The Creative Brain: Corepresenting Schema Violations Enhances TPJ Activity and Boosts Cognitive Flexibility

Cognitive flexibility is one of the essential mental abilities underlying creative thinking. Previous findings have shown that cognitive flexibility can be enhanced by schema violations, and it has been suggested that active involvement is needed for schema violations to facilitate cognitive flexibility. The possibility that identification with an actor performing a schema violation (i.e., corepresenting an active schema violation) can enhance cognitive flexibility was investigated in 2 studies. In the first study, under conditions of high or low identification, participants watched an actor preparing a sandwich. The way the actor made the sandwich followed either a schema violation or contained the normal schema of preparing a sandwich. When identification was high, watching a schema-violation-enhanced cognitive flexibility as compared to watching the corresponding normal event. No effect of schema violation occurred under conditions of low identification. As little is known about the neural correlates of schema violations, in the second study the brain activity during schema violations was explored by means of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Participants were instructed to identify with an actor and brain activity was measured while participants watched the actor performing a schema violation or the corresponding normal schema. Activity in the temporal parietal junction (TPJ), a brain region that is associated with violation of expectations, was higher in the schema-violation condition than in the normal schema condition. These findings enhance the theoretical understanding of the effects of schema violations and may provide important practical implications in various settings where creative thinking is needed.     

Rorschach Characteristics of Mothers of Incest Victims

Investigated the Rorschach characteristics of 28 mothers of incest victims, using the Rorschach Comprehensive System. Their characteristics were compared to those from a control group of 28 women, matched with the target group for socioeconomic status (SES), age, education, marital status, and the presence of children. Chi-square, analysis of variance, and a stepwise linear discriminant function analysis were used to evaluate Rorschach differences between the control and target groups. Major findings indicate that mothers of incest victims demonstrated significantly greater weaknesses in reality testing, more frequent signs of depression, and greater interpersonal guardedness than control group mothers. Discriminant function analysis, based on scores from the schizophrenia index (SCZI), conventional form (X + %), and texture responses (t), yielded an overall accurate classification rate of 87.5% for placement of women into the target and control group categories.     

With infinite utility,more needn't be better

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties: only groups with sufficient structure—call them ‘collectives’—have the necessary agency. Moreover, if duties imply ability then moral agents (of both the individual and collectives varieties) can bear duties only over actions they are able to perform. It is thus doubtful that individual agents can bear duties to perform actions that only a collective could perform. This appears to leave us at a loss when assigning duties in circumstances where only a collective could perform some morally desirable action and no collective exists. But, I argue, we are not at a loss. This article outlines a new way of assigning duties over collective acts when there is no collective. Specifically, we should assign collectivization duties to individuals. These are individual duties to take steps towards forming a collective, which then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivization duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers.     

Interactional Styles of Bullies and Victims Observed in a Competitive and a Cooperative Setting

Observational data were used to examine the interactional styles of bullies and victims while they participated in 2 different games: 1 cooperative and 1 competitive. Participants included 17 bullies, 18 victims, and 35 controls (all aged 8–11 years) selected through a peer nomination questionnaire. Bullies and victims were observed 4 times in total: twice during the cooperative game and twice during the competitive game, each time paired with a partner of opposite status or control status. Results indicated that when bullies and victims interacted together, bullies showed a dominant style in the dyad, often regulating and opposing victims' initiatives. Victims, on the other hand, complied with bullies' requests and presented a submissive style of interaction. However, interactions involving control partners indicated that (a) bullies opposed those partners' initiatives less frequently and (b) victims tended to affirm themselves by asking for help and explanations. These data provide evidence for an interactional model in explaining the dynamics between bullies and victims.     

The Emotional Lexicon of Individuals Diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder

This study investigated the specific emotional lexicons in narratives created by persons diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) to test the hypothesis that individuals with ASPD exhibit deficiencies in emotional language. Study participants consisted of 60 prison inmates with ASPD, 40 prison inmates without ASPD, and 60 men without antisocial tendencies who described situations involving love, hate and anxiety depicted by photographs. The lexical choices made in the narratives were analyzed, and a comparison of the three groups revealed differences between the emotional narratives of inmates with ASPD, inmates without ASPD, and the control group. Although the narratives of the individuals with ASPD included more words describing emotions and higher levels of emotional intensity, the valence of these words was inappropriate. The linguistic characteristics of these narratives were associated with high levels of psychopathy and low emotional reactivity.     

techniques of neutralization and self-esteem: a critical test of social control and neutralization theory

Sykes and Matza argued that delinquents use techniques of neutralization to enable themselves to engage in behavior they believe is wrong under most circumstances. One function of using these techniques is that the individual is able to protect his or her self-concept while committing delinquent acts. This implies that delinquent youth who use these techniques should have higher levels of self-esteem than delinquents who do not use them. Because Sykes and Matza hold that neutralization is necessary because of the delinquents ties to conventional society, this effect should be stronger among delinquent youth who are more strongly attached to their parents. In contrast, Hirschis social control theory predicts that delinquents who are able to maintain a bond to conventional society should be less likely to neutralize, but if they do neutralize, they should be unable to sufficiently convince themselves of the validity of the neutralizations to protect self-esteem. These hypotheses are tested using data from the Richmond Youth Survey. The results differed depending on whether general neutralizations or neutralizations regarding the police were analyzed. Children who are attached to their parents are less likely to use police-related neutralizations, but delinquents who use these neutralizations have higher self-esteem, consistent with neutralization theory. Delinquents who are more strongly attached to their parents are also less likely to use general neutralizations, but these neutralization techniques do not lead to higher levels of self-esteem, consistent with control theory.     

Context length and reading novel words: An eye‐movement investigation

The current study investigated the effects of context length on the processing of novel words. Participants read real adjectives or novel words embedded in either sentence or paragraph contexts while their eye movements were recorded. The results extend the literature on novel word reading by exploring the time‐course of word processing using realistic contexts derived from existing sources. Eye‐movement measures demonstrated that readers were very sensitive to the presence of novel words. Novel words were more likely to be fixated and had longer reading times than real words. In addition, words in sentence contexts had longer gaze durations than words in paragraphs. The effect of novelty on reading the target word did not vary as a function of the context length. While performance on the surprise post‐test did not demonstrate significant word learning, participants did report higher confidence in correct responses than incorrect, suggesting that some learning took place.     

The dimensional structure of people's fears,threats, and concerns and their relationship with right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation

Most theories addressing the topic have proposed that threat and fear underlie right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA), and many empirical findings have been consistent with this proposition. Important questions, however, remain unanswered, such as whether RWA is associated with fear and threat in general or only specific kinds of fear and threat. Theories of RWA generate markedly different predictions on this issue, particularly with respect to social or personal fears, and whether the association would also hold for the closely related construct of social dominance orientation (SDO). We investigated the issue by asking 463 undergraduate students to rate their feelings of fear, concern, and anxiety to a comprehensive 93‐item list of potential fears and threats, which were formulated as either personal or social. Exploratory factors analysis identified five distinct fear–threat factors: Harm to Self, Child, or Country; Personal and Relationship Failures; Environmental and Economic Fears; Political and Personal Uncertainties; and Threats to Ingroup. All the fear–threat factors were correlated with RWA, with the strongest correlations being for Threats to Ingroup, and with stronger effects for social than for personal fears. None of the fear factors correlated with SDO. These relationships were not affected by controlling for Social Desirability or Emotional Stability (EMS). When the intercorrelations between fear factors and EMS were controlled using ridge regression, only Threats to Ingroup predicted RWA. Structural equation modeling indicated good fit for a model in which low levels of EMS had a significant path to Threats to Ingroup, which in turn had a significant path to RWA, and EMS having a significant though weak indirect (fully mediated) inverse effect on RWA. Implications of these findings for theories of authoritarianism and future research are discussed.     

Fading perceptual resemblance: A path for rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to conceptual matching?

Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been intrigued by humans’ and animals’ capacity to respond to abstract relations like sameness and difference, because this capacity may underlie crucial aspects of cognition like analogical reasoning. Recently, this capacity has been explored in higher-order, relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which humans and animals try to complete analogies of sameness and difference between disparate groups of items. The authors introduced a new paradigm to this area, by yoking the relational-matching cue to a perceptual-matching cue. Then, using established algorithms for shape distortion, the perceptual cue was weakened and eliminated. Humans’ RMTS performance easily transcended the elimination of perceptual support. In contrast, RMTS performance by six macaques faltered as they were weaned from perceptual support. No macaque showed evidence of mature RMTS performance, even given more than 260,000 training trials during which we tried to coax a relational-matching performance from them. It is an important species difference that macaques show so hesitant a response to conceptual relations when humans respond to them so effortlessly. It raises theoretical questions about the emergence of this crucial capacity during humans’ cognitive evolution and during humans’ cognitive development.     

The enemy within An exploration of the concept of boundaries in a GP's surgery

Abstract

This paper looks at two GPs' surgeries and the way that they deal with the anxieties aroused when trying to meet patients' needs in primary health care. The practice counsellor is both an observer and a participant in this. The physical surroundings seem to influence the way these anxieties are acted out. Each surgery has to create an enemy in order to live with their anxiety.