Counselling the dead!

The paper discusses the author's meeting and a counselling encounter in Varanasi (formerly known as Banaras) with a former High Court Judge, who has renounced the material world, excised all his attachments, abandoned his wife, his children, his grandchildren and a luxurious and prestigious life-style, and taken on the mantle of a sanyasi in search of enlightenment and nirvana. He has left his hometown and for the past two to three years has been living on the banks of the river Ganges in Varanasi, the holiest of holy cities in India, leading the life of a mendicant, living off the charity of the hordes of pilgrims who come to Varanasi all around the year.     

Carnap’s logical empiricism,values, and American pragmatism

Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap’s mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were considered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted from value experiences. About 1930, however, values and value judgments were banished to the realm of meaningless metaphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict emotivism. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the question why Carnap abandoned his originally positive attitude concerning values. It is argued that his non-cognitivist attitude was the symptom of a deep-rooted and never properly dissolved tension between conflicting inclinations towards Neokantianism and Lebensphilosophie. In America Carnap’s non-cognitivism became a major obstacle for a closer collaboration between logical empiricists and American pragmatists. Carnap’s persisting adherence to the dualism of practical life and theoretical science was the ultimate reason why he could not accept Morris’s and Kaplan’s pragmatist theses that cognitivism might well be compatible with a logical and empiricist scientific philosophy.     

New Developments in Understanding Emotional Facial Signals in Chimpanzees

ABSTRACT— There has been little research over the past few decades focusing on similarities and differences in the form and function of emotional signals in nonhuman primates, or whether these communication systems are homologous with those of humans. This is, in part, due to the fact that detailed and objective measurement tools to answer such questions have not been systematically developed for nonhuman primate research. Despite this, emotion research in humans has benefited for over 30 years from an objective, anatomically based facial-measurement tool: the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). In collaboration with other researchers, we have now developed a similar system for chimpanzees (ChimpFACS) and, in the process, have made exciting new discoveries regarding chimpanzees' perception and categorization of emotional facial expressions and similarities in the facial anatomy of chimpanzees and humans, and we have identified homologous facial movements in the two species. Investigating similarities and differences in primate emotional communication systems is essential if we are to understand unique evolutionary specializations among different species.     

中小学生对教师的信任及问卷编制

通过查阅文献、开放式问卷调查、访谈、内容分析等方法提出了中小学生对特定教师的信任结构并编制问卷项目。以小学四年级至初中二年级学生为研究对象,对539名学生进行初步问卷调查,经探索性因素分析得到含20个项目的中小学生对教师信任问卷,然后对1012名学生进行正式调查和验证性因素分析。结果表明:中小学生对特定教师的信任是一个多维结构,包括学生对教师的教学能力、守信可靠和友善关怀三方面的判断;自编的问卷有良好的信度和效度,可作为进一步研究的工具。     

《中国泌尿外科疾病诊断和治疗指南》点评——前列腺增生症的诊断

比较中国和美国泌尿协会良性前列腺增生症诊断指南,对体格检查,超声检查,IPSS评分,残余尿,尿流率检查等项目的意义进行补充说明,指导泌尿外科医师解决在前列腺增生症的诊断过程中遇到的诸多问题,并有助于形成正确的临床思维,做出正确的诊断,同时为下一版指南的修订提供科学的依据。     

神经管缺陷的病因、预防与产前控制

神经管缺陷(NTDS)是一种常见的先天性中枢神经系统畸形,其发生率占据我国出生缺陷的前列。本文从其发病原因、产前诊断及预防措施进行系统分析,希望能找出一条降低其发生率的有效途径,从而进一步提高我国的人口素质。     

Drive for thinness, affect regulation and physical activity in eating disorders: a daily life study

Using Ecological Momentary Assessment, the within patient associations between drive for thinness, emotional states, momentary urge to be physically active and physical activity were studied in 32 inpatients with an eating disorder. Participants received an electronic device and had to indicate at nine random times a day during 1 week their momentary drive for thinness, positive and negative emotional states and their urge to be physically active and physical activity. Multilevel analyses indicated that patients with higher mean levels for urge to be physically active were characterized by lower body mass index (BMI) and chronically negative affect whereas patients with higher mean levels for physical activity were characterized by lower BMI and higher dispositions for drive for thinness. In addition, within patient relations between drive for thinness and urge to be physically active were moderated by BMI and chronically negative affect whereas within patient relations between drive for thinness and physical activity were moderated by BMI. Finally, also positive emotional states were significantly associated with physical activity within patients. By using a daily process design, characteristics of physical activity were revealed that have not been identified with assessment methods that have a lower time resolution.     

Dynamic action units slip in speech production errors

In the past, the nature of the compositional units proposed for spoken language has largely diverged from the types of control units pursued in the domains of other skilled motor tasks. A classic source of evidence as to the units structuring speech has been patterns observed in speech errors--"slips of the tongue". The present study reports, for the first time, on kinematic data from tongue and lip movements during speech errors elicited in the laboratory using a repetition task. Our data are consistent with the hypothesis that speech production results from the assembly of dynamically defined action units--gestures--in a linguistically structured environment. The experimental results support both the presence of gestural units and the dynamical properties of these units and their coordination. This study of speech articulation shows that it is possible to develop a principled account of spoken language within a more general theory of action.     

The making of an analyst: from 'ideal' to 'good-enough'

This paper addresses the issue of variances in training modalities and how this is linked to one's personal experience of training and to one's analytic lineage. The author, who bases his reflections on discussions held during the yearly directors of training meeting of the North American Jungian Societies, suggests that, while each institute aims to provide an 'ideal' training programme for its candidates, the philosophy underlying how this ideal is defined depends, in large part, on the theoretical and philosophical orientation of the founding fathers and mothers. This results in a form of analytic lineage that necessarily impacts on the form and content of the 'ideal' programme. Shadow issues related to analytic lineage in the admissions procedures, case consultation, exam committees and review committees are presented. Motivation for why we choose to train and reflections on what makes an analyst 'Jungian' are explored.     

Intrusive images in PTSD and in traumatised and non-traumatised depressed patients: a cross-sectional clinical study

Although intrusive images are a hallmark of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and also occur in depression, little is known about the differences and similarities of such images in these conditions. Our study focuses on the qualities and triggers of intrusive images and responses to them in three groups--patients with PTSD, and depressed patients with and without trauma (n=65)-to highlight the diagnostic specificity of intrusive images for PTSD and depression. We distinguished intrusive images from verbal intrusive cognitions such as rumination and intrusive (brief) lexical thoughts. Consistent with the literature, the intrusive images of PTSD patients had a more "here-and-now quality" and were perceived more visually compared to those of both depressed groups. The groups showed a good deal of similarity concerning other image qualities. Most importantly, the intrusive images in PTSD and depressed patients with and without trauma were perceived as similarly distressing. Rumination and intrusive (brief) lexical thoughts were two of the five most named triggers of intrusive images. Limitations, such as the lack of a control group, and the clinical implications of these results are discussed, demonstrating the need to help non-PTSD patients with and without trauma to deal with intrusive images.