Recovered Memories of Abuse Among Therapy Patients: A National Survey

This research explored the ethical decision-making process of civilians in response to real-world military dilemmas. Results revealed the complexity of these dilemmas, with about equal proportions of civilians choosing each of two response options. The moral intensity dimension of social consensus significantly predicted moral judgment in both dilemmas, whereas that of magnitude of consequences did so in only one dilemma, partially supporting our hypothesis. Both dimensions were significant predictors of moral intent in both dilemmas as was moral judgment, also supporting our hypotheses. We conclude with suggestions for future research questions in this compelling area.     

The Islamophobia Scale: Instrument Development and Initial Validation

Opinion poll research suggests that a significant number of Westerners hold negative and fearful perceptions toward Muslims and their religion. Although evidence of Islamophobia has been documented in a number of poll studies, no psychometrically based, multifaceted measure that focuses exclusively on fear related attitudes and is not confounded with a particular group currently exists in the scientific literature. The authors of this study describe the development and psychometric properties of the Islamophobia Scale, which measures cognitive and affective-behavioral facets of fear-related attitudes toward the religion of Islam and Muslims. The results of the study demonstrate a measure of Islamophobia that yielded acceptable psychometric properties of reliability and validity.     

A Christmas fairy tale

The paper takes its title from Freud's early paper on the neuroses of defence. Using approaches based on the psychoanalytic study of mythology, the author reviews the emotional and symbolic significance of Santa Claus as embodying forms of meaning at Christmas. Historical data and mythic images are considered, using as a means of interpretation ideas from Freud, Jung, Klein and Winnicott. The suggestion emerges that Santa Claus personifies a restitution of the primal scene that has been destroyed in primal phantasy. Some applications of these ideas are considered in relation to psychoanalytic approaches to work organization.     

Baboons, like humans, solve analogy by categorical abstraction of relations

Reasoning by analogy is one of the most complex and highly adaptive cognitive processes in abstract thinking. For humans, analogical reasoning entails the judgment and conceptual mapping of relations-between-relations and is facilitated by language (Gentner in Cogn Sci 7:155–170, 1983; Premack in Thought without language, Oxford University Press, New York, 1986). Recent evidence, however, shows that monkeys like “language-trained” apes exhibit similar capacity to match relations-between-relations (Fagot and Thompson in Psychol Sci 22:1304–1309, 2011; Flemming et al. in J Exp Psychol: Anim Behav Process 37:353–360, 2011; Truppa et al. in Plos One 6(8):e23809, 2011). Whether this behavior is driven by the abstraction of categorical relations or alternatively by direct perception of variability (entropy) is crucial to the debate as to whether nonhuman animals are capable of analogical reasoning. In the current study, we presented baboons (Papio papio) and humans (Homo sapiens) with a computerized same/different relational-matching task that in principle could be solved by either strategy. Both baboons and humans produced markedly similar patterns of responding. Both species responded different when the perceptual variability of a stimulus array fell exactly between or even closer to that of a same display. Overall, these results demonstrate that categorical abstraction trumped perceptual properties and, like humans, Old World monkeys can solve the analogical matching task by judging the categorical abstract equivalence of same/different relations-between-relations.     

Senses for senses

If two subjects have phenomenally identical experiences, there is an important sense in which the way the world appears to them is precisely the same. But how are we to understand this notion of ‘ways of appearing’? Most philosophers who have acknowledged the existence of phenomenal content have held that the way something appears is simply a matter of the properties something appears to have. On this view, the way something appears is simply the way something appears to be. This identification supports a Russellian theory of phenomenal content, according to which phenomenal content is exhausted by facts about what specific properties are represented by an experience. The present paper motivates and develops an alternative Fregean theory of phenomenal colour content. According to Fregean theories, the phenomenal content that is shared by any two phenomenally identical experiences is a matter of how the world is represented, and need not involve sameness in what is represented. It is argued that ways of appearing are modes of presentations of external properties and objects, and a detailed theory is presented about the nature of the modes of presentation involved in colour experience.     

Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Guide Exposure-Based Interventions for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Exposure is considered one of the most effective interventions for PTSD. There is a large body of research for the use of imaginal and in vivo exposure in the treatment of PTSD, with prolonged exposure (PE) therapy being the most researched example. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has sometimes been called an exposure-based treatment, but how exposure is implemented in ACT for PTSD has not been well articulated. Although support for the use of ACT in PTSD treatment is limited to a handful of case studies and open trials, research suggests ACT is particularly useful in flexibly targeting avoidance behavior—arguably the most important process in the continued maintenance of PTSD symptoms. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of exposure within ACT in PTSD treatment. Through an overview of PE and ACT, and with the use of case examples, we describe how ACT principles and techniques may inform exposure-based treatments for PTSD in order to create more flexible approaches. In addition, understanding exposure within an ACT framework may also contribute to clarifying processes of change.     

Music Sight-Reading Skill in Flute Players

This article reports an investigation of factors related to music sight-reading skill. Flute players (N = 30) performed six tasks: (a) sight-reading standard music, (b) sight-reading random music, (c) recall of music notation, (d) recall of letters, (e) eye-performance span, and (f) choice reaction time for playing individual notes. Sight-reading ability was significantly correlated with eye-performance span (.85), and music recall (.80), but not with letter recall (-.39), thus replicating results of previous work with pianists. Sight-reading skill was correlated with choice reaction time to notes (- .54), and there was a significant partial correlation between sight-reading skill and eye-performance span, with music-reading ability controlled. These results are consistent with the idea that increased skill involves both the speed-up of individual processing stages, and an increase in the degree to which these stages operate in parallel.