Being a Therapist: Contributions of Heidegger's Philosophy and the Buddha's Teachings to Psychotherapy

Is there a place for Heidegger's philosophy and the Buddha's teachings (dhamma) in contemporary psychotherapy? The simple answer is yes. This article explores how the ideas of Being-in-the-world, Openness, Being-With, anticipatory care, letting be and letting go, cultivating a meditative attitude and a beginner's mind—promoted in Heidegger's philosophy, daseinsanalysis, and the Buddha's teachings—inform my approach to therapy and ground my Being as a therapist, and how this embodiment has been received by clients. Some important parallels and differences between Heideggerian and Buddhist ideas and practices are also discussed. Heidegger's philosophy, the Buddha's teachings, and daseinsanalysis provide therapists with important foundations for understanding their roles as cojourneyers with their clients, and embracing this attitude in therapy can make therapy truly a healing, rather than a curing, process.     

Non-Agential Permissibility In Epistemology

Paul Silva has recently argued that doxastic justification does not have a basing requirement. An important part of his argument depends crucially on the assumption that doxastic and moral permissibility have a parallel structure. I here reply to Silva's argument by challenging this crucial assumption. I claim that moral permissibility is an agential notion, while doxastic permissibility is not. I then briefly explore the nature of these notions and briefly consider their implications for praise and blame.     

Cross‐cultural Measurement Invariance of the Employment Opportunity Index (EOI) in Mexican and Brazilian Professionals

Perceived employment alternatives have been shown to add incremental variance in understanding voluntary turnover as well as factors related to recruiting and staffing. The Employment Opportunity Index (EOI) is a multidimensional assessment of perceived employment alternatives that has exhibited predictive validity across multiple job types and populations. This study assessed the measurement invariance of the EOI in American, Mexican, and Brazilian professionals. We found support for configural and metric invariance in all five dimensions of the EOI with these populations, and support for scalar invariance three of the five EOI dimensions. The construct validity of the EOI appears to be relatively robust in Latin American populations, although cultural and macroeconomic factors may impose some response bias in these groups.     

Is Natural Selection in Trouble? When Emotions Run High in a Philosophical Debate

This paper deals in detail with a fairly recent philosophical debate centered around the ability of the theory of natural selection to account for those phenotypical changes which can be argued to make organisms better adapted to their environments. The philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor started the debate by claiming that natural selection cannot do the job. He follows two main lines of argumentation. One is based on an alleged conceptual defect in the theory, the other on alleged empirical problems in it as well as empirical alternatives to it. Four philosophers and two biologists respond in a way that displays what might easily be described as fallacious. The paper relies on the ideal model of critical discussion of pragma-dialectics to offer a step-by-step analysis of the whole debate, which extended for four issues of the London Review of Books, from October 2007 through January 2008. This pragma-dialectical analysis is carried out by constant reference to the various questions (problems, issues) that arise in the debate. The analysis includes as much detail as possible both in Fodor’s original argument and in the critics’ various comments as well as Fodor’s replies along two rounds of debate. Since a simple negative evaluation in terms of fallacies is out of the question in view of the proved argumentative accomplishments of the participants, an alternative explanation is offered: the undeniable derailments in strategic maneuvering are due to the fact that, whilst ostensibly discussing the theory of natural selection, Fodor’s detractors are worried by an underlying issue, namely, the dangers of discussing the merits and demerits of natural selection as a theory of evolution in a venue as exposed to the general public as the London Review of Books, given the religiously inspired movements that threaten the teaching of evolutionary biology in schools.

     

Posture-related affordances guide attacks in basketball

Objectives

The purpose of this study was to investigate the decision made by the attacker to drive to the left or right of the defender.

Method

Participants were 32 novice and intermediate basketball players who were assigned the role of attacker or defender in a one-on-one subphase. We manipulated the defender’s posture and measured both the postures of defenders and attackers and the ensuing decision on drive direction.

Results

As hypothesized, the posture of defenders guided the decision behavior of the attacker. Both novice and intermediate attackers made the same affordance-based decision by driving to the side of the defender’s most advanced foot, but only when the distance between attacker and defender was small. Moreover, novice attackers conveyed postural information regarding their upcoming drive direction while intermediate attackers were better able to conceal this information.

Conclusions

These results lend further support to the notion of information-based control of interpersonal actions in sport contexts.     

Conditional Discriminations by Preverbal Children in an Identity Matching-to-Sample Task

This study sought to develop methodology for assessing whether children aged 16-21 months could learn to match stimuli on the basis of physical identity in conditional discrimination procedures of the type routinely used in stimulus equivalence research with older participants. The study was conducted in a private room at a daycare center for children and toddlers. The child and the research sat together on the floor facing an apparatus with two windows. Stimuli to be discriminated were toys especially designed to attract the child's attention and maintain continued interest. On simple discrimination and discrimination reversal trials that were programmed in initial training, S+ and S- toys were displayed within the two windows. When the child touched the window containing the toy defined as S+ on a given trial, s/he was allowed to manipulate/play with that toy. Selections of the S- toy ended the trial without a play opportunity. On subsequent identity matching-to-sample trials, the child was first allowed to manipulate a sample toy. Then, S+ (matching) and S- (nonmatching) comparison toys were displayed within the windows, and the selection consequences were the same as on simple discrimination trials. The study provides evidence that preverbal children can master simple and conditional discrimination performances via such procedures, perhaps setting the stage for subsequent studies aimed at establishing procedural control of the discrimination baselines needed to assess the stimulus equivalence potential of children in this age range.     

Integrating fundamental movement skills in late childhood

The study examined how children of different ages integrate fundamental movement skills, such as running and throwing, and whether their developmental status was related to the combination of these skills. Thirty children were divided into three groups (G1 = 6-year-olds, G2 = 9-year-olds, and G3 = 12-year-olds) and filmed performing three tasks: running, overarm throwing, and the combined task. Patterns were identified and described, and the efficiency of integration was calculated (distance differences of the ball thrown in two tasks, overarm throwing and combined task). Differences in integration were related to age: the 6-year-olds were less efficient in combining the two skills than the 9- and 12-year-olds. These differences may be indicative of a phase of integrating fundamental movement skills in the developmental sequence. This developmental status, particularly throwing, seems to be related to the competence to integrate skills, which suggests that fundamental movement skills may be developmental modules.     

The effect of age on decision making according to the Iowa gambling task

Aging has been associated with several brain changes that often affect the cognitive functioning of adults, but changes in executive functions, particularly in the field of decision making, have not been fully investigated. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a widely used tool to evaluate decision making, but little is known about the effect of age on its results. This study used the IGT and compared healthy young (n = 40) and elderly (n = 40) adults to evaluate their decision making processes. There were significant differences in the learning curve of the two age groups, but no difference in overall IGT performance. The results for the first IGT block were different from those of the rest of the task, and the group of elderly adults had a better performance in this block. Elderly adults also showed a preference for deck A, the one that resulted in greater losses. Findings confirmed the results of other studies, which reported that the IGT block score is the variable with the greatest sensitivity to age in this instrument.     

Sex differences in social buffering and social contagion of alarm responses in zebrafish

Animal Cognition - The alarm substance in fish is a pheromone released by injured individuals after a predator attack. When detected by other fish, it triggers fear/defensive responses, such as...