Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim: Theological Reformer,Philosopher and Physician

Journal of Religion and Health - Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim (1493–1541), known as Paracelsus, was a German-Swiss Renaissance man. His interests included alchemy and medicine. During...     

The Last Time: Commentary on Paper by Stuart A. Pizer

Pizer presents poetic details of his patient's complex therapy and analysis. This commentary examines one moment in the treatment that may have violated the potential in potential space. The question is raised as to the impact of such a moment.     

Appropriateness of anxiety and drive for affiliation

Anxiety was induced in first/only born and later born subjects by the threatened injection of a harmless drug. Perceived appropriateness of the induced anxiety was manipulated by the experimenter's suggestion that anxiety over an injection was either perfectly natural (appropriate condition) or to be found only in rather nervous and effeminate men (inappropriate condition). The results indicated that the anxiety induction was successful, but that the perceived appropriateness of the anxiety determined the tendency to affiliate. Subjects in the appropriate condition showed a significantly greater tendency to affiliate than did subjects in the inappropriate condition. Birth order was related to anxiety on one of two measures, but was not implicated in the determination of the affiliative tendency.     

Drops of Light into the Darkness: Migration,Immigration, and Human Rights

This essay is structured like a mosaic with a sequential passage from piece to piece. The author begins with observations on the documentary film 4.1 Miles about refugees smuggled across the Aegean Sea from Turkey to the island of Lesbos in Greece. A discussion about migrant dislocation and dispossession follows along with the implications of the “other.” What about the other? This leads to explorations in human rights and psychoanalysis and how the personal became political for the author.     

Clinton and the Empty Self

I detest the man who is the object of your study: as far as a single individual can be responsible for the misery of this part of the world, he surely is [Freud on Woodrow Wilson, 1920].     

The Impact of Covariates on Statistical Power in Cluster Randomized Designs: Which Level Matters More?

Field experiments with nested structures are becoming increasingly common, especially designs that assign randomly entire clusters such as schools to a treatment and a control group. In such large-scale cluster randomized studies the challenge is to obtain sufficient power of the test of the treatment effect. The objective is to maximize power without adding many clusters that make the study much more expensive. In this article I discuss how power estimates of tests of treatment effects in balanced cluster randomized designs are affected by covariates at different levels. I use third-grade data from Project STAR, a field experiment about class size, to demonstrate how covariates that explain a considerable proportion of variance in outcomes increase power significantly. When lower level covariates are group-mean centered and clustering effects are larger, top-level covariates increase power more than lower level covariates. In contrast, when clustering effects are smaller and lower level covariates are grand-mean centered or uncentered, lower level covariates increase power more than top-level covariates.     

Automatic control of negative emotions: Evidence that structured practice increases the efficiency of emotion regulation

Emotion regulation (ER) is vital to everyday functioning. However, the effortful nature of many forms of ER may lead to regulation being inefficient and potentially ineffective. The present research examined whether structured practice could increase the efficiency of ER. During three training sessions, comprising a total of 150 training trials, participants were presented with negatively valenced images and asked either to “attend” (control condition) or “reappraise” (ER condition). A further group of participants did not participate in training but only completed follow-up measures. Practice increased the efficiency of ER as indexed by decreased time required to regulate emotions and increased heart rate variability (HRV). Furthermore, participants in the ER condition spontaneously regulated their negative emotions two weeks later and reported being more habitual in their use of ER. These findings indicate that structured practice can facilitate the automatic control of negative emotions and that these effects persist beyond training.     

Initial Encounters of Young Men and Women: Impressions and Disclosure Estimates

The purpose of this study was to explore the expectation that, in conversations between unacquainted men and women, men would disclose more than women and would create a positive impression in so doing. In 8-min, relatively unstructured conversations, both men and women (N=301) perceived themselves and their partners as disclosing approximately the same amount. For both sexes, the more their partners disclosed, the more favorably they rated their partners on social attractiveness and positive attributes. Moreover, both sexes believed that the more they disclosed themselves, the more positively their partners evaluated them. However, the strength of this relationship was significantly stronger for men than for women. Neither sex conformed to the expectation that men should disclose more, but both may have believed to some extent that their partners were evaluating them in accord with this expectation.     

The Latent Structure of Spatial Skills and Mathematics: A Replication of the Two-Factor Model

In a previous study, Mix et al. (2016) reported that spatial skill and mathematics were composed of 2 highly correlated, domain-specific factors, with a few cross-domain loadings. The overall structure was consistent across grade (kindergarten, 3rd grade, 6th grade), but the cross-domain loadings varied with age. The present study sought to replicate these patterns. Using the data from Wave 1 (n = 854) and data collected from a 2nd sample of kindergarten (n = 251), 3rd-grade (n = 247), and 6th-grade students (n = 241) with the same measures as in Wave 1, we carried out a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis to compare the 2 waves. We also completed several analyses of the Wave 2 data alone. The overall pattern obtained in Wave 1—2 highly correlated domain-specific factors—was clearly replicated in Wave 2. However, more subtle effects involving cross-domain loading were only partially replicated and generally appear fragile and context-specific. In Wave 2, we also included 2 new measures (i.e., proportion matching and fraction identification) that were analyzed in a separate model. Including these new measures did not change the overall pattern of factors and domain-specific factor loadings but did alter some of the cross-domain loadings.     

Nebbiosi’s Third: A Discussion of Gianni Nebbiosi’s “The Smell of Paper”

Gianni Nebbiosi’s clinical paper is discussed as music to the hammer of the commentator’s ear. Three overlapping points are presented. The first centers on Nebbiosi’s tone of voice with his analysand Teresa. The second point is about music and psychoanalysis. The final point is about Nebbiosi’s free association to Beethoven’s Third Symphony.