Empathy is interpretation (and who ever said it wasn't?)

Whenever the subject is explicitly addressed, all analysts agree that empathic perception is an attitude one takes toward making observations, not a privileged means of perception. Furthermore, analysts seem to agree that observations made with an empathic intention are interpretations like any other observations. Empathy is not a conduit to the patient's inner life. But despite these points of consensus, it often seems to be implied in the psychoanalytic literature, usually unintentionally, that empathy is a privileged means of knowing another person. This undercurrent is sometimes present even in the work of theorists who simultaneously state their opposition to this very point of view. In this paper, after presenting an example from the literature of this kind of contradiction, I, basing my argument in hermeneutics, offer the view that all observation, inside and outside psychoanalysis, is interpretation. Then, turning to the three papers of the symposium individually, I take the perspective that in one way or another they all portray empathic perception as a privileged means of observation. These portrayals are examples of the unconscious politics of theory.     

Motivating Participation in National Park Service Curriculum-Based Education Programs

ABSTRACT

The authors explored barriers and motivations associated with high school and middle school classes’ participation in National Park educational programming through interviews with school administrators and surveys with teachers within the immediate vicinity of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Although teachers commonly cited financial barriers to participation, administrators suggested that these were rarely insurmountable. Moreover, perceptions of such constraints did not help to predict teachers’ intentions to participate. Rather, teachers’ intentions to participate were most strongly predicted by their degree of comfort with relating park programs to the subject matter of their courses, their perceptions regarding whether or not the programs will enhance students’ academic achievement, and their expectations of whether the programs will expose students to environmental themes in an enjoyable manner. Results suggest the importance of classroom visits and direct communications with teachers emphasizing that programs are fun, relevant learning experiences that address academic requirements for multiple subjects and are relatively easy to incorporate into pre-existing curricula.     

Evidence for recovery of fear following immediate extinction in rats and humans

Fear responses can be eliminated through extinction, a procedure involving the presentation of fear-eliciting stimuli without aversive outcomes. Extinction is believed to be mediated by new inhibitory learning that acts to suppress fear expression without erasing the original memory trace. This hypothesis is supported mainly by behavioral data demonstrating that fear can recover following extinction. However, a recent report by Myers and coworkers suggests that extinction conducted immediately after fear learning may erase or prevent the consolidation of the fear memory trace. Since extinction is a major component of nearly all behavioral therapies for human fear disorders, this finding supports the notion that therapeutic intervention beginning very soon after a traumatic event will be more efficacious. Given the importance of this issue, and the controversy regarding immediate versus delayed therapeutic interventions, we examined two fear recovery phenomena in both rats and humans: spontaneous recovery (SR) and reinstatement. We found evidence for SR and reinstatement in both rats and humans even when extinction was conducted immediately after fear learning. Thus, our data do not support the hypothesis that immediate extinction erases the original memory trace, nor do they suggest that a close temporal proximity of therapeutic intervention to the traumatic event might be advantageous.     

Psychology's contributions to understanding and addressing global climate change

Global climate change poses one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in this century. This article, which introduces the American Psychologist special issue on global climate change, follows from the report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change. In this article, we place psychological dimensions of climate change within the broader context of human dimensions of climate change by addressing (a) human causes of, consequences of, and responses (adaptation and mitigation) to climate change and (b) the links between these aspects of climate change and cognitive, affective, motivational, interpersonal, and organizational responses and processes. Characteristics of psychology that cross content domains and that make the field well suited for providing an understanding of climate change and addressing its challenges are highlighted. We also consider ethical imperatives for psychologists' involvement and provide suggestions for ways to increase psychologists' contribution to the science of climate change.     

Metaphor and minimalism

This paper argues first that, contrary to what one would expect, metaphorical interpretations of utterances pass two of Cappelan and Lepore’s Minimalist tests for semantic context-sensitivity. I then propose how, in light of that result, one might analyze metaphors on the model of indexicals and demonstratives, expressions that (even) Minimalists agree are semantically context-dependent. This analysis builds on David Kaplan’s semantics for demonstratives and refines an earlier proposal in (Stern, Metaphor in context, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000). In the course of this argument, I also discuss some new examples of linguistic phenomena that motivate a semantic structure underlying metaphorical interpretation, phenomena I argue that neither Minimalists nor Contextualists can explain.     

Deceived and distorted: game outcome retrospectively determines the reported time of action

Previous work suggested the association between intentionality and the reported time of action was exclusive, with intentionality as the primary facilitator to the mental time compression between the reported time of action and its effect (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). In three experiments, we examined whether mental time compression could also be observed in an unintended action. Participants performed an externally cued key press task that elicited one of two possible tones. The reported time of action shifted closer to the tone when the tone was used to indicate the winner of a race (Exp.2) compared to when the tone was meaningless and did not indicate winning (Exp.1). This suggests that reported time of an unintended action could shift toward the effect in some contexts. Furthermore, the results from Exp.2 and Exp.3 (tones were substituted with verbal feedback) showed that a presumed winning action was judged to occur earlier whereas a presumed losing action was judged to be later. These findings therefore support the view that the reported time of action is reconstructed from known temporal information rather than determined by intentionality.     

Prayer spaces in schools: a subversion of policy implementation?

Based on a major evaluation project, this article presents an emerging theme from research on the activities supported by Prayer Spaces in Schools, an organisation supporting ‘pop-up’ prayer spaces in schools across the UK and internationally. Evaluating the activities primarily in terms of their possible contribution to spiritual development, a number of important issues arose relating to policy on education and religion. This article focuses on how some engage with these prayer spaces as a way of reimagining and renegotiating educational policy. Based on data gathered from interviews with staff and students (aged 7–16) across seven schools in England, questionnaire responses from 555 students across 15 schools and feedback from two prayer spaces conferences, a hermeneutic approach is used to compare the interpretations of staff with those of students and the implicit positions of policy documents. This article explores various forms of policy implementation and how staff engagement with prayer spaces can be seen as a form of subversion, with staff tactically subverting policy implementation sometimes in order to promote the very intention of those policies – a form of what we refer to as subversive obedience.     

From Soma to Symbol: Psychosomatic Conditions and Transformative Experience,edited by Phyllis L. Sloate,Routledge, Abingdon and New York, (2018), 288 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Words and wordlessness in the psychoanalytic situation

The difference between words and wordlessness in the psychoanalytic situation is examined in the context of a detailed clinical example. Various pairs of terms that have been used to account for this difference are mapped onto it: word and act, thought and feeling, public and private experience. Each of these sets of differences suggests certain relations between consciousness and the unconscious, and each implies a position about the nature of language. All three prove to be incomplete or inadequate ways of accounting for the difference between words and wordlessness in the clinical setting. The divergence, though, is well described by the difference between self-reflection and unformulated experience. Reflection is then presented as situated in the unformulated background meanings that contextualize it. It is because of this contextual embeddedness that self-reflection can have the kind of depth, resonance, power, and nuance more commonly associated with the nonverbal. In the creation of an explicit meaning, we simultaneously reconfigure the wordless background, thereby creating new possibilities for other meanings.     

Beyond surprise: the puzzle of infants' expressive reactions to expectancy violation

The reactions of 58 infants to expectancy violation by digitally filtering the experimenter's voice were studied in a cross-sectional design for ages 5, 7, 9, 11-12, and 14 months. The results show that behavioral freezing and changes in gaze direction, but not facial or vocal expression, are reliable responses to expectancy violation. The pattern suggests that a transition in the infant's capacity for cognitive evaluation of novel and discrepant events may occur around age 9 months. These findings confirm the consistent failure to find prototypical facial surprise reactions in research on novel or impossible situations. Componential theories of emotion, which predict adaptive behavior patterns from appraisal processes, may provide clues for underlying mechanisms and generate hypotheses on age-related changes in emotional expression.