Joining with resistance: addressing reluctance to engage in group therapy training

Although research has documented the effectiveness of group psychotherapy, trainees are often reluctant to embrace this modality. This reluctance may reflect an informed choice based on knowledge, interest, and skill. Alternatively, reluctance may reflect misinformation or resistance due to conflicted feelings that arise from group dynamics. The latter are a major obstacle to the success of group therapy training and treatment programs. Understanding the origins of this reluctance and the developmental challenges of group therapy for trainees better equips supervisors to address this difficulty. This article uses case examples to illustrate how trainee reluctance emerges. It also provides strategies for working with hesitant trainees. The success of group therapy programs rests on the supervisor's ability to manage trainees' inhibitions to group therapy.     

Model for a flexible motor memory based on a self-active recurrent neural network

Using recent recurrent network architecture based on the reservoir computing approach, we propose and numerically simulate a model that is focused on the aspects of a flexible motor memory for the storage of elementary movement patterns into the synaptic weights of a neural network, so that the patterns can be retrieved at any time by simple static commands. The resulting motor memory is flexible in that it is capable to continuously modulate the stored patterns. The modulation consists in an approximately linear inter- and extrapolation, generating a large space of possible movements that have not been learned before. A recurrent network of thousand neurons is trained in a manner that corresponds to a realistic exercising scenario, with experimentally measured muscular activations and with kinetic data representing proprioceptive feedback. The network is “self-active” in that it maintains recurrent flow of activation even in the absence of input, a feature that resembles the “resting-state activity” found in the human and animal brain. The model involves the concept of “neural outsourcing” which amounts to the permanent shifting of computational load from higher to lower-level neural structures, which might help to explain why humans are able to execute learned skills in a fluent and flexible manner without the need for attention to the details of the movement.     

Impaired visual perception of hurtful actions in patients with chronic low back pain

Visually presented biological motion stimuli activate regions in the brain that are also related to musculo-skeletal pain. We therefore hypothesized that chronic pain impairs the perception of visually presented actions that involve body parts that hurt. In the first experiment, chronic back pain (CLBP) patients and healthy controls judged the lifted weight from point-light biological motion displays. An actor either lifted an invisible container (5, 10, or 15 kg) from the floor, or lifted and manipulated it from the right to the left. The latter involved twisting of the lower back and would be very painful for CLBP patients. All participants recognized the displayed actions, but CLBP patients were impaired in judging the difference in handled weights, especially for the trunk rotation. The second experiment involved discrimination between forward and backward walking. Here the patients were just as good as the controls, showing that the main result of the first experiment was indeed specific to the sensory aspects of the task, and not to general impairments or attentional deficits. The results thus indicate that the judgment of sensorimotor aspects of a visually displayed movement is specifically affected by chronic low back pain.     

Reviews

Land of Crosses: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in Lithuania, 1939–1978 by Michael Bourdeaux, Augustine Publishing Company, Chulmleigh, Devon, 1977, xx+ 339 pp., £3.00. (Keston Book No. 12).

The Catholic Church, Dissent and Nationality in Soviet Lithuania by V. Stanley Vardys, East European Quarterly, Boulder, distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1978 xiii + 336 pp., $22.50.

Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: a Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World by Alexandre A. Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Publication No. 11, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1979, xxii + 267 pp., $7.95.

The Unknown Homeland translated by Marite Sapiets, Mowbrays, London and Oxford, 1978, vii+ 247 pp., £4.95 (Keston Book No. 13)

Detente and Papal‐Communist Relations, 1962–1978 by Dennis J. Dunn, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1979, 216 pp., £12.15.     

Face detection differs from categorization: Evidence from visual search in natural scenes

In this study, we examined whether the detection of frontal, ¾, and profile face views differs from their categorization as faces. In Experiment 1, we compared three tasks that required observers to determine the presence or absence of a face, but varied in the extents to which participants had to search for the faces in simple displays and in small or large scenes to make this decision. Performance was equivalent for all of the face views in simple displays and small scenes, but it was notably slower for profile views when this required the search for faces in extended scene displays. This search effect was confirmed in Experiment 2, in which we compared observers’ eye movements with their response times to faces in visual scenes. These results demonstrate that the categorization of faces at fixation is dissociable from the detection of faces in space. Consequently, we suggest that face detection should be studied with extended visual displays, such as natural scenes.     

Self-Portraits: Possible Selves in European-American,Chilean, Japanese and Japanese-American Cultural Contexts

Possible selves of students from European-American (EA), Chilean (CH), Japanese-American (JA), and Japanese (JN) cultural contexts were analyzed, revealing differences in the emphasis given to various content themes. EA possible selves focus on intrapersonal themes (i.e., “fear being dependent”), consistent with cultural emphases on uniqueness and independent development. In JN, JA and CH contexts, career and education themes dominate possible selves, consistent with particularly strong cultural emphasis on professional and academic accomplishments. The cultural contexts also differ in their predominant configurations of possible selves—EA and CH possible selves often show balance (expected and feared selves of similar theme but opposing valence, i.e., “expect to graduate from college” and “fear dropping out of college”) while JN and JA selves more frequently match (expected and feared selves of similar thematic content and valence, i.e., “expect to be idle” and “fear being idle”).     

Is It Possible to Prepare the Second Component of a Movement Before the First One?

Experiment 1 utilized a choice reaction time paradigm to examine whether advance information about the second component of a movement has similar effects upon movement initiation and execution as advance information about the first component. Four stimuli were assigned to four goal keys. Subjects responded with the index finger of their preferred hand. They had to press one of two intermediate keys before pressing the assigned stimulus goal key. Advance information signaled one pair of goal keys in such a way that either the first or the second movement component was unequivocally specified before the response signal appeared. Shorter reaction times resulted when the first component was precued. Further control conditions showed that advance information about the second movement component could not be utilized for movement preparation. Experiment 2 ruled out a perceptual interpretation of this effect. Experiment 3 showed that preparation time for two-component movements are longer than for one-component movements. The study permits the conclusions that speeded two-component movements are controlled by motor programs and that advance information about the first movement component is required before the second movement component can be programmed.     

Divine Hiddenness and Discrimination: A Philosophical Dilemma

Since its first delivery in 1993, J.L. Schellenberg’s atheistic argument from divine hiddenness keeps generating lively debate in various quarters in the philosophy of religion. Over time, the author has responded to many criticisms of his argument, both in its original evidentialist version and in its subsequent conceptualist version. One central problem that has gone undetected in these exchanges to date, we argue, is how Schellenberg’s explicit-recognition criterion for revelation contains discriminatory tendencies against mentally handicapped persons. Viewed from this angle, our present critique imparts Schellenberg’s position with a philosophical dilemma: (1) endorsing divine discrimination to the effect that God does not love ‘cognitive-affective outsiders’ or (2) giving up on explicit recognition. Either way, the hiddenness argument does not succeed.     

Tracking multiple objects across abrupt viewpoint changes

The reported experiment tested the effect of abrupt and unpredictable viewpoint changes on the attentional tracking of multiple objects in dynamic 3-D scenes. Observers tracked targets that moved independently among identically looking distractors on a rectangular floor plane. The tracking interval was 11 s. Abrupt rotational viewpoint changes of 10°, 20°, or 30° occurred after 8 s. Accuracy of tracking targets across a 10° viewpoint change was comparable to accuracy in a continuous control condition, whereas viewpoint changes of 20° and 30° impaired tracking performance considerably. This result suggests that tracking is mainly dependant on a low-level process whose performance is saved against small disturbances by the visual system's ability to compensate for small changes of retinocentric coordinates. Tracking across large viewpoint changes succeeds only if allocentric coordinates are remembered to relocate targets after displacements.     

Agent-causation and agential control

According to what I call the reductive standard-causal theory of agency, the exercise of an agent's power to act can be reduced to the causal efficacy of agent-involving mental states and events. According to a non-reductive agent-causal theory, an agent's power to act is irreducible and primitive. Agent-causal theories have been dismissed on the ground that they presuppose a very contentious notion of causation, namely substance-causation. In this paper I will assume, with the proponents of the agent-causal approach, that substance-causation is possible, as I will argue against that theory on the ground that it fails as a theory of agency. I will argue that the non-reductive agent-causal theory fails to account for agency, because it fails to account for agential control: it cannot explain why the stipulated irreducible relation between the agent and an action constitutes the agent's exercise of control over the action. This objection, I will argue, applies to the agent-causal theory in particular, and to the non-reductive approach in general.