Creating Comprehensive and Collaborative Systems

To improve outcomes for children and youth with serious emotional disturbance and their families, we need to create comprehensive and collaborative systems to promote systems change resulting in the development of coherent services built around their individual needs. These services should be family-centered, community-based, and appropriately funded. Unfortunately, barriers to understanding and operationalizing this level of collaboration persist, which challenges the aims of parents, practitioners, policy makers, and others to provide efficient and effective services to these students. I explore the seventh strategic target of the National Agenda for Achieving Better Results for Children and Youth with Serious Emotional Disturbance; provide examples of collaboration that relate to the National Agenda's other six strategic targets; and briefly discuss the present opportunities for and challenges to collaboration.     

在综合基础上创新——鼠伤寒菌pla基因及其功能研究的思考

鼠伤寒菌pla基因及功能的研究从课题确立到取得结果整个过程,充分展现了综合研究方法在现代科学研究中的重要作用;在综合基础上的创新是科学研究成功的中心环节。     

The Ministry of the Church to People with Disability

Jesus’ ministry on earth is meant to be a model of the ministry of the church. It affected all types of people regardless of their socio‐economic and religious status. Jesus regarded all to be made in the image of God and did everything possible to minister to everyone. He particularly went out of his way to reach those whom society marginalized, neglected, rejected, and deemed worthless. This study aims at generally critically evaluating the ministry of the church today. It specifically attempts to examine the ministry of the church to people with disabilities. While the study largely depends on existing literature, it also refers to observation of the status of people with disabilities in the church today, which on its own may not provide adequate information for solid, conclusive findings. In the church’s ministry to people with disabilities, dealing with barriers to their inclusion is core. The article not only examines the challenges faced by the church in addressing issues of inclusion, but identifies specific areas of improvement in the status of people with disabilities.     

Clinical interpretation: The hermeneutics of medicine

I argue that clinical medicine can best be understood not as a purified science but as a hermeneutical enterprise: that is, as involved with the interpretation of texts. The literary critic reading a novel, the judge asked to apply a law, must arrive at a coherent reading of their respective texts. Similarly, the physician interprets the text of the ill person: clinical signs and symptoms are read to ferret out their meaning, the underlying disease. However, I suggest that the hermeneutics of medicine is rendered uniquely complex by its wide variety of textual forms. I discuss four in turn: the experiential text of illness as lived out by the patient; the narrative text constituted during history-taking; the physical text of the patient's body as objectively examined; the instrumental text constructed by diagnostic technologies. I further suggest that certain flaws in modern medicine arise from its refusal of a hermeneutic self-understanding. In seeking to escape all interpretive subjectivity, medicine has threatened to expunge its primary subject — the living, experiencing patient.     

Proverb interpretation changes in aging

Recent investigations have emphasized the involvement of fronto-subcortical networks to proverb comprehension. Although the prefrontal cortex is thought to be affected by normal aging, relatively little work has been carried out to investigate potential effects of aging on proverb comprehension. In the present investigation participants in three age groups were assessed on a proverb comprehension task and a range of executive function tasks. The older group showed impairment in selecting correct interpretations from alternatives. They also showed executive function deficits, as reflected by reduced working memory and deficient set shifting and inhibition abilities. The findings of the present investigation showed proverb comprehension deficits in normal aging which appeared to be related to reduced executive skills.     

Strategic Maneuvering with the Intention of the Legislator in the Justification of Judicial Decisions

The author gives an analysis of the strategic manoeuvring in the justification of legal decisions from a pragma-dialectical perspective by showing how a judge tries to reconcile dialectical and rhetorical aims. On the basis of an analysis and evaluation of the argumentation given by the US Supreme Court in the famous Holy Trinity case, it is shown how in a case in which the judge wants to make an exception to a legal rule for the concrete case tries to meet the dialectical reasonableness norm by seeing to it that his standpoint is sufficiently defended according to the requirements of the burden of proof of a judge in a rational critical discussion and how he tries at the same time to be rhetorically convincing for the legal audience by presenting the decision as a choice that is in line with the argumentation schemes and starting points that can be considered as accepted by the legal community in the US and by the US community as a whole.

Group-as-a-whole interpretations in short-term group psychotherapy

The usefulness of therapists making group-as-a-whole interpretations in long-term group therapy was actively debated in the 1960s and 1970s. Advantages and disadvantages were delineated. An often-cited survey study of therapy groups that had emphasized group-as-a-whole interpretations found that many patients were dissatisfied with the therapist’s technique and the outcome of therapy. Although group-as-a-whole concepts subsequently became a part of the theory of many orientations of group therapy, there has appeared to be reluctance among many therapists to make group-as-a-whole interpretations, especially in short-term group therapies. Contrary to this tendency, an argument is made and a case illustration presented, which advocate the use of group-as-a-whole interpretations in short-term group therapies.     

Jumping to interpretations: social anxiety disorder and the identification of emotional facial expressions

A small body of research suggests that socially anxious individuals show biases in interpreting the facial expressions of others. The current study included a clinically anxious sample in a speeded emotional card-sorting task in two conditions (baseline and threat) to investigate several hypothesized biases in interpretation. Following the threat manipulation, participants with generalized social anxiety disorders (GSADs) sorted angry cards with greater accuracy, but also evidenced a greater rate of neutral cards misclassified as angry, as compared to nonanxious controls. The controls showed the opposite pattern, sorting neutral cards with greater accuracy but also misclassifying a greater proportion of angry cards as neutral, as compared to GSADs. These effects were accounted for primarily by low-intensity angry cards. Results are consistent with previous studies showing a negative interpretive bias, and can be applied to the improvement of clinical interventions.     

Semantic re-interpretation and garden path recovery

Participant's eye-movements were recorded while they read locally ambiguous sentences. Evidence for processing difficulty was found when the interpretation of the initially preferred misanalysis clashed with that of the globally correct analysis, demonstrating the persistence of the earlier interpretation. Processing difficulty associated with the syntactic reanalysis was largely localised to the disambiguating region, with difficulty due to semantic persistence occurring later. The results show that semantic persistence is not limited to extreme cases of parse failure, and can occur even when reanalysis is relatively straightforward.