Numbers and space: Associations and dissociations

A cornerstone of contemporary research in numerical cognition is the surprising link found between numbers and space. In particular, people react faster and more accurately to small numbers with a left-hand key and to large numbers with a right-hand key. Because this contingency is found in a variety of tasks, it has been taken to support the automatic activation of magnitude as well as the notion of a mental number line arranged from left to right. The present study challenges the presence of a link between left-right location, on the one hand, and small-large number, on the other hand. We show that a link exists between space and relative magnitude, a relationship that might or might not be unique to numbers.     

Visual on- and off-latencies and handedness

Ten Ss served in this experiment, five right-handed and five left-handed. Every S was tested in a perceived-order situation and by the up-and-down method to determine the relative on-latency for a visual test stimulus. i.e, (ON-Lat for lest stimulus involving right hemisphere- ON-Lat for standard stimulus involving left hemisphere) and to determine a similarly defined relative off-latency for the same test stimulus. The algebraic difference between the relative on-latency measure and the relative off-latency measure was then found. Data from a previous study had suggested that this “on-off difference” was characteristically positive for left-handed Ss and negative for right-handed Ss. The present data agree. The left-handed Ss were found to differ significantly from the right-handed Ss in the magnitude of the on-off difference. This outcome appears important as a possible clue to functional interhemispheric differences related to handedness.     

延迟折扣及其与青少年物质滥用与成瘾、外化问题的关系

延迟折扣指由于发生时间上的延迟,未来结果的当前价值低于其实际价值或控制当前行为效力下降的心理现象。本文在介绍了延迟折扣的概念及测量方法与指标的基础上,综述了延迟折扣与青少年物质滥用与成瘾、外化问题间关系的研究,发现青少年酗酒者、烟瘾者及网络成瘾者的延迟折扣率高于非成瘾者,而延迟折扣与青少年外化问题之间的关系尚无一致性结论,最后指出了延迟折扣及其与青少年物质滥用与成瘾、外化问题间关系的未来研究方向。     

Tools and Techniques for Diagnosis and Evaluation in Marital and Family Therapy

This is a slightly edited version of a chapter to appear in a forthcoming book. ¹ It is a beginning attempt at codification of existing tools and techniques and is therefore nonexhaustive. The authors welcome feedback from readers concerning omissions and information on new techniques, references, and applicability to therapeutic settings.     

Metaphor and Thinking in Science and Religion

Excerpts from Chapters 1 and 3 of New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (Gerhart and Russell 2001) explore the ramifications of metaphoric process for changes in thinking, especially those changes that lead to a new understanding of our world. Examples are provided from science, from religion, and from science and religion together. In excerpts from Chapter 8, a double analogy—theology is to science as science is to mathematics—is proposed for better understanding the contemporary relationship between science and religion. A conservation of epistemological sufficiency is disclosed as one moves from mathematics to empirical science to theology—a move from one discipline to another that involves a sacrifice of one aspect of thought to gain another.     

Locke and Hume on Belief, Judgment and Assent

Hume's account of belief has been much reviled, especially considered as an account of what it is to assent to or judge a proposition to be true. In fact, given that he thinks that thoughts about existence can be composed of a single idea, and that relations are just complex ideas, it might be wondered whether he has an account of judgment at all. Nonetheless, Hume was extremely proud of his account of belief, discussing it at length in the Abstract, and developing it in the Appendix. Furthermore, he claimed several times that his account was new. It was not just a new answer to an old question, but an answer to a new question as well. Why did Hume think he was raising, and answering, a new question? Is his answer really so appalling? Why did he define belief in terms of a relationship with a present impression? In this paper, I propose answers to these questions. The answers emerge by contrasting Hume with Locke. Locke thought that belief was a pale imitation of knowledge, and that the assent we give to propositions is constituted in the very same act as forming those propositions. Hume saw the problems such a theory faced concerning existential beliefs. By ceasing to treat existence as a predicate, Hume was confronted with the issue of what it was to judge something to be true, or to assent to something. This issue had to be solved independently of the question of what it was to conceive something, or understand the content of a proposition. Hume thought this problem was new. He should be looked at, not as giving a bad answer to an important question, but rather as being the first in the early modern period to recognize that there was an important question here to be answered.     

Subliminal stimulation and cognitive and motor performance

The present experiment investigated whether subliminally exposed messages affect cognitive and motor performance and whether personality factors can explain interindividual differences in this respect. According to Silverman (1983), people have a symbiotic fantasy, that is, a need for symbiotic oneness with the mother figure. This need can temporarily be satisfied by a tachistoscopic exposure of the message "Mommy and I are one." By relieving the unconscious conflict, psychological tension is reduced. Using these notions, it was hypothesized that different measures of performance should be improved. The results indicate that both cognitive performance, in terms of the ability to interpret incomplete and fragmented pictures, and motor performance, in terms of the ability to follow a printed line with a stylus, is improved by this procedure compared to that of a control group exposed to the neutral message "People are walking." However, it was not possible to relate these changes to individual differences in terms of the individual's structure of his psychological defense system as measured by the Defense Mechanism Test (DMT). Other possible explanations are discussed.     

Spinoza and Nietzsche on Freedom Empowerment and Affirmation

Against much of the philosophical tradition, Spinoza and Nietzsche defend an understanding of freedom opposed to free will and formulated as an ethical ideal consisting in a transition from a smaller to a greater power of acting. Starting from a shared commitment to necessity and radical immanence, they present freedom as a passage to a greater power of self‐determination and self‐expression of the body. Nevertheless, the continuities between their power ontologies and their respective commitments to a life of knowledge break down in their discussion of the various possible manifestations of power. I will argue that Nietzsche's distinctive formulation of power as struggle between wills to power enables him to formulate the question of the qualitative dimension of empowerment in a way that is foreign to Spinoza's rational determinism. While acknowledging the profound similarities, I will argue that we must see Nietzsche's discussion of affirmation as the culmination of his disagreement with his predecessor on the topic of freedom and empowerment.     

Love and Marriage and Other Silly Delusions

Summary

This article examines the psychodynamic patterns that (11 inevitably result in a dysfunctional relationship and divorce, and (2) those necessary understandings and prerequisites which are essential for a healthy long term relationship. These themes include: how to assure a divorce, romance as the urge to merge, the role of the Trickster, the template of the Imago, understanding Transference, the Key to Happiness, how to get unstuck and some comments on loneliness and sex. It concludes with a new understanding as to “Why get married?”     

Experiential and physiological responses associated with anger and aggression in women and men

In a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design, 48 male and female college students were either given a “sex-appropriate” provocation or were not provoked. Half of the subjects were then requested to give a “stream of consciousness” (SOC) report. Throughout the experiment, three physiological measures were monitored. Finally, all subjects delivered noxious sounds to their same-sex partner as part of a Buss-type learning task. No sex differences were found for subjects not giving the SOC report; provoked men and women were equally angry, hostile toward their partner, and displayed equal amounts of aggressive behavior. Provoked men reporting on their SOC, however, appeared to stimulate themselves to more aggression, whereas women seemed to adopt a nonhostile strategy for coping with their anger, thus reducing their inclination to behave aggressively. These patterns of results were closely paralleled by physiological changes. The relative validity of systolic and diastolic blood pressure as indicators of anger arousal was also discussed.     

The figural problem solving and problem finding of professional and semiprofessional artists and nonartists

The processes of finding a solution to a stated problem and those employed in formulating a problem prior to determining a solution strategy are implied by the behaviors observed in the manipulation of figural symbol systems. Sixty adult participants agreed to be videotaped while given two measures of spatial visualization, a figural problem‐solving activity, and two games which required defining a problem prior to producing a result. When groups, defined by their experience in producing ideas in art, were compared, traditional quantitative measures of performance yielded few significant differences. However, multivariate analyses of the observed qualitative variables resulted in significant differences. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed.     

Selection and consolidation of objects and actions

Response selection bottleneck models attribute performance costs under dual-task conditions to the human inability to select more than one response at a time. Consistent with this claim Pashler (1991) found that carrying out a speeded manual choice reaction time (RT) task does not impair the unspeeded report of a cued visual target from a masked display. In contrast, Jolicoeur and DellAcqua (1999, Experiment 2) observed pronounced interference between a speeded manual choice RT task and the unspeeded report of a small number of visually presented letters, a finding they attributed to resource sharing between response selection and stimulus consolidation. We demonstrate that comparable costs are obtained with the same task combination used by Pashler (1991) if only task order is reversed—a manipulation that is likely to increase the necessity of consolidating the target stimulus into working memory. We also found that these costs are not diminished if the location of the target to be reported is cued in advance (reducing demands on spatial focusing) and that they do not vary with the number of target features to be reported. These findings support a consolidation account of costs in dual-task performance.     

Promotion and prevention choices between stability and change

Two situations involving choice between stability and change were examined: task substitution, which deals with choosing between resuming an interrupted activity and doing a substitute activity, and endowment, which deals with choosing between a possessed object and an alternative object. Regulatory focus theory (E. T. Higgins, 1997, 1998) predicts that a promotion focus will be associated with openness to change, whereas a prevention focus will be associated with a preference for stability. Five studies confirmed this prediction with both situational induction of and chronic personality differences in regulatory focus. In Studies 1 and 2, individuals in a prevention focus were more inclined than individuals in a promotion focus to resume an interrupted task rather than do a substitute task. In Studies 3-5, individuals in a prevention focus, but not individuals in a promotion focus, exhibited a reluctance to exchange currently possessed objects (i.e., endowment) or previously possessed objects.     

Differences and similarities in event recall and suggestibility between children and adults in Germany and the United States

Children (5-6 year olds, 7-8 year olds, 9-10 year olds) and adults from Germany and the United States were shown a brief video of a theft. One week later, participants were asked to give a free narrative of an observed event (free recall), followed either by sets of misleading or unbiased questions, and finally they were given a three-choice recognition question for each queried item. German participants of all ages had higher levels of correct free recall than did American participants. American adults and 9-10 year olds gave more correct responses to the open-ended unbiased questions than did their German counterparts. Germans of all ages made more correct responses to the misleading questions, whereas national differences, favoring the Germans, for incorrect response to misleading questions were restricted to the 5-6 year olds. National differences were interpreted as reflecting possible differences in strategic abilities, exposure to formal instruction, and the degree to which children experience self-directed, autonomous learning opportunities.     

Suicide and its ethical and legal evaluation

Suicide is--considering general principles to be judged both from ethical and legal viewpoints. Moreover special attentions has to be paid to the particularities of a single case and to the fact that these particularities do not recur. This is also true of the attempt to commit suicide. The "suicideprophylaxis" is of great social important. Attention has to be paid to the problems of a fellowman, who is possibly frightened of a think or who is ill and sees no wayout from his hopelessness. The author discusses regulations of the criminallaw such as indemniti in a case of suicide--if there was no "suicide and also a putting death against another person without there own consent" and the duty of help according to paragraph 119 StGB in an accident or represent a general danger. ("erweiterter Suicid")     

Lexical organization and competition in first and second languages: computational and neural mechanisms

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organization. In this article, I outline a proposal based on our research that takes the dynamical approach to the lexicon, and I discuss how this proposal can be applied to account for lexical organization, structural representation, and competition within and between languages. In particular, I provide computational evidence based on the DevLex model, a self-organizing neural network model, and neuroimaging evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, to illustrate how children and adults learn and represent the lexicon in their first and second languages. In the computational research, our goal has been to identify, through linguistically and developmentally realistic models, detailed cognitive mechanisms underlying the dynamic self-organizing processes in monolingual and bilingual lexical development; in the neuroimaging research, our goal has been to identify the neural substrates that subserve lexical organization and competition in the monolingual and the bilingual brain. In both cases, our findings lead to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics involved in the acquisition and representation of one or multiple languages.     

Counselling and psychotherapy,complementary and alternative medicine and the future of healthcare

The counselling and psychotherapy profession is undergoing considerable change as a result of government intervention in the form of regulation, funding and efficacy research. In this paper we argue that these changes, even though they challenge some of the basic ways of thinking which have come to underpin the profession since its inception, also offer an opportunity to stimulate debate and thought in regard to how the profession might contribute to the development of healthcare systems in the future. We argue that this could be enhanced if therapists can learn from the experience of practitioners in the field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), which has been experiencing similar changes in recent years. Indeed, both fields of clinical activity adopt many similar underlying clinical principles and, according to Samuels (2001), have similar political outlooks. With reference to anthroposophic psychotherapy which, as well as being a form of psychotherapy, is also part of a ‘whole systems’ approach to CAM, we will examine those characteristics of psychotherapy and CAM that can inform the thinking of healthcare systems as a whole.     

Bob and Carol and Tess and Ali

Conflicting religious experiences in different traditions do not necessarily defeat the rationality of conflicting beliefs sustained by those experiences in those traditions. The circularity that protects religious beliefs from such mutual defeat is not vicious. Moreover, the lack of ‘epistemological humility’ exhibited by such believers poses no threat to world peace. In fact, a campaign for compulsory humility would itself constitute a much greater threat.     

Anxiety and Attentional Bias: State and Trait

Abstract

MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata (1986) found that anxious patients showed a tendency to react faster to a probe stimulus that appeared in the location of a threatening visual word rather than in that of a simultaneous neutral word. In 4 experiments, a total of 104 subjects drawn from the general population were tested on different variations of this task. A relationship to anxiety was confirmed, and it was shown that this relationship did not appear on animal names that also formed a semantically similar set and had an equal probability of being followed by a probe stimulus. Although the effect is therefore dependent on the content of the word, it builds up during the experimental session and is therefore likely to be due to increasing post-attentive awareness of the presence of threatening words.

The most reliable results across experiments were found by using Trait rather than State Anxiety, and particularly by fitting a curvilinear relationship such that the exact degree of Anxiety makes little difference at low levels but becomes increasingly important at high levels. If State is used, the best relationship is found with an interaction with Trait, such that State makes more difference at high values of Trait. This means that the effect must be to some extent due to lasting personality characteristics. It is not something that happens to everybody when in a temporary state.     

Comparing and Integrating Biological and Cultural Moral Progress

Moral progress may be a matter of time scale. If intuitive measures of moral progress like the degree of physical violence within a society are taken as empirical markers, then most human societies have experienced moral progress in the last few centuries. However, if the development of the human species is taken as relevant time scale, there is evidence that humanity has experienced a global moral decline compared to a small-band hunter-gatherer (SBHG) baseline that represents a lifestyle presumed to largely account for 99% of human history. A counter-argument to such a diagnosis of moral decline is the fact that the living conditions of the modern world that emerged since sedentariness and the beginning of agriculture are completely different compared to those of SBHG due to cultural and technological developments. We therefore suggest that two notions of moral progress should be distinguished: a “biological notion” referring to the inherited capacities typical of the evolutionary niche of mammals and that unfold in a specific way in the human species; and a “cultural notion” that relates moral progress to dealing with an increasing diversity of temptations and possible wrongdoings in a human social world whose complexity accumulates in time. In our contribution, we describe these two different notions of moral progress, we discuss how they interact, how this interaction impacts the standards by which we measure moral progress, and we provide suggestions and justifications for re-aligning biological and cultural moral progress.