Being Honest About Dishonesty: Correlating Self‐Reports and Actual Lying

Does everybody lie? A dominant view is that lying is part of everyday social interaction. Recent research, however, has claimed, that robust individual differences exist, with most people reporting that they do not lie, and only a small minority reporting very frequent lying. In this study, we found most people to subjectively report little or no lying. Importantly, we found self‐reports of frequent lying to positively correlate with real‐life cheating and psychopathic tendencies. Our findings question whether lying is normative and common among most people, and instead suggest that most people are honest most of the time and that a small minority lies frequently.     

Beyond Darwinism’s Eclipse: Functional Evolution,Biochemical Recapitulation and Spencerian Emergence in the 1920s and 1930s

During the 1920s and 1930s, many biologists questioned the viability of Darwin’s theory as a mechanism of evolutionary change. In the early 1940s, and only after a number of alternatives were suggested, Darwinists succeeded to establish natural selection and gene mutation as the main evolutionary mechanisms. While that move, today known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis, is taken as signalling a triumph of evolutionary theory, certain critical problems in evolution—in particular the evolution of animal function—could not be addressed with this approach. Here I demonstrate this through reconstruction of the evolutionary theory of Joseph Needham (1900–1995), who pioneered the biochemical study of evolution and development. In order to address such problems, Needham employed Herbert Spencer’s principles of emergence and Ernst Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation. While Needham did not reject Darwinian theory, Spencerian and Haeckelian frameworks happened to better fit his findings and their evolutionary relevance. He believed selectionist and genetic approaches to be important but far from sufficient for explaining how evolutionary transformations occur.     

Adolescents,Risk Behaviour and Confidentiality: When Would Australian Psychologists Breach Confidentiality to Disclose Information to Parents?

The protection of confidentiality in psychological practice is vital. However, confidentiality is not absolute and psychologists are permitted to breach confidentiality under particular circumstances. Ethical challenges surrounding confidentiality are complex with adolescent clients, as assessments often consider the risk that adolescents pose to themselves in addition to the risk posed to others. The current study documented situations in which Australian psychologists would breach adolescents' confidentiality to disclose information about risk behaviour to parents, with a focus on situations where adolescents posed a risk to themselves as opposed to other people putting adolescents at risk. A total of 264 Australian psychologists were surveyed online. They were each presented with 68 variations of a vignette about a 15‐year‐old boy who was engaged in risk behaviour and were asked whether they would breach confidentiality in each case. The vignettes covered six behavioural domains (smoking, sexual behaviour, drinking, drug use, suicide, stealing) and varied in behaviour intensity, frequency and duration. Consensus was reached about breaching confidentiality in 16% of cases (related to sexual behaviour, drug use, and suicide). Consensus was reached about not breaching confidentiality in 41% of cases (relating to smoking, sexual behaviour, drug use, suicide, and stealing). In the remaining 43% of cases, significant disagreement occurred (relating to all six behavioural domains). The findings suggest a high degree of variation in opinion about confidentiality with adolescents, emphasising the importance of transparent communication and informed consent. The findings also raise questions about how important consistency of psychological practice is across Australia.     

Ethical Dilemmas of Confidentiality With Adolescent Clients: Case Studies From Psychologists

Navigating limits to confidentiality with adolescent clients can be ethically and professionally challenging. This study follows on from a previous quantitative survey of psychologists about confidentiality dilemmas with adolescents. The current study used qualitative methods to explore such dilemmas in greater depth. Twenty Australian psychologists were interviewed and asked to describe an ethically challenging past case. Cases were then used to facilitate discussion about the decision-making process and outcomes. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using interpretive content and thematic analysis. Three key findings are discussed. First, it is of little use to perceive confidentiality dilemmas as binary choices (breach/don’t breach) because psychologists described 5 distinct options. These can be conceptualized on a spectrum of varying degrees of client autonomy, ranging from “no disclosure” (highest client autonomy) to “disclosure without the client’s knowledge or consent” (lowest client autonomy). Second, confidentiality dilemmas often involve balancing multiple and conflicting risks regarding both immediate and future harm. Third, a range of strategies are employed by psychologists to minimize potential harms when disclosing information. These are primarily aimed at maintaining the therapeutic relationship and empowering clients. These findings and the case studies described provide a valuable resource for teaching and professional development.     

Transference-Love and Institutional Involvement in a Case of Psychotherapy Supervision

Transference-love in supervision remains a relatively unexplored subject in psychotherapy. This article describes and analyzes an incident of the supervision of a student whose dress code raised a question regarding the existence of transference-love. The role of the institution in maintaining a protective envelope is shown to be significant in the satisfactory resolution of what appeared to have been an impasse. In addition, multicultural and gender issues are examined to illustrate the complexity of the subject.     

Dreading the pain of others? Altruistic responses to others' pain underestimate dread

A dislike of waiting for pain, aptly termed ‘dread’, is so great that people will increase pain to avoid delaying it. However, despite many accounts of altruistic responses to pain in others, no previous studies have tested whether people take delay into account when attempting to ameliorate others' pain. We examined the impact of delay in 2 experiments where participants (total N = 130) specified the intensity and delay of pain either for themselves or another person. Participants were willing to increase the experimental pain of another participant to avoid delaying it, indicative of dread, though did so to a lesser extent than was the case for their own pain. We observed a similar attenuation in dread when participants chose the timing of a hypothetical painful medical treatment for a close friend or relative, but no such attenuation when participants chose for a more distant acquaintance. A model in which altruism is biased to privilege pain intensity over the dread of pain parsimoniously accounts for these findings. We refer to this underestimation of others' dread as a ‘Dread Empathy Gap’.     

Theta synchronizes the activity of medial prefrontal neurons during learning

Memory consolidation is thought to involve the gradual transfer of transient hippocampal-dependent traces to distributed neocortical sites via the rhinal cortices. Recently, medial prefrontal (mPFC) neurons were shown to facilitate this process when their activity becomes synchronized. However, the mechanisms underlying this enhanced synchrony remain unclear. Because the hippocampus projects to the mPFC, we tested whether theta oscillations contribute to synchronize mPFC neurons during learning. Thus, we obtained field (LFP) and unit recordings from multiple mPFC sites during the acquisition of a trace-conditioning task, where a visual conditioned stimulus (CS) predicted reward delivery. In quiet waking, the activity of mPFC neurons was modulated by theta oscillations. During conditioning, CS presentation caused an increase in mPFC theta power that augmented as the CS gained predictive value for reward delivery. This increased theta power coincided with a transient theta phase locking at distributed mPFC sites, an effect that was also manifest in the timing of mPFC unit activity. Overall, these results show that theta oscillations contribute to synchronize neuronal activity at distributed mPFC sites, suggesting that the hippocampus, by generating a stronger theta source during learning, can synchronize mPFC activity, in turn facilitating rhinal transfer of its activity to the neocortex.