The Aesthetic Preference for Nature Sounds Depends on Sound Object Recognition

People across the world seek out beautiful sounds in nature, such as a babbling brook or a nightingale song, for positive human experiences. However, it is unclear whether this positive aesthetic response is driven by a preference for the perceptual features typical of nature sounds versus a higher‐order association of nature with beauty. To test these hypotheses, participants provided aesthetic judgments for nature and urban soundscapes that varied on ease of recognition. Results demonstrated that the aesthetic preference for nature soundscapes was eliminated for the sounds hardest to recognize, and moreover the relationship between aesthetic ratings and several measured acoustic features significantly changed as a function of recognition. In a follow‐up experiment, requiring participants to classify these difficult‐to‐identify sounds into nature or urban categories resulted in a robust preference for nature sounds and a relationship between aesthetic ratings and our measured acoustic features that was more typical of easy‐to‐identify sounds. This pattern of results was replicated with computer‐generated artificial noises, which acoustically shared properties with the nature and urban soundscapes but by definition did not come from these environments. Taken together, these results support the conclusion that the recognition of a sound as either natural or urban dynamically organizes the relationship between aesthetic preference and perceptual features and that these preferences are not inherent to the acoustic features. Implications for nature's role in cognitive and affective restoration are discussed.     

Sándor,Gizella, Elma: A biographical journey1

In recent years, particularly with the publication of the Freud‐Ferenczi correspondence, it has become clear that the rich theoretical dialogue between Freud and Ferenczi, a dialogue that may be seen as constitutive for psychoanalytic discourse in recent decades, was intensely intertwined with their complex personal relationship. Two women‐Gizella Pálos, who eventually became Ferenczi's wife, and her daughter Elma, who was both Ferenczi's and Freud's analysand, and with whom Ferenczi fell in love‐played a crucial role in shaping the Freud‐Ferenczi relationship. Their own voices, however, have so far been barely heard. This paper is a preliminary report of a biographical research project which aims to complete the puzzle, by getting to know better Gizella, Elma and their family, with the help of numerous original sources, many of them unpublished till now. The emerging picture tends to confirm Ferenczi's initial view of Elma as a person of depth and integrity, rather than Freud's view of her as fundamentally disturbed; countertransference‐love, it is suggested, may have facilitated fuller perception rather than clouding it. The question of the impact of Elma's ‘confusion of tongues’ with Ferenczi and with Freud on her subsequent life is also discussed.     

Imitation of Self‐Aggressive Behavior: An Experimental Test of the Contagion Hypothesis1

The purpose of the present study was to experimentally examine the influence of a self‐aggressive model on self‐aggressive behavior under controlled laboratory conditions. Participants (N= 94) were given the opportunity to self‐administer electric shock while competing with a fictitious opponent in a reaction‐time task. Participants observed the opponent self‐administer either increasingly intense shock (a self‐aggressive model) or constant low shocks (a non‐self‐aggressive model). Self‐aggression was defined as the intensity of shock that was self‐administered by participants. Results provide support for the notion that social information can influence the expression of self‐aggressive behavior. Specifically, participants attended to the opponent's shock choices in both model conditions, and chose shocks consistent with those of the observed model.     

Pitfalls on our “New Royal Road”: Commentary on Paper by Joyce Slochower

In discussing Joyce Slochower’s paper “Going Too Far: Relational Heroines and Relational Excess,” (this issue) the author welcomes its self-critical emphasis, suggesting that analysts from all schools of thought benefit more from noticing the risks and pitfalls in their own approach—thus becoming able to improve their own clinical work—than from polemically highlighting what is faulty in other, competing approaches. Such polemics run a risk of their own: turning our theoretical homes into theoretical fortresses, and blocking richer communication among analysts. He shares the concern about some specific attributes of relational and intersubjective clinical work but relates many of the issues raised by Slochower to tensions and dilemmas present in older models of the analytic relationship as well, offering examples from the work of Freud, Ferenczi, Balint, Winnicott, and Racker.     

Providing an escape option reduces retaliatory aggression

The purpose of this study was to examine whether providing an explicit means to escape future attacks by a provocative fictitious participant reduces retaliatory aggression. Using a laboratory measure of aggression (the Point Subtraction Aggression Paradigm), 25 participants were given the opportunity to earn points with monetary value on a fixed ratio (FR) 100 schedule, and to subtract points from a fictitious participant on an FR 10 schedule. Aggressive responding was defined as the number of point subtraction responses by the participant. Aggressive responding also produced intervals free from further attack by the fictitious participant. Provocation was manipulated by having the fictitious person subtract points from the participant. Each participant next completed the same task with an explicit FR 10 escape response option added. The escape option produced intervals free from attack identical to the aggressive option, but without taking points away from the fictitious participant. Results indicate that the availability of an escape response attenuated aggressive behavior in response to provocation. Aggr. Behav. 00:000–000, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Thalamic pathways for active vision

Active vision requires the integration of information coming from the retina with that generated internally within the brain, especially by saccadic eye movements. Just as visual information reaches cortex via the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus, this internal information reaches the cerebral cortex through other higher-order nuclei of the thalamus. This review summarizes recent work on four of these thalamic nuclei. The first two pathways convey internal information about upcoming saccades (a corollary discharge) and probably contribute to the neuronal mechanisms that underlie stable visual perception. The second two pathways might contribute to the neuronal mechanisms underlying visual spatial attention in cortex and in the thalamus itself.     

Conduction aphasia, sensory-motor integration, and phonological short-term memory - an aggregate analysis of lesion and fMRI data

Conduction aphasia is a language disorder characterized by frequent speech errors, impaired verbatim repetition, a deficit in phonological short-term memory, and naming difficulties in the presence of otherwise fluent and grammatical speech output. While traditional models of conduction aphasia have typically implicated white matter pathways, recent advances in lesions reconstruction methodology applied to groups of patients have implicated left temporoparietal zones. Parallel work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has pinpointed a region in the posterior most portion of the left planum temporale, area Spt, which is critical for phonological working memory. Here we show that the region of maximal lesion overlap in a sample of 14 patients with conduction aphasia perfectly circumscribes area Spt, as defined in an aggregate fMRI analysis of 105 subjects performing a phonological working memory task. We provide a review of the evidence supporting the idea that Spt is an interface site for the integration of sensory and vocal tract-related motor representations of complex sound sequences, such as speech and music and show how the symptoms of conduction aphasia can be explained by damage to this system.     

A general systems approach to suicide prevention: lessons from cardiac prevention and control

The pathology of cardiac disease includes genetic, physical, biochemical, psychological, social, and environmental vectors. Factors contributing to suicide have been identified in these same areas. Survival from an acute cardiac event requires a systematized and multisectoral response. Communities that do not have systematized response capabilities to acute cardiac events have poorer survival outcomes. Suicide prevention and control may also be responsive to an integrated community response system. This paper examines the development of a community cardiac care model, explores potential parallels for a community suicide prevention and control model, and outlines a general systems theory framework for a suicide prevention and control system.