Sexuality and Intimacy in Couples Therapy

SUMMARY

In ages past, spiritual seekers left their close relationships for the seclusion of a monastery or a solitary journey, facing their dragons essentially alone. Today, however, many of us face the dragons within us as we undertake the tasks of differentiation and individuation. Thus, our relationships, if we allow them, can become the loci of our deepest self-exploration, leading to deepening intimacy with our partners.     

Visuo-Proprioceptive Matching Errors Are Consistent with Biases in Distance Judgments

People make systematic errors when matching the location of an unseen index finger with that of a visual target. These errors are consistent over time, but idiosyncratic and surprisingly task-specific. The errors that are made when moving the unseen index finger to a visual target are not consistent with the errors when moving a visual target to the unseen index finger. To test whether such inconsistencies arise because a large part of the matching errors originate during movement execution, we compared errors in moving the unseen finger to a target with biases in deciding which of two visual targets was closer to the index finger before the movement. We found that the judgment as to which is the closest target was consistent with the matching errors. This means that inconsistencies in visuo-proprioceptive matching errors are not caused by systematic errors in movement execution, but are likely to be related to biases in sensory transformations.     

The publication of Salomon Reinach's ‘Orpheus’ and the question of Christian origins

A covert reason for the decline of ritual wailing among Yemenite-Jewish women in Israel is the community's memory of its stay in Yemen as a period of ‘exile’ manifested in dhimmi status. According to respondents’ oral history, Jewish lamentation was exploited by members of the majority Muslim population to compel Jews – mostly men – to wail in honor of Muslim dead. The article makes its main contribution by revealing this historical episode and analyzing the standing of women's lamentation in the context of religio-political tension. The respondents' narrative reveals that although the wailers mitigated the humiliating effects of this spectacle, the appropriation of their community custom impaired Jewish men's gender status and ability to perform religious differentiation. This, coupled with changes caused by their relocation to Israel, has made women's lament the commemoration of a practice that evokes shame among members of this community, abetting its decline in the past decade.     

Is the perceived present a predictive model of the objective present?

ABSTRACT

Processing latencies for coherent, high level percepts in vision are at least 100?ms and possibly as much as 500?ms. Processing latencies are less in other modalities, but still significant. This seems to imply that perception lags behind reality by an amount equal to the processing latency. It has been proposed that the brain can compensate for perceptual processing latencies by using the most recent available information to extrapolate forward, thereby constructing a model of what the world beyond the senses is like now. The present paper reviews several lines of evidence relating to this hypothesis, including the flash-lag effect, motion-induced position shifts, representational momentum, static visual illusions, and motion extrapolation at the retina. There are alternative explanations for most of the results but there are some findings for which no competing explanation has yet been proposed. Collectively, the evidence for extrapolation to the present is suggestive but not yet conclusive. An alternative account of compensation for processing latencies, based on the hypothesis of rapid emergence of percepts, is proposed.     

Disjunctivism and the urgency of scepticism

This paper argues that McDowell is right to claim that disjunctivism has anti-sceptical implications. While the disjunctive conception of experience leaves unaffected the Cartesian sceptical challenge, it undermines another type of sceptical challenge. Moreover, the sceptical challenge against which disjunctivism militates has some philosophical urgency in that it threatens the very notion that perceptual experience can acquaint us with the world around us.     

Directed forgetting for categorised pictures: recognition memory for perceptual details versus gist

ABSTRACT

Item-based directed forgetting (DF) was tested using 2-alternative forced-choice recognition to examine the effects of forgetting instructions on memory for perceptual detail and gist of categorised pictures of scenes and objects in three experiments. When the distractor is from the same category as the target (exemplar test condition), discrimination must be based on memory for perceptual details, whereas recognition can be based on gist or general category information when the distractor is from a novel category (novel test condition). Recognition accuracy was greater for Remember-cued than Forget-cued pictures when discrimination must be based on perceptual details in the exemplar test condition but not when discrimination could be based on gist in the novel test condition. Accuracy in scene and object recognition is greater for gist than for perceptual details, and DF instructions serve to reduce recognition memory based on perceptual details.     

Representation,Presentation and the Epistemic Role of Perceptual Experience

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the representational theory of perception, on which the world is represented as being a certain way in perceptual experience, cannot explain how there can be a genuinely epistemic connection between experience and belief. I try to show that we are positively required to deny that perceptual consciousness is contentful if we want to make its fitness for epistemic duties intelligible. (So versions of the representational theory on which experience has a merely causal purchase on belief are not considered.) But my aim is not just negative. I try to defeat representationalism in such a way as to motivate a robustly presentational theory of perception. According to such a theory, perceptions are relations not between a subject and a content but between a subject and an ordinary object (such that if the relation holds at t, an appropriate subject and object must exist at t, and the object must be presented to the subject). I end by sketching an account of perceptual experience that is meant to show that, contrary to a very popular misconception, there is a way to conceive perceptual consciousness as relational and presentational (not intentional and representational) that does not succumb to the celebrated ‘myth of the Given’.     

Emotion Differentiation as a Protective Factor Against Nonsuicidal Self-Injury in Borderline Personality Disorder

Evidence that nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) serves a maladaptive emotion regulation function in borderline personality disorder (BPD) has drawn attention to processes that may increase risk for NSSI by exacerbating negative emotion, such as rumination. However, more adaptive forms of emotion processing, including differentiating broad emotional experiences into nuanced emotion categories, might serve as a protective factor against NSSI. Using an experience-sampling diary, the present study tested whether differentiation of negative emotion was associated with lower frequency of NSSI acts and urges in 38 individuals with BPD who reported histories of NSSI. Participants completed a dispositional measure of rumination and a 21-day experience-sampling diary, which yielded an index of negative emotion differentiation and frequency of NSSI acts and urges. A significant rumination by negative emotion differentiation interaction revealed that rumination predicted higher rates of NSSI acts and urges in participants with difficulty differentiating their negative emotions. The results extend research on emotion differentiation into the clinical literature and provide empirical support for clinical theories that suggest emotion identification and labeling underlie strategies for adaptive self-regulation and decreased NSSI risk in BPD.     

Deconfounding the Effects of Local Element Spatial Heterogeneity and Sparsity on Processing Dominance

Black and White American college students were compared to determine how daily hassles, coping strategies, and social support related to depression. Although the mean intensity of hassles did not differ, Black students reported a higher frequency of hassles. Cumulative severity of hassles, defined in terms of both intensity and frequency was therefore higher for Black students. White students perceived more support from friends than from family, but the opposite held for Black students. Mean scores on type of coping (active problem solving, seeking social support, or avoidance) were similar, as were the reported levels of depression. Hierarchical multiple regression showed that the severity of hassles was directly related to depression for both groups. Race did not interact with any index of social support, except perceived family support, which was related to lower depression among Black students. There was no support for the notion that social support serves as a buffer against depression.     

The divisive potential of differences and similarities: The role of intergroup distinctiveness in intergroup differentiation

In this article we examine the relationship between perceptions of intergroup distinctiveness and intergroup differentiation. Research in this area has highlighted two contrasting hypotheses: high distinctiveness is predicted to lead to increased intergroup differentiation (self-categorisation theory), while low distinctiveness or too much similarity can also underlie positive differentiation (social identity theory). We argue for a theoretical integration of these predictions and outline their domains of applicability. In addition to empirical studies from our own laboratory, support for these hypotheses in the literature is examined meta-analytically, and we assess the power of a number of moderators of the distinctiveness ‐ differentiation relation. We focus on group identification and salience of the superordinate category as the most powerful moderators of this relation. We report evidence that low group distinctiveness leads to more differentiation for high identifiers, while high group distinctiveness leads to more differentiation for low identifiers. In addition, our meta-analysis revealed that when the superordinate category was not salient, low distinctiveness tended to lead to differentiation (albeit not significantly so) while high distinctiveness led to differentiation when the salience of the superordinate category was high. A model is proposed integrating our predictions concerning moderators of the distinctiveness ‐ differentiation relation. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed and we suggest directions for future research.