How to read The Red Book and why

The Red Book can be, and is, read in a variety of ways and used for different purposes. Here I propose to view it from the perspectives of three contexts: the personal and biographical one, a literary one and a cultural and religious one. Each of these viewpoints exposes different, but (in each case) important, features and meanings. Composing Liber Novus clearly had great significance for Jung's own personal individuation process. In studying this work, the reader must keep in mind that Jung had a great many predecessors in view and looking over his shoulder as he composed it. The text reveals that he was in dialogue with a vast number of cultural figures from the near and the far past. It is also a foundational text for Jung's later works in psychology. And it addresses large cultural and historical issues, looking back at traditions from the standpoint of modernity and forward toward what is to come collectively in the near and distant future. His creation was a work for himself, but also for the culture and for the ages. I try to understand what the title Liber Novus means and suggest that it represents an intention of attaining to a rank beyond being a 'new book' for only one man, Carl Gustav Jung, to being a work relevant to humanity as a totality.     

Selection history: How reward modulates selectivity of visual attention

Visual attention enables us to selectively prioritize or suppress information in the environment. Prominent models concerned with the control of visual attention differentiate between goal-directed, top-down and stimulus-driven, bottom-up control, with the former determined by current selection goals and the latter determined by physical salience. In the current review, we discuss recent studies that demonstrate that attentional selection does not need to be the result of top-down or bottom-up processing but, instead, is often driven by lingering biases due to the “history” of former attention deployments. This review mainly focuses on reward-based history effects; yet other types of history effects such as (intertrial) priming, statistical learning and affective conditioning are also discussed. We argue that evidence from behavioral, eye-movement and neuroimaging studies supports the idea that selection history modulates the topographical landscape of spatial “priority” maps, such that attention is biased toward locations having the highest activation on this map.     

Perceptual experience in learning to read

A group of 24 children (12 boys and 12 girls) aged 10 yr. was given the Children's Embedded Figures Test and a Reading Ability Test on Comprehension, Accuracy, and Speed. Only the correlation of CEFT and Accuracy scores was statistically significant, while that for CEFT and Comprehension scores fell just short of significance, and that for CEFT and Speed was nonsignificant. Data are discussed in terms of more holistic and more articulated processes in learning to read, respectively, as adopted by more field-dependent and more field-independent subjects.     

To read or not to read: a meta-analysis of print exposure from infancy to early adulthood

This research synthesis examines whether the association between print exposure and components of reading grows stronger across development. We meta-analyzed 99 studies (N = 7,669) that focused on leisure time reading of (a) preschoolers and kindergartners, (b) children attending Grades 1-12, and (c) college and university students. For all measures in the outcome domains of reading comprehension and technical reading and spelling, moderate to strong correlations with print exposure were found. The outcomes support an upward spiral of causality: Children who are more proficient in comprehension and technical reading and spelling skills read more; because of more print exposure, their comprehension and technical reading and spelling skills improved more with each year of education. For example, in preschool and kindergarten print exposure explained 12% of the variance in oral language skills, in primary school 13%, in middle school 19%, in high school 30%, and in college and university 34%. Moderate associations of print exposure with academic achievement indicate that frequent readers are more successful students. Interestingly, poor readers also appear to benefit from independent leisure time reading. We conclude that shared book reading to preconventional readers may be part of a continuum of out-of-school reading experiences that facilitate children's language, reading, and spelling achievement throughout their development.     

What we look at when we read

The entire surface phrase structure hierarchy of sentences influences visual scanning patterns in reading familiar material. A general eye-fixation rule predicts the pattern of adults’ eye-fixations in a study of reading predictable sentences: “fixate on the first half of phrase structure constituents.” This rule applies cumulatively at all levels of the surface phrase structure.     

A walk through time: What you should have read by now or will read soon about psychotherapy

In this paper a five years analysis of psychotherapy is done. The sample, taken from the PsycLIT was composed of 2694 books and book's chapters which deal with psychotherapy from many perspectives. Results are offered about first author's sex, institutional affiliation and country. Besides, the content of each book and chapter is analyzed in terms of the therapeutic approach followed, the pathology and sample treated, and the specific theme or author's work reviewed. The paper ends with a thorough discussion of the most relevant results found and brief comments about the future of psychotherapy.