A Pastoral Theological Approach to the New Anxiety

Noting that we live in anxious times, and that the question is not whether but to what extent are the persons with whom pastoral and spiritual caregivers work today are experiencing anxiety, the paper claims that a basic understanding of the nature of anxiety is required in order to practice pastoral care effectively. To this end, it focuses on the role an uncertain future plays in the development of anxiety; on the importance of determining whether the person with whom one is working has a degree of anxiety that is out of proportion to the threat that he or she is under; and on the fact that although anxiety is endemic to the modern condition, it is also the case that a more acute form of anxiety is a primary feature of the super-modern condition. This “new anxiety” is complex and multifaceted, but a fundamental feature of this new anxiety is that it has less to do with the loss and more to do with an excess of meaning. Resources from the Judeo–Christian tradition include the teachings of Jesus on anxiety and the importance it places on hope experientially grounded in the living presence of a loving God.     

Interdisciplinary research and interprofessional collaborative care in a memory clinic for rural and northern residents of western Canada: Unique training ground for clinical psychology graduate students

Abstract: In Canada, interprofessional education (IPE) and interdisciplinary health research initiatives are beginning to transform the academic health sciences, including graduate training programs for clinical psychologists. In response to mandates and directives from national health policy and research funding bodies, academic training programs are re‐structuring course offerings, practicum training experiences, and research activities to better prepare students for their future roles within interdisciplinary research groups and collaborative patient‐centred clinical teams. As an example of this transformative movement in IPE, described herein are the recent training initiatives in the Graduate Program in Clinical Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan, and the role of clinical neuropsychology in an innovative interprofessional rural and remote memory clinic.     

The developmental mental-disorder histories of adults with posttraumatic stress disorder: a prospective longitudinal birth cohort study

Clinical and epidemiologic studies have established that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is highly comorbid with other mental disorders. However, such studies have largely relied on adults' retrospective reports to ascertain comorbidity. The authors examined the developmental mental health histories of adults with PTSD using data on mental disorders assessed across the first 3 decades of life among members of the longitudinal Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study; 100% of those diagnosed with past-year PTSD and 93.5% of those with lifetime PTSD at age 26 had met criteria for another mental disorder between ages 11 and 21. Most other mental disorders had first onsets by age 15. Of new cases of PTSD arising between ages 26 and 32, 96% had a prior mental disorder and 77% had been diagnosed by age 15. These data suggest PTSD almost always develops in the context of other mental disorders. Research on the etiology of PTSD may benefit from taking lifetime developmental patterns of comorbidity into consideration. Juvenile mental-disorder histories may help indicate which individuals are most likely to develop PTSD in populations at high risk of trauma exposure.     

Heritability of antisocial behaviour at 9: do callous‐unemotional traits matter?

A previous finding from our group indicated that teacher-rated antisocial behaviour (AB) among 7-year-olds is particularly heritable in the presence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits. Using a sample of 1865 same-sex twin pairs, we employed DeFries-Fulker extremes analysis to investigate whether teacher-rated AB with/without CU traits also shows aetiological differences among 9-year-olds. Furthermore, we assessed whether the differences in the magnitude of heritability would be evident even when hyperactive symptoms were controlled for in the statistical analysis. AB among 9-year-olds was more heritable with than without concomitant CU. The heritability difference was even more pronounced in magnitude when hyperactive symptoms were controlled. CU traits thus appear to index one valid way of sub-typing children with early-onset AB.     

Treating the Child or Syndrome: Does Context Matter for Treatment Decisions for Antisocially Behaving Youth?

Using a between-subject 3 × 3 design of an experimentally manipulated realistic case vignette of Black, White, and Hispanic youth in a survey mailed to 1540 experienced psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, the authors examined if clinicians alter their judgments about treatment for antisocially behaving youth based on the symptom’s social context (e.g., life circumstances) and the youth’s race or ethnicity, even among youth who are otherwise identical in terms of behavioral symptoms. Vignettes describe behaviors meeting DSM-IV criteria for conduct disorder, but contain contextual information suggesting either internal dysfunction (ID) or a normal response to a difficult environment [i.e., environmental-reaction (ER)]. Comparison was symptom-only (SO). Judgments of effectiveness of 14 treatments for youth exhibiting antisocial behavior were examined. Frequencies and median scores of perceived effectiveness level (1–9, Likert) were compared in bivariate analyses, stratifying context and youth’s race or ethnicity. The context of the behavior was associated significantly with differences in effectiveness judgments in 13 of 14 treatments. Within ID and ER contexts, clinicians judged three different treatments as effective (median ≥ 7 of 9). In the SO condition, clinicians were less selective, judging six as effective. In the ID context, psychiatric medications, systems oriented family therapy, and residential care were judged more effective for White than for Black or Hispanic youth. Evidence-based practice research may be hampered by inattention to the social context of behavioral symptoms. Context may activate implicit racial assumptions about treatment effectiveness. Implications are for clinical training to improve service delivery, and future clinical research.     

Do corporations have minds of their own?

Corporations have often been taken to be the paradigm of an organization whose agency is autonomous from that of the successive waves of people who occupy the pattern of roles that define its structure, which licenses saying that the corporation has attitudes, interests, goals, and beliefs which are not those of the role occupants. In this essay, I sketch a deflationary account of agency-discourse about corporations. I identify institutional roles with a special type of status function, a status role, in which the collectively accepted function is expressed in part through its occupier’s intentional expression of her agency in that role (where the occupier is part of the group whose collective acceptance underwrites her having the relevant function in social transactions). I identify institutions as systems of status roles and show how this is compatible with seeing the agency of institutions generally, even over time periods in which there is complete change in role occupiers, as a matter of the contributions only of individual agents. I explain how the reduction of the institution to its members is compatible with its potentially having had a completely different membership. I show in the case of the corporation in particular that, once we see its origins and function, the surface features of legal discourse about corporate agency are misleading and are compatible with a deflationary account of corporate agency. I show in connection with this that the corporation is to be identified with its shareholders, and that where a corporation separates ownership and control, its managers and employees are proxy agents of the shareholders doing business under the corporate form. Finally, I canvass the legitimate ways of construing ordinary talk about corporate intention, belief, and so on, in light of this, none of which support the attribution of genuine agency or intentionality to any group per se associated with the corporation.