Acting-out: its functions within analytic group psychotherapy and its transformation into dreams

In group processes, acting-out has diverse functions, all of them equally important. It has an intrapsychic, interpersonal, and group dynamic function. Not only may it be understood as a form of resistance, but also in its communicative and reparative potential. The authors investigate the thesis that acting-out also contains the seed for change, thus helping patients divest themselves of pathological behavior. Using a group process as an example, this article shows how boundaries can be drawn between past and present experiences while using the communicative and reparative functions of acting-out. Unconscious psychodynamics can then be transformed from acting-out into dreams.     

Auguste Comte on Positivism and Happiness

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is the founder of a French school of thought that became famous for its encyclopaedic account of the sciences as well as for its exposition of what was designed as a way out of a state of intellectual and moral crisis. This essay demonstrates that there is a linkage between the diagnosis of crisis and the pursuit of happiness in Comte's foundation of positivism. It begins by distinguishing Comte's notion of positivism from that of a value-free science. In analysing Comte's peculiar usage of the term happiness, the essay shows that happiness is understood as the result of the convergence (consensus) of three components: a scientific conception of the world, the feelings of love and veneration, and a wisely ordered activity. The essay then demonstrates that the first of these components is of primary importance inasmuch as it is to frame a new horizon within which man is expected to return to a healthy state of mind, to reshape both his hopes and activities, and to discover his own participation in a supreme order acting through the laws of nature as well as through those of the civilization in which he lives. Conveying this new horizon to citizens of a lasting Republic is the sacred mission of sociology. The essay concludes by pointing out that Comte's conception of happiness can be assessed as unifying some main qualities of life as they are classified in Ruut Veenhoven's fourfold matrix.     

How much attention does an event file need?

Attentional requirements for the spontaneous integration of stimulus and response features were analyzed. In line with previous findings, carrying out a prepared response to the onset of a stimulus created bindings between the response and the features of that stimulus, thereby impairing subsequent performance on mismatching stimulus-response combinations. Findings demonstrate that a stimulus gets bound to a response even if its presence is neither necessary nor useful for the task at hand, it follows rather than precedes the response in time, it competes with a task-relevant stimulus, and if the response is suppressed--but only if the stimulus appears close to the response's eventual execution or abandonment. A multiple-integration model is suggested that assumes that the integration of stimulus features in perception and of response features in action planning are local processes that are independent of stimulus-response integration, which presumably is triggered by the success of the perception-action episode.     

Development of the acquisition and control of action-effect associations

Voluntary action is anticipatory and, hence, must depend on associations between actions and their perceivable effects. We studied the acquisition of action-effect associations in 4-5-vs. 7-year-old children. Children carried out key-pressing actions that were arranged to produce particular auditory effects. In a subsequent test phase, children were to press keys in response to the previous effect sounds, with the sound-key mapping being either consistent or inconsistent with previous key-sound practice. As the processes underlying voluntary action controls are known to significantly improve between 4 and 7 years of age, it was expected that younger children were more prone to automatic effects of acquired sound-key associations. This hypothesis was confirmed, but reaction times and accuracy measures showed different and dissociable patterns. Four-year-olds but not 7-year-olds were more likely to commit an error--i.e., to perform a sound-compatible rather than the correct action--if the sound-key mapping was inconsistent with previous practice. This effect strongly depended on previous practice, suggesting that it reflects long-term learning. In contrast, reaction time effects of mapping consistency did not depend on previous experience but only on the consistency between stimulus and action effect in the present task. Taken altogether, the results suggest that children acquire response-effect associations automatically and that younger children are more likely to suffer from frequent goal neglect; i.e., they tend to forget the current action goal, so that their behavior is dominated by automatic, stimulus-triggered response tendencies.     

Backward-compatibility effects with irrelevant stimulus-response overlap: the case of the SNARC effect

In 3 dual-task experiments, the relationship between primary-task response (R1) and secondary-task response (R2) was varied. In general, R1-left responses were faster when followed by the word one, and right responses were faster when followed by the word two. This backward-compatibility (BWC) effect indicated (a) that activation of R2 was not delayed until R1 selection was completed, and (b) that activation of the vocal responses was accompanied by the automatic activation of magnitude codes, known to be associated with spatial left-right codes (spatial-numerical association of response codes [the SNARC effect]). These findings supported the hypotheses (a) that BWC effects persist even with irrelevant R1-R2 overlap, (b) that the SNARC effect is based on associations between magnitude and spatial representations underlying response processing, and (c) that the production and perception of magnitudes relies on common codes.     

Symbolic control of visual attention: The role of working memory and attentional control settings

This study examined how 1 symbol is selected to control the allocation of attention when several symbols appear in the visual field. In Experiments 1-3, the critical target feature was color, and it was found that uninformative central arrows that matched the color of the target were selected and produced unintentional shifts of attention (i.e., involuntary, initiated slowly, producing long-lasting facilitatory effects). Experiment 4 tested whether such selection is the result of an attentional filter or of a competition bias due to a match of incoming information against integrated object representations stored in working memory. Here, the critical feature was shape and color was irrelevant, but matching color arrows were still selected. Thus, features of objects in working memory will bias the selection of symbols in the visual field, and such selected symbols are capable of producing unintentional shifts of attention. ((c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved)     

Moving through virtual reality without moving?

Virtual reality (VR) technology is increasingly used in spatial cognition research, as it offers high experimental control and interactivity in naturalistic multi-modal environments, something that is difficult to achieve in real-world settings. Even in the most sophisticated and costly VR systems, people do not necessarily perceive and behave as they would in the real world. This might be related to our inability to use embodied (and thus often highly automated and effective) spatial orientation processes in VR. While real-world locomotion affords automatic and obligatory spatial updating of our self-to-surrounding relationships, such that we easily remain oriented during simple perspective changes, the same is not necessarily true in VR. This can lead to striking systematic and qualitative errors such as failures to update rotations ("Nonturner" behavior). Here, we investigated whether rich naturalistic visual stimuli in immersive VR might be sufficient to compensate for the lack of physical motion. To this end, 24 participants performed point-to-origin tasks after visually simulated excursions along streets of varying curvature in a naturalistic virtual city. Most (21/24) participants properly updated simulated self-motions and showed only moderate regression toward mean pointing responses. 3/24 participants, however, exhibited striking "Nonturner" behavior in that they pointed as if they did not update the visually simulated turns and their heading had not changed. This suggests that our immersive naturalistic VR stimuli were an improvement over prior optic flow stimuli, but still insufficient in eliciting obligatory spatial updating that supported correct point-to-origin responses in all participants.     

Eye movements and display change detection during reading

In the boundary change paradigm (Rayner, 1975), when a reader's eyes cross an invisible boundary location, a preview word is replaced by a target word. Readers are generally unaware of such changes due to saccadic suppression. However, some readers detect changes on a few trials and a small percentage of them detect many changes. Two experiments are reported in which we combined eye movement data with signal detection analyses to investigate display change detection. On each trial, readers had to indicate if they saw a display change in addition to reading for meaning. On half the trials the display change occurred during the saccade (immediate condition); on the other half, it was slowed by 15-25 ms (delay condition) to increase the likelihood that a change would be detected. Sentences were presented in an alternating case fashion allowing us to investigate the influence of both letter identity and case. In the immediate condition, change detection was higher when letters changed than when case changed corroborating findings that word processing utilizes abstract (case independent) letter identities. However, in the delay condition (where d' was much higher than the immediate condition), detection was equal for letter and case changes. The results of both experiments indicate that sensitivity to display changes was related to how close the eyes were to the invalid preview on the fixation prior to the display change, as well as the timing of the completion of this change relative to the start of the post-change fixation.     

Parafoveal processing of word n + 2 during reading: do the preceding words matter?

We used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) to test two hypotheses that might explain why no conclusive evidence has been found for the existence of n + 2 preprocessing effects. In Experiment 1, we tested whether parafoveal processing of the second word to the right of fixation (n + 2) takes place only when the preceding word (n + 1) is very short (Angele, Slattery, Yang, Kliegl, & Rayner, 2008); word n + 1 was always a three-letter word. Before crossing the boundary, preview for both words n + 1 and n + 2 was either incorrect or correct. In a third condition, only the preview for word n + 1 was incorrect. In Experiment 2, we tested whether word frequency of the preboundary word (n) had an influence on the presence of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effects. Additionally, Experiment 2 contained a condition in which only preview of n + 2 was incorrect. Our findings suggest that effects of parafoveal n + 2 preprocessing are not modulated by either n + 1 word length or n frequency. Furthermore, we did not observe any evidence of parafoveal lexical preprocessing of word n + 2 in either experiment.