An Archetypal Symbol of Water in the Amazon

Archetypal symbols traced on the thousand-year-old art of the moundbuilders of the Marajoara people support the assumption that some sort of ritual honoring of a great goddess took place at the mouth of the Amazon River prior to European colonization. An intriguing figurine, 30 centimeters high, seems to have played a central role in these rituals. The fish-like body of the goddess, covered in red, black, and white spirals, suggests the regenerating process of the waters. A double portal around the vulva is a gateway to undiscovered regions, perhaps associated to life after death, as corroborated by other symbols. Breast-shaped vases found at the same archeological site are covered in images of shoots, leaves, and scrolls in mandala-like symbols. These vases suggest that the cult of the goddess might have included the drinking of her milk, which was made of hallucinogenic plants. The cult of this “Lady of the Waters” may have helped to lessen the psychological hardships of tropical life in the ebb and flow of the tides and the recurrent season of floods, which brought aquatic animals with it. Frogs, snakes, fish, turtles, scorpions, and water birds represented in the ancient pottery were possibly part of the goddess domain. Today the same archetypal manifestation that influenced the prehistorical adaptation is present in the modern Christian devotion to Our Lady of Nazareth. Exploring the native and the Christian cults can help us understand what is missing in today's psychology and guide us to take right action toward water preservation around the world. The symbolic approach of this indigenous art can provide rich soil in which to nourish a sustainable connection with water, flora, and fauna.     

Sweet Pea Summer

For a number of years, the author, now 64, has studied the mythological theme of the mother and daughter mysteries. An earlier memoir in Psychological Perspectives, entitled “Pictures of My Mother” (2010), explored a strained and often painful relationship. In that essay, the author uncovered a previously unfelt love for the “colorful, constrained, complicated, and courageous” woman her mother was. The generative process of writing “Pictures of My Mother” opened a new understanding. In this article the author receives a fresh visitation from Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. The goddess penetrates beneath images of illness and old age and travels into an earlier time. The author was five, and her mother, at the age of 44, was still vital and alive. The mother, a gifted gardener, taught her daughter how to grow sweet peas. The flowers blossom as an expression of the bond between mother and daughter.     

A psychological and theological understanding of the histrionic personality

This paper examines a representative case of histrionic (the term hysterical is used interchangably) personality from a psychological and theological perspective. A working hypothesis is presented, based on Genesis 1–3, that is both clinical and theological. It is hypothesized that individuals who manifest histrionic features relate to each other as Strong Man/Dependent Woman and/or Strong Woman/Passive Man. Both ways of relating are usually present in the same relationship. In relating to one another in these ways, they are searching for a human god or goddess. In turn, they think and act as if they too were a god or goddess. They have not discovered another way of relating; that is, as male and female created in the image of God. A clinical case study is presented and the course of treatment described. Since the histrionic personality is multidimensional, so must be the treatment.     

Divine reconciliations: The Mother of Grain and Gautama Buddha in De'ang religion

Located in China along the boarders of China and several Southeast Asian countries, Southwestern China is characterised by ethnic diversity and the influence of various world religions, especially that of different schools of Buddhism. This article examines how the De'ang people transform the cosmological order of Theravada Buddhism to reassert the indispensable position of their indigenous agricultural goddess, the Mother of Grain. Corresponding to myths that portray the reconciliation between the goddess and Gautama Buddha, the rituals dedicated to her are performed primarily by women, while male monastic institutions participate on certain ceremonial occasions. A comparison with similar beliefs and rituals in other cultural groups in the region demonstrates that the Mother of Grain in De'ang religion offers an exceptionally strong local challenge to the male bias embedded in Buddhism. By examining the conflicts and compromises between Buddhism and the indigenous religions of Southwest China, this article analyses the complex local negotiations of gender ideologies when world religions and local beliefs are at odds.     

Response

Located in China along the boarders of China and several Southeast Asian countries, Southwestern China is characterised by ethnic diversity and the influence of various world religions, especially that of different schools of Buddhism. This article examines how the De’ang people transform the cosmological order of Theravada Buddhism to reassert the indispensable position of their indigenous agricultural goddess, the Mother of Grain. Corresponding to myths that portray the reconciliation between the goddess and Gautama Buddha, the rituals dedicated to her are performed primarily by women, while male monastic institutions participate on certain ceremonial occasions. A comparison with similar beliefs and rituals in other cultural groups in the region demonstrates that the Mother of Grain in De’ang religion offers an exceptionally strong local challenge to the male bias embedded in Buddhism. By examining the conflicts and compromises between Buddhism and the indigenous religions of Southwest China, this article analyses the complex local negotiations of gender ideologies when world religions and local beliefs are at odds.     

Altars for the Morrigan: the legitimizing agency of a goddess in the networked flow of authority of a YouTube sub-culture

ABSTRACT

The Pagan YouTube e-community is an informal, amorphous collectivity within which small sub-cultures evolve around more specific common practices, such as worship of a deity. One such sub-culture is that of altar-creation for the Irish goddess the Morrigan and the mediation of these altars through the recording and uploading of videos on YouTube. A clear culture and consistent aesthetic can be observed in the analysis of the altars mediated in this sub-culture. This article examines the operating authorities that can be traced across its development. Evidence for the networked nature of the group’s social formation—along with the aesthetically conservative nature of the culture evident therein—suggests that the authority structure of the e-community is networked and thus ‘horizontal’: a co-creation of the individuals within the collective. However, the formative influence of a prominent individual demonstrates a ‘vertical’ influence. This article thus argues that an axial horizontal–vertical theoretical model of authority most accurately describes the dynamics of this e-community. Ultimately, it is the implied authority of the Morrigan herself that mediates the flows of authority. It is due to the devotees’ understanding of the Morrigan as the legitimating force that the vertical influences are denied or deflected through a discourse of individualism.     

Imagery in the congenitally blind: how visual are visual images?

Three experiments compared congenitally blind and sighted adults and children on tasks presumed to involve visual imagery in memory. In all three, the blind subjects' performances were remarkably similar to the sighted. The first two experiments examined Paivio's (1971) modality-specific imagery hypothesis. Experiment 1 used a paired-associate task with words whose referents were high in either visual or auditory imagery. The blind, like the sighted, recalled more high-visual-imagery pairs than any others. Experiment 2 used a free-recall task for words grouped according to modality-specific attributes, such as color and sound. The blind performed as well as the sighted on words grouped by color. In fact, the only consistent deficit in both experiments occurred for the sighted in recall of words whose referents are primarily auditory. These results challenge Paivio's theory and suggest either (a) that the visual imagery used by the sighted is no more facilitating than the abstract semantic representations used by the blind or (b) that the sighted are not using visual imagery. Experiment 3 used Neisser and Kerr's (1973) imaging task. Subjects formed images of scenes in which target objects were described as either visible in the picture plane or concealed by another object and thus not visible. On an incidental recall test for the target objects, the blind, like the sighted, recalled more pictorial than concealed targets. This finding suggests that the haptic images of the blind maintain occlusion just as the visual images of the sighted do.     

Emotional modulation of attention affects time perception: Evidence from event-related potentials

Emotional effects on human time perception are generally attributed to arousal speeding up or slowing down the internal clock. The aim of the present study is to investigate the less frequently considered role of attention as an alternative mediator of these effects with the help of event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants produced short intervals (0.9, 1.5, 2.7, and 3.3 s) while viewing high arousal images with pleasant and unpleasant contents in comparison to neutral images. Behavioral results revealed that durations were overproduced for the 0.9 s interval whereas, for 2.7 and 3.3 s intervals, underproduction was observed. The effect of affective valence was present for the shorter durations and decreased as the target intervals became longer. More specifically, the durations for unpleasant images were less overproduced in the 0.9 s intervals, and for the 1.5 s trials, durations for unpleasant images were slightly underproduced, compared to pleasant images, which were overproduced. The analysis of different ERP components suggests possible attention processes related to the timing of affective images in addition to changes in pacemaker speed. Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) was larger for positive than for negative images, indicating valence-specific differences in activation of early attention mechanisms. Within the early P1 and the Late Positive Potential (LPP) components, both pleasant and unpleasant stimuli exhibited equal affective modulation. Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) remained independent of both timing performance and affective modulation. This pattern suggests that both pleasant and unpleasant stimuli enhanced arousal and captured attention, but the latter effect was more pronounced for pleasant stimuli. The valence-specificity of affective attention revealed by ERPs combined with behavioral timing results suggests that attention processes indeed contribute to emotion-induced temporal distortions, especially for longer target intervals.     

Why do doctored images distort memory?

Doctored images can cause people to believe in and remember experiences that never occurred, yet the underlying mechanism(s) responsible are not well understood. How does compelling false evidence distort autobiographical memory? Subjects were filmed observing and copying a Research Assistant performing simple actions, then they returned 2 days later for a memory test. Before taking the test, subjects viewed video-clips of simple actions, including actions that they neither observed nor performed earlier. We varied the format of the video-clips between-subjects to tap into the source-monitoring mechanisms responsible for the ‘doctored-evidence effect.’ The distribution of belief and memory distortions across conditions suggests that at least two mechanisms are involved: doctored images create an illusion of familiarity, and also enhance the perceived credibility of false suggestions. These findings offer insight into how external evidence influences source-monitoring.     

Detection of a change in photorealism1

The perceived degree of photorealism is interpreted as reflecting the artificialness or naturalness of images. Natural images (real‐scene photographs) are images with high degrees of naturalness, while artificial images (e.g., paintings) are images with low degrees of naturalness. Alternatively, natural images are images with low degrees of artificialness, while artificial images are images with high degrees of artificialness. We attempted to disambiguate these two interpretations of the perception of photorealism by using a change‐blindness paradigm. Participants observed an image sequence showing a gradual transformation from a natural image to an artificial image or vice versa, and reported changes they noticed. More participants reported noticing changes in photorealism for the natural‐to‐artificial transformations than for the opposite transformations. This asymmetry indicates that disappearing naturalness was detected more readily than emerging naturalness, or alternatively, emerging artificialness was detected more readily than disappearing artificialness. The results for the control conditions showed that the emergence of visual information was detected more readily than the disappearance. These results suggest that the perception of photorealism should be considered as the perception of artificialness.     

Deficits of subliminal self-face processing in schizophrenia

Most studies show that self-processing in schizophrenia is impaired at the supraliminal level. Schizophrenic patients generally lack the ability to prioritize the processing of self-related information, such as their own face. However, some evidence suggests that schizophrenic patients may retain intact subliminal processing abilities even though their conscious experiences are compromised. We conducted the first study exploring schizophrenic patients’ subliminal self-face processing. Using a breaking continuous flash suppression (bCFS) paradigm, we interocularly suppressed face images (self, famous, and unknown faces). Participants’ reaction times to detect the faces when they broke the suppression were recorded as an index for the subliminal processing of faces. Unlike the healthy controls, schizophrenic patients did not demonstrate a processing advantage for their own face when it broke interocular suppression; only a face familiarity effect was found. These findings contribute to the understanding of self-processing deficits in schizophrenia.     

What is the link between language and spatial images? Behavioral and neural findings in blind and sighted individuals

In order to find objects or places in the world, multiple sources of information, such as visual input, auditory input and asking for directions, can help you. These different sources of information can be converged into a spatial image, which represents configurational characteristics of the world. This paper discusses the findings on the nature of spatial images and the role of spatial language in generating these spatial images in both blind and sighted individuals. Congenitally blind individuals have never experienced visual input, yet they are able to perform several tasks traditionally associated with spatial imagery, such as mental scanning, mental pathway completions and mental clock time comparison, though perhaps not always in a similar manner as sighted. Therefore, they offer invaluable insights into the exact nature of spatial images. We will argue that spatial imagery exceeds the input from different input modalities to form an abstract mental representation while maintaining connections with the input modalities. This suggests that the nature of spatial images is supramodal, which can explain functional equivalent results from verbal and perceptual inputs for spatial situations and subtle to moderate behavioral differences between the blind and sighted.     

Women's responses to stereotypical media portrayals: An fMRI study of sexualized and domestic images of women

Women tend to be portrayed in a sexualized or domestic manner in mainstream advertising; importantly this trend holds not only for ads targeting men but also for those targeting women themselves. Such a focus on sexualized portrayals in particular may not seem strategic given a wealth of evidence suggesting that women evaluate these portrayals quite negatively. Consumer attitudes toward domestic portrayals are more mixed but, unsurprisingly, vary according to how much a woman identifies as traditional. If female consumers do not evaluate these common portrayals positively, why might they persist? Past work suggests a disconnect between reported attitudes toward general visual sexual stimuli and physiological and neural responses; therefore, it is plausible that neural responses to stereotypical female portrayals in advertising may be at odds with reported attitudes and may have a bigger impact on consumer behavior. The current study exposed women to sexualized, domestic, and control images in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner as an initial test of this idea. We found that participants reported liking both domestic and control images more than sexualized images. In contrast, they showed more activity in regions associated with reward and arousal (ventral striatum and amygdala, respectively) while viewing sexualized images relative to both control and domestic images. Surprisingly, ventral striatum response to sexualized ads was stronger for women who endorsed traditional attitudes than those who reported less traditional attitudes. These results suggest that despite reporting negative attitudes toward sexualized portrayals, women may in fact have a favorable response to these images. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Happier,faster: Developmental changes in the effects of mood and novelty on responses

Positive mood ameliorates several cognitive processes: It can enhance cognitive control, increase flexibility, and promote variety seeking in decision making. These effects of positive mood have been suggested to depend on frontostriatal dopamine, which is also associated with the detection of novelty. This suggests that positive mood could also affect novelty detection. In the present study, children and adults saw either a happy or a neutral movie to induce a positive or neutral mood. After that, they were shown novel and familiar images. On some trials a beep was presented over headphones either at the same time as the image or at a 200-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and the task of the participant was to detect these auditory targets. Children were slower in responding than adults. Positive mood, however, speeded responses, especially in children, and induced facilitatory effects of novelty. These effects were consistent with increased arousal. Although effects of novelty were more consistent with an attentional response, in children who had watched a happy movie the novel images evoked a more liberal response criterion, suggestive of increased arousal. This suggests that mood and novelty may affect response behaviour stronger in children than in adults.     

The labor of Job: The biblical text as a parable of human labor

This paper addresses how religion is playing an increasingly important role in empowering anti-nuclear protests at Gongliao in Taiwan. It begins by describing how the anti-nuclear movement in Taiwan was originally dependant on the opposition political party, and then examines how growing disaffection with party politics at Gongliao has resulted in a local temple dedicated to the goddess Mazu coming to the forefront of the struggle. This paper frames the dispute as a struggle between three different ways of generating power (and implicitly, of losing power): first, the generation of nuclear power by bureaucrats and scientists working through the industrial sector; second, the generation of political power by opposition politicians and elite campaigners; and third, the generation of religious power by people rooted in local communities, creating an alliance between religious power and secular protest.     

The perception of changing emotion expressions

The utility of recognising emotion expressions for coordinating social interactions is well documented, but less is known about how continuously changing emotion displays are perceived. The nonlinear dynamic systems view of emotions suggests that mixed emotion expressions in the middle of displays of changing expressions may be decoded differently depending on the expression origin. Hysteresis is when an impression (e.g., disgust) persists well after changes in facial expressions that favour an alternative impression (e.g., anger). In expression changes based on photographs (Study 1) and avatar images (Studies 2a-c, 3), we found hystereses particularly in changes between emotions that are perceptually similar (e.g., anger-disgust). We also consistently found uncertainty (neither emotion contributing to the mixed expression was perceived), which was more prevalent in expression sequences than in static images. Uncertainty occurred particularly in changes between emotions that are perceptually dissimilar, such as changes between happiness and negative emotions. This suggests that the perceptual similarity of emotion expressions may determine the extent to which hysteresis and uncertainty occur. Both hysteresis and uncertainty effects support our premise that emotion decoding is state dependent, a characteristic of dynamic systems. We propose avenues to test possible underlying mechanisms.     

The Portrayal of Women in Nationally-Endorsed English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Textbooks for Senior High School Students in Indonesia

From a critical feminist perspective, women are not fairly represented in English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks. The unequal representation of women in EFL textbooks potentially affects students’ negative perceptions and misconceptions about gender identity (re)construction. The findings of previous studies on gender issues in language textbooks mostly indicate that they depict gender biases and stereotypes, but some studies reported positive images of women. To continue a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of EFL textbooks from a feminist perspective, the present study looks at visual and textual discourses representing images of women in EFL textbooks in the Indonesian secondary school context. The findings reveal that some gendered discourses expressed by female characters and social actors in the analyzed textbooks support the continuation of gender biases and stereotypes, but some emerging discourses represent constructive images of women. This textual study suggests that as English plays an increasingly important role in a transcultural and post-feminist world, authors of English textbooks must pay attention to the issue of gender in language education.     

Sexualized and Athletic: Viewers’ Attitudes toward Sexualized Performance Images of Female Athletes

Using an experimental methodology, the present study investigated college students’ attitudes toward media images of female athletes. We are particularly focused on how viewers perceive media images of female athletes that have both an appearance and athleticism focus, such as those found in ESPN’s The Body Issue. An aim of our study was to assess viewers’ attitudes toward these images that are not purely objectified, thereby contributing to the objectification literature and providing empirical data relevant to theorizing on the social impact of these images. U.S. college students (n?=?563) viewed one of four types of images of the same athletes including: (a) sexualized athletes, (b) sexualized performance athletes (in which both athleticism and sexualization are present), (c) sport performance athletes (in which athletes are depicted playing their sport), or (d) non-sexualized athletes. They then rated the athletes’ competence, esteem, and sexual appeal. Overall, sexualized performance athletes were rated more positively than sexualized athletes, but less positively than sport performance athletes. These results have implications for advocacy efforts calling for more media coverage in which women are depicted as athletes rather than as sexual objects.

     

Changing the focus of attention: The interacting effect of valence and arousal

We examined how valence and arousal of an image influence visual attention. “Spotlight of attention” theory suggests that positive affect broadens, and negative affect narrows, one's aperture of attention, whereas the arousal theory literature suggests that arousal level is what modulates attentional focus, with highly arousing affect capturing attention, regardless of valence. In two experiments, a digit parity task was used to index the influence of valence, and arousal, on visual attention. Positive or negative images were displayed centrally on each trial, with single digits presented more peripherally (Experiment 1) or more centrally (Experiment 2) to the image. In both Experiments participants were slower, and less accurate at making parity decisions (e.g., both digits odd or both even) when the image was negative relative to positive, and of high arousal. For low arousal images, positive, relative to negative, valence images led to greater impairment of the digit parity task. Findings suggest that arousal level of images modulates the influence of valence on distribution of visual attention. Highly negative emotional images may command or capture attention, but there are other factors that can lead to attention capture, even in low arousing positive stimuli.