Ritual and spontaneity in healthcare and in the organisation of therapeutic communities

The author, following constructivist psychoanalysis, observes a dialectic at work in the therapeutic community between knowledge and authority of the analyst and his/her spontaneity on the one hand, and between the formal and informal roles that therapists adopt in a therapeutic community on the other hand. The key to successful therapy, he suggests, lies in maintaining this dialectic. He then goes on to discuss the function of staff teams in therapeutic communities and the importance of taking into account the patients’ unconscious representations of the team. He stresses the need for leadership in therapeutic communities and in engaging with moral issues and not just clinical ones.     

Eye movements during mental time travel follow a diagonal line

Recent research showed that past events are associated with the back and left side, whereas future events are associated with the front and right side of space. These spatial–temporal associations have an impact on our sensorimotor system: thinking about one’s past and future leads to subtle body sways in the sagittal dimension of space (Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2010). In this study we investigated whether mental time travel leads to sensorimotor correlates in the horizontal dimension of space. Participants were asked to mentally displace themselves into the past or future while measuring their spontaneous eye movements on a blank screen. Eye gaze was directed more rightward and upward when thinking about the future than when thinking about the past. Our results provide further insight into the spatial nature of temporal thoughts, and show that not only body, but also eye movements follow a (diagonal) “time line” during mental time travel.     

Justice,authority, and the world order

This paper defends the pertinence of global justice in the contemporary world. It accepts, for the sake of argument, Nagel's view that matters of justice arise only when political authority is asserted or exercised and, connectedly, his rejection of the cosmopolitan thesis. However, it challenges his conclusion that considerations of justice do not apply beyond the state. It argues that on any plausible account of the relationship between authority and justice international institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation, are now authoritative in the right way to justify their evaluation from the point of view of justice.     

It is about time: Daily relationships between temporal perspective and well-being

This study examined the day-to-day relationships between temporal perspective and well-being. Temporal perspective has predominantly been measured with single-occasion measurement designs, which ignore the potential for within-person variations that may be important in accounting for fluctuations in well-being. A 14-day daily diary design was employed to examine the dimensions of temporal perspective (temporal focus, temporal attitude, and temporal distance) and their dynamic relationships with daily well-being. The results from multilevel analyses indicated that: (a) there is evidence of within-person variability in daily temporal perspective, and (b) this within-person variability in temporal perspective fluctuated systematically with fluctuations in daily well-being. Each temporal perspective dimension was useful in predicting daily well-being. Temporal perspective dimensions interacted with each other such that the daily relationships with well-being depended on both the temporal region (past, present, or future) and the nature of the thoughts (pleasant vs. unpleasant; near vs. far).     

SCIENCE MEETS BIBLICAL EXEGESIS IN THE GALILEO AFFAIR

Abstract Although Galileo's venture into theology, as discussed by McMullin, is limited to Galileo's exegesis of Scripture, it can be seen as an important element in a broader role in theology, namely in ecclesiology and in the development of doctrine. From the Council of Trent, the Reformation Council, until today there has been a development in the Church concerning the manner in which Sacred Scripture should be interpreted and as to whether it can be said to be in conflict with our scientific knowledge of nature. Galileo made a significant contribution to this development. With his telescopic observations he was, in fact, undermining the prevailing Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day and was defending the birth of modern science against a mistaken view of Scripture. The Church of his time was not prepared to accept his contribution to this theological development. What does this history have to contribute to the challenges we face today in the interactions between science and religious belief?     

Richard Popkin – A Personal Memoir

This article is an introduction to an ancient Egyptian text called The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant and an argument that it ought to be seen as a classic of political philosophy. After contextualizing the tale as part of a tradition of moral and political philosophy in ancient Egypt, I explore the methods by which the text defines the proper roles of political authority and contrast its approach to justifying political authority with the argument from the state of nature so common in modern Western political philosophy. I claim that the tale's argument from dysfunction anticipates the move in contemporary Western political philosophy towards privileging non-ideal over ideal theory. I discuss challenges in translating the key term in the tale – ma'at – in light of the fact that it can be taken to mean ‘justice’ and/or ‘truth’. Finally, I discuss how the irony at the heart of its narrative can lead us to interpret the tale as having either conservative or revolutionary implications for the political system it depicts.     

Constructing autobiographical events within a spatial or temporal context: a comparison of two targeted episodic induction techniques

ABSTRACT

Recalling and imagining autobiographical experiences involves constructing event representations within spatiotemporal contexts. We tested whether generating autobiographical events within a primarily spatial (where the event occurred) or temporal (the sequence of actions that occurred) context affected how the associated mental representation was constructed. We leveraged the well-validated episodic specificity induction (ESI) technique, known to influence the use of episodic processes on subsequent tasks, to develop variants that selectively enhance spatial or temporal processing. We tested the effects of these inductions on the details used to describe past and future autobiographical events. We first replicated the standard ESI effect, showing that ESI enhances generating episodic details, particularly those that are perception-based, when describing autobiographical events (Experiment 1). We then directly compared the effects of the spatial and temporal inductions (Experiment 2 and 3). When describing autobiographical events, spatial induction enhanced generating episodic details, specifically perception-based details, compared to the control or temporal inductions. A greater proportion of the episodic details generated after the temporal induction were gist-based than after the spatial induction, but this proportion did not differ from a control induction. Thus, using a spatial or temporal framework for autobiographical event generation alters the associated details that are accessed.     

Temporal patterns of behavior from the scheduling of psychology quizzes

Temporal patterns of behavior have been observed in real-life performances such as bill passing in the U.S. Congress, in-class studying, and quiz taking. However, the practical utility of understanding these patterns has not been evaluated. The current study demonstrated the presence of temporal patterns of quiz taking in a university-level introductory psychology course and used these patterns to manage the traffic of quiz takers in a computerized testing lab. Results are discussed in terms of the applications of tracking temporal response patterns.