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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Dissociation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dissociation. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Strategic Regulation of Empathy

Weisz, E., & Cikara, M. 
(2020, October 9).

Abstract

Empathy is an integral part of socio-emotional well-being, yet recent research has highlighted some of its downsides. Here we examine literature that establishes when, how much, and what aspects of empathy promote specific outcomes. After reviewing a theoretical framework which characterizes empathy as a suite of separable components, we examine evidence showing how dissociations of these components affect important socio-emotional outcomes and describe emerging evidence suggesting that these components can be independently and deliberately modulated. Finally, we advocate for a new approach to a multi-component view of empathy which accounts for the interrelations among components. This perspective advances scientific conceptualization of empathy and offers suggestions for tailoring empathy to help people realize their social, emotional, and occupational goals.

From Concluding Remarks

Early research on empathy regarded it as a monolithic construct. This characterization ultimately gave rise to a second wave of empathy-related research, which explicitly examined dissociations among empathy-related components.Subsequently, researchers noticed that individual components held different predictive power over key outcomes such as helping and occupational burnout. As described above, however, there are many instances in which these components track together in the real world, suggesting that although they can dissociate, they often operate in tandem.

Because empathy-related components rely on separable neural systems, the field of social neuroscience has already made significant progress toward the goal of characterizing instances when components do (or do not) track together.  For example, although affective and cognitive channels can independently contribute to judgments of others emotional states, they also operate in synchrony during more naturalistic socio-emotional tasks.  However, far more behavioral research is needed to characterize the co-occurrence of components in people’s everyday social interactions.  Because people differ in their tendencies to engage distinct components of empathy, a better understanding of the separability and interrelations of these components in real-world social scenarios can help tailor empathy-training programs to promote desirable outcomes.  Empathy-training efforts are on average effective (Hedges’ g = 0.51) but generally intervene on empathy as a whole (rather than specific components). 

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Research and clinical issues in trauma and dissociation: Ethical and logical fallacies, myths, misreports, and misrepresentations

Jenny Ann Rydberg
European Journal of Trauma & Dissociation
Available online 23 April 2017

Introduction

The creation of a new journal on trauma and dissociation is an opportunity to take stock of existing models and theories in order to distinguish mythical, and sometimes dangerous, stories from established facts.

Objective

To describe the professional, scientific, clinical, and ethical strategies and fallacies that must be envisaged when considering reports, claims, and recommendations relevant to trauma and dissociation.

Method

After a general overview, two current debates in the field, the stabilisation controversy and the false/recovered memory controversy, are examined in detail to illustrate such issues.

Results

Misrepresentations, misreports, ethical and logical fallacies are frequent in the general and scientific literature regarding the stabilisation and false/recovered memory controversies.

Conclusion

A call is made for researchers and clinicians to strengthen their knowledge of and ability to identify such cognitive, logical, and ethical manoeuvres both in scientific literature and general media reports.

The article is here.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Why Don’t Cops Believe Rape Victims?

Brain science helps explain the problem—and solve it.

By Rebecca Ruiz
Slate.com
Originally posted June 19, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

This is rape culture in action. It puts the burden of proving innocence on the victim, and from Steubenville, Ohio, to Notre Dame and beyond, we’ve seen it poison cases and destroy lives. But science is telling us that our suspicions of victims, the ones that seem like common sense, are flat-out baseless. A number of recent studies on neurobiology and trauma show that the ways in which the brain processes harrowing events accounts for victim behavior that often confounds cops, prosecutors, and juries.

These findings have led to a fundamental shift in the way experts who grasp the new science view the investigation of rape cases—and led them to a better method for interviewing victims. The problem is that the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies haven’t been converted. Or at least, most aren’t yet receiving the training to improve their own interview procedures. The exception, it turns out, is the military. Despite its many failings in sexual assault cases, it has actually been at the vanguard of translating the new research into practical tools for investigating rape.

(cut)

This is why, experts say, sexual assault victims often can’t give a linear account of an attack and instead focus on visceral sensory details like the smell of cologne or the sound of voices in the hallway. “That’s simply because their brain has encoded it in this fragmented way,” says David Lisak, a clinical psychologist and forensic consultant who trains civilian and military law enforcement to understand victim and offender behavior.

The entire story is here.