To Achieve Sustainability

Having passed the level of sustainability, we now face a depleted planet and the possible extinction of our species. With hunter-gatherer brains we have created a civilization we cannot handle. We must understand what's gone wrong, what's needed for sustainability, and the difficulties we will face achieving it. We need a holistic view of the world and a better understanding of the biosphere and ourselves. We must reorient our economy away from perpetual growth toward meeting needs of humanity within the limitations of the planet. Our conscious mind must take control over the unconscious, and we must become more than what we now are.     

How to be a good professional: existentialist continuing professional development (CPD)

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on the construct and practice of continuing professional development (CPD) and its significance for the professional careers workforce. The article presents the idea of the CPD triad and considers how professional bodies, employers and individuals can each benefit from a practitioner's ongoing commitment to continuing professional development. The tension between the practitioner's quest for lifelong learning is set against professional body demands, leading to the conclusion that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Consideration is given to propositional, practical and procedural knowledge, and to overall competence. The article explores an existentialist approach to professional learning, and concludes that, along with personal agency, this could usefully be adopted by career practitioners to weather turbulent times.     

EMBODIED COGNITION,CHARACTER FORMATION,AND VIRTUE

The theory of embodied cognition makes the claim that our cognitive processes are, at their core, sensorimotor, situated, and action‐relevant. Our mental system is built primarily to control action, and so mind is formed by the nature of the body and its interactions with the world. In this paper we will explore the nature of virtue and its formation from the perspective of embodied cognition. We specifically describe exemplars of the virtue of compassion (caregivers of individuals with developmental disabilities in L'Arche communities), speculating as to what might have been the formative influences in their character development. Embodied formation is understood in the context of the openness of human cortical systems to formation by social interactions, and in terms of the openness to reorganization and change of complex dynamical systems. Specific formative influences explored include interpersonal imitation, social attachment, language, and story.     

The Study of Socioethical Issues in Systems Biology

Systems biology is the rapidly growing and heavily funded successor science to genomics. Its mission is to integrate extensive bodies of molecular data into a detailed mathematical understanding of all life processes, with an ultimate view to their prediction and control. Despite its high profile and widespread practice, there has so far been almost no bioethical attention paid to systems biology and its potential social consequences. We outline some of systems biology's most important socioethical issues by contrasting the concept of systems as dynamic processes against the common static interpretation of genomes. New issues arise around systems biology's capacities for in silico testing, changing cultural understandings of life, synthetic biology, and commercialization. We advocate an interdisciplinary and interactive approach that integrates social and philosophical analysis and engages closely with the science. Overall, we argue that systems biology socioethics could stimulate new ways of thinking about socioethical studies of life sciences.     

The Journal of Couples Therapy Entelechy Institute CEU Quiz

SUMMARY

The majority of gay male couples are not monogamous. Relationship clinicians can help gay male couples to have a healthy sexually open relationship by working from a family systems perspective. This approach requires the therapist to have an understanding of family systems theory, the Enneagram (a personality topology), gay male sexual culture, as well as being clear of negative countertransference. Assessment of functionality of sexually open gay male relationships is described.     

How Managed Care Can Help Couples Cope

ABSTRACT

This article traces how managed care became a quick fix to curb out-of-control healthcare costs rather than a real effective approach to managing care. To date, the impact has been not only a negative experience, but impediment to treating couples facing relationship and related problems. The author is optimistic about how managed care will evolve to recognize the importance of couples and family treatment as we enter the future with integrated systems of healthcare. ? The future will also require significant shifts in the thinking and practice patterns of providers and an emphasis on quality and outcomes.     

Development of Bimanual Skill: The Search for Stable Patterns of Coordination

In 2 experiments, dynamic systems theory predictions concerning intrinsic dynamics and variability of bimanual coordination were examined at different developmental stages. In Experiment 1, ten 4-, 6-, 7-, 8-, and 10-year-old children and adults performed unimanual dominant, unimanual nondominant, and bimanual continuous circle drawing. All tasks were performed at the participants' preferred rate, size, and mode of coordination. The 4-, 6-, and 7-year-old children produced larger circles with longer durations than those of the 8- and 10-year-olds and the adults. That finding demonstrates that younger children display different intrinsic dynamics than older children and adults. The 4-, 6-, and 7-year-old children also displayed more variability in bimanual coordination (more time in less stable patterns of coordination, higher standard deviation in relative phase) and produced more transitions between coordination patterns than the 8- and 10-year-olds and the adults. In Experiment 2, the same participants performed bimanual circles at increasing rates. Consistent with predictions of the HKB model (H. Haken, J. A. S. Kelso, & H. Bunz, 1985), the number of transitions decreased as speed increased. Some support was found for the notion that age-related variables of attention and rate contribute to the increased variability in young children's bimanual coordination.     

Opportunities and Issues in Modeling Intensive Longitudinal Data: Learning from the COGITO Project

Abstract

Technological developments increasingly permit the collection of longitudinal data sets in which the data structure contains a large number of participants N and a large number of measurement occasions T. Promising new dynamical systems approaches to the analysis of large N, large T data sets have been proposed that utilize both between-subjects and within-subjects information. The COGITO project, begun over a decade ago, is an early large N?=?204, large T?=?100 study that collected high quality cognitive and psychosocial data. In this introduction, I describe the COGITO project and conceptual and statistical issues that arise in the analysis of large N, large T data sets. I provide a brief overview of the five papers in the special section which include conceptual pieces, a didactic presentation of a dynamic structural equation approach, and papers reporting new statistical analyses of the COGITO data set to answer substantive questions. Although many challenges remain, these new approaches offer the promise of improving scientific inquiry in the behavioral sciences.     

Integrating Spirituality and Domestic Violence Treatment

Summary

This article provides a brief reflection on how the Change of Seasons treatment model developed and the reasons for its success with Aboriginal men. Parallels between Aboriginal perspectives, or worldviews, and Ken Wilber's transpersonal psychology, Rupert Sheldrake's fields theory, and Peter Senge's systems thinking are also discussed. Practical rituals and ceremonies that have been successfully integrated into psychoeducational group counselling as practiced in the Change of Seasons model are explained. These musings are included to initiate further dialogue on holistic approaches to counselling and other community initiatives.     

A Trauma-Informed Call to Action: Culturally Informed,Multi-Disciplinary Theoretical,and Applied Approaches to Prevention and Healing,Part II

The prevalence of trauma and its negative impact on humankind have created a burgeoning awareness of the need for systems that are trauma-informed across the lifespan. A collaborative project with the National Partnership to End Interpersonal Violence (NPEIV) sought out research as a call-to-action to mitigate the impact of trauma. The following is Part II of an introduction to a special double-issue focused on theoretical and applied approaches to using trauma-informed care in multi-disciplinary, mental and physical health, criminal justice, school-based, and community settings. Consideration is given to essential issues such as resilience, self-care, and intersectional cultural awareness. Introspective exploration of biases was encouraged to address barriers to implementing trauma-informed care.