Gender: Genetics,Genitality, Generosity (Grace), Gentility

After acknowledging that gender is defined at many levels and that definitions may not be concordant across all of these layers of human development, this essay illuminates how these threads intertwine with one another to produce a final product that we call a person. Gene expression, gender identity, sexual orientation, and anatomic structures are not always coterminus. Arbitrarily assigning an infant child with maldefined genitalia to a socially defined gender role on the basis of surgical convenience may (should) be perceived as an act of violence, and an untruth. A further intent of this article is to help in pastoral settings to respond to events which raise points of anxiety and concern, among persons of faith, which are sometimes associated with instances of discrepancy.     

The Duty to Rescue and the Limits of Confidentiality

Surveys and routine clinical procedures applied in research protocols are typically considered only minimally risky to participants. The apparent benign nature of "minimal risk" tasks increases the chance that investigators and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) will overlook the probability that clinical tools will identify signs, symptoms, or definitive test results that are clinically-relevant to subjects' welfare. "Minimal risk" procedures may also pose a particular hazard to participants in clinical research by increasing the therapeutic misconception because the tasks mimic clinical care and are often conducted in clinical settings. Investigators should anticipate which measures could yield clinically-important findings and should describe explicit plans for data monitoring, disclosure, and follow-up. Protocols that include reliable and valid clinical measures should prompt a more detailed risk assessment by the IRB, even when the tasks meet the regulatory criteria for minimal physical, psychological, or emotional risk.     

What members of Alcoholics Anonymous really believe

Many mental health professionals work with people who are members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or may benefit from AA attendance. This article provides practical information about AA that professionals can use to understand and work with people in AA. It is a summary of a survey of 187 members of AA as well as synthesising the literature on AA. Specifically, it describes what AA is, the twelve steps and principles that underlie them, common AA expressions and how they can be used in therapy, common concerns about AA, and how to get more information about AA. Implications of how AA's steps and language can be incorporated into therapy, how therapy can facilitate working the steps of AA, and how to address consumers’ (or professionals’) concerns about AA are addressed.     

Age-related effects in inter-trial inhibition of attention

ABSTRACT

Young and older adults indentified the shape of a color oddball in a visual search task, and both showed faster and more accurate responses when the distractor color was passively viewed in the preceding target-absent trial than when the target color was previewed. This inter-trial effect, known as the distractor previewing effect (DPE), reflects an attentional bias that prevents attention from focusing on recently inspected features that failed to produce a target. The results showed that the DPE pattern was preserved across the lifespan, and that the age-related increase in the magnitude of the DPE appeared rooted in age-related slowing, suggesting substantial sparing of this inhibitory effect in old age.     

Exploring early developmental changes in face scanning patterns during the perception of audiovisual mismatch of speech cues

Young infants are capable of integrating auditory and visual information and their speech perception can be influenced by visual cues, while 5-month-olds detect mismatch between mouth articulations and speech sounds. From 6 months of age, infants gradually shift their attention away from eyes and towards the mouth in articulating faces, potentially to benefit from intersensory redundancy of audiovisual (AV) cues. Using eye tracking, we investigated whether 6- to 9-month-olds showed a similar age-related increase of looking to the mouth, while observing congruent and/or redundant versus mismatched and non-redundant speech cues. Participants distinguished between congruent and incongruent AV cues as reflected by the amount of looking to the mouth. They showed an age-related increase in attention to the mouth, but only for non-redundant, mismatched AV speech cues. Our results highlight the role of intersensory redundancy and audiovisual mismatch mechanisms in facilitating the development of speech processing in infants under 12 months of age.     

The trajectory of psychoanalysis: A prognosticationy3

I present an overview of the development to this point of psychoanalysis as a discipline'both as a theory of the mind and a treatment of the disorders of the mind' and offer a prediction concerning evolving development over its (near) future. My focus is on the coherence of psychoanalysis as a theoretical structure, starting with Freud's strenuous endeavours to maintain the psychoanalysis that he had single‐handedly created as a unitary and unified theory, tracing then the breakdown of this effort, even in Freud's lifetime, into the burgeoning theoretical diversity or pluralism that characterises worldwide psychoanalysis today, and then going on to the beginning appearance of evidences' not yet widely remarked' of growing convergences from within very disparate and even seemingly very opposed theoretical perspectives, at least at the level of technical interventions and experience‐near clinical theory, with implications, however, even for the level of experience‐distant general (metapsychological) theory. Such a development, if sustained, as I anticipate, would strengthen the credibility of psychoanalysis as a science of the mind, amenable to growth through empirical research in accord with the canons of scientific method.     

Difference Scores in the Identification of Children with Learning Disabilities It's Time to Use a Different Method

In this article, we identify ten reasons why discrepancy scores (based on differences between IQ and reading achievement scores) provide an inadequate means for identifying children with reading disabilities. We recommend instead that children be identified simply on the basis of problems in reading skills, regardless of their IQs.     

Assessing the Readability of Mental Health Internet Brochures for Children and Adolescents

We investigated the readability of seven mental health brochures on mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders in children that were selected from a website developed by the Center for Mental Health Services at http://www.mentalhealth.org. The reading grade levels of the brochures ranged from 11.1 to 14.8 (mean 13.23), considerably higher than the 8th grade level recommended for educational material by the U. S. Department of Education (1986). On other readability variables, assessed using the Readability Assessment Instrument (RAIN; Singh, 1994), all brochures met criterion on most variables but failed on those for new words (audience appropriateness) and print size. This is a favorable result in comparison with other studies that have assessed readability of mental health information on the Internet using the RAIN, although less so with reading grade levels.