Unstable Embodiments: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Patient Satisfaction with Treatment Outcome

Many patients experience aspects of treatment and care as dehumanizing because the body is considered separate from the self and its life context. An attempt to transcend viewing persons in dualistic terms is posed by phenomenologists who focus not on "the body" as such but on what it means to be "embodied." In this paper, we review the relevance of the phenomenology of the body for health care and report the results of comparing Sally Gadow's phenomenological insights about body-self unity with a qualitative analysis of patients' accounts of satisfaction with the outcome of hand surgery. We illustrate the ways in which our findings were and were not congruent with Gadow's conceptualization of embodiment and highlight aspects that are ambiguous. We conclude that the body-self dialectical relationship should be recast as a body-self-society trialectic and discuss the implications of this new conceptualization for clinical practices.     

Age-Related Changes in Smoothness of Gait of Healthy Children and Early Adolescents

Abstract

In this study, we acquired and processed trunk accelerations during level walking in 85 children aged 8-13?years to calculate spatio-temporal parameters and Harmonic Ratio (HR), which is a metrics representative of gait smoothness and step-to-step symmetry. The results show that while spatio-temporal parameters remain unchanged once normalized considering individuals’ anthropometry, significantly higher values of HR for both the antero-posterior and vertical directions were found in participants aged 12–13 with respect to those of 8–9. This indicates an improvement of gait symmetry, which suggests that the gait maturation process is still ongoing for the age ranges tested here.     

Absence of exposure time influence on lateralized face recognition and object naming latency tasks

J. Sergent (1982, Perception & Psychophysics, 31, 451-461; 1983, Psychological Bulletin, 93, 481-512) postulates that the left cerebral hemisphere preferentially extracts higher spatial frequency information, while the right hemisphere preferentially extracts lower frequency spatial information, from the visual scene. According to this view, shorter exposure times favor better right than left hemisphere performance, while longer exposure times favor better left than right hemisphere performance on tachistoscopic laterality tasks. We studied the effects of a threefold variation (40 msec versus 120 msec) in exposure duration, with constant 3-mL luminance, on face recognition and on object naming latency task performances. These are the same stimulus parameters employed by J. Sergent (1983, Psychological Bulletin, 93, 481-512) to demonstrate exposure duration effects in a task requiring the judgment of the sex of models from face photographs. We found the expected LVF superiority on the face recognition task and RVF superiority on the object naming task. There was, however, no influence of exposure duration on the performances. It is concluded that these tasks, which tap established lateralized processing asymmetries, are quite robust in their resistance to exposure time influence.     

Children's reading of words, pseudohomophones, and other nonwords

In Experiment 1 children aged 8-9 and 9-10 years were tested for neighbourhood and pseudohomophone effects in nonword reading. Neighbourhood effects ( N effects) were robust irrespective of group or type of nonword. Pseudohomophones were read more accurately than other nonwords but this finding was robust only for the younger 8-9-year-olds. High-frequency words were read more accurately than low-frequency words, but the reverse applied to pseudohomophones based on high- and low-frequency words, although this was not robust. Error rates for the 9-10-year-olds in Experiment 1 were low, and so it was difficult to interpret the lack of a pseudohomophone advantage for reading nonwords in this age group. Experiment 2 was therefore carried out, which consisted of a replication of the first study with a further group of 9- 10-year-olds, but pronunciation latencies were measured, as well as accuracy. All the effects obtained in Experiment 1 were replicated but, in addition, an advantage for pseudohomophones in terms of pronunciation latencies was observed. The implications for accounts of reading development are discussed.     

Do Abrupt-onset Peripheral Cues Attract Attention Automatically?

The proportion of peripheral cues that predicted at which of two locations a discrimination target would occur was manipulated in three experiments. Near cues occurred adjacent to the target and far cues occurred adjacent to the other location. In Experiment 1, near and far cues were presented in separate blocks so each predicted target location. Both types of cue produced benefit relative to a neutral baseline. In Experiment 2 expectancy for near versus far cues was manipulated. In one group, 80% of the peripheral cues were near; in another, only 20% were near; in a third, near and far cues occurred randomly. Near cues always produced benefit. Far cues produced benefit when they were expected, had no effect in the random group, and sometimes produced cost when they were unexpected. Experiment 3 repeated the near-expected and far-expected conditions, but target duration was shortened to 50 msec. A similar pattern emerged, except that near cues produced less benefit at longer SOAs when they were unexpected. The data suggest that peripheral, abrupt-onset cues may produce benefit via an automatic process, but that such a process is more like location priming than the capture of attention. Expectancy determines whether and where attentional resources will be allocated in response to the cue.     

FROM PRIMARY MATERNAL PREOCCUPATION TO DEAD MOTHER*

Ferenczi (1929) writes about the unwelcome child who is not ushered into this world with care and grows up in the grip of the death instinct, with a depressive streak and a weakness in the capacity for life. Andre Green’s (1986) concept of the dead mother describes a similar phenomenon, by which the image of a loving mother is transformed into an inanimate, dead parent. The absent mother becomes the negative, which will then take up a central position in the child’s psyche. Winnicott (1956) describes a different maternal participation, and proposes that towards the end of her pregnancy the ordinary devoted mother develops a psychological condition which he calls primary maternal preoccupation, the main feature of which is the mother’s heightened attunement to her baby at the expense of all else. I suggest that there is a potent and clinically relevant connection among these concepts: a depressed or damaged mother can still provide temporary devotion before reverting back to a state of depressive absence and that, conversely, even the devoted mother will eventually recover from the state of primary maternal preoccupation and begin to tend to other matters, and the mother’s reclaiming herself can be traumatic for the child even under the best of circumstances. The connection among these concepts is illustrated with clinical material, including transference and countertransference implications, from the treatment of a young woman who grew up as an unwelcome child.     

2D or not 2D? An fMRI study of how dogs visually process objects

Animal Cognition - Given humans’ habitual use of screens, they rarely consider potential differences when viewing two-dimensional (2D) stimuli and real-world versions of dimensional stimuli....