Unpacking Cultural Variations in Peak-Experiences: Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Early Childhood Recollection Between Hong Kong and Brazil

In this cross-cultural study, 115 Hong Kong Chinese and 117 Brazilian college students described a childhood peak-experience (occurring before the age of 14) and provided a self-rating on its enduring impact. Among various categories of peak-experiences, both Hong Kong Chinese and Brazilians reported interpersonal joy most frequently; the second most frequently reported category was external achievement for the Hong Kong sample and developmental landmark for the Brazilian sample. Compared with Brazilians’ narratives, those of Hong Kong Chinese were more social-focused, involving greater number of other people, but less specific. These characteristics of autobiographical memory, i.e., memory focus (self vs. social), memory specificity (specific vs. general), and the number of other people involved, significantly mediated the relation between culture and interpersonal joy. The present findings have extended research on peak-experiences to cross-cultural contexts and incorporated measures of autobiographical memory to unpack cultural variations in these two collectivist societies.     

A confirmatory factor analytic approach on perceptions of knowledge and skills in teaching (PKST)

This paper reports the cross-validation of the factor pattern of the Perceptions of Knowledge and Skills in Teaching (PKST) survey, which was used to assess the self-perceived pedagogical knowledge and skills of pre-service and beginning teachers. The sample comprised 323 pre-service teachers enrolled in a 1-yr. post-graduate teacher education program in Singapore. The survey had 37 items distributed across six scales: student learning, lesson planning, instructional support, accommodating diversity, classroom management, and care and concern. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to cross-validate the survey's factor pattern. The results showed that the model was an acceptable fit to the data. The PKST survey can thus be adapted by different teacher education programs to assess pre-service and beginning teachers' progress in developing their pedagogical knowledge and skills.     

Self-reported experience of bullying of students who stutter: relations with life satisfaction, life orientation, and self-esteem

Self-reported self-esteem, life orientation, satisfaction with life, and bullying were examined in relation to victimization experiences among 54 students who stuttered and 54 students who did not stutter. Those who stuttered reported greater, i.e., clinically significant, victimization (44.4%) than students who did not stutter (9.2%). Significant differences were found between means for self-esteem and life orientation, with students who stuttered reporting lower self-esteem and less optimistic life orientation than those who did not stutter. In both groups of students, high victimization scores had statistically significant negative correlations with optimistic life orientation, high self-esteem, and high satisfaction with life scores. Given the increased likelihood of students who stuttered being bullied, the negative relation of adjustment variables and bullying, and the potentially negative long-term effects of bullying, increased vigilance and early intervention are discussed.     

Attentional biases to threat in social anxiety disorder: time to focus our attention elsewhere?

Background: Cognitive models propose that attentional biases to threat contribute to the maintenance of social anxiety disorder (SAD). However, the specific characteristics of such biases are still object to debate.

Objectives: The current study aimed to disentangle effects of trait and state social anxiety on attention allocation towards social stimuli.

Methods: Participants with SAD (n?=?67) and healthy controls (n?=?62) completed three visual search tasks while their eye movements were recorded. Half of the participants in each group were randomly assigned to a state anxiety induction.

Results: Contrary to our predictions, neither trait nor state social anxiety was associated with a facilitated attention to or a delayed disengagement from threat. However, participants with SAD did show reduced fixation durations for threatening stimuli, indicating an avoidance of threat. Induction of state anxiety led to an increased distractibility by threat.

Conclusions: We suggest that attention allocation in SAD is characterized by an avoidant rather than a vigilant attentional bias. Accordingly, our results contradict previous results that associate SAD with facilitated attention to threat and existing approaches to modify attentional biases, that aim to decrease attention towards threatening stimuli.     

Ideology,inquiry, and antiquity: a critical notice of Lloyd's The Ideals of Inquiry: An Ancient History

A discussion of Lloyd's Tarner Lectures at Trinity College. The importance of Lloyd's previous scholarship is characterized and these sweeping, erudite lectures are placed in the context of that scholarship. In the broadest terms, the lectures are a call to culturally and historically comparative study of human reasoning. At their heart is a comparative history of scientific theorizing from the ancients through to modern science. Lloyd rejects the positivist picture, and the view of modern and ancient science as discontinuous; he urges scholars to undertake comparative work on the ancient sciences in different traditions. This critical notice evaluates Lloyd's view and raises several questions for further reflection.     

The countertransference impact of autistic defence in an otherwise neurotic patient

This paper investigates the question of why, in the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a patient with encapsulated autistic pathology, the steady maintenance of a therapeutically neutral stance can be especially difficult. Transference and countertransference vicissitudes are examined. The author notices that the patient's intolerance of ‘opposites’ (cf. Tustin, 1986), combined with extreme antipathy to having that intolerance noticed, can elicit corresponding, and potentially destabilizing, countertransference reactions. These reactions comprise an unstable tension between co‐existing pressures towards fusion with, or expulsion of, the patient, their co‐existence under further pressure to remain unnoticed. Until perceived, this state of affairs risks collusion with the pressure either to merge with or to expel the patient, and compromises the capacity to notice the detail of the transference process and even to notice co‐existent positive and negative transference images. Detailed clinical illustration is given, including a session where it was difficult to notice the patient's experience of a couple as a combined object. The author finds these observations of bipolar countertransference tensions illuminated by Green's concepts of positive and negative narcissism and of the disobjectalizing function, and specifically accounted for by Ribas's theory of autism as radical drive defusion.