Hysteria,A Century Later: Post-Kleinian Theory and Technique

ABSTRACT

Freud developed many of his theories and technique while attempting to help hysterical patients. This article approaches hysteria not just as a syndrome consisting of a group of signs and symptoms, but primarily as an inner world configuration that fuels object relations patterns. The internal world hysterical profile informs the transference/countertransference experience and the therapeutic process. I attempt to describe some of the technical problems psychoanalysts have to deal with while working with these patients. Hysterical object relations do not necessarily manifest themselves as somatic symptoms—epileptic-like, paralysis, blindness, etc.—even in patients that show the relational hysterical patterns. These object relations modes can appear in any analysis irrespective of the primary diagnostic conceptualization.     

Emotional prosody effects on verbal memory in older and younger adults

Prosody, or the way things are said, can modify the meaning of utterances making qualitatively different affective prosodies useful for understanding how auditory affective information is processed and remembered. In this study, we collected behavioral data from 225 younger (M age = 20.8 years, SD = 2.5 years; 119 males) and 225 older adults (M age = 71.6 years, SD = 6.5 years; 119 males) in order to examine age differences in emotional prosody effects on verbal memory. Participants were randomly divided into three subgroups according to different prosody listening conditions (positive, negative, and neutral) and prosody effects on a yes–no recognition memory task were investigated. The results showed how older adults who listened to the story read with a neutral prosody remembered more words than those who listened to the same story with a positive or negative prosody. Younger adults showed no valence effects. Our findings highlighted an age and affective prosody interaction that affects remembering in older adults alone.     

The Minho Word Pool: Norms for imageability,concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 Portuguese words

Words are widely used as stimuli in cognitive research. Because of their complexity, using words requires strict control of their objective (lexical and sublexical) and subjective properties. In this work, we present the Minho Word Pool (MWP), a dataset that provides normative values of imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 (European) Portuguese words—three subjective measures that, in spite of being used extensively in research, have been scarce for Portuguese. Data were collected with 2,357 college students who were native speakers of European Portuguese. The participants rated 100 words drawn randomly from the full set for each of the three subjective indices, using a Web survey procedure (via a URL link). Analyses comparing the MWP ratings with those obtained for the same words from other national and international databases showed that the MWP norms are reliable and valid, thus providing researchers with a useful tool to support research in all neuroscientific areas using verbal stimuli. The MWP norms can be downloaded along with this article or from http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases.     

Learning representation hierarchies by sharing visual features: a computational investigation of Persian character recognition with unsupervised deep learning

In humans, efficient recognition of written symbols is thought to rely on a hierarchical processing system, where simple features are progressively combined into more abstract, high-level representations. Here, we present a computational model of Persian character recognition based on deep belief networks, where increasingly more complex visual features emerge in a completely unsupervised manner by fitting a hierarchical generative model to the sensory data. Crucially, high-level internal representations emerging from unsupervised deep learning can be easily read out by a linear classifier, achieving state-of-the-art recognition accuracy. Furthermore, we tested the hypothesis that handwritten digits and letters share many common visual features: A generative model that captures the statistical structure of the letters distribution should therefore also support the recognition of written digits. To this aim, deep networks trained on Persian letters were used to build high-level representations of Persian digits, which were indeed read out with high accuracy. Our simulations show that complex visual features, such as those mediating the identification of Persian symbols, can emerge from unsupervised learning in multilayered neural networks and can support knowledge transfer across related domains.     

Use of evidence in a categorization task: analytic and holistic processing modes

Category learning performance can be influenced by many contextual factors, but the effects of these factors are not the same for all learners. The present study suggests that these differences can be due to the different ways evidence is used, according to two main basic modalities of processing information, analytically or holistically. In order to test the impact of the information provided, an inductive rule-based task was designed, in which feature salience and comparison informativeness between examples of two categories were manipulated during the learning phases, by introducing and progressively reducing some perceptual biases. To gather data on processing modalities, we devised the Active Feature Composition task, a production task that does not require classifying new items but reproducing them by combining features. At the end, an explicit rating task was performed, which entailed assessing the accuracy of a set of possible categorization rules. A combined analysis of the data collected with these two different tests enabled profiling participants in regard to the kind of processing modality, the structure of representations and the quality of categorial judgments. Results showed that despite the fact that the information provided was the same for all participants, those who adopted analytic processing better exploited evidence and performed more accurately, whereas with holistic processing categorization is perfectly possible but inaccurate. Finally, the cognitive implications of the proposed procedure, with regard to involved processes and representations, are discussed.     

Tactile short-term memory for stimuli presented on the fingertips and across the rest of the body surface

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which tactile information that is unavailable for full conscious report can be accessed using partial-report procedures. In Experiment 1, participants reported the total number of tactile stimuli (up to six) presented simultaneously to their fingertips (numerosity judgment task). In another condition, after being presented with the tactile display, they had to detect whether or not the position indicated by a (visual or tactile) probe had previously contained a tactile stimulus (partial-report task). Participants correctly reported up to three stimuli in the numerosity judgment task, but their performance was far better in the partial-report task: Up to six stimuli were perceived at the shortest target-probe intervals. A similar pattern of results was observed when the participants performed a concurrent articulatory suppression task (Exp. 2). The results of a final experiment revealed that performance in the partial-report task was overall better for stimuli presented on the fingertips than for stimuli presented across the rest of the body surface. These results demonstrate that tactile information that is unavailable for report in a numerosity task can nevertheless sometimes still be accessed when a partial-report procedure is used instead.     

Infant sign training and functional analysis

We taught manual signs to typically developing infants using a reversal design and caregiver-nominated stimuli. We delivered the stimuli on a time-based schedule during baseline. During the intervention, we used progressive prompting and reinforcement, described by Thompson et al. (2004, 2007), to establish mands. Following sign training, we conducted functional analyses and verified that the signs functioned as mands. These results provide preliminary validation for the verbal behavior functional analysis methodology and further evidence of the functional independence of verbal operants.     

Short-term memory for temporal intervals: Contrasting explanations of the choose-short effect in pigeons

To better understand short-term memory for temporal intervals, we re-examined the choose-short effect. In Experiment 1, to contrast the predictions of two models of this effect, the subjective shortening and the coding models, pigeons were exposed to a delayed matching-to-sample task with three sample durations (2, 6 and 18 s) and retention intervals ranging from 0 to 20 s. Consistent with the coding model, the results suggested a sudden forgetting of memories for duration. In Experiment 2, to test the confusion hypothesis, the characteristics of the ITI and the retention interval differed. Contrary to the confusion hypothesis, a choose-short effect was obtained. In both experiments, a test with only two of the three comparison keys was performed. The results suggest three effects that may be controlling the birds’ responses: stimulus generalization when no retention interval is present; an increase in random responding at longer retention intervals; and, similarly, an increase in preference for the “short-sample” key at longer retention intervals.     

To what extent do Gestalt grouping principles influence tactile perception?

Since their formulation by the Gestalt movement more than a century ago, the principles of perceptual grouping have primarily been investigated in the visual modality and, to a lesser extent, in the auditory modality. The present review addresses the question of whether the same grouping principles also affect the perception of tactile stimuli. Although, to date, only a few studies have explicitly investigated the existence of Gestalt grouping principles in the tactile modality, we argue that many more studies have indirectly provided evidence relevant to this topic. Reviewing this body of research, we argue that similar principles to those reported previously in visual and auditory studies also govern the perceptual grouping of tactile stimuli. In particular, we highlight evidence showing that the principles of proximity, similarity, common fate, good continuation, and closure affect tactile perception in both unimodal and crossmodal settings. We also highlight that the grouping of tactile stimuli is often affected by visual and auditory information that happen to be presented simultaneously. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and applied benefits that might pertain to the further study of Gestalt principles operating in both unisensory and multisensory tactile perception.     

Moment/History Duality in Prior’s Logics of Branching-Time

The basic notions in Prior’s Ockhamist and Peircean logics of branching-time are the notion of moment and that of history (or course of events). In the tree semantics, histories are defined as maximal linearly ordered sets of moments. In the geometrical approach, both moments and histories are primitive entities and there is no set theoretical (and ontological) dependency of the latter on the former. In the topological approach, moments can be defined as the elements of a rank 1 base of a non-Archimedean topology on the set of histories. In this paper, it will be shown that the topological approach, and hence the other approaches, can be reconstructed in a framework in which the basic notions are those of history and of relative closeness relation among histories.