SPONTANEOUS REMISSIONS: NORMAN REIDER'S FORGOTTEN PAPER,PART I

Almost sixty years ago, Norman Reider published a paper about spontaneous “remissions” he had observed. He discussed the manner in which psychoanalytic theory provided a way to partially explain these otherwise mysterious remissions or improvements in symptoms, some without benefit of either psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. Especially important were his comments about the negligible role of interpretation or insight in these examples. His conjectures reflected controversies that were current at the time and that remain unsettled. Of special interest is his introduction of some highly original ways to think of applying psychoanalytic ideas to supportive psychotherapy. But few analysts today have heard of this paper. A reconsideration of his paper allows us to be vividly reminded about our enduring and profound confusion about exactly what constitutes a “cure” at all. Spontaneous shifts in the severity of symptoms may be viewed as experiments of nature that we have neglected to investigate as valuable restraints on our immodest therapeutic claims.     

Situating Standards in Practices: Multi Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Treatment in India

Public health care needs to cope with a basic dilemma between providing standardized care within public programmes across entire and at times resource-constrained countries and adapting this care locally when responding to individual needs. This tension between standardization and local adaptation becomes particularly obvious for the prolonged and complicated treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). Situated standardization, as introduced by Zuiderent-Jerak [2007a, 2007b] offers a way out of this dilemma. It helps to focus on how standards need to be situated in practice rather than viewing standardization and local adaptation as mutually exclusive practices. How do actors relate standardization and individual care in their practices of treating MDR-TB? Results from qualitative fieldwork at the first MDR-TB treatment sites of the Indian TB programme show that actors situate standards in a particular way. They assess the role of guidelines in a particular situation and on that basis recognize the core recommendations of guidelines or go beyond the guidelines. This allows actors to negotiate how standards should be situated and reconciles the dilemma between local adaptation and standardization. Having guidelines internalized, as is common for Indian TB control, bears both promises and pitfalls for engaging in standardization processes in a situated manner. The results contribute to science and technology study scholarship on guideline development. They highlight how actors coordinate the situating of standards and how this depends upon cultures of control. This illustrates the potential of qualitative studies on local adaptation for guideline developers by revealing existing practices of relating and negotiating local adaptation and standardization.     

Behavioral variability in an evolutionary theory of behavior dynamics

McDowell’s evolutionary theory of behavior dynamics (McDowell, 2004) instantiates populations of behaviors (abstractly represented by integers) that evolve under the selection pressure of the environment in the form of positive reinforcement. Each generation gives rise to the next via low‐level Darwinian processes of selection, recombination, and mutation. The emergent patterns can be analyzed and compared to those produced by biological organisms. The purpose of this project was to explore the effects of high mutation rates on behavioral variability in environments that arranged different reinforcer rates and magnitudes. Behavioral variability increased with the rate of mutation. High reinforcer rates and magnitudes reduced these effects; low reinforcer rates and magnitudes augmented them. These results are in agreement with live‐organism research on behavioral variability. Various combinations of mutation rates, reinforcer rates, and reinforcer magnitudes produced similar high‐level outcomes (equifinality). These findings suggest that the independent variables that describe an experimental condition interact; that is, they do not influence behavior independently. These conclusions have implications for the interpretation of high levels of variability, mathematical undermatching, and the matching theory. The last part of the discussion centers on a potential biological counterpart for the rate of mutation, namely spontaneous fluctuations in the brain's default mode network.     

Creative Self-Efficacy: An Exploration of Its Antecedents,Consequences, and Applied Implications

Creativity and innovation are at the core of important outcomes such as economic and sales growth, production of articles and students' learning. Thus, it is not surprising to find research articles on creativity and innovation across different disciplines such as business, psychology, and education. Given the importance of understanding creativity and innovation, we reviewed the empirical literature examining the antecedents and consequences of creative self-efficacy in the work domain. Our review used the theory of individual creative action and social cognitive theory as guiding frameworks to place creative self-efficacy in the creativity and innovation process, define creativity and innovation, explore how creative self-efficacy has been measured, examine the antecedents and consequences of creative self-efficacy, point out gaps in knowledge and offer suggestions for future research and provide some applied implications. One important finding was that creative self-efficacy has made a significant contribution as a process variable explaining how several organizational and personal factors influence creative outcomes via their influence on creative self-efficacy.     

创新自我效能感对创新行为的影响:多重中介效应分析

采用创新自我效能感量表、内部动机量表、外部动机量表和创新行为量表,对北京和天津地区的144名科技创新者进行问卷调查,检验了科技创新者的创新自我效能感、内部动机、外部动机与创新行为之间的关系。研究结果发现创新自我效能感、内部动机、外部动机和创新行为之间均存在显著正相关;创新自我效能感、内部动机和外部动机均可正向预测创新行为;外部动机和内部动机在创新自我效能感和创新行为之间起多重中介作用。研究结果初步揭示了科技创新领域中创新动机、自我效能感和创新行为之间的动态关系。     

Rebooting Mental Health Care Delivery for the COVID-19 Pandemic (and Beyond): Guiding Cautions as Telehealth Enters the Clinical Mainstream

Across the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed perhaps the field’s largest and most abrupt transformation in scope of practice. In the context of surging mental health needs and historically limited feasibility of traditional office-based services during the pandemic, telehealth has launched into the clinical mainstream and has become a dominant mode of outpatient mental health care delivery. The articles in this terrific Special Issue outline some of the field’s most exciting innovations from the past 18 months. The present commentary discusses how these unprecedented times have prompted unprecedented resourcefulness and innovation in the field. Issues related to evolving and uncertain telehealth regulation and reimbursement policies are discussed, and cautions for the road ahead are offered as we prepare for post-pandemic practices. The commentary concludes with a call to redouble efforts to move beyond the use of telehealth to largely treat only those populations who already enjoyed access to traditional office-based services. Understanding and overcoming barriers to telehealth care and ensuring equitable access to telehealth options are critical steps for actualizing the great potential of telehealth strategies for increasing the reach of supported care to underserved populations.     

如何解决团队创新悖论?基于成员认知风格“组型”与“构型”视角的探究

如何提升团队创新绩效?这是近年来管理实践界与学术界共同关注的热门话题。鉴于创新是一项兼具“探索”与“利用”双元特征的活动, 懂得如何平衡二者之间的悖论关系就成为提升团队创新绩效的关键。基于成员认知风格的微观视角, 从“组型”与“构型”两方面探索了解决这一悖论关系的方法。具体而言：(1)成员认知风格组型与团队领导行为之间的互补效应有助于解决团队创新悖论; (2)在合理的“成员认知风格-工作角色要求”构型基础上, 营造良好的团队协作氛围, 有助于解决团队创新悖论。进一步地, 还基于阴阳哲学思想研究了解决团队创新悖论的内在机制。为论证相关理论命题, 将开展三个研究模块, 采用定量与定性相结合的研究方法对提出的研究模型进行检验。相关发现不仅有助于丰富从微观视角研究团队创新前因、悖论管理方法的理论成果, 还将为企业的创新管理实践提供建议。     

Legal Innovation for Social Change: Exploring Change and Resistance to Different Types of Sustainability Laws

In this article I argue that a desirable future direction for political psychology would be to pay more attention to social‐psychological processes involved in the response to innovative laws, in particular those devised with sustainability and environmental protection aims. This involves taking into account the following premises: (1) innovation and change are not unitary phenomena; instead there are different types of innovation; (2) legal and policy innovation is a specific type and is highly central in an era when global challenges are increasingly dealt with by global treaties which are then translated into national laws with a call to transform local practices; (3) offering attention to the reception of such innovation involves developing specific conceptual tools; (4) devising a typology of legal innovation is one step in this direction; (5) furthering our comprehension of how people, groups, and institutions receive—i.e., accept, contest—legal innovation for sustainability is important for helping to push forward sustainability goals, which are legislated but far from attained. The present article outlines theoretical tools for addressing psychosocial processes involved in the reception of legal innovation, drawing mostly on the approach of social representations and the literature of environmental psychology, and offers three criteria for a typology of laws. Finally I present some examples of responses to subtypes of legal innovation from the sustainability domain, taken as an illustrative case, and discuss differences and commonalities in the processes of acceptance and resistance that each mobilizes.     

Social Discounting and Cigarette Smoking During Pregnancy

In this study, we examined the association between social discounting and smoking status in a cohort of pregnant cigarette smokers (n = 91), quitters (n = 27), or never‐smokers (n = 30). The smokers and quitters were participants in clinical trials on smoking cessation and relapse prevention, whereas the never‐smokers were controls in a study on nicotine withdrawal during pregnancy. Social discounting was assessed using a paper‐and‐pencil task that assesses the amount of hypothetical money a person is willing to forgo in order to share with individuals in their social network ranging from the person who is emotionally closest to them to a mere acquaintance. The amount that women were willing to forgo in order to share decreased hyperbolically as a function of social distance, with smokers exhibiting steeper discounting functions (i.e., less generosity) than quitters or never‐smokers; discounting functions of quitters and never‐smokers did not differ significantly. In multivariate analyses controlling for potential sociodemographic and other confounds, social discounting remained a significant predictor of smoking status among smokers versus quitters. Overall, these results suggest that individual differences in social discounting may be a factor influencing the choices that women make about quitting smoking upon learning of a pregnancy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.