THE INFLUENCE OF SCHOOLING ON ADULT RECALL OF FAMILIAR STIMULI: A STUDY IN GHANA*

Several studies have shown the influence of schooling on a variety of cognitive skills. However, since the tasks employed were nearly always derived from the school setting, such findings provide no adequate answer to the following question: given a cognitive task with which schooled and unschooled subjects have had equal experience, does schooling still have an effect? Opposing views are held about this question, and the aim of the present study was to contribute towards answering it. Twenty-four schooled and 24 unschooled subjects, evenly divided by sex within each group, were given a recall task based on an indigenous game equally familiar to all of them. The task involved positions, numbers, and combinations of both. The performance of schooled subjects was very significantly superior on all aspects of the tasks. With regard to position there was an interaction indicating that women's performance was particularly enhanced by schooling, but this was not the case with numbers. Results thus support the view that schooling does have a general effect not necessarily mediated by specific experience. Moreover, in the light of the proportion of variance accounted for among different component tasks, it is suggested that a major effect of schooling might be an increased ability to process complex information.     

Theodor Lipps and the shift from "sympathy" to "empathy"

In the course of extensive philosophical debates on aesthetics in nineteenth-century Germany, Robert Vischer introduced the concept of Einfühlung in relation to art. Theodor Lipps subsequently extended it from art to visual illusions and interpersonal understanding. While Lipps had regarded Einfühlung as basically similar to the old notion of sympathy, Edward Titchener in America believed it had a different meaning. Hence, he coined the term empathy as its translation. This term came to be increasingly widely adopted, first in psychology and then more generally. But the lack of agreement about the supposed difference between these concepts suggests that Lipps had probably been right.     

Critical notes and reflections on ‘social representations’

Moscovici has ushered in the ‘era of social representations widely welcomed as a European alternative to what are increasingly regarded as the shortcomings of mainline American social psychology. The rapid and enthusiastic adoption by many psychologists of Moscovici's theoretical approach has not so far evoked a great deal of critical appraisal of the ideas he put forward. The present paper seeks to make a start in jilling this gap by an examination of the conceptual structure and some of its underlying assumptions. There appear to be a number of internal inconsistencies and some doubt concerning the logical status of social representations’ It is suggested that clarification of such issues, together with the establishment of closer links with the findings of neighbouring disciplines, would help to strengthen what is undoubtedly one of the most stimulating new departures in the field.     

The Experiences of Guilt and Shame: A Phenomenological–Psychological Study

This study aims at discovering the essential constituents involved in the experiences of guilt and shame. Guilt concerns a subject’s action or omission of action and has a clear temporal unfolding entailing a moment in which the subject lives in a care-free way. Afterwards, this moment undergoes a reconstruction, in the moment of guilt, which constitutes the moment of negligence. The reconstruction is a comprehensive transformation of one’s attitude with respect to one’s ego; one’s action; the object of guilt and the temporal-existential experience. The main constituents concerning shame are its anchorage in the situation to which it refers; its public side involving the experience of being perceptually objectified; the exclusion of social community; the bodily experience; the revelation of an undesired self; and the genesis of shame in terms of a history of frozen now-ness. The article ends with a comparison between guilt and shame.