Probing the attentional control theory in social anxiety: An emotional saccade task

Volitional attentional control has been found to rely on prefrontal neuronal circuits. According to the attentional control theory of anxiety, impairment in the volitional control of attention is a prominent feature in anxiety disorders. The present study investigated this assumption in socially anxious individuals using an emotional saccade task with facial expressions (happy, angry, fearful, sad, neutral). The gaze behavior of participants was recorded during the emotional saccade task, in which participants performed either pro- or antisaccades in response to peripherally presented facial expressions. The results show that socially anxious persons have difficulties in inhibiting themselves to reflexively attend to facial expressions: They made more erratic prosaccades to all facial expressions when an antisaccade was required. Thus, these findings indicate impaired attentional control in social anxiety. Overall, the present study shows a deficit of socially anxious individuals in attentional control—for example, in inhibiting the reflexive orienting to neutral as well as to emotional facial expressions. This result may be due to a dysfunction in the prefrontal areas being involved in attentional control.     

Catechol-O-methyltransferase Val158Met genotype affects neural correlates of aversive stimuli processing

It was previously shown that variation of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene modulates brain activity during the processing of stimuli with negative valence, but not for pleasant stimuli. Here, we tested whether the COMT genotype also modulates the electrophysiological correlates of emotional processing and explored whether the environmental factor of life stress influences this effect. Using the early posterior negativity (EPN) paradigm, event-related brain potentials were measured in 81 healthy individuals during the processing of pictures that evoked emotions of positive and negative valence. As was hypothesized, the COMT genotype affected the EPN amplitudes for unpleasant stimuli, but not for pleasant ones. Specifically, Met/Met carriers respond more sensitively to unpleasant stimuli, as compared with Val/Val carriers. We did not find evidence that life stress moderates the effect of the COMT genotype on emotional stimuli processing.     

Functional role theories of representation and content explanation: with a case study from spatial cognition

The aim of this paper is to show that the widespread opinion, according to which functional role theories of representation fail to account for content explanations of human and animal behaviour, cannot be confirmed with respect to each type of functional role theory. Functional resemblance theories (as referred to by O’Brien and Opie in Representation in mind, Elsevier, 2004) allow for content explanations of successfully performed cognitive abilities as much as for explanations of systematic errors resulting from misrepresentation. How functional roles do their explanatory work in actual scientific research examples is shown by a detailed exploration of model assumptions about homing performances based on path integration mechanisms in humans and animals.

The “Not Letting Go” phenomenon: accuracy instructions can impair behavioral and metacognitive effects of implicit learning processes

One major assumption in the field of implicit learning is that implicit learning processes directly affect performance without further top-down control (e.g., Destrebecqz and Cleeremans 2003). In three related experiments, the authors tested the so-called “Not Letting Go Phenomenon” (Schneider and Fisk in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 8:261–278, 1982); that is, the assumption that accuracy instructions might impair the effect of implicit learning processes during skill acquisition. Results of Experiment 1 show that accuracy instructions can impair both, the behavioral and metacognitive effects of implicit learning. Experiments 2 and 3 indicate that this impairment is due more to an impairment of the performance effects of implicit learning processes than to a direct impairment of the learning processes, per se. While these results are in accordance with recent findings in skill acquisition showing that monitoring processes impede experts’ performance, they seem to contradict the above mentioned assumption that implicit learning processes directly affect performance.

---

“Im Anfang liegt alles beschlossen”: Hannah Arendts politisches Denken im Schatten eines Heideggerschen Problems

The article seeks to understand Hannah Arendt's political thinking by relating it to an issue which is crucial to the thinking of the later Heidegger, i.e., the problem of originality ( Anfänglichkeit) and history. In opposition to Hegel's thesis of the “end of art,” Heidegger envisages in “great art” such as Hölderlin's poetry a new origin of thinking and history. The end of art, which Hegel holds to be necessary, is in Heidegger's view to be overcome precisely because art, for him, entails an origin which is not a “Not yet” of a teleological perfection in Hegel's sense, but a “Not yet” of a future history. However, Heidegger's orientation towards a “pure” origin qua future leads him to poietically escape the realm of the Political and the questions of praxis and practical rationality. Like Heidegger, Arendt is taken with the problem of origin; but in contrast to her former teacher, she tries to regain what Heidegger thought he could leave, viz., the dimension of the genuine Political and of acting. The original sense of acting (for Arendt, the capability of human beings to make a new beginning) can be observed in the Greek polis as well as in the American Revolution in modern times: The revolutionary act of a total new beginning elucidates, according to Arendt, what “acting” means in the full and truly political sense. However, Arendt's notion of an epochal beginning seems one-sided, and her abstract concept of acting seems to foster a mere actionism and anarchy. Therefore, contrary to Arendt's claims, the concept of the Political which she shapes in accordance with the extraordinary experiences of an epochal acting has apolitical consequences. The task of thinking after Heidegger and Arendt thus remains one of determining the political character of action in a convincing manner. In this respect, the paper pleads for a rethinking of Hegel's concept of ethical life ( Sittlichkeit).     

The emerging self: the convergence of mind,personality and thinking styles

This paper aims to integrate research and theorizing about problem solving, self and personality into a comprehensive theory. With this purpose, the paper attempts to answer three questions: how do humans become aware of themselves and how do the products of self-awareness interrelate to produce an integrated self-system, which includes the domains of cognition and personality? How do persons know and influence each other? How do these processes change with development? The answers given to these questions by self, personality and cognitive developmental psychology are critically examined. It is concluded that an overarching model would have to assume a multilevel and multidimensional architecture. This would involve three main levels: the first includes general-purpose processes and functions, such as processing efficiency and working memory, which define current cognitive potentials; the second includes several domain-specific systems directed to different aspects of the environment; the third includes self-oriented processes that register, represent and regulate processes at the other two levels. Each person’s self-concepts result from the application of the third level on the other two and they differentially reflect their condition. Personality reflects the interaction between these self-concepts and dispositions to act in particular ways. Because humans share this architecture they can negotiate and affect each other’s self- and reflected representations. Thus, the formation of mind, self and personality results from a continuous flow of interactions between the levels and domains of mind within and across persons. The article summarizes a series of studies lending support to this general model.