Satir's Therapeutically Oriented Educational Process: A Critical Appreciation

Virginia Satir, one of the most influential of the early family therapists, reached millions of people throughout the world through her writings, videotapes, workshops, and personal appearances. Yet the Satir model has never been fully accepted by the mainstream of the family therapy movement. This article introduces Satir and her work, and outlines the conceptual foundations of the model, organized in terms of presuppositions, basic constructs, therapeutic process, and methods, and offers some reasons for this lack of acceptance. The relation of theory to method and practice is the least developed aspect of the Satir model.     

Representing Spatial Structure Through Maps and Language: Lord of the Rings Encodes the Spatial Structure of Middle Earth

Spatial mental representations can be derived from linguistic and non‐linguistic sources of information. This study tested whether these representations could be formed from statistical linguistic frequencies of city names, and to what extent participants differed in their performance when they estimated spatial locations from language or maps. In a computational linguistic study, we demonstrated that co‐occurrences of cities in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit predicted the authentic longitude and latitude of those cities in Middle Earth. In a human study, we showed that human spatial estimates of the location of cities were very similar regardless of whether participants read Tolkien’s texts or memorized a map of Middle Earth. However, text‐based location estimates obtained from statistical linguistic frequencies better predicted the human text‐based estimates than the human map‐based estimates. These findings suggest that language encodes spatial structure of cities, and that human cognitive map representations can come from implicit statistical linguistic patterns, from explicit non‐linguistic perceptual information, or from both.     

Harmony,structure, and force in the Essai analytique sur les facultés de l'âcme of Charles Bonnet

The psychological works of Charles Bonnet of Geneva (1720–1793) have customarily been read as part of the mentalistic traditions of associationism or Leibnizianism. They are better understood as part of a campaign—directed against the radical Enlightenment —to reclaim the human body for religion by the paradoxical strategy of incorporating a materialist conception of the human mind into the framework of divine providence. Bonnet's embodied psychology treats the soul as an intrinsically indeterminate force, and attributes the capacity of the mind to organize experience to highly specialized fibers, providentially constructed to correspond to the created world.     

Speaker’s reference,stipulation, and a dilemma for conceptual engineers

Philosophical Studies - Advocates of conceptual engineering as a method of philosophy face a dilemma: either they are ignorant of how conceptual engineering can be implemented, or else it is...     

A defense of the very idea of moral deference pessimism

Philosophical Studies - Pessimists think that there is something wrong with relying on deference for one’s moral beliefs—at least if one is morally mature. Call this no deference. They...     

Headphone screening to facilitate web-based auditory experiments

Psychophysical experiments conducted remotely over the internet permit data collection from large numbers of participants but sacrifice control over sound presentation and therefore are not widely employed in hearing research. To help standardize online sound presentation, we introduce a brief psychophysical test for determining whether online experiment participants are wearing headphones. Listeners judge which of three pure tones is quietest, with one of the tones presented 180° out of phase across the stereo channels. This task is intended to be easy over headphones but difficult over loudspeakers due to phase-cancellation. We validated the test in the lab by testing listeners known to be wearing headphones or listening over loudspeakers. The screening test was effective and efficient, discriminating between the two modes of listening with a small number of trials. When run online, a bimodal distribution of scores was obtained, suggesting that some participants performed the task over loudspeakers despite instructions to use headphones. The ability to detect and screen out these participants mitigates concerns over sound quality for online experiments, a first step toward opening auditory perceptual research to the possibilities afforded by crowdsourcing.     

When parallel processing in visual word recognition is not enough: new evidence from naming

Low-frequency irregular words are named more slowly and are more error prone than low-frequency regular words (the regularity effect). Rastle and Coltheart (1999) reported that this irregularity cost is modulated by the serial position of the irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondence, such that words with early irregularities exhibit a larger cost than words with late ones. They argued that these data implicate rule-based serial processing, and they also reported a successful simulation with a model that has a rule-based serial component—the DRC model of reading aloud (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001). However, Zorzi (2000) also simulated these data with a model that operates solely in parallel. Furthermore, Kwantes and Mewhort (1999) simulated these data with a serial processing model that has no rules for converting orthography to phonology. The human data reported by Rastle and Coltheart therefore neither require a serial processing account, nor successfully discriminate among a number of computational models of reading aloud. New data are presented wherein an interaction between the effects of regularity and serial position of irregularity is again reported for human readers. The DRC model simulated this interaction; no other implemented computational model does so. The present results are thus consistent with rule-based serial processing in reading aloud.