Revenge versus forgiveness/forbearance in response to narrative-simulated victimization

The authors engaged men and women (N = 120) who read one of two versions of a dramatic narrative in which the narrator became HIV-positive following heterosexual intercourse with an AIDS-infected partner. Assuming the role of the narrator, the participants completed two situation-instigated criterion measures as a response to becoming HIV-infected, indicated whom they blamed for their predicament, and completed two "trait" predictor measures-negative affect and response to perceived victimization in everyday life. Trait victimization response and blaming the sexual partner were strongly associated with high rather than low negative affect. Reasons for the reluctance to blame the sexual partner and seek revenge were discussed, and recommendations were made to develop less problematic simulated victimization narratives.     

Evaluating teaching and students’ learning of academic research ethics

A team of philosophers and scientists at Dartmouth College worked for three years to create, train faculty and pilot test an adequate and exportable class in research methods for graduate students of science and engineering. Developing and testing methods for evaluating students’ progress in learning research ethics were part of the project goals. Failure of methods tried in the first year led to the refinement of methods for the second year. These were used successfully in the pilot course and in one university setting external to Dartmouth. The process of development and justification for the final methods are discussed here.     

Habituation of orienting responses as a function of “instructional set”

Electrodermal and plethysmographic recordings were obtained from three groups of alcoholic patients. The groups differed with respect to instructions given for response to a series of words spoken by the experimenter. Group A was told to report verbally their first associations for each word presented. Group B received instructions to think of an association for each word without reporting it. Group C was to respond to each word by repeating it after it was spoken by the experimenter. The instructions did not have the predicted differing effects upon rate of EDR habituation. However, the over-all amplitude of EDR was lower for Group B than for Group A or C. We observed very little habituation of the plethysmographic OR as measured by per cent of subjects responding to each word. As with the EDR data, Group B shows less responsivity, i.e., this group produced significantly fewer plethysmographic responses over all words than did either of the other two groups. The relative importance of association and of verbal responding to a stimulus word for eliciting autonomic responses was considered.     

Perioral anesthesia disrupts maternal behavior during early lactation in Long-Evans rats

The role of perioral somatosensory stimulation from pups in maternal behavior was investigated in lactating Long-Evans rats (Rattus norvegicus) during early lactation by local anesthesia of the mystacial pads with lidocaine, which blocks conduction in the infraorbital nerve. It was concluded that (1) acute perioral anesthesia markedly inhibited pup retrieval when the subjects had no formal pretreatment retrieval experience. Further, these dams displayed little tolerance to the lidocaine treatment when they were tested repeatedly. (2) The severity of the effects of perioral anesthesia on retrieval was dependent upon prior experience and the testing situation. Following pretreatment retrieval experience, and in a test cage with dark and light compartments which provided a strong incentive to retrieve, 80% of lidocaine-injected dams did retrieve. However, retrieval efficiency was impaired by perioral anesthesia, largely due to increased time in contact with pups prior to each retrieval and to increased carrying time. (3) Perioral anesthesia also inhibited pup licking, but not self-grooming, suggesting that the former, but not the latter, is largely under peripheral stimulus control and that deficits in maternal oral activities cannot be due to impairment of mouth opening and use. (4) The onset of nursing behavior was delayed until after the recovery of snout sensations and retrieval. This suggests that a maternal behavior not directly involving the mouth is nonetheless dependent upon the dam's receipt of perioral tactile input from pups.     

James hillman (1926-2011)

Presents an obituary for James Hillman. James Hillman, the third child of Madeline and Julian Hillman, died of metastatic bone cancer at his home in Thompson, Connecticut, on October 27, 2011. The parent of "archetypal psychology," he was born on April 12, 1926, at the Breakers, a then-opulent hotel founded by his family that overlooked the boardwalk and beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey. With an extensive footing in the classics and classical humanism, Jim established the foundations for his emerging archetypal psychology. With archetypal psychology, he was to move away from a dependence on the concept of a personal ego in favor of larger sources that relied on his notion of variegated identity. He proposed a profusion of mythical images that emerge under the rubric of "soul." Soul stands as an appellation indicating a deepening of psychic events, such as when dreams, chaos, and "pathologizing" (the struggles of imagination) are most experienced. For Hillman, psychology could not be taken as a separate discipline isolated from mythology, literature, art, philosophy, politics, religion, natural science, and the ordinary affairs of individuals. Hillman envisioned archetypes as processes that bear evidence to personal suffering and, in so doing, prompt the expansion of compassion. In 1975, Jim was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his book Re-Visioning Psychology (Harper & Row). In addition to many other citations, Jim had the high honor in 2001 of receiving the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

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.     

Dual-tasking alleviated sleep deprivation disruption in visuomotor tracking: an fMRI study

Effects of dual-responding on tracking performance after 49-h of sleep deprivation (SD) were evaluated behaviorally and with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Continuous visuomotor tracking was performed simultaneously with an intermittent color-matching visual detection task in which a pair of color-matched stimuli constituted a target and non-matches were non-targets. Tracking error means were binned time-locked to stimulus onset of the detection task in order to observe changes associated with dual-responding by comparing the error during targets and non-targets. Similar comparison was made with fMRI data. Our result showed that despite a significant increase in the overall tracking error post SD, from 20 pixels pre SD to 45 pixels post SD, error decreased to a minimum of about 25 pixels 0-6s after dual-response. Despite an overall reduced activation post SD, greater activation difference between targets and non-targets was found post SD in task-related regions, such as the left cerebellum, the left somatosensory cortex, the left extrastriate cortex, bilateral precuneus, the left middle frontal gyrus, and the left motor cortex. Our results suggest that dual-response helps to alleviate performance impairment usually associated with SD. The duration of the alleviation effect was on the order of seconds after dual-responding.     

Relational Psychoanalysis and the Inner Life: Commentary on Cooper,Corbett, and Seligman

Relational analysts know that their experience feels private and contemplative during a significant portion of their working hours. A consideration of the inner life, both the analyst’s and the patient’s, is part of relational praxis. Yet relational analysts also recognize that they are continuously involved with their patients, even at those very same quiet moments. Cooper, Corbett, and Seligman recognize both these parts of relational clinical work and argue that both are necessary. Making this argument explicit is important for its own sake, but also because analysts from other schools sometimes write as if there is no place in relational clinical practice for a quiet consideration of the inner life. Two examples of such criticism are offered, in both of which relational analysts are described as being too focused on social interaction and too little on the inner life. I offer my own version of the kinds of arguments about privacy and contemplation offered by Cooper, Corbett, and Seligman. I then make the case that all psychoanalytic theories come with risks of excess. Relational and interpersonal theories come with the risk of an overenthusiastic embrace of clinical interaction, whereas more intrapsychic theories carry the risk of attending too little to the impact on their patients of present-day relatedness—which is just as likely to have unconscious roots as the inner life.