The caregiving relationship under stress: foster carers’ experience of loss of the sense of self

This paper is an account of a piece of research which involved interviewing six foster carers who had ended a placement with a child under the age of five with an early experience of abuse and neglect. The paper describes one of the themes that emerged from the data analysis, the loss of the sense of self in the foster carers, and argues that the experience of attempting to provide care for these children led to internal shifts in the carers that reverberated throughout the network around the child. The paper suggests that knowing about the external reasons for placement breakdown is not enough without taking into account the impact on the internal world of the foster carers and the emotional impact of attempting to provide care for a child who has experienced abuse and neglect.     

Ecobiopsychology

The latest scientific discoveries acknowledge that the universe, from the atom to the galaxies, is a system behaving as a whole where each single set composing it seems informed by the global state of the system. In-formation can be exemplified as a “software” governing the “hardware” that is composed of the objects of the universe. This in formation comes from an Akashic Field or archetypal field that can breed each single form as well as the relevant states of consciousness. Ecobiopsychology, through the study of vital analogies and symbols, supports reflective consciousness to have access to the archetypal field studying the relation between the aspects of matter (infrared) and those referred to the psyche (ultraviolet). With this perspective the human's reflective consciousness field can gradually expand until becoming accessible to the reality of the Unus Mundus, represented by the coherence of the single structures of the universe and their own embedded state of implicit consciousness.     

Scrutinizing the Emotional Nature of Intuitive Coherence Judgments

Dual‐system models propose that cognitive processing can occur either intuitively or deliberately. Unlike deliberate decision strategies, intuitive ones are assumed to have an emotional component attached to the decision process. We tested if intuitive decisions are indeed accompanied by an emotional response while deliberate decisions are not. Specifically, we conducted a psychophysiological study in which participants were instructed to decide either intuitively or deliberately if three simultaneously presented words were semantically coherent or incoherent (triad task). The degree of emotionality of these two decision strategies (intuitive vs. deliberate) was compared using changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) and the reaction time (RT) effect of an affective priming paradigm as primary measurements. Based on a valence‐arousal model, our results revealed that intuitive and deliberate judgments do not differ as to their emotional valence but that they do differ in emotional arousal. Most notably, sympathetic activation during intuitive judgments was significantly lower compared to sympathetic activation during deliberate judgments. Our results reflect that a relaxed state of mind—manifested in low sympathetic activity—could underlie the holistic processing that is assumed to facilitate the proliferation of semantic associations during coherence judgments. This suggests that coherence judgments made under an (instructed) intuitive decision mode have a specific psychophysiological signature and that arousal is the differentiating component between intuitive and deliberate decision strategies. © 2016 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

国内关于职业声望的研究进展

自1995年以来,国内有关学者对当前国内的职业声望现状以及职业声望评价的影响因素进行了大量研究。本文对这些已有的成果进行了简单而较为系统的分析,并针对有关研究结论以及其中所存在的问题提出了自己的看法和意见。     

Wofür sprechen die Daten?

What Do the Data Tell Us? Justification of scientific theories is a three-place relation between data, theories, and background knowledge. Though this should be a commonplace, many methodologies in science neglect it. The article will elucidate the significance and function of our background knowledge in epistemic justification and their consequences for different scientific methodologies. It is argued that there is no simple and at the same time acceptable statistical algorithm that justifies a given theory merely on the basis of certain data. And even if we think to know the probability of a theory, that does not decide whether we should accept it or not.     

Minding Minding God: A Response to Spezio and Bielfeldt

Abstract. Michael Spezio and Dennis Bielfeldt have each raised important issues with regard to my positions in Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences. In this article I respond to several of their criticisms, including issues of the nature of theology, my stance on epistemology and realism, and issues of physicalism, freedom, and determinism.     

Black identity and workplace oppression

This paper is primarily aimed at counselling and psychotherapy practitioners who meet issues of workplace conflict in their practice and the resulting stress and trauma faced by their clients. I define workplace conflict as complex and enduring situations arising from diverse forms of harassment. These include bullying, scapegoating and other discriminatory and oppressive practices that affect health, esteem and work performance. This paper reports the findings from my doctoral research project which investigated and sought to understand the specific experience and nature of workplace conflict for black workers in three institutional settings: the National Health Service (NHS), education and social services. The inspiration for this research came from psychotherapy practice, where it was repeatedly observed that black workers appeared to be suffering significantly more negative and damaging effects of workplace stress and trauma than white workers. I describe these experiences as workplace oppression and differentiate them from other workplace conflicts.     

Impulse processing: a dynamical systems model of incremental eye movements in the visual world paradigm

The Visual World Paradigm (VWP) presents listeners with a challenging problem: They must integrate two disparate signals, the spoken language and the visual context, in support of action (e.g., complex movements of the eyes across a scene). We present Impulse Processing, a dynamical systems approach to incremental eye movements in the visual world that suggests a framework for integrating language, vision, and action generally. Our approach assumes that impulses driven by the language and the visual context impinge minutely on a dynamical landscape of attractors corresponding to the potential eye-movement behaviors of the system. We test three unique predictions of our approach in an empirical study in the VWP, and describe an implementation in an artificial neural network. We discuss the Impulse Processing framework in relation to other models of the VWP.     

论朱熹对"继善成性"说的规范

"继善成性"是易学哲学的重要问题.朱熹解释"继善成性"总体上不是为字义的通顺,而在为他的理学本体论作论证.理上气下的基本原则通过易学的语言进一步得到贯彻.善与性、天与人、未发与已发、天理流行与人物成性等,虽也体现了天人之间的密切关联,但又不能将一般天理与已具形质的人性混淆起来."继善成性"说的优长,就在于它将由天至人的生成序列,解释为一个以天道为本而构筑本性的思辨逻辑,同时兼顾个体形质生成带来的特殊性.而本性只是"存"而非"成",以卫护本然之性纯善无恶的假定.