Observing a client's grieving process: bringing logical positivism into qualitative grief counselling research

This positional paper originates from our need as researcher/practitioners to establish a meaningful epistemological framework for research into bereaved people's journey through loss and grief over time. We describe how the field of grief research has a long and established biological basis, in keeping with a positivist epistemology. However, there has been a diminution of the influence of logical positivism in twenty-first-century counselling research. We argue that in grief counselling research, naturalistic observation of the grieving process within a logical positivist paradigm, remains a valid and valuable construct. We posit an observational protocol for the grief counselling process which minimises the intrusion of research method into the therapeutic process. We offer this as a means of conducting qualitative research within a bereavement counselling service. Further, we suggest that the development of an observational protocol for a client's grieving process has potential implications for developing good practice in grief work.     

Negative hallucinations,dreams and hallucinations: The framing structure and its representation in the analytic setting

This paper explores the meaning of a patient's hallucinatory experiences in the course of a five times a week analysis. I will locate my understanding within the context of André Green's ideas on the role of the framing structure and the negative hallucination in the structuring of the mind. The understanding of the transference and countertransference was crucial in the creation of meaning and enabling the transformations that took place in the analytic process. Through a detailed analysis of a clinical example the author examines Bion's distinction between hysterical hallucinations and psychotic hallucinations and formulates her own hypothesis about the distinctions between the two. The paper suggests that whilst psychotic hallucinations express a conflict between life and death, in the hysterical hallucination it is between love and hate. The paper also contains some reflections on the dramatic nature of the analytic encounter.     

胰岛素研究的新突破

人类与糖尿病抗争的历史最早可上溯到公元前1500年前,但直到20世纪20年代胰岛素才由生理学家FredrickBanting等发现。自此,挽救了数以百万计的糖尿病患者的生命。随后,人们在研究胰岛素如何调节物质代谢时,意外发现含胰岛素的激化液(Glucose-insulin-potassium,GIK)可改善急性心脏梗死患者的症状。提示,胰岛素还具有其它多方面的生理功能。近期研究证明,胰岛素确有抗心肌坏死与凋亡、进而保护缺血再灌注心肌的作用,这再次引起了人们对胰岛素进行深入研究的兴趣。从胰岛素的发现到对其新的作用机制的认识给我们带来许多有益的启示。     

Behavior,process, and scale: Comments on Shimp (2020), “Molecular (moment-to-moment) and molar (aggregate) analyses of behavior”

If we study the behavior of organisms, we must understand the ontological status of both “organism” and “behavior.” A living organism maintains itself alive by constantly interacting with the environment, taking in energy and discarding waste. Ontologically, an organism is a process. Its interactions with the environment, which constitute its behavior, are processes also, because the parts of any process are themselves processes. Processes serve functions, and the function of a process must be part of its identity. A process, by definition, extends in time. Time is the fundamental and universal measure of behavior. All processes have the property of scale. Activities of an organism have parts that are themselves activities on a smaller time scale. Scale varies continuously, and behavior may be studied on as large or as small a time scale as seems necessary. When researchers refer to the “structure” of behavior, they refer to smaller-scale activities. Attaching a switch to a lever or key is convenient, but one should never confuse operation of a switch with a unit of behavior. Shimp's (2020) “molecular” measures are small-scale measures. The molecular view based on discrete events has outlived its usefulness and should be replaced by a multiscale molar paradigm.     

An empirical and computational investigation of perceiving and remembering event temporal relations

Events have beginnings, ends, and often overlap in time. A major question is how perceivers come to parse a stream of multimodal information into meaningful units and how different event boundaries may vary event processing. This work investigates the roles of these three types of event boundaries in constructing event temporal relations. Predictions were made based on how people would err according to the beginning state, end state, and overlap heuristic hypotheses. Participants viewed animated events that include all the logical possibilities of event temporal relations, and then made temporal relation judgments. The results showed that people make use of the overlap between events and take into account the ends and beginnings, but they weight ends more than beginnings. Neural network simulations showed a self-organized distinction when learning temporal relations between events with overlap versus those without.     

Artificial intelligence for the measurement of vocal stereotypy

Both researchers and practitioners often rely on direct observation to measure and monitor behavior. When these behaviors are too complex or numerous to be measured in vivo, relying on direct observation using human observers increases the amount of resources required to conduct research and to monitor the effects of interventions in practice. To address this issue, we conducted a proof of concept examining whether artificial intelligence could measure vocal stereotypy in individuals with autism. More specifically, we used an artificial neural network with over 1,500 minutes of audio data from 8 different individuals to train and test models to measure vocal stereotypy. Our results showed that the artificial neural network performed adequately (i.e., session-by-session correlation near or above .80 with a human observer) in measuring engagement in vocal stereotypy for 6 of 8 participants. Additional research is needed to further improve the generalizability of the approach.