‘Characters’ in psychoanalytic and interpersonal therapy: A comparison

In this paper the author considers how the therapist might listen to the characters talked about by his or her patients. In psychoanalytic therapy the emphasis is on listening to the patient's characters as though they are located in psychic reality and as representatives of the transference relationship, whereas in interpersonal therapy (IPT) the patient's characters are taken as inhabiting the realm of external reality. It is argued that clinical thinking in IPT would be enhanced by taking more account of psychic reality, which will make clearer the quality of external reality in which the patient's characters are located. It is also argued that both therapies share an interest in enabling the patient to find characters which can serve as holograms of previously unexpressed affective experience.     

How Preschoolers Use Cues of Dominance to Make Sense of Their Social Environment

A series of four experiments investigated preschoolers’ abilities to make sense of dominance relations. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that as early as 3 years old, preschoolers are able to infer dominance not only from physical supremacy but also from decision power, age, and resources. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that preschoolers have expectations regarding the ways in which a dominant and a subordinate individual are likely to differ. In particular, they expect that an individual who imposes his choice on another will exhibit higher competence in games and will have more resources.     

Physicians' Silent Decisions: Because Patient Autonomy Does Not Always Come First

Physicians make some medical decisions without disclosure to their patients. Nondisclosure is possible because these are silent decisions to refrain from screening, diagnostic or therapeutic interventions. Nondisclosure is ethically permissible when the usual presumption that the patient should be involved in decisions is defeated by considerations of clinical utility or patient emotional and physical well-being. Some silent decisions—not all—are ethically justified by this standard. Justified silent decisions are typically dependent on the physician's professional judgment, experience and knowledge, and are not likely to be changed by patient preferences. We condemn the inappropriate exclusion of the patient from the decision-making process. However, if a test or treatment is unlikely to yield a net benefit, disclosure and discussion are at times unnecessary. Appropriate silent decisions are ethically justified by such considerations as patient benefit or economy of time.     

Participant recruitment methods and statistical reasoning performance

Optimal Bayesian reasoning performance has reportedly been elusive, and a variety of explanations have been suggested for this situation. In a series of experiments, it is demonstrated that these difficulties with replication can be accounted for by differences in participant-sampling methodologies. Specifically, the best performances are obtained with students from top-tier, national universities who were paid for their participation. Performance drops significantly as these conditions are altered regarding inducements (e.g., using unpaid participants) or participant source (e.g., using participants from a second-tier, regional university). Honours-programme undergraduates do better than regular undergraduates within the same university, paid participation creates superior performance, and top-tier university students do better than students from lower ranked universities. Pictorial representations (supplementing problem text) usually have a slight facilitative effect across these participant manipulations. These results indicate that studies should take account of these methodological details and focus more on relative levels of performance rather than absolute performance.     

Lewis' Strawman

In a survey of his views in the philosophy of mind, David Lewis criticizes much recent work in the field by attacking an imaginary opponent, 'Strawman'. His case against Strawman focuses on four central theses which Lewis takes to be widely accepted among contemporary philosophers of mind. The theses concern (1) the language of thought hypothesis and its relation to folk-psychology, (2) narrow content, (3) de se content, and (4) rationality. We respond to Lewis, arguing (amongst other things) that he underestimates Strawman's theoretical resources in a variety of important ways.     

The role of nonlinguistic stimuli and semantic relations in children's acquisition of grammatical utterances

Eighteen children, randomly assigned to one of six conditions, were trained in the use of two-word subject-verb (e.g. “mommy go”) utterances. The groups differed in (1) the number of different semantic relations theoretically underlying the subject-verb utterances on which the children were trained, and (2) the extent to which these semantic relations were associated with nonlinguistic events. The results indicated that the children acquired the subject-verb utterance forms more readily when they were also exposed to the events to which the utterances actually referred. Provided that the subject-verb utterances were related to ongoing events, the number of relations “underlying” these utterances did not appear critical. These results suggest that the child's acquisition of novel and grammatical utterances describing nonlinguistic stimuli highly similar to those in his natural environment are amenable to experimental control.