Counselor Responsiveness to Client Religiousness

An understanding of the degree and Quality of client religiousness and the connections between client issues and religion can enhance counselor resposiveness to the potentially religious dimension of client issues.     

PASTORAL PSYCHOTHERAPY: IS IT UNIQUE?

Proponents and practitioners of pastoral psychotherapy hold to the idea that it is a unique form of psychotherapy. Little empirical or procedural evidence seems to exist to substantiate that viewpoint. Indeed, the data suggest that pastoral psychotherapy is a close kin to secular psychotherapy, not only in practice, but in the opinion of those who seek it out for help. This article takes the viewpoint that pastoral psychotherapy should be unique and attempts to show how it can be. The author stresses that it is ordination that makes pastoral psychotherapy unique, because the ordained pastor is both a theologian and a representative of the church. These two elements provide unique “lenses” for doing psychotherapy. To the extent that these lenses are not being used, the author issues a challenge to pastoral psychotherapists to bring this uniqueness to the forefront.     

Detectability as a function of target location: effects of spatial configuration

Marked differences in detectability as a function of spatial location, a "detectability gradient," are observed when subjects are required to detect a briefly exposed target pattern of uncertain location in the presence of a number of nontarget patterns. Target detectability also is inversely related to the number of nontarget patterns which are present in this search paradigm. These previous findings provide strong evidence for a serial process in which increasing probability of error occurs during a scan of a rapidly degrading neural representation of the visual image following a brief exposure to the stimuli. It is not yet established whether this scan is attentional or perceptual in nature. The present experiments test the hypothesis of an attentional scan by presenting the target and nontarget patterns in spatially segregated groups. If the scan is attentional, then target detectability under these circumstances would be expected to exhibit the characteristic phenomenon of "group processing"--a close clustering of detection performance for targets located within a group and large differences in detectability across groups. As no evidence for group processing was observed, the results fail to support the view that the scan is attentional in nature but are fully consistent with a nonattentional scan.     

Prediction and prejudice

Evidence that supports a theory may be available to the scientist who constructs the theory and used as a guide to that construction, or it may only be discovered in the course of testing the theory. The central claim of this essay is that information about whether the evidence was accommodated or predicted affects the rational degree of confidence one ought to have in the theory. Only when the evidence is accommodated is there some reason to believe that the theoretical system was ‘fudged’ to fit the evidence in a way that weakens support. This weakening is an objective matter, but not one that can be conclusively determined by examining the contents of the theory and its logical relationship to the evidence. Consequently, there is less reason to believe a theory on the basis of that evidence when it is known that the evidence was accommodated than there would be if it was known instead that the same evidence had been predicted.     

Scotching the Dutch Book Argument

Consistent application of coherece arguments shows that fair betting quotients are subject to constraints that are too stringent to allow their identification with either degrees of belief or probabilities. The pivotal role of fair betting quotients in the Dutch Book Argument, which is said to demonstrate that a rational agent's degrees of belief are probabilities, is thus undermined from both sides.     

Long-term effects of cerebellar pathology on cognitive functions

Twelve patients with circumscribed chronic neocerebellar lesions but without CT-evidence of forebrain damage (other than the effects of shunting) were investigated for deficits of cognitive functions. Two different mechanisms were considered as possible causes of cognitive impairment: (1) Damage to the dentato-thalamo-cortical projection leading to impairments of cortical functions, and (2) prolonged intracranial pressure resulting in diffuse forebrain damage and subcortical dementia. Patients with lesions in the left neocerebellum showed deficits in cognitive operations in three dimensional space, consistent with the right forebrain dominance for spatial functions. Prolonged intracranial pressure, on the other hand, resulted in a mild overall cognitive impairment.     

Serial processing of visual spatial patterns in a search paradigm

Previous experiments in this laboratory employing a search paradigm have found highly significant differences in the detectability of a briefly exposed target pattern as a function of the spatial location of the target when it is presented simultaneously with a number of discriminably different nontarget patterns. These detectability differences, at loci equidistant from the fovea, could not be accounted for by any known variation in retinal spatial resolution or by differential lateral masking effects of the target by nearby nontarget patterns. These observations led to the hypothesis that the target in these experiments was detected by a serial mechanism which "scanned" a persisting but rapidly degrading neural representation of the visual scene with increasing detection failures the later in time the scan processed the location occupied by the target. If this hypothesis is correct, then target detectability should vary inversely with the number of stimuli which must be examined. The present experiment confirmed this expectation. A mathematical model of such a serial scanning process also predicts other, less obvious, effects on target detectability which were observed when the number of nontarget patterns was changed.     

Inquiry into intentional systems I: Issues in ecological physics

Summary The role of intention in guiding the behavior of goal-directed systems is a problem that continues to challenge behavioral science. While it is generally agreed that intentional systems must be consistent with the laws of physics, there are many obvious differences between inanimate, physical systems and sentient, intentional systems. This suggests that there must be constraints over and above those of physics that govern goal-directed behavior. In this paper it is suggested that generic properties of self-organizing mechanisms may play a central role in the origin and evolution of intentional constraints. The properties of self-organizing systems are first introduced in the context of simple physical systems and then extended to a complex (biological) system. Whereas behavior of an inanimate physical system is lawfully determined by force fields, behavior of an animate biological system is lawfully specified by information fields. Biological systems are distinguished from simple physical systems in terms of their ubiquitous use of information fields as special (biological and psychological, social, etc.) boundary conditions on classical laws. Unlike classical constraints (boundary conditions), informational constraints can vary with time and state of the system. Because of the nonstationarity of the boundary conditions, the dynamic of the system can follow a complex trajectory that is organized by a set of spatially and temporally distributed equilibrium points or regions. It is suggested that this equilibrium set and the laws that govern its transformation define a minimal requirement for an intentional system. One of the benefits of such an approach is that it suggests a realist account for the origin of semantic predicates, thereby providing a basis for the development of a theory of symbolic dynamics. Therefore, the principles of self-organization provide a comprehensive basis for investigating intentional systems by suggesting how it is that intentions arise, and by providing a lawful basis for intentional behavior that reveals how organisms become and remain lawfully informed in the pursuit of their goals.     

How far can attraction-caused misalignment account for the Morinaga misalignment effect?

Summary When a line (the pointer) is collinear with a dot, the addition of a second line (the induction line) contiguous with the dot or near it may cause the pointer to appear to be collinear with a point further along or nearer to the induction line. The geometrical relations upon which this effect, which we call attraction-caused misalignment, depends have been studied with the Obonai and Wundt-Loeb (Hotopf, 1981; Hotopf & Brown, 1988) figures. Drawing upon the studies of misalignment in the Morinaga figure carried out by Restle (1976), Day, Bellamy, and Norman (1983), and Day and Kasperczyk (1985), as well as upon two new experiments, we show that misalignment in the Morinaga figure is also attraction-caused misalignment, as previously defined. We conclude with a discussion of a number of theories that aim at accounting for attraction misalignment.     

Properties of memory for unattended spoken syllables

Whereas previous studies on memory for unattended speech have inadvertently included acoustic interference, the present study examines memory for unattended syllables during a silent period of 1, 5, or 10 s. The primary task was to read silently (Experiments 1-3) or whisper the reading (Experiment 4). Occasionally, when a light cue occurred, the subject was to recall the most recent spoken syllable, as well as the recent reading material. Memory for both the vowels and consonants of the syllables decreased across 10 s, confirming that auditory memory does decay in the absence of acoustic interference. However, the specific patterns of memory decay for vowels versus consonants depended on task demands, including the allocation of attention and the opportunity for subvocal coding. We suggest an account of performance that includes auditory sensory and phonetic memory codes with different properties, used in combination.