MAKING ROOM FOR MADNESS IN MENTAL HEALTH: THE IMPORTANCE OF ANALYTICALLY‐INFORMED SUPERVISION OF NURSES AND OTHER MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS

In this paper, I discuss the importance of psychoanalytically informed supervision and training of nurses and other professionals in mental health settings. Using examples from supervision groups I will illustrate how a psychoanalytic approach to mental health can complement other ways of thinking about practice and management. Psychoanalysis provides a framework for understanding the relationship between the internal world of the patients, the therapeutic relationship and the social system. I will also argue that this understanding helps to develop and maintain therapeutic factors while reducing the risk of damaging behaviour and beliefs.     

Catch 22: the inflammatory nature of insight

I will describe a man I saw in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a history of serious drug abuse and violent psychotic episodes. At the start of therapy my patient had little capacity to tolerate the anxiety, depression or the inevitable frustrations involved in facing reality. Over time and with the support of the therapy he was able to increase his capacity for self observation noticing the way he withdrew from the world of shared reality into psychotic states of mind in order to avoid painful feelings of rage, humiliation and shame. In the book ‘Catch 22?, Joseph Heller described the paradox of pilots who wish to claim insanity in order to avoid fatal flying missions, while the authorities maintain that in claiming insanity to avoid suicidal missions the individual demonstrates a sane awareness of the insanity of the missions! This insight is deemed to be evidence of the individual’s sanity and consequently their plea of insanity is denied. In this paper, I will show how Mr. A’s developing capacity for reflective functioning lead to a ‘Catch 22’ as the insight he needed as part of the process of recovery threatened to overwhelm him with depressing realities about the extent of his illness.     

Disequilibrium in the mind,disharmony in the body

Although it is generally acknowledged that experiences of frustration, confusion, and anxiety are embodied phenomena, very little is known about how these processes modulate presumably unconscious, but constantly present, subtle bodily movement. We addressed this problem by tracking the low-level dynamics of body movement, using 1/f noise, pink noise, or “fractal scaling”, during naturalistic experiences of affect in two studies involving deep learning and effortful problem-solving. Our results indicate that body movement fluctuations of individuals experiencing cognitive equilibrium was characteristic of correlated pink noise, but there was a whitening of the signal when participants experienced states that are diagnostic of cognitive distress such as anxiety, confusion, and frustration. We orient our findings within theories that emphasise the embodied nature of cognition and affect and with perspectives that view affective and cognitive processes as emergent products of a self-organising dynamical system (the brain) that is inextricably coupled to the body.     

An Exploratory Assessment of Sales Culture Variables: Strategic Implications Within the Banking Industry

Growing, or even simply sustaining, profitability in today's rapidly changing environment is a daunting task. Today's firm must contend with increasing competition, changing customer requirements, and unprecedented technological change. Further, changing government regulations, such as the recent wave of deregulation, have dramatically changed the way business has traditionally been done in certain industries. In such a turbulent environment many firms have discovered that a total organizational sales effort is necessary. For many firms, this means a paradigm shift that involves strengthening their sales culture.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the sales culture (SC) concept and discuss its importance in contemporary business strategy. First, we will discuss market orientation from a corporate culture perspective. Second, the sales culture component of a market orientation will be defined and examined. Third, an exploratory investigation of constructs associated with sales culture will be investigated using an example taken from an industry that is experiencing rapid change, the banking industry. Finally, strategic implications, limitations and suggestions for future research will be shared.     

Adapting Motivation,Control, and Compensation Research to A New Environment

The authors discuss the need to adapt research in three substantively related but paradigmatically diverse research domains (salesperson motivation, control systems, and compensation) in light of the evolving selling environment. A key objective is to suggest the desirability of integrating these literatures, which, ultimately, all seek to inform management regarding how salespeople and sales organizations can be encouraged to become more productive. The authors maintain that specification of the right goals and metrics constitutes a fundamental common denominator across the three literatures.     

Two-Year-Olds' Object Retrieval Based on Television: Testing a Perceptual Account

Two-year-olds frequently fail to use information provided by video to find objects hidden in an adjacent room. Schmitt and Anderson (2002) hypothesized that they fail to map the 2-dimensional (2D) video image onto the 3D layout of the search space. Two experiments tested whether 2-year-olds can successfully use information from video when the search space is 2D or when the information is provided verbally (by telling the child where the toy is hidden). In both experiments, children performed poorly in the video conditions but performed well in direct live experience comparison conditions, contradicting Schmitt and Anderson's hypothesis. Performance was above chance on the first trial in the video conditions, suggesting that 2-year-olds do have a memory of the hiding location, albeit one that is easily disrupted by perseverative errors on subsequent trials. Overall, the results are most consistent with the hypothesis that very young children give priority to direct experience over mediated information.     

Measuring Narrative Engagement

Research indicates that the extent to which one becomes engaged, transported, or immersed in a narrative influences the narrative's potential to affect subsequent story-related attitudes and beliefs. Explaining narrative effects and understanding the mechanisms responsible depends on our ability to measure narrative engagement in a theoretically meaningful way. This article develops a scale for measuring narrative engagement that is based on a mental models approach to narrative processing. It distinguishes among four dimensions of experiential engagement in narratives: narrative understanding, attentional focus, emotional engagement, and narrative presence. The scale is developed and validated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with data from viewers of feature film and television, in different viewing situations, and from two different countries. The scale's ability to predict enjoyment and story-consistent attitudes across different programs is presented. Implications for conceptualizing engagement with narratives as well as narrative persuasion and media effects are discussed.     

Frame-differencing methods for measuring bodily synchrony in conversation

The study of interpersonal synchrony examines how interacting individuals grow to have similar behavior, cognition, and emotion in time. Many of the established methods of analyzing interpersonal synchrony are costly and time-consuming; the study of bodily synchrony has been especially laborious, traditionally requiring researchers to hand-code movement frame by frame. Because of this, researchers have been searching for more efficient alternatives for decades. Recently, some researchers (e.g., Nagaoka & Komori (IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, 91(6), 1634–1640, 2008); Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2008) have applied computer science and computer vision techniques to create frame-differencing methods (FDMs) to simplify analyses. In this article, we provide a detailed presentation of one such FDM, created by modifying and adding to existing FDMs. The FDM that we present requires little programming experience or specialized equipment: Only a few lines of MATLAB code are required to execute an automated analysis of interpersonal synchrony. We provide sample code and demonstrate its use with an analysis of brief, friendly conversations; using linear mixed-effects models, the measure of interpersonal synchrony was found to be significantly predicted by time lag (p < .001) and by the interaction between time lag and measures of interpersonal liking (p < .001). This pattern of results fits with existing literature on synchrony. We discuss the current limitations and future directions for FDMs, including their use as part of a larger methodology for capturing and analyzing multimodal interaction.