A Developmental Model For Counseling Groups

Students taking a course in Group Guidance participated in group counseling as an adjunct experience to the course. The counseling sessions were tape recorded and later analyzed according to an affect-topic classification. This paper presents a theoretical discussion of the development of one of the counseling groups, and the results of the analysis of the recorded group sessions.     

Intrusive and avoidant ideation among females pursuing infertility treatment

Abstract

It was shown that infertility and its treatment constitute a stressful experience for women, reflected particularly in disturbing intrusive ideation about the stress source. Infertility patients reported levels of intrusive ideation significantly higher than routine gynecologic patients and not significantly different from levels of psychiatric outpatients being treated for stress reactions to traumatic events. Intrusive ideation also predicted the degree of self-reported infertility-specific distress and dysfunction, further clarifying the key role of such ideation in the experience. Finally, as hypothesized, the frustration level of the treatment experience (as indexed by the number of infertility treatment methods attempted) predicted avoidant ideation. Implications for managing the psychological distress and disruption associated with the infertility treatment experience were discussed.     

Risky Decision Making in Substance Dependent Adolescents with a Disruptive Behavior Disorder

Of all psychiatric disorders, the disruptive behavior disorders (DBDs) are the most likely to predispose to substance dependence (SD). One possible underlying mechanism for this increased vulnerability is risky decision making. The aim of this study was to examine decision making in DBD adolescents with and without SD. Twenty-five DBD adolescents (19 males) with SD (DBD+SD), 28 DBD adolescents (23 males) without SD (DBD-SD) and 99 healthy controls (72 males) were included in the study. DBD adolescents with co-morbid attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were excluded. Risky decision making was investigated by assessing the number of disadvantageous choices in the Iowa gambling task. DBD+SD made significantly more risky choices than healthy controls and DBD-SD. Healthy controls and DBD-SD did not differ on risky decision making. These results suggest that risky decision making is a vulnerability factor for the development of SD in a subgroup of adolescents with DBD without ADHD.     

Bypassing shame and conversion disorder

We report a case of conversion disorder (partial aphonia) that was successfully treated with speech therapy. During the one year duration of this illness, the patient regained transiently (minutes) her normal speech on a few occasions, independently of concomitant pharmacological interventions. One year after recovery she developed aphonia for the second time, which responded again to speech therapy, although the response rate was slower. Several mechanisms of conversion disorder are reviewed as specifically applied to this case. The possible role of pertinent shame mechanisms in the conversion pathology is discussed.     

Human frontal midline theta and its synchronization to gamma during a verbal delayed match to sample task

The involvement of oscillatory activity, especially at theta and gamma frequency, in human working memory has been reported frequently. A salient pattern during working memory is electroencephalographic frontal midline theta activity which has been suggested to reflect monitoring functions in order to deal with a task. In general, theta activity has been credited with integrative functions of distributed activity. In the present study, we focused on electroencephalographic power analyses and cross-frequency phase synchronization in order to test whether frontal midline theta activity is linked to more locally generated gamma oscillations during the performance of a verbal delayed match to sample task. The task consisted of two different conditions where subjects either had to reorganize three consonant letters in alphabetical order (manipulation condition) or where they merely had to retain the three consonant letters (retention condition). Results revealed higher frontal midline theta activity for the manipulation of maintained stimulus material compared to pure retention of stimulus material. Interestingly, power differences between conditions were most pronounced during the second half of the delay period. Cross-frequency phase synchronization between frontal midline theta activity and distributed gamma activity, on the other hand, was predominant during the first half of the delay period and was stronger for manipulation compared to retention. We suggest that coupling of frontal midline theta to gamma activity reflects monitoring functions on the temporal segregation of memory items, whereas higher frontal midline theta power in the second half of the delay period might be associated with rehearsal processes. Rehearsal processes in the manipulation condition are likely more pronounced, because rehearsal of a new letter string in a limited time window requires higher mental effort compared to pure retention where rehearsal processes may already start at the beginning of the delay period.     

Promise is debt, threat another matter: the effect of credibility on the interpretation of conditional promises and threats.

Evidence from reasoning tasks shows that promises and threats both tend to receive biconditional interpretations. They also both display high speaker control. On the face of it, the only difference seems to be the positive or negative signing of the consequent. In a promise, the speaker tries to persuade the hearer to do something by holding out the prospect of a particular reward; in a threat, the speaker tries to refrain the hearer from doing something by holding out the prospect of a particular punishment. This paper investigates the respects in which conditional promises and threats differ further by means of an inference task. The credibility of the consequent was manipulated in order to examine whether the acceptability ratings of inferences based on promises and on threats would be equally affected. The results of the inference task and an analysis of the reasons people give for their answers suggest that the credibility of promises is less affected by the use of excessive consequents than the credibility of threats. In other words, promise remains debt, whereas threat is another matter.     

The Fading Boundaries of Analysis and Speculation in the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi: An Argument Recognising Advaita as a Philosophy in Praxis

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - The recent scholarship on Advaita testifies that the epistemology of Advaita Vedānta is of a special sort that warrants a philosophical...     

Anti-intuitionism and paraconsistency

This paper aims to help to elucidate some questions on the duality between the intuitionistic and the paraconsistent paradigms of thought, proposing some new classes of anti-intuitionistic propositional logics and investigating their relationships with the original intuitionistic logics. It is shown here that anti-intuitionistic logics are paraconsistent, and in particular we develop a first anti-intuitionistic hierarchy starting with Johansson's dual calculus and ending up with Gödel's three-valued dual calculus, showing that no calculus of this hierarchy allows the introduction of an internal implication symbol. Comparing these anti-intuitionistic logics with well-known paraconsistent calculi, we prove that they do not coincide with any of these. On the other hand, by dualizing the hierarchy of the paracomplete (or maximal weakly intuitionistic) many-valued logics (Iⁿ)_nω we show that the anti-intuitionistic hierarchy (I^n*)_nω obtained from (Iⁿ)_nω does coincide with the hierarchy of the many-valued paraconsistent logics (Pⁿ)_nω. Fundamental properties of our method are investigated, and we also discuss some questions on the duality between the intuitionistic and the paraconsistent paradigms, including the problem of self-duality. We argue that questions of duality quite naturally require refutative systems (which we call elenctic systems) as well as the usual demonstrative systems (which we call deictic systems), and multiple-conclusion logics are used as an appropriate environment to deal with them.