Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation, with disproportionate costs to Black Americans’ opportunities, networks, education, wealth, health, and legal treatment. These institutional and societal systems build-in individual bias and racialized interactions, resulting in systemic racism. Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans’ inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human. Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals’ systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior. Interracial interactions likewise convey disrespect and distrust. These systematic individual and interpersonal patterns continue partly due to non-Black people’s inexperience with Black Americans and reliance on societal caricatures. Despite systemic challenges, Black Americans are more diverse now than ever, due to resilience (many succeeding against the odds), immigration (producing varied backgrounds), and intermarriage (increasing the multiracial proportion of the population). Intergroup contact can foreground Black diversity, resisting systemic racism, but White advantages persist in all economic, political, and social domains. Cognitive science has an opportunity: to include in its study of the mind the distortions of reality about individual humans and their social groups.

Using Interpersonal Dimensions of Personality and Personality Pathology to Examine Momentary and Idiographic Patterns of Alliance Rupture

The Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD) integrates several theoretical models of personality functioning, including interpersonal theory. The interpersonal circumplex dimensions of warmth and dominance can be conceptualized as traits similar to those in AMPD Criterion B, but interpersonal theory also offers dynamic hypotheses about how these variables that change from moment to moment, which help to operationalize some of the processes alluded to in AMPD Criterion A. In the psychotherapy literature, dynamic interpersonal behaviors are thought to be critical for identifying therapeutic alliance ruptures, yet few studies have examined moment-to-moment interpersonal behaviors that are associated with alliance ruptures at an idiographic level. The current study examined the concurrent and cross-lagged relationships between interpersonal behaviors and alliance ruptures within each session in the famous Gloria films (“Three Approaches to Psychotherapy”). Interpersonal behaviors (warmth and dominance) as well as alliance ruptures (i.e., withdrawal and confrontation) were calculated at half minute intervals for each dyad. We identified distinct interpersonal patterns associated with alliance ruptures for each session: Gloria (patient)’s warmth was positively related with withdrawal ruptures concurrently in the session with Carl Rogers; Gloria’s dominance and coldness were related with increased confrontation ruptures in the session with Fritz Perls concurrently, while her coldness was also predicted by confrontation ruptures at previous moments; lastly, both Gloria’s dominance and Albert Ellis’s submissiveness were positively related with withdrawal ruptures. These interpersonal patterns demonstrated the promise of using AMPD dimensions to conceptualize momentary interpersonal processes related to therapy ruptures, as well as the clinical importance of attuning to repetitive, dyad-specific interpersonal cues of ruptures within each session.

Complex PTSD and personality disorder in ICD-11: when to assign one or two diagnoses?

Objective: To outline overlap and boundaries between ICD-11 definitions of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and personality disorder (PD) and propose guiding principles that may assist practitioners in assigning one or both of the two diagnoses. Conclusions: The ICD-11 definitions for C-PTSD and PD are substantially comparable in terms of self- and interpersonal problems, and childhood trauma may be at the root of both disorders. The ICD-11 formally recognizes this overlap and allows the assignment of both diagnoses at the same time. The C-PTSD diagnosis essentially differs from a PD diagnosis by requiring a history of trauma and PTSD symptoms. Moreover, C-PTSD typically involves stable and persistent patterns of negative self-perception while emphasizing avoidant interpersonal patterns. In comparison, the PD diagnosis may differ from C-PTSD by allowing an unstable or internally contradictory sense of self, which may involve both overly negative and overly positive self-views. When the diagnostic requirements for both C-PTSD and PD are met, only the C-PTSD diagnosis should be assigned, unless the PD diagnosis may contribute with clinically useful information that is not sufficiently covered by the C-PTSD diagnosis. The outlined similarities and boundaries must be further corroborated by future empirical studies.

Comparing Interpersonal Defense Theory and Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy and Their Views of Sharon’s Case

This paper compares the approaches to Sharon’s case presented in two articles that appear earlier in this module, my paper (Westerman, 2021a), which was based on Interpersonal Defense Theory, and the paper by Critchfield, Dobner-Pereira, and Stucker (2021a), which was based on Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy (IRT). I begin by considering differences in general between the ways in which these two perspectives approach case formulation. I then turn to comparing the formulations of Sharon’s case based on the two perspectives. Among other things, this part of the paper contrasts IRT’s focus on copy processes and the Gift of Love with Interpersonal Defense Theory’s focus on functionalist processes that involve the temporal organization of the parts of noncoordinating defensive interpersonal patterns. The second half of the paper compares the treatment implications of the two approaches in general terms and as they relate to Sharon’s case in particular. Implications for treatment are discussed regarding both insight-oriented interventions and enacted interventions at the level of therapy relationship processes.

Freedom and Desire: A Quest for Spiritual Journey in James Joyce’s Novel Ulysses/A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

This study, Freedom, and Desire: A quest for a spiritual journey in the novel by James Joyce, describes the journey of the main character of the story from his adolescence to the best way of conceptualizing the dynamic, multilateral relationship between individual experience and socio-cultural scope, since it recognizes the causal significance of culture but also recognizes individual choice and changes. The researcher examines the true desire which enables him to embrace his creative spirits “the actual experiences” which also symbolize freedom. This claim is formed by contemplating how many historical shifts in the socio-cultural context, i.e. the increase in freedom of choice, the shift in interpersonal patterns, the loss of traditional values, the loss of religious understanding, and the increasing conflict between the desire for individuality and the complexity of achieving it, have led to changes in the essence of true intentions and modern personhood. For this research, a qualitative method is adopted in the framework of Locke on Freedom (2015). It also points out and aims at the need to establish a new perspective on the provision of spiritual treatment in the field of freedom and desire, which focuses on improving the particular spiritual journey of the person, rather than simply reassuring spiritual distress. A man should not have to restrict himself to limited ideas, for this one has to go beyond limitation to change his mind which is the ultimate reality of advancement in life.

Dreamwork Principles and Approaches for Palliative Care

Remembering and working with dreams can be of great benefit in life and especially in connection with death and palliative care not only for the dying, but also for friends and relatives, and even for the caregiver(s).Inevitably, dreams around the time of death of both the dying and their loved ones will be offering incredible opportunities for vital emotional release, insight into deep unresolved interpersonal patterns, and a source of communication between personality and spirit for acceptance of death itself.Dreams of the dying, friends, relatives, and caregivers alike also often act as a daily inner compass and source of wisdom for health and treatment.Caregivers may use dreamwork and related appraoches as powerful tools even with patients who are unable to communicate, not very lucid, or even in a coma.Research shows that anyone can learn to recall dreams and tap their wisdom for daily guidance, and social/emotional, mental, and even physical healing, including the dying, visitors, and caregivers alike. In this way, dreams can become the source of insight and transformation they are meant to be.The presentation will cover the science, philosophy, and real-world examples of practical applications of dreams, such as for healing and caregiving, and will touch upon concepts and methods for inducing, remembering and working with dreams that can provide opportunities for healing, greater fulfillment, enhanced treatment, and a personal soul connection around the time of death.