“‘Ninja’ levels of focus”: Therapeutic holding environments and the affective atmospheres of telepsychology during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 crisis in Australia led to a rapid increase in the use of telehealth services to offer psychological therapy (often referred to as ‘telepsychology’). In this article, we discuss the intersection of the social psychology concepts of therapeutic holding spaces and containment with more-than-human theory as it relates to Australia's mental health sector during the COVID-19 crisis. Drawing on our recent qualitative survey research into Australian psychologists' use of telepsychology during the crisis, we consider the ways that they worked to build and maintain therapeutic holding spaces and alliances over teleconferencing platforms during this extraordinary time of social crisis and isolation. We explore and contextualise three important findings from our study: 1) the limited viewing area of a flat screen makes it difficult for therapists to read and respond to their client's body language and requires different forms of returned bodily gestures in order to show empathy; 2) most respondents implemented different affective and relational strategies online to ensure they were not missing important non-verbal cues from their clients; and 3) the traditionally ‘safe’ therapeutic holding space created in face-to-face therapy can be easily subverted by client-end interruptions, and concerns around safety or personal privacy in the client's home environment. In bringing these issues to the fore, we highlight the online therapeutic holding space as a temporally and socially situated human-technological assemblage in which a series of affective, spatial, relational and sense-making agencies coverage, opening or closing off capacities for therapists and their clients.     

Cognition in moral space: A minimal model

We describe moral cognition as a process occurring in a distinctive cognitive space, wherein moral relationships are defined along several morally relevant dimensions. After identifying candidate dimensions, we show how moral judgments can emerge in this space directly from object perception, without any appeal to moral rules or abstract values. Our reductive “minimal model” (Batterman & Rice, 2014) elaborates Beal’s (2020) claim that moral cognition is determined, at the most basic level, by “ontological frames” defining subjects, objects, and the proper relation between them. We expand this claim into a set of formal hypotheses that predict moral judgments based on how objects are “framed” in the relevant dimensions of “moral space.”     

感知运动经验在心理时间线形成中的作用—来自盲生的证据

本研究考察视觉和读写习惯有关的感知运动经验是如何影响心理时间形成的。实验1和实验2分别采用一天内和一生中的词语或短句,以小学三年级的普生和盲生为被试,结果发现不论是短的还是长的时间,普生对早的刺激按左键,晚的刺激按右键反应更快,而盲生未出现早左晚右的心理时间线。实验3和实验4分别以短时间和长时间范围的时间词为材料,以初一盲生和普生为被试,结果发现普生和盲生都是对过去的时间按左键,未来的时间按右键反应快;而且在长的时间范围内,盲生的反应时长于普生。结果表明视觉是心理时间线的基础,阅读经验在盲生心理时间线的形成中起着关键作用。     

Revisiting the crossroads: can Oedipus take a gay turn in the 21st C?

Is our foundational story of sexual identity still relevant and valid for today, or is it wrong? Oedipus has been used in the past as a cautionary tale for the consequences of transgressive sexuality, as well as an exemplar of hetero-normative development. Perhaps most influentially he has been used recently to illustrate a mechanism that underpins the concept of a pathological organization of personality, a perverse turning of a blind eye to the truth. But is this reading mistaken? In this article I return to the crossroads with Oedipus to try to give him back – for the first time – his sexual identity. By offering a re-reading of the myth in light of how we understand the impact of internalized stigma on the formation of sexual identity today I hope to show that our psychoanalytic imagination can use the Oedipus myth to encompass a range of different developmental possibilities.     

Minding gaps on the skin: Opposite bisection biases on forehead and back of one’s head

Humans perceive the world from an egocentric perspective, while being able to mentally take a third person’s perspective. Graphesthesia tasks revealed that letters written on the back of one’s own head are consistently perceived from an embodied perspective, while the perspective on one’s front is less consistent and often disembodied. We developed a cutaneous gap bisection task as a more discrete measure of the perspective on the body. In analogy to a visual pseudoneglect, we expected bisections to deviate toward the left ear when perceived from an embodied perspective. While this hypothesis was confirmed for gap bisections on the back, the results on the front suggest overall a disembodied perspective. Contrary to our expectation, this pattern was not predicted by the spontaneous perspective participants took in a graphesthesia task, indicating different cognitive mechanisms. We discuss these findings in the frame of the current literature on spatial attention and perspective taking.     

Auditory spatial concepts in blind football experts

ObjectivesWe compared the spatial concepts given to sounds' directions by blind football players with both blind non-athletes and sighted individuals.MethodParticipants verbally described the directions of sounds around them by using predefined spatial concept labels, under two blocked conditions: 1) facing front, 2) pointing with the hand towards the stimulus.ResultsBlind football players categorized the directions more precisely (i.e., they used simple labels for describing the cardinal directions and combined labels for the intermediate ones) than the other groups, and their categorization was less sensitive to the response conditions than blind non-athletes. Sighted participants' categorization was similar to previous studies, in which the front and back regions were generally more precisely described than the sides, where simple labels were often used for describing directions around the absolute left and right.ConclusionsThe differences in conceptual categorization of sound directions are a) in sighted individuals, influenced by the representation of the visual space b) in blind individuals, influenced by the level of expertise in action and locomotion based on non-visual information, which can be increased by auditive stimulation provided by blind football training.     

The ethical potential of sound in public space: Migrant pan flute music and its potential to create moments of conviviality in a ‘failed’ public square

In this paper we examine the notion that music in public space could be understood in terms of ethical potential, where new sensibilities for thinking, feeling, seeing and being with others might be imagined and practiced. We do this by considering how musical performances by migrants impact on inclusive forms of place (re-)making, affective enactments of public space and emotional accounts of belonging and ‘the other’. The paper draws on an ethnographic exploration of South American pan flute musicians, performing music at Sergels torg, a central square in Stockholm, Sweden. Through fieldwork with a combination of qualitative techniques, including observation, interviews and sensory methods such as photography, video and recorded ‘sound walks’ we trace the affective aspects of encounters with busking and the impact of music on place. We highlight the ethical potential of music in the experience of urban moments and its capacity to reconfigure space. We find that encounters with sound can produce new spaces of conviviality and inclusion; it can soothe, animate and soften urban spaces. However, a positive encounter with difference through sound depends on a favourable social, physical and temporal context, and because busking serves to make marginalised voices heard (both literally and metaphorically), it can be experienced as troubling for precisely this reason. Thus, we need to take into account the full complexity of the dynamics between sound and place, in considering this relationship as a novel window to the ethical potential of the urban encounter.     

Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children's Wh-Questions

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well-known examples is medial wh-question errors in English-speaking children's wh-questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? from Thornton, 1990). The evidence for this non-target-like structure in both production and comprehension has been taken to support the existence of innate, syntactic parameters that define all possible grammatical variation, which serve as a top-down constraint guiding children's language acquisition process. The present study reports new story-based production and comprehension experiments that challenge this interpretation. While we replicated previous observations of medial wh-question errors in children's sentence production (Experiment 1), we saw a reduction in evidence indicating that English-speaking children assign interpretations that conform to the medial wh-question pattern (Experiment 2). Crucially, we found no correlation between production and comprehension errors (Experiment 3). We suggest that these errors are the result of children's immature sentence production mechanisms rather than immature grammatical knowledge.     

Priestley Duality for Quasi-Stone Algebras

In this paper we describe the Priestley space of a quasi-Stone algebra and use it to show that the class of finite quasi-Stone algebras has the amalgamation property. We also describe the Priestley space of the free quasi-Stone algebra over a finite set. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Psychodynamic Assumptions of the U.S. Constitution

The U.S. Constitution is a blueprint for the design of a government which reflects the consistent application of an understanding of the emotions and interests driving the political activity of individuals and groups. This understanding is articulated in the writings of key proponents of the Constitution, and clarified by its historical and philosophical context. Their theories are congruent with psychoanalytic perspectives on narcissism, leadership, group dynamics, and the role of transitional space in cultural life. The concept of interests, reformulated in psychoanalytic terms, is a useful addition to our understanding of political behavior.