Delivery of Psychological Interventions by Clinical Neuropsychologists: Current Practice in Australia and Implications for Training

Clinical neuropsychologists are increasingly involved in delivering psychological interventions to people with neurological conditions. This is a key competency for accredited Australian postgraduate neuropsychology courses; however it is not clear how effective courses are in preparing neuropsychologists to deliver interventions. The study aims were to (a) determine the frequency and confidence with which particular types of interventions are delivered by Australian neuropsychologists, (b) examine the availability of opportunities to deliver interventions on clinical placements, (c) identify barriers to delivering interventions in current workplaces; and (d) determine which factors influence the frequency and confidence with which neuropsychologists deliver interventions. An online survey was completed by 114 participants who had graduated from a postgraduate neuropsychology program. Results indicated that respondents delivered different intervention types with varying frequency. They reported limited opportunities to practice these interventions on placements. The majority wanted to be doing more interventions, with lack of time, resources, and adequate training being the major barriers. There were several significant relationships between the frequency and confidence with which respondents delivered interventions and the perceived quality of their postgraduate training. These results highlight the need to consider appropriate postgraduate training options in delivery of interventions, including increasing opportunities to practice interventions on placements.     

The Influence of Avoidance Temperament and Avoidance‐Based Achievement Goals on Flow

In the present research, we conducted two studies designed to examine the joint influence of avoidance temperament and avoidance‐based achievement goals on the experience of flow on a creativity task. In both a laboratory study (N = 101; M_age = 22.61, SD_age = 4.03; 74.3% female) and a naturalistic study (N = 102; M_age = 16.23, SD_age = 1.13; 48% female), participants high in avoidance temperament were shown to experience greater flow when performance‐avoidance goals were induced; no differences were found in any of the other three achievement goal conditions from the 2 × 2 achievement goal framework. These findings reveal a short‐term benefit for a disposition‐goal match grounded in avoidance motivation, and point to the need for more research on both avoidance‐based matches and the short‐term versus long‐term implications of such matches.     

Sincerity,Solidarity, and Deliberative Commitment

Two challenges have lately been posed to the importance of sincerity for our public discourse. On the one hand, it has been suggested that because sincerity is so difficult to identify, a preoccupation with the inner lives of others distracts us from the substance of what people say. On the other hand, some worry that making sincere statements can sometimes undermine the very deliberation that advocates of sincerity are so concerned to protect. In light of these challenges, I attempt to analyze our interest in sincerity in terms of a concern for solidarity with our fellow citizens. I then argue that focusing on the sincerity of various assertions is not a good way to promote social cohesion and that this concern is better addressed by looking at the commitment that others have to the process of democratic deliberation.     

Causal Decision Theory and EPR correlations

The paper argues that on three out of eight possible hypotheses about the EPR experiment we can construct novel and realistic decision problems on which (a) Causal Decision Theory and Evidential Decision Theory conflict (b) Causal Decision Theory and the EPR statistics conflict. We infer that anyone who fully accepts any of these three hypotheses has strong reasons to reject Causal Decision Theory. Finally, we extend the original construction to show that anyone who gives any of the three hypotheses any non-zero credence has strong reasons to reject Causal Decision Theory. However, we concede that no version of the Many Worlds Interpretation (Vaidman, in Zalta, E.N. (ed.), Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy 2014) gives rise to the conflicts that we point out.     

Vindicating Virtue: A Critical Analysis of the Situationist Challenge Against Aristotelian Moral Psychology

This article provides a critical analysis of the situationist challenge against Aristotelian moral psychology. It first outlines the details and results from four paradigmatic studies in psychology that situationists have heavily drawn upon in their critique of the Aristotelian conception of virtuous characteristics, including studies conducted by Hartshorne and May (1928), Darley and Batson (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27:100–108, 1973), Isen and Levin (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21:384–388, 1972), and Milgram (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67:371–378, 1963). It then presents ten problems with the way situationists have used these studies to challenge Aristotelian moral psychology. After challenging the situationists on these grounds, the article then proceeds to challenge the situationist presentation of the Aristotelian conception, showing that situationists have provided an oversimplified caricature of it that goes against the grain of much Aristotelian text. In evaluating the situationist challenge against the actual results from empirical research as well as primary Aristotelian text, it will be shown that the situationist debate has advanced both an extreme, untenable view about the nature of characteristics and situations, as well as an inaccurate presentation of the Aristotelian view.     

Using facial muscular movements to understand young children's emotion regulation and concurrent neural activation

Individual differences in young children's frustration responses set the stage for myriad developmental outcomes and represent an area of intense empirical interest. Emotion regulation is hypothesized to comprise the interplay of complex behaviors, such as facial expressions, and activation of concurrent underlying neural systems. At present, however, the literature has mostly examined children's observed emotion regulation behaviors and assumed underlying brain activation through separate investigations, resulting in theoretical gaps in our understanding of how children regulate emotion in vivo. Our goal was to elucidate links between young children's emotion regulation‐related neural activation, facial muscular movements, and parent‐rated temperamental emotion regulation. Sixty‐five children (age 3–7) completed a frustration‐inducing computer task while lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) activation and concurrent facial expressions were recorded. Negative facial expressions with eye constriction were inversely associated with both parent‐rated temperamental emotion regulation and concurrent LPFC activation. Moreover, we found evidence that positive expressions with eye constriction during frustration may be associated with stronger LPFC activation. Results suggest a correspondence between facial expressions and LPFC activation that may explicate how children regulate emotion in real time.     

How (not) to think of the ‘dead-donor’ rule

Although much has been written on the dead-donor rule (DDR) in the last twenty-five years, scant attention has been paid to how it should be formulated, what its rationale is, and why it was accepted. The DDR can be formulated in terms of either a Don’t Kill rule or a Death Requirement, the former being historically rooted in absolutist ethics and the latter in a prudential policy aimed at securing trust in the transplant enterprise. I contend that the moral core of the rule is the Don’t Kill rule, not the Death Requirement. This, I show, is how the DDR was understood by the transplanters of the 1960s, who sought to conform their practices to their ethics—unlike today’s critics of the DDR, who rethink their ethics in a question-begging fashion to accommodate their practices. A better discussion of the ethics of killing is needed to move the debate forward.     

Seeing structure: Shape skeletons modulate perceived similarity

An intrinsic part of seeing objects is seeing how similar or different they are relative to one another. This experience requires that objects be mentally represented in a common format over which such comparisons can be carried out. What is that representational format? Objects could be compared in terms of their superficial features (e.g., degree of pixel-by-pixel overlap), but a more intriguing possibility is that they are compared on the basis of a deeper structure. One especially promising candidate that has enjoyed success in the computer vision literature is the shape skeleton—a geometric transformation that represents objects according to their inferred underlying organization. Despite several hints that shape skeletons are computed in human vision, it remains unclear how much they actually matter for subsequent performance. Here, we explore the possibility that shape skeletons help mediate the ability to extract visual similarity. Observers completed a same/different task in which two shapes could vary either in their skeletal structure (without changing superficial features such as size, orientation, and internal angular separation) or in large surface-level ways (without changing overall skeletal organization). Discrimination was better for skeletally dissimilar shapes: observers had difficulty appreciating even surprisingly large differences when those differences did not reorganize the underlying skeletons. This pattern also generalized beyond line drawings to 3-D volumes whose skeletons were less readily inferable from the shapes’ visible contours. These results show how shape skeletons may influence the perception of similarity—and more generally, how they have important consequences for downstream visual processing.

     

It's a great big universe: Astrobiology and future trends for an astrotheology

Despite the awe and wonder that discoveries related to astrobiology inspire, the sheer volume and diversity of new discoveries related to space science can become overwhelming without meaningful frames of reference by which to organize our understanding of these phenomena. I suggest that a critical feature of the future of “astrotheology” relates to how it serves as an organizing correlate to astrobiology and space research. Considering that the prefix astro‐ has an amplicative and abductive effect on the fields of study to which it is applied, I contend that astrotheology implies a creative and constructive shift in how we conceptualize meaningful human being for theology that parallels how astrobiology effects a creative and constructive shift in how we conceptualize living systems.