Temporal lobe lability in the highly transliminal mind

Transliminality is “a hypothesized tendency for psychological material to cross thresholds into or out of consciousness,” which has been proposed to derive from hyperconnectivity between temporal-limbic structures and sensory association cortices. Accordingly, it might be expected that transliminality would positively correlate with temporal lobe lability. To test this hypothesis, 135 undergraduate psychology students at an Australian and a British university completed the Revised Transliminality Scale (Lange et al., 2000) and the Personal Philosophy Inventory (Persinger, 1984a), a validated measure of temporal lobe lability. As predicted, scores on transliminality showed a strong association with the general temporal lobe scale (r=0.72), as well as moderate correlations with a number of other scalar variables and individual items. The findings are consistent with the idea that transliminality is related to more ungated processing related to temporal lobe functioning, and furthermore that temporal lobe phenomenology promotes transliminal experiences with mystical or religious overtones.     

“Making things better”: Personal construct counselling for young children

A personal construct counselling approach that we are using with young children is presented here, an approach based on the construct of “wellness”, a medium to promote the well-being of troubled children and their families. The case study we share with you shows a counselling intervention based on play, with experiments drawn from self-related construct systems of “making things better” rather than construct systems of “fixing things up”. We present a case study of a young girl grieving over the death of her father. Emphasis is placed on the relationship of trust between the child and the counsellor, to encourage experimentation with relationship experiences to help the child to reconstrue events outside the counselling context. Working hypotheses drawn from cognitive and emotional developmental research into young children are provided, and the subsequent investigations which guide our intervention. Suggestions for process and outcome research in this area are finally made.     

Career self-management: Its nature, causes and consequences

In a recent special issue [Journal of Vocational Behavior 59 (2001) 284], scholars noted that the field of vocational psychology needs a better understanding of career self-management. This article proposes a conceptual framework of career self-management, based on Crites’ [Vocational Psychology, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1969] model of vocational adjustment. It argues that people use three types of career self-managing behavior (positioning, influence, and boundary management) as adaptive responses to career development tasks. These behaviors are used to respond to or eliminate thwarting conditions or career barriers, and thereby lead to vocational adjustment. Suggested determinants of this behavior are self-efficacy, desire for control, and career anchors. Career self-management can enhance perceptions of control over the career, leading to career satisfaction, but it may also be associated with negative outcomes and maladjustment. The framework is suggested to apply both to bounded ‘organizational’ careers and to more flexible, improvised careers. The article concludes by considering the implications for research and practice.     

The effects of personal and collective mortality salience on individualism: Comparing Australians and Japanese with higher and lower self-esteem

The cross-cultural generality of terror management theory was examined in Australia and Japan. Based on previous research suggesting that individualism is stronger in Australia than in Japan, mortality salience was predicted to enhance individualism in Australia, but to reduce it in Japan. The results supported this prediction. Consistent with the theory, the cultural pattern of worldview defense was found only among Australians and Japanese with low self-esteem. We also found preliminary evidence that collective mortality (death of one’s in-group) has a greater impact than personal mortality (personal death) in Japan. Although the cultural worldview and self-esteem may serve terror management functions in both cultures, there may be differences between cultures in the type of mortality that produces the greatest levels of anxiety and the manner in which a given worldview is used to cope with anxiety about mortality.     

Social Justice and Race in the United States: Key Issues and Challenges for Couple and Family Therapy

Social justice tends to be narrowly defined as equality without due recognition of human dignity and respect for those whose daily lives continue to be adversely impacted by race. This article seeks to explore key issues and challenges at the intersection of social justice and race for couple and family therapy. These include: (a) defining social justice; (b) diversity and inclusion; (c) power and privilege; (d) witness; and (e) personal responsibility.     

Recherche en santé et protection des données personnelles à l’heure du Règlement général relatif à la protection des données

France has a very rich legal framework, which defines the conditions of access and use of health data for scientific research purposes and ensures their protection. Currently, this legal framework is undergoing revision. The European regulation of April 27th 2016 on protection of natural persons in relation to the processing of personal data came into effect in EU member states since 25th May 2018 and substitute a rationale of administrative process for a rationale that empowers the researchers to document and prove compliance with the regulation (“accountability”). This regulation must be coordinated with the other regulation applicable to research in UE and with national law.     

A novel machine learning approach for early detection of hepatocellular carcinoma patients

Liver cancer is quite common type of cancer among individuals worldwide. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the malignancy of liver cancer. It has high impact on individual’s life and investigating it early can decline the number of annual deaths. This study proposes a new machine learning approach to detect HCC using 165 patients. Ten well-known machine learning algorithms are employed. In the preprocessing step, the normalization approach is used. The genetic algorithm coupled with stratified 5-fold cross-validation method is applied twice, first for parameter optimization and then for feature selection. In this work, support vector machine (SVM) (type C-SVC) with new 2level genetic optimizer (genetic training) and feature selection yielded the highest accuracy and F₁-Score of 0.8849 and 0.8762 respectively. Our proposed model can be used to test the performance with huge database and aid the clinicians.     

Project systems of procrastinators: a personal project-analytic and action control perspective

The purpose of this research was to explore the Personal Project Systems (e.g., Little, 1983) of state-oriented and action-oriented individuals. Eighty-four female and 57 male undergraduates enrolled in an introductory psychology class completed Little’s Personal Projects Analysis (e.g., 1983) and Kuhl’s Action Control Scale (Kuhl, 1994). The results from the present study revealed that the project systems of state-oriented individuals are higher in procrastination, frustration, boredom, uncertainty, and guilt, and lower in absorption, control, outcome, progress and self-identity. These findings are discussed in terms of previous research in the area of procrastination, project-analytic theory (e.g., Little, 1983) and Kuhl’s theory of action (e.g., Kuhl, 1994).     

Duplicate publication and ‘paper inflation’ in the fractals literature

The similarity of documents in a large database of published Fractals articles was examined for redundancy. Three different text matching techniques were used on published Abstracts to identify redundancy candidates, and predictions were verified by reading full text versions of the redundancy candidate articles. A small fraction of the total articles in the database was judged to be redundant. This was viewed as a lower limit, because it excluded cases where the concepts remained the same, but the text was altered substantially. Far more pervasive than redundant publications were publications that did not violate the letter of redundancy but rather violated the spirit of redundancy. There appeared to be widespread publication maximization strategies. Studies that resulted in one comprehensive paper decades ago now result in multiple papers that focus on one major problem, but are differentiated by parameter ranges, or other stratifying variables. This ‘paper inflation’ is due in large part to the increasing use of metrics (publications, patents, citations, etc) to evaluate research performance, and the researchers’ motivation to maximize the metrics. The views in this paper are solely those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of the Navy or any of its components, UNAM, University of Virginia or University of Karlsruhe.     

Personal standards and evaluative concerns dimensions of "clinical" perfectionism: a reply to Shafran et al. (2002, 2003) and Hewitt et al. (2003)

Shafran, Cooper, and Fairburn (2002, 2003) provided a cognitive-behavioral analysis of "clinical" perfectionism, a construct they considered to involve both the determined pursuit of self-imposed standards and extremely vulnerable self-evaluation. They argued against a multidimensional perspective to studying perfectionism. We respond to Shafran et al. (2002, 2003) and Hewitt, Flett, Besser, Sherry, and McGee's (2003) reply to Shafran et al. (2002) by considering the theoretical, empirical, and clinical implications of findings identifying two higher-order dimensions of perfectionism reflecting personal standards (PS) and self-critical evaluative concerns. Analyses of data from two diverse study groups, a college student sample (N = 527) and a clinical sample of patients with binge eating disorder (N = 236), revealed that self-criticism accounts for the relation between perfectionism measures and depressive, anxious, and eating disorder symptoms. We conclude that possessing high PS is not by itself maladaptive. Rather, self-critical evaluative tendencies are more relevant than PS to the critical processes Shafran et al. (2002) suggested contribute to the maintenance of clinical perfectionism.