Bibliography of Walter Burkert

Geoffrey Hartman (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Haneda Nobuo (translator) December Fan. The Buddhist Essays of Manshi Kiyozawa. Kyoto, Higashi Honganji Publication Department, 1984, 98 pp.     

The doctrine of distribution

Peter Geach describes the ‘doctrine of distribution’ as the view that a term is distributed if it refers to everything that it denotes, and undistributed if it refers to only some of the things that it denotes. He argues that the notion, so explained, is incoherent. He claims that the doctrine of distribution originates from a degenerate use of the notion of ‘distributive supposition’ in medieval supposition theory sometime in the 16th century. This paper proposes instead that the doctrine of distribution occurs at least as early as the 12th century, and that it originates from a study of Aristotle's notion of a term's being ‘taken universally’, and not from the much later theory of distributive supposition. A detailed version of the doctrine found in the Port Royal Logic is articulated, and compared with a slightly different modern version. Finally, Geach's arguments for the incoherence of the doctrine are discussed and rejected.     

Coping with transphobia in employment: Strategies used by transgender and gender-diverse people in the United States

Background: Transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) individuals face stigma in the general public and in the workplace. Research has suggested that TGD individuals may demonstrate unique coping strategies in the workplace in order to manage transphobia in that setting; however, further research is needed to identify the specific strategies that transgender individuals use to deal with transphobia at work.

Method: The present qualitative study utilized the grounded theory methodology to identify the specific coping strategies utilized to deal with transphobia at work. Participants included 45 TGD participants from the northeastern United States.

Results: The results of the study include the identification of eight coping-strategy themes including gender-presentation strategies, gender detachment, relationship navigating, resource utilization, job-performance strategies, maladaptive coping strategies, structural strategies, and power-acquisition strategies.

Conclusions: Implications of the present study suggest the resilience and diverse coping strategies that mental health providers can help TGD workers draw from in dealing with transphobia at work. In addition, there is a need for greater remediation and prevention of employment-related transphobia, including leadership within employment settings, greater legal protections, and enforcement of these laws in the United States.     

Web-Based Intervention for Returning Veterans with Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Risky Alcohol Use

A substantial number of military personnel who have served in Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom; OIF) and Afghanistan (Operating Enduring Freedom; OEF) develop symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in response to their military experiences and many of these same individuals will drink in a risky or problematic manner following deployment. If left untreated, PTSD symptoms and alcohol problems can become chronic and have a significant, negative impact on the lives of veterans, their families and communities. Further, OIF and OEF service members are often reluctant to seek treatment for mental health symptoms or alcohol problems secondary to stigma. In order to reach this population it is essential that new strategies and venues for delivering evidence-based care are explored. Web-based interventions are uniquely suited to this cohort of veterans in that they have the potential to reach a significant number of veterans who commonly use the Web and who might not otherwise receive care. This article will review the prevalence of PTSD and alcohol problems among OIF and OEF veterans, common barriers they experience with accessing care in traditional mental health settings, and what is known about the effectiveness of Web-based approaches for PTSD and alcohol problems. It also describes the components of a new Web-based intervention, developed by the authors, that uses motivational enhancement and cognitive-behavioral strategies to intervene with returning veterans who report PTSD symptoms and problem drinking. Recommendations for future directions in working with returning veterans with PTSD and alcohol problems will be offered.     

'Hearts on their sleeves': the use of systemic biofeedback in school settings

This article describes how a biofeedback device is used to 'externalize' internal physiological states. Heart rate monitors, emitting audible signals when a specific threshold is reached, are fitted to children and members of the family. This can help all those present to make connections between problematic behaviours and internal states of emotional/physical arousal. Devices may be worn for up to twenty-four hours and computer graph printouts of fluctuating heart rates can assist in contextualizing problematic interactions, particularly if other family members are also fitted with heart rate monitors. In this way biofeedback becomes 'systemic' as people are alerted to the interconnectedness of each others' states. Participants are not only helped to identify stressors leading to heightened states of emotional arousal and resulting 'out-of-control' behaviours, but also to find ways of employing (self-)calming strategies. This article outlines the application of systemic biofeedback in school settings with children at risk of exclusion. With the help of these biofeedback devices pupils begin to manage themselves in situations which would previously have resulted in stressed, angry or violent behaviours.     

Using perceptrons to explore the reorientation task

The reorientation task is a paradigm that has been used extensively to study the types of information used by humans and animals to navigate in their environment. In this task, subjects are reinforced for going to a particular location in an arena that is typically rectangular in shape. The subject then has to find that location again after being disoriented, and possibly after changes have been made to the arena. This task is used to determine the geometric and featural cues that can be used to reorient the agent in the arena. The purpose of the present paper is to present several simulation results that show that a simple neural network, a perceptron, can be used to generate many of the traditional findings that have been obtained using the reorientation task. These results suggest that reorientation task regularities can be explained without appealing to a geometric module that is a component of spatial processing.     

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Adolescent Body Dysmorphic Disorder

The onset of appearance-related concerns associated with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) typically occurs in adolescence, and these concerns are often severe enough to interfere with normal development and psychosocial functioning. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment for adults with BDD. However, no treatment studies focusing on adolescents with BDD have been conducted. The need for an effective treatment in this population led to the development of a brief CBT protocol with family involvement. The treatment focuses on enhancing an adolescent's quality of life through the reduction of maladaptive thoughts and behaviors, and incorporates skills training and parent training. Similar treatment packages have already been shown to be efficacious for children and adolescents with similar disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and social phobia. The following case illustrates the application of this brief CBT protocol for BDD in an adolescent, and highlights clinical considerations needed when adapting CBT for a pediatric population. Treatment was associated with clinically significant improvement in symptoms of BDD, self-esteem, depression, and quality of life. This report extends extant literature by suggesting that CBT may be a helpful treatment for adolescents with BDD.     

The development of skin conductance fear conditioning in children from ages 3 to 8 years

Although fear conditioning is an important psychological construct implicated in behavioral and emotional problems, little is known about how it develops in early childhood. Using a differential, partial reinforcement conditioning paradigm, this longitudinal study assessed skin conductance conditioned responses in 200 children at ages 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 years. Results demonstrated that in both boys and girls: (1) fear conditioning increased across age, particularly from ages 5 to 6 years, (2) the three components of skin conductance fear conditioning that reflect different degrees of automatic and controlled cognitive processes exhibited different developmental profiles, and (3) individual differences in arousal, orienting, and the unconditioned response were associated with individual differences in conditioning, with the influence of orienting increasing at later ages. This first longitudinal study of the development of skin conductance fear conditioning in children both demonstrates that children as young as age 3 years evidence fear conditioning in a difficult acquisition paradigm, and that different sub-components of skin conductance conditioning have different developmental trajectories.     

Generalizability of interest structure to China: Application of the Personal Globe Inventory

Two Chinese samples of the high school students (N=721) and the college students (N=943) were administered a translated version of the Personal Globe Inventory (PGI, Tracey, 2002), and the responses were examined with respect to their structure. Results of separate factor analyses demonstrated that there were three substantive factors: People/Things, Data/Ideas, and Prestige, similar to the structure of the PGI. The fit of the data to the PGI spherical model and the circular model of eight and six (i.e., RIASEC) types were examined using the randomized test of hypothesized order relations. The results demonstrated that the spherical model and the eight-type model fit the Chinese data equally well as data from the United States. However, unlike the Japanese results, Holland's six-type model fit the data as well as the eight-type model in the present study. No structure differences were found in the high school and the college samples or across gender within the high school and the college samples. The results support the structural validity of the PGI in Chinese applications.     

Interpersonal rigidity and complementarity

The relations among behavioral complementarity, interpersonal rigidity, as indicated by the Interpersonal Adjective Checklist (IAS, Wiggins, 1995) vector score, and interpersonal distress, as indicated by the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP, Horowitz, Rosenberg, Baer, Ureno, & Villasenor, 1988), were examined in two studies. In Study 1, 214 undergraduates viewed videotapes depicting different interactions and then provided their responses. In Study 2, 122 undergraduates interacted in randomly paired dyads on a mutual task. These interactions were videotaped and the interchanges were rated using the Interpersonal Communication Ratings Scale (ICRS, Strong, Hills, & Nelson, 1988). The extent to which each participant demonstrated complementary behavior was determined. Results of the studies demonstrated support for interpersonal rigidity as related to complementarity and as a moderator of the adaptability of behavior. Further complementarity was a mediator in the behavioral rigidity–interpersonal distress relation.