected) that had been preceded by either traumatic or mildly distressing events. Experts' judgments of abnormality were strongly and systematically influenced by the degree of mismatch between the past event and current behaviors in strength and valence, such that the greater the mismatch, the more abnormal the person seemed. A separate, additional group of clinical psychologists (N = 20) further confirmed that the greater the degree of mismatch, the greater the perceived difficulty in understanding the patient. These findings held true across clinicians of different theoretical orientations and in disorders for which these patterns of judgments ran contrary to formal recommendations in the DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). The rationality of these effects and implications for clinical decision science are discussed.     

Test-retest reliability and practice effects of the Wechsler Memory Scale-III

Although serial administration of cognitive tests is increasingly common, there is a paucity of research on test-retest reliabilities and practice effects, both of which are important for evaluating changes in functioning. Reliability is generally conceptualized as involving short-lasting changes in performance. However, when repeated testing occurs over a period of years, there will be some longer lasting effects. The implications of these longer lasting effects and practice effects on reliability were examined in the context of repeated administrations of the Wechsler Memory Scale-III in 339 community-dwelling women aged 40-79 years over 2 to 7 years. The results showed that Logical Memory and Verbal Paired Associates subtests were consistently the most reliable subtests across the age cohorts. The magnitude of practice effects varied as a function of subtests and age. The largest practice effects were found in the youngest age cohort, especially on the Faces, Logical Memory, and Verbal Paired Associates subtests.     

Beliefs of Chinese buyers of pirated goods

This study fills a void in the piracy literature by describing the results of a qualitative investigation of buyers conducted in mainland China, one of the largest piracy markets in the world. Chinese college students, invited to write essays expressing their views, revealed themselves to be active buyers of fake music and movies, untroubled by any legal or ethical issues. Theories of cognitive dissonance and neoclassical economics are used to explain the behavior of buyers. A surprising result is the feeling of young Chinese that their government is unwilling and/or able to control piracy. Another insight not previously revealed in the literature is the Chinese essayists' condemnation of foreigners as hypocrites who preach against piracy while avidly buying fake goods themselves. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.