Psychology Commons^™

Car Trouble And Other Stories, Adam Charpentier

Adam R. Charpentier

A collection of four short stories which examine the connection between awareness and emotional, psychological, and geographical identity. "Car Trouble" is a first person narrative of a hit & run accident and the events that follow. "Ten More Minutes" follows the recollections of a narrator detailing his admittance into and release from a mental hospital. The protagonist of "Islander" recounts his investigations of his lodgings on Tinian, an island far removed from his past life. "Little Black Dress" chronicles the impact the protagonist's lifestyle choices make on his marriage.

Idealization And Desire In The Hundred Acre Wood: A.A. Milne And Christopher (Robin), Laura Bright

Laura E Bright

Argues that A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner represent the conscious rejection, unconscious reproduction, and re-imaging of the author's traumatic Victorian childhood.

Mindscapes And Landscapes: Hayek And Simon On Cognitive Extension, Leslie Marsh

Leslie Marsh

Hayek’s and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects …

Beyond Dogma: The Role Of "Evolutionary" Science And The "Embodiment" Of Archetypal Energies, Carroy U. Ferguson

Carroy U "Cuf" Ferguson, Ph.D.

At individual and collective levels (locally, nationally, and globally), humanity is currently entertaining many challenges and opportunities for growth. In my view, these challenges and opportunities are connected to Energy shifts that are taking place on the planet, and the inability of some to move beyond dogma in relating to these Energy shifts. By its pre- and proscriptive nature, dogma fosters limiting beliefs that often interfere with how best to relate to these Energy shifts as vibrational beings in an evolving, vibrational world. Here, I want to briefly identify some of the limiting effects of dogma, and the role of …

Embodied Metaphors And Creative “Acts”, Angela K.-Y. Leung, Suntae Kim, Evan Polman, Lay See Ong, Lin Qiu, Jack A. Goncola, Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks

Ka Yee Angela LEUNG

Creativity is a highly sought after skill. To inspire people’s creativity, prescriptive advice in the form of metaphors abound: We are encouraged to think outside the box, to consider the problem on one hand, then on the other hand, and to put two and two together to achieve creative breakthroughs. These metaphors suggest a connection between concrete bodily experiences and creative cognition. Inspired by recent advances on body-mind linkages under the emerging vernacular of embodied cognition, we explored for the first time whether enacting metaphors for creativity enhances creative problem-solving. In five studies, findings revealed that both physically and psychologically …

Musical Stem Completion: Humming That Note, J.A. Warker, Andrea Halpern

Andrea Halpern

This study looked at how people store and retrieve tonal music explicitly and implicitly using a production task. Participants completed an implicit task (tune stem completion) followed by an explicit task (cued recall). The tasks were identical except for the instructions at test time. They listened to tunes and were then presented with tune stems from previously heard tunes and novel tunes. For the implicit task, they were asked to sing a note they thought would come next musically. For the explicit task, they were asked to sing the note they remembered as coming next. Experiment 1 found that people …

Wordsworth's Habits Of Mind: Knowledge Through Experience (Review), Nancy Easterlin

Nancy Easterlin

No abstract provided.

Alexithymia In Relation To Parental Alcoholism, Everyday Frontal Lobe Functioning And Alcohol Consumption In A Non-Clinical Sample, Michael Lyvers, Roy Onuoha, Fred Thorberg, Christina Samios

Mike Lyvers

Background: Recent studies have indicated that 45–67% of those in treatment for alcohol use disorders suffer from alexithymia, a multifaceted personality trait characterized by difficulties identifying and describing emotions and an externally oriented cognitive style. The high reported prevalence rates of alexithymia among those with alcohol dependence led to speculation that alexithymia is a personality dimension that may predispose to risky or problematic alcohol use.Methods: This notion was examined in 314 adult volunteers (54% female) aged 18–45 years (M=27.6 years), all of whom reported at least occasional alcohol consumption,who completed online surveys assessing alexithymia (Toronto Alexithymia Scale, or TAS-20), parental …

Alexithymia In Relation To Parental Alcoholism, Everyday Frontal Lobe Functioning And Alcohol Consumption In A Non-Clinical Sample, Michael Lyvers, Roy Onuoha, Fred Thorberg, Christina Samios

Christina Samios

Background: Recent studies have indicated that 45–67% of those in treatment for alcohol use disorders suffer from alexithymia, a multifaceted personality trait characterized by difficulties identifying and describing emotions and an externally oriented cognitive style. The high reported prevalence rates of alexithymia among those with alcohol dependence led to speculation that alexithymia is a personality dimension that may predispose to risky or problematic alcohol use.Methods: This notion was examined in 314 adult volunteers (54% female) aged 18–45 years (M=27.6 years), all of whom reported at least occasional alcohol consumption,who completed online surveys assessing alexithymia (Toronto Alexithymia Scale, or TAS-20), parental …

Designing An Information-Experience Using Creativity Science & Tools, Stephanie Belhomme

Stephanie Belhomme

An “information-experience” encapsulated by a technological/digital audio-visual tool presents data and potentially meaningful information to prompt actionable knowledge concerning: “unspoken creative process elements;” their profound impacts on both how well our “physiology of creativity” functions but also; how well foundational creative thinking and behavioral prerequisites (energy, motivation, imagination, and ownership) are leveraged.

The product: 1) introduces the user to one component of the CPS (Creative Problem Solving) Facilitation Process - Exploring the Challenge; 2) features a content specific component which prompts exploration of the many correlations between societal, organizational / community, human physiological / behavioral data, and the direct relationships …

Finding Benefits In The Aftermath Of Australia's Black Saturday Bushfires: Can Distant Witnesses Find Benefits And Do Benefits Found Relate To Better Adjustment?, Christina Samios, Kerrilee Hollows

Christina Samios

This study aimed to extend the meaning literature beyond finding meaning in personal trauma by examining the benefits found by persons who were distant witnesses to Australia’s Black Saturday bushfires. One hundred and twenty-five university students who witnessed the bushfires through the media completed measures of meaning making coping, benefits found, and adjustment. The most strongly endorsed categories of benefits found by distant witnesses were increased faith in people and increased compassion. After controlling for demographics, the duration of media exposure to the bushfires and meaning making coping, hierarchical multiple regression analyses demonstrated that the perceived benefit of enhanced self-efficacy …

A Biocultural Approach To Literary Theory And Interpretation, Nancy Easterlin

Nancy Easterlin

Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for literary interpretation. Easterlin maintains that the practice of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to …

The Visual Experience Of Image Metaphor: Cognitive Insights Into Imagist Figures, Daniel W. Gleason

Dan Gleason

In this essay I investigate how image metaphors – metaphors that link one concrete object to another, such as “her spread hand was a starfish” – promote visualization in the reader. Focusing on image metaphors in Imagist poetry, I assert that the two terms (e.g., the hand and the starfish) of many of these metaphors are similar in shape, and that this “structural correspondence” encourages the reader to visualize those metaphors. Readers may spontaneously form a “visual template,” a schematic middle ground that mediates between those similar shapes, in order to smoothly move between the two images within each metaphor. …

Trading French And Postcolonial Feminisms, Zubeda Jalalzai

Zubeda Jalalzai

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in articulating feminist and postcolonial politics, raises issues of importance for both first world and third world feminists as well as enacting some of the very dangers which accompany those tenuous relationships. Spivak's essays, "French Feminism in an International Frame" (1981) and "French Feminism Revisited: Ethics and Politics" (1992), provide a rich arena in which she presents powerful cautions regarding international solidarities and explores the complicated dynamics of ethical relationships on multiple levels, including that between mother and daughter, bourgeois postcolonial feminist and the woman of the "ground," as well as between metropolitan and postcolonial feminists.

Assessment Of Firesetters, Rebekah Doley, Bruce Watt

Bruce Watt

Extract This chapter will equip readers with the information required to screen and assess arsonists effectively using a number of modalities. The appropriate tools are presented and discussed, along with the evidence base underlying them. The focus of the discussion is on risk assessment, recidivism and dangerousness. In particular, these issues are discussed with reference to mental health and psychiatric patients as arsonists. The terms ’arson’ and ’firesetting’ will be used interchangeably throughout this chapter; the term ‘arson’ is commonly acknowledged to have a legal definition, while firesetting describes the behaviour itself.

The Multi-Trajectory Theory Of Adult Firesetting (M-Ttaf), Therese A. Gannon, Caoilte Ó Ciardha, Rebekah M. Doley, Emma Alleyne

Rebekah Doley

The assessment and treatment of adults who set fires deliberately are underdeveloped relative to other areas of forensic-clinical psychology. From a scientist–practitioner perspective, all clinical assessment and treatment should be guided by a theoretical and empirically based understanding of the presenting clinical phenomena. In this paper, we critically review current typologies, motives, and theories regarding the etiological features of deliberate adult firesetting. Then, using a theory knitting perspective, we synthesize the prime parts of this information into a comprehensive multifactorial framework of deliberate firesetting. The resulting Multi-Trajectory Theory of Adult Firesetting (M-TTAF) is an integration of current theory, typological, and …

Assessment Of Firesetters, Rebekah Doley, Bruce Watt

Rebekah Doley

Extract This chapter will equip readers with the information required to screen and assess arsonists effectively using a number of modalities. The appropriate tools are presented and discussed, along with the evidence base underlying them. The focus of the discussion is on risk assessment, recidivism and dangerousness. In particular, these issues are discussed with reference to mental health and psychiatric patients as arsonists. The terms ’arson’ and ’firesetting’ will be used interchangeably throughout this chapter; the term ‘arson’ is commonly acknowledged to have a legal definition, while firesetting describes the behaviour itself.

Power And Excitement In Arson: The Case Of Firefighter Arson, Rebekah Doley, Kenneth Fineman

Rebekah Doley

Extract Perhaps more than most crimes, the crime of arson is often shrouded in anecdotal descriptions concerning what actually motivates the offender. Arson in any form is repugnant, but even more so when the individual involved is a serving member of the fire service. Fire department personnel and the community alike abhor incidents of this nature. Although the incidence of fire-fighter arson is low in comparison with the total number of currently serving fire-fighters, the impact on community faith and fire service morale is disproportionately great. The integrity of the service is demonstrated in the performance of its personnel. While …

Bushfire And Wildfire Arson: Arson Risk Assessment In The Australian Context, Troy Mcewan, Rebekah Doley, Mairead Dolan

Rebekah Doley

Extract Deliberately lit vegetation fires have the greatest destructive potential of any intentionally lit blaze. The ’Black Saturday’ bushfires of 7 February 2009 in Victoria, Australia, killed 173 people, injured 414 and destroyed 3500 buildings, including two entire towns (Teagne et al, 2010). Even before the fires had abated police and fire-fighters revealed that several had been deliberately lit (Silvester, 2009). The subsequent Royal Commission attributed four of the large fires to arson. These four fires caused 52 deaths and burnt approximately 2000 km2 of land, an area slightly larger than that of Greater London (Teague et aI, 2010). The …

Webs Of Faith As A Source Of Reasonable Disagreement, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

Contemporary political theorists and philosophers of epistemology and religion have often drawn attention to the problem of reasonable disagreement. The idea that deliberators may reasonably persist in a disagreement even under ideal deliberative conditions and even over the long term poses a challenge to the common assumption that rationality should lead to consensus. This essay proposes a previously unrecognized source of reasonable disagreement, based on the notion that an individual's beliefs are rationally related to one another in a fabric of sentences or web of beliefs. The essay argues that an individual's beliefs may not form a single, seamless web, …

The Truths Of Chenglish: Logical Imperfection, Natural Language, And Philosophical Disagreement, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

Why is it that philosophy seems unable to obtain the kinds of agreement regularly achieved by mathematics and the natural sciences? The experimental philosophy movement emphasizes conflicting intuitions as a potential source of philosophical disagreement. This essay draws attention to another, complementary source: the logical imperfection of natural languages. Unlike logic as it is formalized in symbolic notation, the rules governing the correct use of terms in a natural language can be indeterminate, underdetermined, and inconsistent. Though most philosophers recognize the logical imperfection of natural languages in the abstract, everyday philosophical discussion is often conducted as though the argumentative moves …

Fibromyalgie, Douleur Et Fasciathérapie, Cyril Dupuis, Danis Bois

Danis Bois

Ce travail porte sur la fasciathérapie appliquée aux douleurs de la fibromyalgie, et tente de répondre à la question « quels sont les effets de la fasciathérapie sur la douleur et ses consé- quences, ainsi que sur le vécu des patients qui souffrent de fibromyalgie ? » Pour cela, j’ai présenté le champ théorique des douleurs chroniques et du syndrome fibromyalgique, ainsi que celui des thérapies s’adressant aux fascias et notamment la fasciathérapie méthode Danis Bois. J’ai abordé cette recherche avec une posture double pour tenter d’appréhender la complexité de la douleur. La première, qualitative, est basée sur des entretiens …

Stigmergy 3.0: From Ants To Economies, Leslie Marsh, Margery Doyle

Leslie Marsh

No abstract provided.

Fiestas, For 12 Percussionists, Bruno Louchourn

Bruno Louchouarn

Fiestas is conceptually inspired by the "Feasts" as social rituals. The musical process and form mirror aspects of group dynamic in these gatherings. Although a few individual players may at times dominate, the ensemble has to "conduct" itself with several sub-groups emerging and disappearing. The main theme, introduced by hand claps, is an oscillation slowly quickening to a fast trepidation, giving way to a stable polyrhythm. The degree of synchronization between players or groups of players varies and generally increases toward more order as the piece unfolds. I wanted to impart a sense of “orchestra” to the group with relatively …

A Productive Dialogue: Contemporary Moral Education And Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucian Ethics, Stephen C. Angle

Stephen C. Angle

Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections Of Race And Class For Women In Academia -- Introduction, Carmen G. Gonzalez, Angela P. Harris

Carmen G. Gonzalez

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. One of the topics addressed is the importance of forging supportive networks to transform the workplace and create a more hospitable environment for traditionally subordinated groups. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and …

A Productive Dialogue: Contemporary Moral Education And Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucian Ethics, Stephen C. Angle

Stephen C. Angle