Continulty in the Life Story: Self-Defining Memories, Affect, and Approach/Avoidance Personal Strivings

To study affective responses to memories and their relationship to personal strivings, 117 participants (65 males, 52 females) wrote selfdefining memories and indicated their affective responses to the memories. A week later they generated personal strivings, rated them along 10 dimensions, and indicated the relevance of their memories to the strivings. Participants who recalled more memories relevant to the attainment of their strivings felt more positively about their memories. Additionally, participants who listed greater percentages of avoidance strivings also recalled more memories related to the nonattainment of their strivings. Participants with higher percentages of avoidance strivings also recalled less positive memories. In an extension of Emmons's (1986) research, participants' feelings about personal strivings were linked to their affective responses to memories generated a week earlier. These results support a goal-based theory of affect and a role for motivation in memory.     

Informing supervision practice through research: A narrative inquiry

Intention: This study focused on questions of whether and how clients benefit from supervision. As practitioner research, the study was intended to shape the researchers’ own supervision practice. Method: The qualitative approach was based on interviews with a small number of experienced practitioners about their supervision experiences. The findings are presented in the form of reflexive stories, told by each researcher. Findings: In these stories the researchers tell how engagement with experienced practitioners’ accounts of their past supervision shaped the hopes and intentions the researchers hold for their future supervision. Implications forpractice: The stories suggest there are therapeutic benefits in an ethic of transparency that provides for practices that overtly carry stories in both directions between counselling and supervision.     

Factors of Cognitive Complaints in Adults With HIV: A Structural Equation Model Analysis

The objective of this study was to use structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the relationships between factors of cognitive complaints in 427 adults with HIV receiving care from an AIDS service organization (ASO) in Alabama. A face-to-face interview assessed cognitive complaints, mood, self-perceived health status, and substance use. Direct and indirect paths were specified between years with HIV (chronicity) age, education, stress, self-perceived health status, substance use, and cognitive complaints. The final model fit the data well (GFI = .95; AGFI = .92), revealing that age, education, substance use, self-perceived health status, and stress contributed directly or indirectly to cognitive complaints. Chronicity was only related to age, suggesting that duration of HIV may be of limited value in predicting cognitive complaints. These results demonstrate the complexity between the factors that influence cognitive complaints and offer possible solutions that health professionals can use to mitigate cognitive complaints in this population.     

Vices of Inattention

abstract Why do we routinely betray moral commitments that, in some sense, we authentically embrace? One explanation involves inattention: failure to attend to morally important aspects of our lives. Inattention ranges from an unmotivated lack of focus, or “simple” inattention, to more purposeful and wilful self‐deception. Self‐deception has received exhaustive and insightful treatment by philosophers and psychologists; what remains unexamined is the less complex, but more pervasive phenomenon of simple inattention. Since inattention is at least equally important in accounting for our routine moral failures, this gap is an important one to fill. In this essay I examine moral dimensions of inattention: what makes it problematic, what vices it reflects, what duties we have to overcome it, and how we might try to do that. I argue that inattention obscures responsibilities to prevent harm, erodes autonomy, manifests a lack of virtue, and undermines integrity. For these reasons, we have obligations of attentiveness. I propose that we should attend (at least) to apparent violations of our moral values in which we are personally implicated, which we have power to affect, and to which we have been directed by clues that something is amiss. I end with practical suggestions for enhancing our attentiveness.