Chapter 8: “Always Green and Full of Sap”: Facilitating Wholeness in Aging

SUMMARY

Wholeness in aging is difficult to define, especially in the face of physical disability or catastrophic illness. How one meets the challenges of aging depends upon numerous physical, emotional, and spiritual factors. Rehabilitation may play an important role in restoring wholeness to those with physical disabilities. Likewise, a physical fitness program may lessen some of the effects of aging, helping the older person maintain a higher quality of life. The lived theologies of the older patients and their caregivers also interact, providing an important ground of connection in rediscovery of wholeness as well. Ultimately, our most important role as healthcare providers is to help our older patients regain and maintain this multidimensional wholeness even in times of physical challenge.     

对环保行为的心理学解读——规范焦点理论述评

社会规范对个体行为的影响常被低估.通过将社会规范区分为描述性规范和命令性规范,并强调注意焦点的作用,规范焦点理论重新强调了社会规范的重要作用.根据规范焦点理论,不同类型的社会规范有不同的作用,恰当地使用相应的社会规范信息对环保行为进行干预,可以减少乱丢垃圾、促进垃圾分类,改善节能、节约和保护资源等行为.立足于环保应用,总结了运用这种既科学又省力的措施时应注意的问题.最后,从文化差异和我国社会现阶段特征两个方面,论述了规范焦点理论及其所倡导的措施对我国环保工作的适用性.     

A Controlled Pilot-Outcome Study of Sensory Integration (SI) in the Treatment of Complex Adaptation to Traumatic Stress

This study tested whether sensory integration (SI) treatment combined with psychotherapy would improve symptom outcome over psychotherapy alone in the treatment of complex posttraumatic stress, as measured by the Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS) clinical construct in a group of 10 adult patients with histories of childhood abuse. DESNOS symptoms were assessed at three time periods (T1, baseline; T2, after experimental group SI treatment; and T3, after wait-list control group SI treatment) using the Structured Interview for Disorders of Extreme Stress (SIDES). The Sensory Learning Program? (SLP), developed by the Sensory Learning Institute of Boulder, Colorado, was used as the SI treatment modality. Results indicated significant differential improvement for the group treated with SLP in SIDES Total Score (T1/T2 and T2/T3), Self Perception (T1/T2 and T2/T3), Affect Regulation (T2/T3), and Alterations in Meaning (T1/T2).     

Advanced Brief Strategic Therapy: An overview of interventions with eating disorders to exemplify how theory and practice work

This paper aims at introducing some of the central aspects of the evolution that brief strategic therapy has undergone at the Centro di Terapia Strategica of Arezzo, Italy, towards advanced therapeutic strategies which differ from the original Palo Alto model. (Fisch, Weakland, &; Segal, 1982; Watzlawick, 1978 Watzlawick, P. 1978. The language of change: Elements of therapeutic communication, New York: Basic Books.  [Google Scholar]; Watzlawick, Beavin, &; Jackson, 1967; Watzlawick, Weakland, &; Fisch, 1974). We will focus on how the concept of self-deception is central to the formation and the persistence of psychological disorders; and how the usage of non-ordinary logics and the understanding of the individual's perceptive-reactive system are of key importance in unravelling such disorders, allowing the therapist to guide the patient towards an efficacious and efficient solution. Rather than attempting to describe and enlist the theoretical corpus that underlies brief strategic therapy, we have chosen to exemplify some focal concepts that connect theory to practice, and vice versa, by presenting the outline of some therapeutic protocols devised for solving eating disorders which can be specifically tailored for each individual patient.     

A psycho-social system approach to well-being: Empirically deriving the Five Domains of Positive Functioning

A new psycho-social system approach to well-being is presented, in which psychological and social functioning is understood through an empirically derived framework of five domains. A quantitative co-term analysis was performed on 3466 terms within 18,401 PsycINFO^® journal documents on topics related to positive psychology (PP) across disciplines such as psychology, education, management, business and psychiatry. The analysis revealed that research on PP topics can be classified into five broad domains: attention and awareness, comprehension and coping, emotions, goals and habits, and virtues and relationships. These domains provide a new systematic framework, the Five Domains of Positive Functioning, for understanding positive psycho-social functioning and exploring the underlying ways in which people function to achieve well-being outcomes. When used within the psycho-social system approach, the framework can be used in future research to clarify mechanisms of change, facilitate comparisons between different PP interventions and suggest ways to improve intervention effectiveness.     

The Intrinsic Value of Sport: A Reply to Culbertson

Leon Culbertson's recent contribution, ‘Does Sport Have Intrinsic Value?’ objects to the account of the value of sport as intrinsic value I had developed in my Sport, Rules and Values; in particular, as this occurs in my argument that the value of some sports resided in the possibility of their functioning as a moral laboratory. He identifies two accounts of intrinsic value; and shows that neither would fit my purposes seamlessly. He urges that my account of the place of normative reasons cannot generate intrinsic value: rather, the person whose reasons they are somehow imports that value. Yet he has misunderstood my particularist conception of values; and the place occupied by my contextualism – these, rather than a residual commitment to essentialism, are what generates an apparent inconsistency he identifies. But they also explain it away. As a result, much of his concern to find some exact account of the term ‘intrinsic’ is misplaced: we need to look contextually. Further, the project of my discussion was limited to showing, first, how the moral laboratory idea might explain the value of some sport (on the assumption that sport had intrinsic value); and, second, how failures of realisation of that intrinsic value might be traced to the distinction between motivating reasons and normative ones.     

Processing negative numbers by transforming negatives to positive range and by sign shortcut

Numerals are processed by a phylogenetically old analogue magnitude system. Can culturally new negative numerals be processed using this same representation? To find out whether magnitude representation could be used, we contrasted three possible processing mechanisms: an extended magnitude system for both positive and negative numbers, a mirroring mechanism that could transform negative values to the positive range to be processed on the positive magnitude system, and a sign shortcut strategy that can process the signs of numbers independently of the absolute values of numerals. To test these three hypotheses, a comparison task was used and the reaction time pattern, numerical distance, and Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect was analysed. The results revealed a mirroring process along with a sign shortcut mechanism. The SNARC effect was observed only when positive numbers were compared.     

Review

Book reviewed in this article:
David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts     

综合性大学开设长学制高等医学教育的初步研究

我国现有的医学教育学制偏短,不利于培养高质量医学人才。综合性大学有着许多办学优势,有利于开设长学制医学教育,因此,要发挥综合性大学的优势,实行多通道办学模式,学分制和弹性学制,强化公共基础教育和人文素质教育,改善办学条件,提高管理水平,努力培养能参与国际竞争的高层次医学人才。     

现代认知心理学关于图式模型的研究

对现代认知心理学关于知识图式的研究作了系统的阐述,分析了产生式系统取向和联结主义取向的优缺点。指出：图式模型研究的整合观是近来及以后认知心理学研究的主要课题之一。