Benign and disruptive disturbances of the supervisory field1

Inspired by Baranger, Baranger and Mom’s notion of psychoanalytic bastion, we describe an unconscious collusion between analytic supervisors and supervisees. This collusion’s purpose is to avoid the anxiety inherent in the psychoanalytic field and that enters unprocessed into the supervisory field. The supervisor/supervisee dyad’s emotional experience can be fleeting, with moderate intensity, but can slow down the process. This can happen sometimes in any supervisory situation. Or it can become permanent and with greater intensity and bring the entire process to a standstill and to a disruption of the supervisory field. We call the first situation a ‘benign disturbance of the supervisory field’, the second a ‘disruptive disturbance of the supervisory field’. We illustrate both disturbances using supervisory material. Our purpose is to show how to detect these disturbances, understand them, and manage them.     

The role of injection cues in the associative control of the US pre-exposure effect in flavour aversion learning

Two experiments, using rats as subjects, examined the role of contextual cues in producing the unconditioned stimulus (US) pre-exposure effect in conditioned taste aversion. Experiment 1 showed a significant US pre-exposure effect, when the pre-exposure was conducted in a familiar context, and that a change of context between the pre-exposure and conditioning phases did not attenuate this effect. Experiment 2 demonstrated that extinction of injection-related cues after the pre-exposure stage attenuated the US pre-exposure effect, when the pre-exposure was conducted in either a familiar or a novel context. Taken together, these results support the associative explanation of the US pre-exposure effect in terms of blocking, incorporating a role for injection-related cues in the context blocking analysis of the US pre-exposure effect.     

Sharing without caring? Respect for moral others compensates for low sympathy in children's sharing

We examined links between sharing, respect for moral others, and sympathy in an ethnically diverse sample of 7‐ and 15‐year‐olds (N = 146). Sharing was assessed through children's allocation of resources in the dictator game. Children reported their respect towards hypothetical characters performing moral acts. Sympathy was evaluated via caregiver and child reports. Respect and caregiver‐reported sympathy interacted in predicting sharing: Higher levels of respect were associated with higher levels of sharing for children with low, but not medium or high, levels of sympathy. The motivational components of other‐oriented respect may compensate for low levels of sympathetic concern in the promotion of sharing.     

Control by Contextual Stimuli in Novel Second-Order Conditional Discriminations

The Psychological Record - Eighteen undergraduates participated in studies designed to examine the factors that produce transfer of contextual functions to novel stimuli in second-order conditional...