Embodiment Effects and Language Comprehension in Alzheimer's Disease

It has been shown that when participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences that describe a transfer of an object toward or away from their body, they are faster to respond when the response requires a movement in the same direction as the transfer described in the sentence. This phenomenon is known as the action compatibility effect (ACE). This study investigates whether the ACE exists for volunteers with Alzheimer's disease (AD), whether the ACE can facilitate language comprehension, and also whether the ACE can still be produced if the order of the two events is inverted, that is, whether overt movement can prime comprehension of transfer sentences. In Study 1, participants with AD, younger, and older adults were tested on an adaptation of the ACE Paradigm. In Study 2, the same paradigm was modified to include an arm movement that participants had to perform prior to sentence exposure on screen. In Study 1, young, older adults, and individuals with AD were faster to respond when the direction of the response movement matched the directionality implied by the sentence (ACE). In Study 2, no traditional ACE was found; participants were faster when the direction of the movement immediately preceding the sentence matched the directionality of the sentence. It was found that compatibility effects generated a relative advantage, that transfer schemata are easier to process, and that an ACE‐like effect can be the result of mutual priming between language and movement. Results suggested preservation in AD of the neural systems for action engaged during language comprehension, and conditions under which comprehension in AD can be facilitated in real life may be identified.     

老子之道及其创生因子探究

"道"是老子哲学体系中的核心,老子不仅提出虚空的道是宇宙的本体,是无法用语言来描述的,而且说明道是混成之物,即道是有精妙的内部结构属性的,并从不同的侧面说明了认识"道"是混成之物的路径。道是由无限创生因子混融而成的系统,宇宙在创生及万物演化的过程中,道或无限的创生因子始终起着根本性的作用,即宇宙间的一切事物现象都是道所为。道是由创生因子混融而成的思想观点,可为现代宇宙论的发展提供新的思维维度,为科学探索真空世界的奥秘提供新的研究途径,推进现代宇宙学的进步。     

Iranian Psychotherapists’ Behaviors and Beliefs Toward Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The aim of this study is to investigate Iranian psychotherapists’ behaviors and beliefs toward sexual orientation and gender identity. The sample consisted of 358 Iranian psychotherapists, of whom 29.3% (n = 105) were male and 67% (n = 24) were female. Results from the chi-square analyses showed that more male participants reported accepting homosexual clients and treating them as having a pathological disorder than their female counterparts; and licensed respondents reported engaging more in accepting only male or female clients, accepting more homosexual and transgender clients for treatment, and treating them as having a pathological disorder when compared with their unlicensed counterparts. Furthermore supervised respondents reported accepting more homosexual clients than their unsupervised counterparts. However results from the multivariate analysis of variance has indicated that the female participants reported “accepting homosexuals or transgender clients for treatment” more often than the male participants; unsupervised participants reported “accepting homosexual or transgender clients for treatment” and “treating homosexuality per se as a pathological disorder” more often than their supervised counterparts.     

The Community Psychologist as Critical Friend: Promoting Critical Community Praxis

Community‐engaged researchers have a responsibility to community partners to get beyond the traditional researcher stance to take on the active role of critical friend. On the basis of my own community research experiences in the USA, in this article, I argue that there is added value in taking on the practice of critical friendship to encourage a higher degree of critical reflection and critical practice in our partners and in our work together. In the context of long‐term, trusting relationships with community partners, researchers can play the role of critical friend working together to shape critical community praxis on the basis of critical theorizing, critical reflection, and a shared commitment to working for social justice. Those trying to make a difference in communities are often isolated and can benefit from opportunities for dialogue with other community practitioners within a critical frame of reference. Although not without risks and challenges, stepping into this role allows us to put into sharper relief the gap between community practice that challenges injustice and practice that maintains it. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How similar are the changes in neural activity resulting from mindfulness practice in contrast to spiritual practice?

Meditation and spiritual practices are conceptually similar, eliciting similar subjective experiences, and both appear to provide similar benefits to the practicing individuals. However, no research has examined whether the mechanism of action leading to the beneficial effects is similar in both practices. This review examines the neuroimaging research that has focused on groups of meditating individuals, groups who engage in religious/spiritual practices, and research that has examined groups who perform both practices together, in an attempt to assess whether this may be the case. Differences in the balance of activity between the parietal and prefrontal cortical activation were found between the three groups. A relative prefrontal increase was reflective of mindfulness, which related to decreased anxiety and improved well-being. A relative decrease in activation of the parietal cortex, specifically the inferior parietal cortex, appears to be reflective of spiritual belief, whether within the context of meditation or not. Because mindful and spiritual practices differ in focus regarding the ‘self’ or ‘other’ (higher being), these observations about neurological components that reflect spirituality may continue work towards understanding how the definition of ‘self’ and ‘other’ is represented in the brain, and how this may be reflected in behaviour. Future research can begin to use cohorts of participants in mindfulness studies which are controlled for using the variable of spirituality to explicitly examine how functional and structural similarities and differences may arise.     

Giving and receiving autonomy support in a high-stakes sport context: A field-based experiment during the 2012 London Paralympic Games

ObjectiveRecognizing that high-stakes competitions tend to pressure coaches toward a maladaptive controlling motivating style, we sought to evaluate the capacity of an intervention to help coaches adopt a more autonomy-supportive style as they and their athletes prepared for the 2012 London Paralympic Games.DesignWe adopted a coach-focused experimental research design that longitudinally assessed coaches' and athletes' self-report, rater-scored, and objective dependent measures.MethodWe randomly assigned 33 coaches and their 64 athletes from 10 sports into either an experimental or control group and assessed their motivation and functioning longitudinally.ResultsIn the control group, athletes and coaches both showed a significant longitudinal deterioration in all measures of motivation, engagement, and functioning. In the experimental group, none of the measures of motivation, engagement, and functioning deteriorated but, instead, were generally maintained. In terms of performance, athletes of coaches in the experimental group won significantly more Olympic medals than did athletes in the control group.ConclusionEnacting an autonomy-supportive coaching style within the context of a high-stakes sports competition functioned as an antidote to coaches' otherwise situationally-induced controlling style.     

The analytic setting today: using the couch or the chair?

This paper re‐visits Murray Jackson's 1961 paper in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, ‘Chair, couch and countertransference’, with the aim of exploring the role of the couch for Jungian analysts in clinical practice today. Within the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) and some other London‐based societies, there has been an evolution of practice from face‐to‐face sessions with the patient in the chair, as was Jung's preference, to a mode of practice where patients use the couch with the analyst sitting to the side rather than behind, as has been the tradition in psychoanalysis. Fordham was the founding member of the SAP and it was because of his liaison with psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts that this cultural shift came about. Using clinical examples, the author explores the couch/chair question in terms of her own practice and the internal setting as a structure in her mind. With reference to Bleger's (2013) paper ‘Psychoanalysis of the psychoanalytic setting’, the author discusses how the analytic setting, including use of the couch or the chair, can act as a silent container for the most primitive aspects of the patient's psyche which will only emerge in analysis when the setting changes or is breached.