Idealization and psychoanalytic learning

Idealization is an intrinsic part of psychological maturation, but it is also a potential barrier to psychoanalytic learning, and must to some degree be outgrown if an analyst is to develop a natural authority and individual style. Unrecognized idealizations stifle analysts' engagement in the transferences of their patients, and so compromise the ability to freely experience and analyze them. Attention to real life and the lessons it teaches counterbalances the tendency to idealize and encourages lifelong psychoanalytic growth.     

Attachment categories as reflections of multiple dimensions: comment on Fraley and Spieker (2003)

Ainsworth's system of classifying patterns of attachment behavior has served the field well and will not be easily displaced--not because of a commitment by attachment researchers to the taxonomic status of these categories but rather because of difficulties lying in the way of a dimensional approach. Foremost among these is the large number of dimensions used in making classifications and the need to develop reliable scales to tap them. Other problems include the need to capture how behavior changes across age and across the episodes of the Strange Situation. Others will debate R.C. Fraley and S.J. Spieker's (2003) arguments concerning taxonomic status. However, whether taxa or not, Ainsworth's categories at the least have represented well the multidimensional space underlying attachment behavior in conditions of mild stress. Only when an alternative approach is demonstrated to predict (with equal power, in practice) the vast range of outcomes associated with Ainsworth's categories will it be a candidate for substitution.     

The Distinctive Wrong in Lying

In this essay I will argue, as does Bernard Williams, that lying and misleading are both commonly wrong because they involve an aim to breach a trust. I will also argue, contrary to Williams, that lying and misleading threaten trust differently, and that when they are wrong, they are wrong differently. Indeed, lying may be wrong when misleading is not.     

Rational maximizing by humans (Homo sapiens) in an ultimatum game

In the human mini-ultimatum game, a proposer splits a sum of money with a responder. If the responder accepts, both are paid. If not, neither is paid. Typically, responders reject inequitable distributions, favoring punishing over maximizing. In Jensen et al.’s (Science 318:107–109, 2007) adaptation with apes, a proposer selects between two distributions of raisins. Despite inequitable offers, responders often accept, thereby maximizing. The rejection response differs between the human and ape versions of this game. For humans, rejection is instantaneous; for apes, it requires 1 min of inaction. We replicate Jensen et al.’s procedure in humans with money. When waiting 1 min to reject, humans favor punishing over maximizing; however, when rejection requires 5 min of inaction, humans, like apes, maximize. If species differences in time horizons are accommodated, Jensen et al.’s ape data are reproducible in humans.     

A Top-Down Approach to a Complex Natural System: Protein Folding

We develop a general method for applying functional models to natural systems and cite recent progress in protein modeling that demonstrates the power of this approach. Functional modeling constrains the range of acceptable structural models of a system, reduces the difficulty of finding them, and improves their fidelity. However, functional models are distinctly different from the structural models that are more commonly applied in science. In particular, structural and functional models ask different questions and provide different kinds of answers. As we clarify these differences and articulate how to use these models jointly, we extend our ability to do science and gain insight into the proper use of the terms organization, order, and emergence when describing systems in nature.     

Structural properties of spatial representations in blind people: Scanning images constructed from haptic exploration or from locomotion in a 3-D audio virtual environment

When people scan mental images, their response times increase linearly with increases in the distance to be scanned, which is generally taken as reflecting the fact that their internal representations incorporate the metric properties of the corresponding objects. In view of this finding, we investigated the structural properties of spatial mental images created from nonvisual sources in three groups (blindfolded sighted, late blind, and congenitally blind). In Experiment 1, blindfolded sighted and late blind participants created metrically accurate spatial representations of a small-scale spatial configuration under both verbal and haptic learning conditions. In Experiment 2, late and congenitally blind participants generated accurate spatial mental images after both verbal and locomotor learning of a full-scale navigable space (created by an immersive audio virtual reality system), whereas blindfolded sighted participants were selectively impaired in their ability to generate precise spatial representations from locomotor experience. These results attest that in the context of a permanent lack of sight, encoding spatial information on the basis of the most reliable currently functional system (the sensorimotor system) is crucial for building a metrically accurate representation of a spatial environment. The results also highlight the potential of spatialized audio-rendering technology for exploring the spatial representations of visually impaired participants.     

Gaze allocation in a dynamic situation: effects of social status and speaking

Human visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this, we recorded people taking part in a group decision-making task and then showed video clips of these situations to new participants while tracking their eye movements. Observers spent the majority of time looking at the people in the videos, and in particular at their eyes and faces. The social status of the people in the clips had been rated by their peers in the group task, and this status hierarchy strongly predicted where eye-tracker participants looked: high-status individuals were gazed at much more often, and for longer, than low-status individuals, even over short, 20-s videos. Fixation was temporally coupled to the person who was talking at any one time, but this did not account for the effect of social status on attention. These results are consistent with a gaze system that is attuned to the presence of other individuals, to their social status within a group, and to the information most useful for social interaction.     

The right to withdraw from research

The right to withdraw from participation in research is recognized in virtually all national and international guidelines for research on human subjects. It is therefore surprising that there has been little justification for that right in the literature. We argue that the right to withdraw should protect research participants from information imbalance, inability to hedge, inherent uncertainty, and untoward bodily invasion, and it serves to bolster public trust in the research enterprise. Although this argument is not radical, it provides a useful way to determine how the right should be applied in various cases.     

Clauses and the semantic representation of words

When a sentence with more than one clause is processed, words of the first clause become less available for recall or recognition once the clause boundary has been passed. One common interpretation of this observation is that the representation of a given word shifts from a predominantly surface form (e.g., phonological or lexical) to a semantic form, after the clause boundary. Two experiments that test that interpretation are reported. In the first experiment, two-clause spoken sentences were followed by spoken word or picture probes. Pictures were intended to provide a fast semantic match to probed words, but a slow surface match. Although response times exhibited a robust main effect of the clause position of the probe, no interaction with probe type was found. Similar results were obtained in a second experiment that compared pictures with written word probes. The faster response to picture than to word probes in the second experiment indicates that subjects did not covertly name the picture, but made a semantic match (as intended). These observations suggest the following reinterpretation of earlier sentence memory experiments: Words in the most recent clause of a sentence are more available than words in an earlier clause because their semantic representations are more active, not because their surface representations are more active.