Existence and the existential quantifier

This paper draws a distinction between the existential quantifier and the symbol ‘∃’ used to express it, on the one hand, and existence and ‘exists’, on the other. It argues that some popular arguments in metaphysics, including arguments against vague existence and arguments against deflationary metaontology (which views ontological disputes as lacking substance), are guilty of fudging this distinction. The paper draws some lessons for metaphysical debate about existence and highlights some heretofore ignored and attractive positions in logical space.     

Art in existential psychotherapy with couples and families

The authors describe and outline how art can be used in existential psychotherapy to help a couple or family uncover, discover, and make use of the meanings and meaning potentials to be found in marital and family life. In existential psychotherapy with couples and families, art can be used to help the members of the relationship notice meaning potentials in the future, honor meaning potentials that have been actualized and deposited in the past, and discover new ways to actualize meaning potentials in the here and now.     

Thoughts and feelings and things: A new psychiatric epistemology

Epistemology — the study of knowledge — is a philosophical discipline with close ties to psychiatry. When epistemologists address specific questions about how knowledge is actually realized by human beings, their philosophy must be informed by empirical studies of the sort psychiatrists now take up in a variety of forms. As this paper describes, psychiatrists can likewise improve their understanding of human psychology through a deeper appreciation of philosophical analysis in epistemology.The aim of this article is to introduce a unifying framework within which the experience from different approaches to psychiatry — (1) the conceptual schemas of cognitive psychiatry, (2) the mental structures of psychoanalytic psychiatry, (3) the categorical forms of existential psychiatry, and (4) the neural pathways of biological psychiatry — can all be applied productively to the central question of epistemology. By establishing a broad understanding of the problem of knowledge, this new view of epistemology is developed within the idiom of each psychiatric approach. In addressing themselves to a unitary problem, these diverse psychiatric approaches are themselves revealed, not as competing points of view, but as complementary views of a single subject. The result is a new epistemology that can not only bring the insights of psychiatry to philosophy, but can also contribute to the care of patients when psychiatrists bring this broader view to their clinical work.     

The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Domain-Specific and Domain-General Creativity

The Amusement Park Theory of Creativity, which represents both domain-specific and domain-general perspectives of creativity, calls for more research on how individual difference constructs are related to creativity at all ends of the domain-specificity and general spectrum. Toward this goal, this study examined emotional intelligence (using the Emotional Intelligence Scale) in relationship with both a domain-general measure (the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults) and a domain-specific measure (Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale) in a sample of 281 Chinese undergraduates. Although emotional intelligence demonstrated no relationship with divergent thinking, it did positively predict all five domains of creativity on the self-report measure (ranging from .52 to .77). These findings add to the nuanced relationship between emotional intelligence and creativity and serve as a call for more work of this nature.     

Domain Specificity and the Limits of Creativity Theory

A growing body of research evidence suggests that creativity is very domain‐specific and that domain‐general skills or traits contribute little to creative performance. The term “creativity” is a convenient term for collecting many interesting artifacts, processes, and people into a single category, and the term “creative thinking skills” may be a useful way to connect a diverse set of unrelated cognitive processes that operate on different content and in different domains. These concepts are misleading, however, because although they connect things that may seem similar to observers, they lack any underlying cognitive psychological validity. This has implications for the ways we understand and assess creativity, and also for how we should direct our efforts to develop creative‐thinking skills in diverse domains. Creativity training needs either to target the domains in which creativity enhancement is desired or to use a wide range of activities in diverse domains if the goal is more general improvement in many domains. Creativity assessment needs to focus on domain‐by‐domain assessment and to review findings based on allegedly domain‐general tests of creativity that may have misled researchers to unsupportable interpretations. Creativity theory needs to set more modest goals of domain‐by‐domain theory development and to recognize that theories that may seem domain‐general might better be understood as meta‐theoretical heuristics that do not actually describe domain‐general processes. These meta‐theories might in some cases help guide the search for domain‐based theories.     

A Life Domains Perspective on Acculturation and Psychological Adjustment: A Study of Refugees from the Former Soviet Union

The study articulates a contextual approach to research on acculturation of immigrants, suggesting that the relationship between acculturation and adjustment is dependent on the cultural demands of the life domains considered. Specifically, the study investigated the mediating effects of adjustment in occupational and social life domains on the relationship between acculturation and psychological adjustment for 391 refugees from the former Soviet Union. The study used bilinear measures of acculturation to the host (American) and heritage (Russian) cultures. Using Structural Equation Modeling, the study confirmed the hypothesized relationships, such that the positive effects of American acculturation on psychological adjustment were mediated by occupational adjustment, and the effects of Russian acculturation on psychological adjustment were mediated by satisfaction with co-ethnic social support. Psychological adjustment was measured in two ways, as psychological well-being, using a measure of life satisfaction, and as symptoms of depression and anxiety, using the Hopkins symptom checklist (HSCL). Life satisfaction served as a mediator between adjustment in occupational and social domains and HSCL, suggesting that it may be an intervening variable through which environmental stress associated with immigration contributes to the development of symptoms of mental disorder.     

Patient preference as a predictor of outcomes in a pilot trial of person-centred counselling versus low-intensity cognitive behavioural therapy for persistent sub-threshold and mild depression

The aim of this analysis was to explore whether pre-treatment intervention preferences were related to outcomes for patients with persistent sub-threshold and mild depression who received one of two treatment types. Thirty-six patients took part in a two-arm, parallel group, pilot randomized controlled trial that compared short term (3 month and 6 month) outcomes of person-centred counselling (PCC) compared with low-intensity, CBT-based guided self-help (LICBT). Patient preferences for the two interventions were assessed at baseline assessment, and analysed as two independent linear variables (pro-PCC, pro-LICBT). Eight out of 30 interactions between baseline treatment preferences and treatment type were found to be significant at the p < .05 level. All were in the predicted direction, with patients who showed a stronger preference for a treatment achieving better outcomes in that treatment compared with the alternative. However, pro-LICBT was a stronger predictor of outcomes than pro-PCC. The findings provide preliminary support that treatment preferences should be taken into account when providing interventions for patients with persistent sub-threshold and mild depression. It is recommended that further research analyses preferences for different treatment types as independent variables, and examines preferences for format of treatment (e.g. guided self-help vs. face-to-face).