A conversation analysis of therapist repeats in open dialogue network meetings

Writings on Open Dialogue approaches to working with families experiencing mental distress emphasize the importance of the therapist repeating the family's words back to them verbatim. Repeats are theorized to display the therapist's listening and to encourage elaboration without imposing the therapist's own interpretations or conclusions on the family. These recommendations have not been subjected to rigorous interactional investigation. In this study, we used conversation analysis to analyze 160 examples of therapists repeating the prior talk of the family from 14 h of video-recorded Open Dialogue sessions. We found that these repeats had similar functions to those previously described in conversation analysis research such as initiating repair, marking receipt, and requesting elaboration as well as examples of therapist repeats occurring in overlap with the talk of the client. Open Dialogue writings thus present an oversimplified account of how repeats are utilized in clinical Open Dialogue sessions. Consistent with dialogical writings, repeats can elicit elaboration with limited input from the therapist, however repeats reflect selectivity and function to direct and guide the conversation to some extent. So, while therapist authority can be mitigated by repeating clients' words, when a therapist chooses to employ a repeat actively shapes the direction of the interaction.     

Can humans perceive their brain states?

Although the brain enables us to perceive the external world and our body, it remains unknown whether brain processes themselves can be perceived. Brain tissue does not have receptors for its own activity. However, the ability of humans to acquire self-control of brain processes indicates that the perception of these processes may also be achieved by learning. In this study patients learned to control low-frequency components of their EEG: the so-called slow cortical potentials (SCPs). In particular "probe" sessions, the patients estimated the quality of the SCP shift they had produced in the preceding trial. The correspondence between the recorded SCP amplitudes and the subjective estimates increased with training. The ability to perceive the SCPs was related to the ability to control them; this perception was not mediated by peripheral variables such as changes in muscle tonus and cannot be reduced to simple vigilance monitoring. These data provide evidence that humans can learn to perceive the neural activity of their brain. Alternative interpretations are discussed.     

Alcohol Affects Emotion Through Cognition

Determining how cognition and emotion interact is pivotal to an understanding of human behavior and its disorders. Available data suggest that changes in emotional reactivity and behavior associated with drinking are intertwined with alcohol's effects on cognitive processing. In the study reported here, we demonstrated that alcohol dampens anticipatory fear and response inhibition in human participants not by directly suppressing subcortical emotion centers, as posited by traditional tension-reduction theories, but instead by impairing cognitive-processing capacity. During intoxication, reductions in fear response (assessed via startle potentiation) occurred only under dual-stimulus conditions, and coincided with reduced attentional processing of threat cues as evidenced by brain response (assessed via P3 event-related potentials). The results are consistent with higher cortical mediation of alcohol's effects on fear, and illustrate more broadly how disruption of a cognitive process can lead to alterations in emotional reactivity and adaptive behavior.     

The Recaptured Scale Technique: A Method for Testing the Structural Robustness of Personality Scales

Tellegen and Waller advocated a complex and time-consuming scale construction method that they called “exploratory test construction.” Scales that are constructed by this method—such as the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ)—are presumed to be more “psychologically coherent” and “robust” than scales constructed by other means. Using a novel procedure that we call the “recaptured scale technique,” we tested this conjecture by conducting a megafactor analysis on data from the 411 adult participants of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart who completed the MPQ, the MMPI, and the CPI. We extracted and obliquely rotated 21 factors from a matrix of gender-corrected tetrachoric correlations for the 1,102 nonredundant items of the three omnibus inventories. Robustness of the 11 MPQ scales was assessed by the degree to which these factors recaptured the MPQ item groupings. Our results showed that nine factors were clearly recognizable as MPQ scales and two additional factors represented a bifurcation of an MPQ scale. A higher-order factor analysis of all 21 factor scales yielded five factors that clearly resembled the Big Five. Our results provide strong support for (a) the method of exploratory test construction, (b) the structural robustness of most MPQ scales, and (c) the utility of the recaptured scale technique.     

Envy and Its Consequences: Why It Is Useful to Distinguish between Benign and Malicious Envy

Envy is the pain that arises from the good fortune of others. Recent research identified two subtypes of envy, benign and malicious envy. Malicious envy is the envy subtype with action tendencies aimed to pull down the envied person from their superior position. Benign envy is also a frustrating experience, but activates action tendencies aimed at improving oneself. This article provides an overview of the empirical support for making this distinction in envy subtypes. It then discusses the benefits of a subtype approach to envy, with the main advantages of distinguishing benign and malicious envy being that it (a) provides researchers with the language to be clear in how they conceptualize envy and (b) allows novel predictions. A next section provides a response to some criticism on making this distinction. Finally, I conclude with a section on how envy in general, and benign and malicious envy in particular, could be measured.     

The (un)detectability of absolute Newtonian masses

Synthese - Absolutism about mass claims that mass ratios obtain in virtue of absolute masses. Comparativism denies this. Dasgupta (in: Bennett, Zimmerman (eds), Oxford studies in metaphysics,...     

Ideomotor silence: the case of complete paralysis and brain–computer interfaces (BCI)

The paper presents some speculations on the loss of voluntary responses and operant learning in long-term paralysis in human patients and curarized rats. Based on a reformulation of the ideomotor thinking hypothesis already described in the 19th century, we present evidence that instrumentally learned responses and intentional cognitive processes extinguish as a consequence of long-term complete paralysis in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Preliminary data collected with ALS patients during extended and complete paralysis suggest semantic classical conditioning of brain activity as the only remaining communication possibility in those states.     

Heroic or hubristic? A componential approach to the relationship between perceived transformational leadership and leader–member exchanges

Using an interpersonal approach to self-perceptions, we broke down leaders’ self-perceptions of their transformational leadership behaviour into three components: a target effect (i.e., how leaders are perceived by followers), a perceiver effect (i.e., how leaders perceive followers), and a self-enhancement effect (i.e., idiosyncratic positivity bias in how leaders perceive themselves), and then examined the relationships between these components and the quality of exchanges between leaders and followers (LMX). In a survey study among 60 leaders with 286 followers, we found the target effect in leaders’ self-perceptions of their transformational leadership to be positively related to the quality of LMX, whereas the perceiver effect and self-enhancement effects were negatively associated with LMX. Follower extraversion intensified the positive role of the target effect and the negative role of the self-enhancement effect in the leader–follower exchanges.     

Deep Incarnation and Kenosis: In,With, Under,and As: A Response to Ted Peters

In this response to Ted Peters, I relate the proposal of deep incarnation to Luther's theology of the real presence of the humanity of Christ in creation. Based on a typology of four distinctive models of kenosis, I furthermore argue that a kenotic view of incarnation and divine creativity does not necessarily imply a divine absence and withdrawal from creation, as presupposed by Professor Peters. Deep incarnation is consistent with a compatibilist view of kenosis, but not with ideas of divine abdication, or metamorphosis. Finally I situate the view of deep incarnation to Scandinavian creation theology and to research programs at the Centre for Naturalism and Christian Semantics, Copenhagen University.     

God,Information, and Complexity: From Descriptive to Explorative Metaphysics

Abstract

Information and complexity have become central concepts in our contemporary worldview. On this background, it is discussed in which sense concepts of information and complexity may apply to theology proper. While the inherited axiom of divine simplicity forbids complexity and plurality as features of divine nature, an argument is developed for the presence of information and complexity in divine life. Three forms of information are proposed as relevant for a contemporary concept of God: Information as difference (Information1), information as form and relational structure (Information2) and semantic information (Information3). It is argued that features of these forms of information must be internal to divine life, if God can properly be said to facilitate and value the complex world of creation, to allow embodied creates to participate in divine life, and to communicate with creatures. In this light, the notion of divine simplicity will have to be redefined as the divine self-identity throughout temporal flux.