Betrayal And Paranoia: The Psychotherapist's Function as an Intermediary

We present an approach to the problem of structuring a therapeutic alliance with patients presenting paranoid symptoms, using both psychoanalytical and cognitive techniques. Initially, we focused on one of the main aspects of the paranoid worldview: the fear of being betrayed and the tendency to betray. This is a defense maneuver, through which patients deny their passivity, and the impotence in the relationship with their own internal needs and with the significant people in the external world, including the therapist. In our experience to build up a working relationship, both a psychoanalytical interpretation of unconscious conflicts and the cognitive analysis of dysfunctional beliefs are needed. Often, in more serious cases, the role of nonqualified object must be accepted at the beginning, due to the patient's need to be in control of the situation. Only then can a therapeutic phase begin, in most cases, through an integrated approach that includes pharmacological, psychodynamic, and cognitive modalities.     

Embodied Knowledge and Making Sense of Prenatal Diagnosis

Open-ended, qualitative interviews with women to whom amniocentesis was offered were analyzed to understand how women made sense of these tests. We found that women, whether tested or not, negotiated with biomedical information. They transformed it through identifiable processes, then wove it with their own instincts and beliefs and with their personal experiences, thereby creating embodied knowledge on which their decisions were based. Women who were and were not tested may have differed from each other when categorized on the basis of a final, binary choice, but they were more alike than unalike in reaching this point. The apparent importance of embodied knowledge suggests the critical role of the listening activities of the genetic counselor and of awareness of the validity and importance of women's complementary ways of knowing and doing in understanding the uses and meanings of prenatal genetic testing.     

Infants’ responses to objects representing levels of word knowledge and categorical information

The effects of differing levels of word knowledge on infants’ sequential touching behaviors were investigated in two studies. In both, parent report was used to assess three levels of word knowledge: known, frontier, and unknown. In the first study, 14-month-old infants sequentially touched objects consistent with parents’ reports of their word knowledge. In the second study, 20-month-old infants sequentially touched objects by both conceptual category and reported level of word knowledge. It appears that even infants, like adults, can make distinctions among objects on the basis of their knowledge about the objects’ labels.     

When is ignorance bliss? The effects of inaccurate self-assessments of knowledge on learning and attrition

Two studies were conducted to examine the implications of inaccurate self-appraisals in online training. Self-assessment of knowledge moderated the effects of trainees’ performance on subsequent performance and attrition. Performance was highest after uniformly positive ratings (i.e., high self-assessment and high performance), followed by underestimation, overestimation, and uniformly negative ratings, respectively. Attrition was lowest after uniformly positive ratings, followed by underestimation, uniformly negative ratings, and overestimation, respectively. Effort had a more positive effect on performance following low than high self-assessments and this interaction fully mediated the self-assessment/performance interaction on subsequent performance. Commitment had a more negative effect on subsequent attrition following low than high self-assessments and this interaction fully mediated the self-assessment/performance interaction on subsequent attrition. Finally, trainee conscientiousness affected their behavior when their performance and self-assessments were inconsistent—overestimating and underestimating performance increased attrition more for trainees low in conscientiousness and impaired performance more for trainees high in conscientiousness.     

进化心理学对心理素质结构研究的整合与重构——以学生心理素质结构研究为例

传统的心理素质结构研究模式不经济,研究结果出现纵向断裂横向分裂的趋势.从进化心理学的视角来看,心理素质结构的最终功能均指向个体的适应性,其形成是与周围环境不断排斥和融合的过程.建构的心理素质结构融合模型能在一定程度上解决传统研究模式的弊端,并建议今后的研究应以分析人为主导转而分析人及其所处的文化环境并重,进而引导人的心理素质结构的不断发展.     

Children's response to sales promotions and their impact on purchase behavior

Despite the growth in children's purchasing power, surprisingly little is known about how children respond to sales promotions. We conduct two experiments to address this issue. Study 1 shows that elementary-aged (second and fifth grade) children's purchase decisions are influenced by the presence of sales. Study 2 demonstrates that both age groups favor conceptually easier promotions, even when the sale is inferior. Additionally, we find that children have difficulty applying mathematical concepts to sales promotions, regardless of classroom mastery of the associated operations. Together, these results indicate that elementary-aged children routinely incorporate sales into purchase decisions, sometimes with suboptimal results.     

Maternal Expressive Style and Children's Emotional Development

Maternal expressive styles, based on a combination of positive and negative expressive patterns, were identified at two points in time and related to multiple aspects of preschool children's emotional development. Mother–child pairs from 260 families participated when the children were 3 years old, and 240 participated again at aged 4 years. Expressive styles were identified at age 3 using cluster analysis, replicated at age 4 and examined in relation to children's emotional understanding, expressiveness and regulation. Three expressive styles were identified: high positive/low negative, very low positive/average negative and average positive/very high negative. Cluster membership was stable in 63% of families from age 3 to 4 years; no systematic patterns of change were evident in the remaining families. Expressive style was related to aspects of children's emotional expression at 3 years and to emotion expression and regulation at 4 years. Children's expressiveness and regulation at age 3 were also related to changes in mothers' expressive styles over 1 year. Identifying mothers' expressive styles provides a unique way to understand the potential role of the emotional climates in which preschool‐aged children learn to express and regulate their own emotions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The shadow of familiarity: a contributor to the intersubjective field

This paper examines the influence of familiarity on the progress of analysis. It is proposed that familiarity is a particular aspect of the intersubjective field which emerges over time and begins to shape and influence the behaviours, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of the participants. It is also proposed that states of familiarity can have facilitative or defensive functions in an analytic relationship and that it is an influence co-created in the field. The experience of familiarity operates as background to our various foreground concerns in analytic work and therefore exists primarily as an implicit, rather than explicit, experience in analysis. Defensive familiarity often creates a feeling of relatedness that is subtly unrelated, a form of pseudo-intimacy. Parallels between defensive familiarity and related concepts are examined including defences against the unknown, role responsiveness, romantic love, the image of the stranger, and unformulated experience. This paper concludes with two case examples and a discussion of procedural knowledge in the implicit domain as an explanatory framework for the understanding of familiarity states in the analytic setting.     

Modeling,Truth, and Philosophy

Knowledge requires truth, and truth, we suppose, involves unflawed representation. Science does not provide knowledge in this sense but rather provides models, representations that are limited in their accuracy, precision, or, most often, both. Truth as we usually think of it is an idealization, one that serves wonderfully in most ordinary applications, but one that can terribly mislead for certain issues in philosophy. This article sketches how this happens for five important issues, thereby showing how philosophical method must take into account the idealized nature of our familiar conception of truth.     

Justification is potential knowledge

This paper will articulate and defend a novel theory of epistemic justification; I characterize my view as the thesis that justification is potential knowledge (JPK). My project is an instance of the ‘knowledge-first’ programme, championed especially by Timothy Williamson. So I begin with a brief recapitulation of that programme.