The Action of God in the World—A Synthesis of Process Thought in Science and Theology

A foundational belief of monotheistic religions is that God acts in the world. In this paper, the case is made that divine action has its origins in the molecular world. Within a metaphysical framework of process thought, a hypothesis is constructed in which God's action in the world, God's ‘initial aim’ for all actualities, is divine motivation of chemical becoming.     

Visitor Self-Report Behavior Mapping as a Tool for Recording Exhibition Circulation

ABSTRACT

The evaluation of visitor flow within a museum or exhibition has been a topic of interest for decades with several research approaches taken over the years. Direct observation or visitor tracking during museum occupancy is the most popular technique, but it generally requires substantial amounts of time and financial resources. An alternative approach to direct observation—visitor self-mapping—is presented using data obtained from 2 short-term, small-budget evaluations of a world-class collection museum. Results show that self-mapping provides usable data with more than 90% of maps having tracking data for the entire museum. Maps varied in the amount of detail, but more than 60% of visitors provided details beyond what was required. In Study 1, movement patterns, sweep rate indices, and timing data suggest that the mapping data accurately reflected the visitor experience. Study 2 directly paired the self-mapping method used in Study 1 with unobtrusive behavioral observations to address the reliability and validity of the new approach. A discussion compares the relative costs and benefits of the new approach with more conventional direct observation techniques and provides directions for future research.     

Trauma and Aggression in the DSM–5

Psychological trauma, stress, childhood abuse, neglect, and loss are mentioned as important features or risk factors for mental disorders in 15 out of 19 sections of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed. [DSM-5]). This means that, according to the DSM–5, trauma and stress are relevant themes throughout the mental health field, not solely an area of subspecialty. Despite the recognition of the widespread role of trauma and stress in the DSM–5, there are inconsistencies in the discussion of trauma, including its relationship to anger and aggression, that should be corrected in future editions of the manual.     

Holistic processing in the composite task depends on face size

Holistic processing is a hallmark of face processing. There is evidence that holistic processing is strongest for faces at identification distance 2–10 metres from the observer. However, this evidence is based on tasks that have been little used in the literature and that are indirect measures of holistic processing. We use the composite task—a well validated and frequently used paradigm—to measure the effect of viewing distance on holistic processing. In line with previous work, we find a congruency x alignment effect that is strongest for faces that are close (2 m equivalent distance) than for faces that are further away (24 m equivalent distance). In contrast, the alignment effect for same trials, used by several authors to measure holistic processing, produced results that are difficult to interpret. We conclude that our results converge with previous findings providing more direct evidence for an effect of size on holistic processing.     

Dependence on Visual Feedback During Motor Skill Learning in Alzheimer's Disease

Three experiments examined the role of visual feedback on the performance of a fine motor task, namely the rotary pursuit, in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy older adults. After extensive practice tracking a fully visible target, participants in Experiments 1 and 2 were tested under restricted vision (RV) conditions. In both experiments, the two groups showed a drop in performance when vision was restricted, with AD patients showing a significantly larger decline. Tracking improved significantly in normal controls, but not AD patients across the RV trials after the initial drop. When difficulty of the rotary pursuit task was manipulated in Experiment 3 without restricting vision, AD patients and normal controls showed identical patterns of performance. Consequently, it could be concluded that AD patients in the first two experiments were relying more heavily on visual information for accurate performance of the tracking task than their healthy peers.     

Obsessional Whiteness and the Unpaid Debt of Apartheid

This paper considers post‐apartheid South African Whiteness from a psychoanalytic perspective. A point of focus is Samantha Vice's controversial and much debated recent article on the ethical quandaries of post‐apartheid White privilege, “How Do I Live in this Strange Place?”, which is read alongside J.M. Coetzee's essay, “The Mind of Apartheid”, written in the early 1990s on the brink of South Africa's transition. Coetzee used a Freudian framework of obsessional neurosis to highlight what he saw as the libidinal economy of apartheid, suggesting that apartheid policies were not only or even primarily aimed at consolidating White material privilege; they were, rather, in Coetzee's view, a set of measures designed to preserve the purity of the White social body from contamination. What the juxtaposition of Coetzee and Vice suggests is that, while the stain of South African Whiteness has shifted or been displaced, post‐apartheid White antiracism, exemplified in the critical discourse Vice elaborates, remains as obsessional, as concerned with keeping the White social body clean, pure, as apartheid thinking. The paper then concludes by considering the usefulness, but also, crucially, the limits of psychoanalysis as a critical frame for interrogating the continuities between apartheid and the new South Africa.     

Invited Address at the Occasion of the Bertelson Award 2005 Impairments in visual discrimination in amnesia: Implications for theories of the role of medial temporal lobe regions in human memory

A prominent and long-standing view of human long-term memory is that structures within the medial temporal lobe (MTL) work together to support the acquisition of memory for facts and events. In contrast to this view, recent studies in rats and non-human primates suggest dissociations in function between regions comprising the MTL. Evidence in support of such specialisation in humans, however, has been inconclusive, leading some researchers to propose that human MTL functions as a unitary system uniquely specialised for the acquisition and storage of long-term memory. This paper reviews some of the key studies from the animal and human literature that support an account of functional differentiation and discusses the different theoretical positions that have emerged from their findings. A series of recent experiments in humans designed to determine whether there is functional homogeneity in MTL regions across species are also reviewed and an alternative account of human memory—in which long-term memory is dependent upon representations distributed throughout the human brain rather than one specialised system—is proposed.     

Obtaining guilty knowledge in human intelligence interrogations: Comparing accusatorial and information-gathering approaches with a novel experimental paradigm

Substantial research has assessed interrogations seeking to obtain a criminal confession, and consequently much has been learned regarding the potential problems with confession evidence. However, an increasing focus on counter-terrorism, and therefore intelligence interrogations, reveals an obvious gap in the literature. Intelligence interrogations are primarily focused on collecting information from individuals as opposed to a confession linked to an alleged event, and little of the extant psychological literature can speak directly to such a scenario. The current research developed an experimental paradigm to test interrogation approaches in an intelligence-gathering context, providing a method for gathering empirical data on human intelligence collection. In the first implementation of this paradigm, accusatorial and information-gathering interrogation strategies were tested using a procedure high in psychological realism. Results indicate that an information-gathering approach yields more relevant information than an accusatorial approach and leads to more diagnostic impressions by third party observers.