Plea for a Balanced Conception of AD/HD and Its Diagnosis and Treatment

AD/HD may be overlooked as well as too zealously and concretely overdiagnosed. When this condition is properly identified, it is most fruitfully understood in a balanced manner that is integrated with an appreciation of its inevitable shaping influence on the patient's perceptions, self-experience, and psychodynamic constellation, including central unconscious fantasies. This exploration is necessarily multifaceted: the patient's internal experience of states of distractibility, impulsivity, and hyperactivity, their incorporation in unconscious fantasies, and their employment in the service of both self-punitive urges and defenses against the “unpleasure” (Brenner, 1982) associated with psychic conflicts. Psychoanalysts are in a unique position to grasp these complex relationships. Familiarity with diagnostic issues, the developmental impact of AD/HD, common difficulties such patients present in treatment, and typical countertransference responses will enrich their psychoanalytic work. Interrelationships between AD/HD and the patient's psychic world are presented as they arose in the analysis of a child and an adult.     

Compromise Formation Theory: An Intersubjective Dimension

This paper has two purposes. The first is to elaborate compromise formation theory from an intersubjective perspective. The second is to explore the implications of this vantage point for our understanding of the modes of therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.

I pursue the goals of this paper by outlining the essentials of compromise formation theory and by elaborating what I mean by its intersubjective dimension. Then I present and discuss analytic data to demonstrate the value of the theory for understanding aspects of mode of therapeutic action. Finally, I contrast this perspective with competing theoretical points of view.     

A Religiously Partisan Science? Islamic and Christian Perspectives

Both within Christianity and Islam we can find influential scholars who maintain that science is not religiously neutral because it contains a naturalist bias. They argue that Christians or Muslims should respond by developing their own kind of science, an “Islamic science,” a “sacred science,” a “theistic science” or a “faith-informed science.” In this article the recent writings of two advocates of such a view, standing in two different religious traditions, namely Mehdi Golshani (Islam) and Alvin Plantinga (Christianity) are compared, analyzed, and evaluated. A distinction between different ways in which religion might enter into the fabric of science is introduced and it is argued that the most crucial issues surround the question of whether or not religion ought to play a part in the validation of theories.     

Three kinds of reliabilism

Abstract

The distinction between acting and suffering underlies any theory of agency. Among contemporary writers, Fred Dretske is one of the few who has attempted to explicate this distinction without restricting the notion of action to intentional action alone. Aristotle also developed a global account of agency, one which is deeper and more detailed than Dretske's, and it is to Aristotle's account (with some modifications) that the bulk of this paper is devoted. Dretske's sketchier theory faces at least two ground-level problems. It is shown in the course of the paper how these can be handled by the Aristotelian account, in a way which is friendly to Dretske's approach.     

The path to epigenetic treatment of memory disorders

A new line of neuroscience research suggests that epigenetics may be the site of nature and nurture integration by providing the environment with a mechanism to directly influence the read-out of our genome. Epigenetic mechanisms in the brain are a series of post-translational chromatin and DNA modifications driven by external input. Given the critical hub that epigenetics appears to be, neuroscientists have come to suspect its fundamental influence on how our minds change in response to our unique environment and, in turn, how these changes can then impact our future interactions with the environment. The field of learning and memory is becoming particularly interested in understanding the cognitive influence of epigenetics. With the majority of us working with an eye toward therapeutics, the question naturally arises: "Has neuroepigenetics gotten us closer to treating memory disorders and if so, where do we go from here?" This review will begin with a brief exploration of recent advances in our understanding of how epigenetic mechanisms contribute to learning and memory processes that are susceptible to failure. Next the implications for disorders of cognition, such as Alzheimer's disease, will be discussed. Finally, we will use parallels from the field of cancer to speculate on where we should consider heading from here in the pursuit of therapeutics.     

Time-driven effects on parsing during reading

The phonological trace of perceived words starts fading away in short-term memory after a few seconds. Spoken utterances are usually 2-3 s long, possibly to allow the listener to parse the words into coherent prosodic phrases while they still have a clear representation. Results from this brain potential study suggest that even during silent reading, words are organized into 2-3 s long ‘implicit’ prosodic phrases. Participants read the same sentences word by word at different presentation rates. Clause-final words occurring at multiples of 2-3 s from sentence onset yielded increased positivity, irrespective of presentation rate. The effect was interpreted as a closure positive shift (CPS), reflecting insertion of implicit prosodic phrase boundaries every 2-3 s. Additionally, in participants with low working memory span, clauses over 3 s long produced a negativity, possibly indicating increased working memory load.     

Publication bias in psychological science: comment on Ferguson and Brannick (2012)

It is well documented that studies reporting statistically significant results are more likely to be published than are studies reporting nonsignificant results--a phenomenon called publication bias. Publication bias in meta-analytic reviews should be identified and reduced when possible. Ferguson and Brannick (2012) argued that the inclusion of unpublished articles is ineffective and possibly counterproductive as a means of reducing publication bias in meta-analyses. We show how idiosyncratic choices on the part of Ferguson and Brannick led to an erroneous conclusion. We demonstrate that their key finding--that publication bias was more likely when unpublished studies were included--may be an artifact of the way they assessed publication bias. We also point out how the lack of transparency about key choices and the absence of information about critical features of Ferguson and Brannick's sample and procedures might have obscured readers' ability to assess the validity of their claims. Furthermore, we demonstrate that many of the claims they made are without empirical support, even though they could have tested these claims empirically, and that these claims may be misleading. With their claim that addressing publication bias introduces subjectivity and bias into meta-analysis, they ignored a large body of evidence showing that including unpublished studies that meet the inclusion criteria of a meta-analysis decreases (rather than increases) publication bias. Rather than exclude unpublished studies, we recommend that meta-analysts code study characteristics related to methodological quality (e.g., experimental vs. nonexperimental design) and test whether these factors influence the meta-analytic results.