Iraqi refugee men’s experiences of psychotherapy: clinical implications and the proposal of a pluralistic model

The psychotherapy experiences of a sample of Iraqi refugee men, in later stages of exile, were explored with the aim of shedding some light on how this client group can experience therapy. Ten adult male Iraqi refugees – who had lived in Sweden for at least five years and had been psychotherapy clients at some point during that time – were recruited for this study. Using individual semi-structured interviews (in Arabic), three main areas were explored with each participant: (1) reasons for seeking psychotherapy; (2) perceptions of the psychotherapy professional; and (3) experiences of the psychotherapy process and outcome. The interviews were then translated into English, transcribed, and then analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Most participants/clients described exile-related stressors as their main reason for seeking psychotherapy, but some described distress due to a combination of pre-migration trauma and post-migration stress. They also found some aspects of therapy to be positive (mainly verbalising ones thoughts and feelings, and feeling less marginalised) and some negative (mainly experiencing racist or culturally insensitive treatment by therapists, and experiencing a lack of competence and transparency in therapists). The findings were explored in terms of clinical implications and a pluralistic model was proposed to address the identified needs.     

Narcissism and Performance on Behavioral Decision‐making Tasks

Three studies examined narcissism and behavioral decision making. Decision‐making tasks included the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Studies 1–3), Balloon Analogue Risk Task (Studies 1–3), Columbia Card Task (CCT; Studies 2 and 3), and Game of Dice Task (Study 3). To tease apart the contributions of grandiose narcissism (i.e., narcissism found in the general population), pathological narcissism, and narcissistic traits (i.e., grandiosity, entitlement, and exploitativeness) in decision making, we assessed grandiose narcissism in Studies 1 (n = 380) and 2 (n = 244), pathological narcissism in Study 2, and the narcissistic traits in Study 3 (n = 312). Grandiose and pathological narcissism failed to predict decision making regardless of whether or not decision making included immediate feedback. In Study 3, the narcissistic trait of grandiosity (i.e., having an inflated sense of self‐importance) was associated with greater risk taking on the CCT‐hot (i.e., provided immediate feedback), and entitlement was associated with greater risk taking on the IGT. Measurement and applied implications are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Love,Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics

I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to virtue. We can then see that respect in the virtuous person cannot be blind to the individual, as critics of Kantian ethics contend. My approach contrasts recent efforts (Velleman and Bagnoli) to assimilate Kantian respect to Murdochian love, which overlook Murdoch's distinctive claims about the singularity of moral activity. This idea is not as un‐Kantian as it seems, and it should inform any Kantian ethics that aims to address the charge about individuals.     

Warding Off the Attacker: Self‐Defense in Theory and in Practice1

Whereas men and women predict that they will have similar responses to a physical attack, women's actual self‐defense behaviors are less effective than are men's. In Study 1, male and female students expected to respond equally quickly and aggressively to a hypothetical attack by a stranger. Women also considered themselves to be more knowledgeable about self‐defense, more physically fit, and less likely to become assault victims than the “average woman,” and both men and women underestimated their victimization risk. In Study 2, a simulated attack situation showed strong gender differences, with men defending themselves more effectively than women. These findings suggest a disparity between beliefs and abilities among young women at risk of violence.     

Phonetic variability and prosodic structure in mothers

Spontaneous speech acoustics are highly variable. Such variability may be problematic for infants relying on phonological form to solve the segmentation problem. In the present study, acoustic measures of vowel duration and a computer model of speech segmentation were used to evaluate the problem of phonetic variability for a rhythm-based speech segmentation strategy. The specific questions under study were (1) whether or not mothers realized disyllabic vowel duration patterns consistently in spontaneous infant-directed speech, and (2) whether or not these patterns were distinctive enough in the context of an utterance to provide a useful cue for speech segmentation. Data from four English-speaking mothers indicated that the trochaic-like duration pattern may interact with phrase-position and with grammatical category, but when the resulting patterns are consistent, they provide useful segmentation cues for spontaneous infant-directed speech.     

An Examination of Gender Differences in Adolescent Adjustment: The Effect of Competence on Gender Role Differences in Symptoms of Psychopathology

Numerous studies have documented gender differences in psychopathology; girls generally report more internalizing symptoms and boys generally report more externalizing symptoms. These gender differences are partially accounted for by the gender-typed personality characteristics of boys and girls. This study was designed to investigate how gender roles influence symptoms of psychopathology by examining the mediating effects of self- and peer-rated competencies. Using a multiple regression approach to path analysis with a sample of primarily White, middle-class high school students, gender roles significantly predicted symptoms of psychopathology and mediated the gender differences in those symptoms. In addition, the adolescents' self- and peer-rated competence in various domains helped to explain the effect of gender roles on symptoms of psychopathology. Specifically, self-rated social attractiveness and global self-worth fully mediated the relation between instrumentality (i.e., masculinity) and internalizing symptoms. Global self-worth and both self- and peer-rated achievement/conduct partially mediated the relation between expressivity (i.e., femininity) and externalizing symptoms. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Epistemology and artificial intelligence

In this essay we advance the view that analytical epistemology and artificial intelligence are complementary disciplines. Both fields study epistemic relations, but whereas artificial intelligence approaches this subject from the perspective of understanding formal and computational properties of frameworks purporting to model some epistemic relation or other, traditional epistemology approaches the subject from the perspective of understanding the properties of epistemic relations in terms of their conceptual properties. We argue that these two practices should not be conducted in isolation. We illustrate this point by discussing how to represent a class of inference forms found in standard inferential statistics. This class of inference forms is interesting because its members share two properties that are common to epistemic relations, namely defeasibility and paraconsistency. Our modeling of standard inferential statistical arguments exploits results from both logical artificial intelligence and analytical epistemology. We remark how our approach to this modeling problem may be generalized to an interdisciplinary approach to the study of epistemic relations.     

Personality traits prospectively predict verbal fluency in a lifespan sample

In a community-dwelling sample (N = 4,790; age range 14-94), we examined whether personality traits prospectively predicted performance on a verbal fluency task. Open, extraverted, and emotionally stable participants had better verbal fluency. At the facet level, dispositionally happy and self-disciplined participants retrieved more words; those prone to anxiety and depression and those who were deliberative retrieved fewer words. Education moderated the association between conscientiousness and fluency such that participants with lower education performed better on the fluency task if they were also conscientious. Age was not a moderator at the domain level, indicating that the personality-fluency associations were consistent across the life span. A disposition toward emotional vulnerability and being less open, less happy, and undisciplined may be detrimental to cognitive performance.     

Helping military families through the deployment process: Strategies to support parenting

Recent studies have highlighted the impact of deployment on military families and children and the corresponding need for interventions to support them. Historically, however, little emphasis has been placed on family-based interventions in general, and parenting interventions in particular, with returning service members. This paper provides an overview of research on the associations between combat deployment, parental adjustment of service members and spouses, parenting impairments, and children's adjustment problems, and provides a social interaction learning framework for research and practice to support parenting among military families affected by a parent's deployment. We then describe the Parent Management Training-Oregon model (PMTO(?)), a family of interventions that improves parenting practices and child adjustment in highly stressed families, and briefly present work on an adaptation of PMTO for use in military families (After Deployment: Adaptive Parenting Tools, or ADAPT). The article concludes with PMTO-based recommendations for clinicians providing parenting support to military families.