Taoism and psychotherapy

An attempt is made in this paper to apply the principals of Taoism to the practice of psychotherapy. The Eastern approach to the nature of experience is described in order for the therapist to become more present for himself as well as for the patient. The relationship of insight to the process of change is explored, contrasting Eastern notions of transcendent liberation to the traditional psychoanalytic model of personal transformation, which has been viewed as curing the patient. Taoist precepts are described, comparing the Eastern view of the enlightened teacher to an ideal therapist. Finally, fifteen Zen tenets are described, as outlined by Holmes and Horioka, with an effort made to relate each tenet to the experience of being a therapist.     

Does Psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer.

D. J. Bem and C. Honorton (1994) recently presented in this journal a set of ganzfeld extrasensory perception (ESP) experiments conducted by C. Honorton that appeared to support the existence of a communication anomaly. In this article, the authors present a meta-analysis of 30 ganzfeld ESP studies from 7 independent laboratories adhering to the same stringent methodological guidelines that C. Honorton followed. The studies failed to confirm his main effect of participants scoring above chance on the ESP task, Stouffer z = 0.70, p = .24, one-tailed; M effect size (z/N1/2) = 0.013, SD = 0.23. The new studies included replication attempts of 3 out of 5 internal effects reported as statistically significant by D. J. Bem and C. Honorton. Only 1 was confirmed, and the authors found that D. J. Bem and C. Honorton were mistaken in describing the original effect as being statistically significant. The authors conclude that the ganzfeld technique does not at present offer a replicable method for producing ESP in the laboratory.     

Affective Contagion in Effortful Political Thinking

We offer a theory of motivated political reasoning based on the claim that the feelings aroused in the initial stages of processing sociopolitical information inevitably color all phases of the evaluation process. When a citizen is called on to express a judgment, the considerations that enter into conscious rumination will be biased by the valence of initial affect. This article reports the results of two experiments that test our affective contagion hypothesis—unnoticed affective cues influence the retrieval and construction of conscious considerations in the direction of affective congruence. We then test whether these affectively congruent considerations influence subsequently reported policy evaluations, which we call affective mediation. In short, the considerations that come consciously to mind to inform and to support the attitude construction process are biased systematically by the feelings that are aroused in the earliest stages of processing. This underlying affective bias in processing drives motivated reasoning and rationalization in political thinking.     

Boundary Disturbances and Eating Disorder Symptoms

Female graduate students in counseling and clinical psychology retrospectively rated maternal and paternal boundaries in their families of origin. Subscales of the Eating Disorders Inventory-3 were used to assess disordered eating, including drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction, bulimia symptoms, and overall risk. Results indicated that maternal enmeshment and maternal psychological control were related to disordered eating. Further, daughters who reported that their mothers shielded them from parents’ conflict and adult concerns were less likely to report drive for thinness or bulimic tendencies. With respect to paternal boundary problems, paternal infantilization (overprotection) was significantly related to daughters’ drive for thinness.     

III. On the concept of attitude

Evaluation is, as J. R. Maze has recently suggested, central to the concept of attitude. But it is argued that Maze's noncognitivist analysis of evaluation yields an inadequate account of our ordinary concept of attitude. A criteriological account of evaluation is sketched which allows for an objective dimension to evaluation and hence to attitudes. In the case of attitudes, it is argued that some criteria will be chosen at least in part for their consequences, and hence will not be chosen solely on the basis of interest, preference or affect.     

Brief Report: Utilization of the Patient-Examiner Relationship in Intelligence Testing of Children

Rorschach scales were used to examine the quality of thought disturbance and object relations in boys meeting the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition (DSM-III American Psychiatric Association, 1980) criteria for separation anxiety disorder (SAD). Nineteen urban, middle and tow socioeconomic status (SES). SAD boys were compared to a group of 14 male control subjects. The hypotheses of the study were that SAD boys as compared to controls would: (a) have significantly more thought disordered responses as measured by Korschach Thought Disorder Scale (Blatt &; Rizzier, 1974), and (b) evidence significantly less adaptive object relations scale scores as measured by the Mutuality of Autonomy Scale (Urist, 1977). Results confirmed both hypotheses, The SAD group had more thought disordered responses and more disrupted object relations scores than the controls. Ideas and images of these boys were found to generally be more unstable, boundary compromised, fluid, idiosyncratic, tangential, and psychotic like than the controls. It was concluded that these boys possess a significant potential to have thinking abnormalities that wilt interfere with their independent functioning. Concerning their object relations scores, the SAD subjects were found to have significantly fewer benign, adaptive object interactional percepts, and a greater number of dependent and/or clinging interactional object representations (imagery) than the controls. This study supports the viewpoint that SAD boys are deeply psychologically troubled.