Odorant quality perception: a metric individual differences approach

Perceptual spaces, in which similar stimuli are located close to each other and dissimilar stimuli are located far apart, have aided in the understanding of the physiological and psychological bases for sensory quality coding. Differences in perception between individuals should be reflected by differences in the spatial relationships between stimuli. If the dimensionality of the perceptual space is small (e.g., color space), individual differences that reflect specific pathologies are readily apparent from visual inspection. On the other hand, if the dimensionality of the perceptual space is large (as is proposed for odor space), visual inspection alone may not reveal individual differences in quality perception. The present work presents an information-theory-based method for quantifying individual differences in quality perception from perceptual confusion matrices. The ability of this method to quantify individual differences in quality perception is shown in a hypothetical example of specific anosmia. Finally, the method is applied to the examination of intrasubject consistency of odorant quality perception.     

An outcome survey of psychology residency training program graduates of the University of Texas Houston Medical School

A survey of 71 graduates of the psychology residency program at The University of Texas Houston Medical School and the Texas Research Institute of Mental Science indicated that two-thirds of the respondents were involved in private practice, conducting primarily individual therapy, with assessment also playing a major role in their practice. Managed care had the effect of placing limits on the numbers of sessions available to patients, reducing income, and increasing paperwork associated with practice. Implications for training during residency are that individual therapy, using focused short-term approaches, and assessment should continue to be the primary clinical experiences for trainees, and that there should also be training in the business aspect of practice, including marketing.     

Religious implications of paranormal events occurring during chemically-induced ‘psychedelic’ experience

Pastoral Psychology -     

In the eye of the storm: race and genomics in research and practice

The difficulties of operationalizing race in research and practice for social, behavioral, and genetic researchers and practitioners are neither new nor related to recent genetic knowledge. For geneticists, the bases for understanding groups are clines, observed traits that gradually change in frequency between geographic regions without distinct identifiable population boundaries and population histories that carry information about the distribution of genetic variants. For psychologists, race may not exist or be a social and cultural construct associated with fluid social inferences. Because definitions of populations and race can be socially and biologically incongruent, the authors suggest that geneticists and social and behavioral scientists and clinicians attend to external validity issues by operationalizing population and racial categories and avoiding race proxies for other biological, social, and cultural constructs in research designs, data analyses, and clinical practice.     

Matters of conscience and conscientiousness: the place of ego development in the Five-factor model

The Five-factor model (FFM; Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1990) and Loevinger's (1994) theory of ego development are two active research traditions that are often construed as incompatible approaches to the study of personality. For example, each theory proposes a different view of the concept of conscientiousness. Loevinger argued that FFM conscientiousness, which emphasizes attributes such as order, self-discipline, and achievement striving, lacks a moral component and is more similar to the conformist stage in her theory. To investigate these claims, we administered the Revised NEO-Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) and the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT; Hy & Loevinger, 1996) to 120 university students on 2 separate occasions. Together, the five traits of the FFM significantly predicted item sum scores from the WUSCT (multiple R = .54). Unique linear relationships of Openness to Experience and Agreeableness with ego level demonstrated that the two theories proposed similar constructs. We argue that these two FFM dimensions have conceptual relevance to the cognitive and interpersonal aspects of the ego development construct. We draw further connections between these FFM dimensions, ego development, and human values.     

The relationship between metacognitive awareness of olfactory ability and age in people reporting chemosensory disturbances

When determining how much to rely on olfactory information, accurate estimates of olfactory ability are important. Nevertheless, metacognitive errors regarding olfactory ability are common in the normal population. Are older adults less accurate at estimating olfactory ability, or do they simply tend to make a particular type of estimation error? We examined data from 203 patients, all of whom self-rated olfactory ability and then were tested with the Odorant Confusion Matrix. The patients' self-reports did not match the objective measure of olfactory ability in 42% of the cases, thus demonstrating a high level of impairment in metacognitive knowledge. Neither the cause of loss nor the patient's age was related to the inability to accurately estimate olfactory loss, but both contributed to the type of metacognitive errors patients made. Younger patients tended to underestimate their olfactory ability, thus behaving similarly to patients with "blindsight" who demonstrate residual visual function in the absence of awareness. Older patients tended to overestimate their olfactory ability, thus making the metacognitive error of deficit unawareness that is observed in a number of other clinical syndromes. These findings indicate that older patients are not necessarily more likely to make errors in estimating their olfactory ability; rather, they are more prone to a particular type of metacognitive error than are younger patients.     

The thrall of the negative and how to analyze it

From clinical material of patient-analyst pairs caught up in negativistic transference-countertransference enmeshment, the defensive functions of negativism are explored for both patient and analyst. Fascination with and dread of the negative intersect as patients struggle to avoid terrifying aspects of self and other. The analyst works to avoid being trapped in negativism within the dyad. Containing, metabolizing, and transforming the dyad's mutual destructiveness and mutual love enable analyst and patient to feel safer with both. How to play with the negative, to engage the patient in play at the intersection of destructive negativism and dangerous love, is described.