Family Unification with Reactive Attachment Disorder Children: A Brief Treatment

This is a case study of a family with a child (age eight) with reactive attachment disorder and the subsequent individual and family therapy. Treatment of choice for the child was Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and supportive educational counseling for the parents and family. Qualitative evaluation of the process demonstrated that the parents observed an instant change in the child's attitude. The child reported that she felt better about family, school, and truthfulness, and stated about the therapy: It opened a window for me. A 12-month evaluation demonstrated continued positive effects.     

Police Officer Performance Under Stress: A Pilot Study on the Effects of Visuo-Motor Behavior Rehearsal

This study examined the effectiveness ofvisuo-motor behavior rehearsal(VMBR) as a method of reducing acute stress and improving police officer performance. Fifty-four recruits were randomly assigned to a treatment and a nontreatment condition prior to undergoing a highly stressful, critical event training scenario involving live fire. A manipulation check showed that participants who received VMBR displayed significantly lower scores on the cognitive state anxiety subscale of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2; somatic state anxiety and self-confidence were unaffected by the VMBR treatment. Most importantly, participants in the VMBR training condition displayed better performance on the critical event scenario, including significantly more assailant hits. The findings are discussed with respect to the four-stage model of stress and human performance of Salas and colleagues.     

Beyond conflict of interest: the responsible conduct of research

This paper reports data and scholarly opinion that support the perception of systemic flaws in the management of scientific professions and the research enterprise; explores the responsibility that professional status places on the scientific professions, and elaborates the concept of the responsible conduct of research (RCR). Data are presented on research misconduct, availability of research guidelines, and perceived research quality. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an International Conference on “Conflict of Interest and its Significance in Science and Medicine” held in Warsaw, Poland, 5–6 April, 2002. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Office of Research Integrity, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or any other federal agency.     

Tyrannical omnipotence in the archetypal father

This paper sets the archetypal relationship between the tyrannical, devouring father and his sons in the context of a disjunction in the parental couple (syzygy) whereby the role of the maternal feminine is eclipsed and excluded. This is shown to originate in an omnipotent defence against infantile dependence on the mother. Successful liberation from the father's tyranny requires the restoration of mutuality between the internal couple. Although the main focus is on the internal world (and a detailed clinical illustration is given, showing the working out of this process in the analytical relationship), reference is also made to political tyranny, attitudes to the control of Nature by technological means and patriarchal forms of masculinity. The Chronos myth is amplified through the use of two modern variants in the films The Terminator and Star Wars.     

Family Processes and Treatment Outcome in the MTA: Negative/Ineffective Parenting Practices in Relation to Multimodal Treatment

To elucidate processes underlying therapeutic change in a large-scale randomized clinical trial, we examined whether alterations in self-reported parenting practices were associated with the effects of behavioral, medication, or combination treatments on teacher-reported outcomes (disruptive behavior, social skills, internalizing symptoms) in children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Participants were 579 children with Combined-type ADHD, aged 7–9.9 years, in the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA). We uncovered 2 second-order factors of parenting practices, entitled Positive Involvement and Negative/Ineffective Discipline. Although Positive Involvement was not associated with amelioration of the school-based outcome measures, reductions in Negative/Ineffective Discipline mediated improvement in children's social skills at school. For families showing the greatest reductions in Negative/Ineffective Discipline, effects of combined medication plus behavioral treatment were pronounced in relation to regular community care. Furthermore, only in combination treatment (and not in behavioral treatment alone) was decreased Negative/Ineffective Discipline associated with reduction in children's disruptive behavior at school. Here, children in families receiving combination treatment who showed the greatest reductions in Negative/Ineffective Discipline had teacher-reported disruptive behavior that was essentially normalized. Overall, the success of combination treatment for important school-related outcomes appears related to reductions in negative and ineffective parenting practices at home; we discuss problems in interpreting the temporal sequencing of such process-outcome linkages and the means by which multimodal treatment may be mediated by psychosocial processes related to parenting.     

Representation of subjective preferences under ambiguity

The objective of this paper is to show how potentially incomplete preferences of a decision maker (DM) on acts can be modelled formally in a subjective ambiguity perspective. We identify acts as functions from a state space Ω to bounded support (finitely additive) probabilities over a set X of prizes. Then, we characterize preferences over equibounded acts a which have a numerical representation by the family of functionals , where u is a cardinal utility on X (representing the risk attitude of the DM) and Π is a unique pointwise closed convex set of probabilities on all events in Ω (representing the ambiguity perceived by the DM). To this end, in addition to the usual independence and continuity assumptions, we add completeness and dominance for preferences restricted to constant acts; moreover, we consider two other properties (subjective monotonicity and coherence) related with the preferences of a DM who is not able, owing to his partial knowledge, to evaluate any event in Ω.     

Rewarded remembering: dissociations between self-rated motivation and memory performance

People often claim that they perform better in memory performance tasks when they are more motivated. However, past research has shown minimal effects of motivation on memory performance when factors contributing to item-specific biases during encoding and retrieval are taken into account. The purpose of the present study was to examine the generality of this apparent dissociation by using more sensitive measures of experienced motivation and memory performance. Extrinsic motivation was manipulated through competition instructions, and subjective ratings of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were obtained before and after study instructions. Participants studied a series of words, and memory performance was assessed by content recall (Experiment 1) and source recall (Experiment 2). Both experiments showed dissociation between subjective ratings of extrinsic motivation and actual memory performance, so that competition increased self-rated extrinsic motivation but had no effects on memory performance, including source recall. Inconsistent with most people's expectations, the findings suggest that extrinsic motivation has minimal effects on memory performance.     

Admissibility of Cut in <Emphasis Type="Italic">LC</Emphasis> with Fixed Point Combinator

The fixed point combinator (Y) is an important non-proper combinator, which is defhable from a combinatorially complete base. This combinator guarantees that recursive equations have a solution. Structurally free logics (LC) turn combinators into formulas and replace structural rules by combinatory ones. This paper introduces the fixed point and the dual fixed point combinator into structurally free logics. The admissibility of (multiple) cut in the resulting calculus is not provable by a simple adaptation of the similar proof for LC with proper combinators. The novelty of our proof—beyond proving the cut for a newly extended calculus–is that we add a fourth induction to the by-and-large Gentzen-style proof. Presented by Robert Goldblatt     

Nietzsche Contra “Self-Reformulation”

Not only do the writings of Nietzsche – early and late – fail to support the pedagogy of self-reformulation, this doctrine embodies what for him is worst in man and would destroy that which is higher. The pedagogy of self-reformulation is also incoherent. In contrast, Nietzsche offers a fruitful and comprehensive theory of education that, while non-democratic and contemptuous of egalitarian aspirations, emerges consistently from his metaphysics and philosophical anthropology. Whatever, then, we might think of his premises, Nietzsche’s philosophy of education represents an attractive model for those who would develop a meaningful, distinctive, and persuasive educational theory. It defines a domain of the possible and then straightforwardly states what is and is not to be done within it – and why.