Acceptance and Certainty,Doxastic Modals,and Indicative Conditionals

I give a semantics for a logic with two pairs of doxastic modals and an indicative conditional connective that all nest without restriction. Sentences are evaluated as accepted, rejected, or neither. Certainty is the necessity-like modality of acceptance. Inferences may proceed from premises that are certain, or merely accepted, or a mix of both. This semantic setup yields some striking results. Notably, the existence of inferences that preserve certainty but not acceptance very directly implies both failure of modus ponens for the indicative conditional in the logic of acceptance and failure of the deduction theorem for the material conditional in the logic of certainty. The latter failure dissolves, in the logic of certainty, the much - discussed tension between modus ponens and the law of import-export.

     

Zur Dynamik der Interaktion in der Supervision

The manifold functions of a supervisor in following the course of complex processes together with the trainee, are: ? to keep the goals of the supervision in view, ? to establish a teaching alliance and to support the wish and ambitions of the candidate to learn, ? to build a platform for the complex interactions with the trainee with regard to the dynamics of the training situation and keeping in mind the institutional influences, ? to lay down the setting for the work, ? to explore and to reflect how transference and counter-transference influence the interaction between patient and analyst as well as between trainee and supervisor, ? to examine these interactions together focussing continuously on the interaction between candidate and patient, and to encourage the candidate to do the same on his own, ? to continuously formulate hypotheses about the core conflict, the transference phenomena and resistance of the patient, ? to explore and reflect on the cooperative work.     

Further Analysis of the Discriminate Validity of the Parenting Scale

The psychometric properties of the Parenting Scale (PS), a measure employed to identify use of dysfunctional strategies for managing child misbehavior, were examined. Parents of 75 children ages 2 to 12 (45 in the clinic-referred and 30 in the community sample group) completed the PS and a measure of child misbehavior. Mean scores were significantly higher for parents in the clinic-referred group on the PS Total, Laxness, and Overreactivity scales. However, there were no between-group differences in the number of parents who scored at or above a cutoff score designed to identify “clinical significance” on any PS scale. Reported parenting strategies were associated with reported child misbehavior regardless of group status; associations were not stronger depending on referral status. Results support the ability of the PS to discriminate between referred and community sample families. However, the PS scales were not precise in identifying clinically significant variations in parenting practices. Portions of this work were presented at the 2004 convention for the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, New Orleans, LA.     

Using the MMPI-2 to Predict Symptom Reduction During Psychotherapy in a Sample of Community Outpatients

In the present study, potential MMPI-2 predictors of psychotherapy outcome were examined in a community clinical sample of 51 patients seeking treatment at a university training clinic. Results indicated that particular MMPI-2 scales (L, F, Pd, Pa, Sc, Trt) were the most predictive of initial levels of patient distress, whereas three other clinical scales (Hs, D, Hy) were significantly associated with actual symptom reduction over time. The clinical implications of these data include the use of the MMPI-2 in clinical practice as a means to frame the provision of direct feedback to patients regarding the likelihood of treatment response, which in turn, might actually have therapeutic benefits. The limitations of the study are reviewed and suggestions for future research are offered, including the potential use of widely known and utilized instruments in helping to predict response to psychotherapy.     

Interracial contexts debilitate same-race face recognition

Social cognitive research has documented the integral role of social categories (e.g., race) in face processing. Activating a social category can lead perception and memory of faces to be biased in a category-consistent direction. The current research extends this past work, to test the hypothesis that making a social category salient can reduce subsequent face recognition. In two experiments, the current research finds that the typically superior same-race recognition is debilitated by making the same-race category salient. We find that when White-Americans self-categorize as ‘White,’ subsequent perceptual and memorial biases reduce the typically strong same-race recognition.     

Loyalty and Creativity in a Disciplinary Organization

The relationship between loyalty to rules and the creativity that attempts to improve those same rules was examined among Norwegian army officers deployed in international operations. Today's army officers are faced with rapidly changing work conditions and unpredictable enemies, both of which challenge and outdate rules and routines. They thus may experience that they are either guided by too few or inadequate rules, or by many rules that need to be constantly updated. Assuming that following rules is advantageous to officers, then, contrary to classical theory, it was hypothesized that officers scoring both low and high on loyalty to rules would score high on creativity. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed a significant U‐shaped relationship between loyalty to rules and creativity.     

Storage and non-storage components of working memory predicting reasoning: A simultaneous examination of a wide range of ability factors

The current study examined basic cognitive abilities that are related to or included in the concept of working memory (WM): different WM components, three executive functions, simple short-term storage (STM), and sustained attention. Tasks were selected from well-established models and balanced in terms of content. The predictive power of storage and non-storage components of WM was examined. The same analyses were conducted with mental speed as an additional predictor of reasoning. Finally, we investigated whether the identified predictors of reasoning remain relevant when a general factor is considered in the analysis. The analyses revealed that short-term memory accounted for the relationship between complex span measures of WM and reasoning but not for the relationship between coordination and reasoning. These findings remained stable in the context of a mental speed and a general factor. The mental speed factor did not add an incremental contribution to the prediction of reasoning above and beyond short-term memory and coordination. The general factor was mainly built by mental speed tasks and acted as an additional predictor of reasoning besides STM and coordination. Thus, we concluded that reasoning ability can be explained by coordination, STM, and mental speed.