Objects with a past: Husserl on “ad-memorizing apperceptions”

In a late notation from 1932, Husserl emphasizes the fact that a broad concept of ??apperception?? should also include, alongside his usual examples, the apprehension of objects as bearers of an individual or inter-subjective past, specifically ??indicated?? with them; thus, he distinguishes between apperceptions ??appresenting?? a simultaneous content (co-presentations), anticipatory apperceptions pointing to future incidents, and retrospective apperceptions referring to ??ad-memorized?? (hinzuerinnert, ad-memoriert) features and events. The latter sort of apperceptions are involved not only in our apprehension of historical traces and relics, but also in that of causal relations, familiar objects, and cultural objects in general. Following several later notations of Husserl concerning the topic of ??apperceptions,?? this paper outlines the specific intentional structure of retrospective or evocative apperceptions, analyzing their various possible forms.     

Patriots in the Making? Migrants, Citizens, and Demos Building in the European Union

Almost 20?years ago, Jürgen Habermas launched the idea of constitutional patriotism as a proposed solution to the tension between citizenship and national identity in the European Union. Since then, constitutional patriotism has remained a key concept in debates on European Union (EU) citizenship and democracy. This article, as so many before it, scrutinizes the meaning and viability of the concept. Unlike most others, however, it focuses less on the content of the concept and more on the subjects to which it is assumed/supposed to apply. I argue, firstly, that constitutional patriotism is not a viable or even desirable ideal for the European demos in its totality. The potential patriots of the EU are not the large majority of European Union citizens who live in their home country but migrants from other member states and nonmember states who are foreigners in their host countries. Secondly and accordingly, I argue that advancing constitutional patriotism means improving the status of foreign nationals in general and third-country nationals in particular. Connecting the acquisition of EU citizenship to domicile as opposed to member state nationality is one venue for such improvement. I discuss what this could imply and defend it as a means of building a truly European demos.     

Integrating the irrelevant sound

A distractor can be integrated with a target response and the subsequent repetition of the distractor can facilitate or hamper responding depending on whether the same or a different response is required, a phenomenon labeled distractor-response binding. In two experiments we used a priming paradigm with an identification task to investigate influences of stimulus grouping on the binding of irrelevant stimuli (distractors) and responses in audition. In a grouped condition participants heard relevant and irrelevant sounds in one central location, whereas in a non-grouped condition the relevant sound was presented to one ear and the irrelevant sound was presented to the other ear. Distractor-based retrieval of the prime response was stronger for the grouped compared to the non-grouped presentation of stimuli indicating that binding of irrelevant auditory stimuli with responses is modulated by perceptual grouping.     

Threat Appraisal and Authoritarianism in Context: Reactions to the European Union Enlargement in Border Regions

The present study uses European Union (EU) enlargement as the treatment in a “natural” quasi experiment to analyze the relationship of threat appraisal and authoritarianism. Theoretically it is based on the discussion about the role of contextual variables in the genesis of authoritarianism. Two contradictory perspectives are explicated: the trait model and the situationist model. To test the competing causal hypotheses panel data collected before and after the EU eastern enlargement on perceived threat, authoritarian attitudes, and xenophobia among inhabitants of the German external frontier of the EU (at Wave 1) were analyzed. The use of a cross‐lagged panel design demonstrated that the type of relationship between authoritarianism and perceived threat depended on the kind of threat (material or cultural) that was addressed.     

Compensatory nonconformity: Self-uncertainty and low implicit self-esteem increase adoption and expression of minority opinions

The present studies tested whether people, particularly those who are most vulnerable to self-threats as indicated by low implicit self-esteem, adopt and express minority opinions to compensate for self-uncertainty. In Studies 1 through 3, low implicit self-esteem participants who were made to feel uncertain about themselves as individuals (versus uncertain about a self-irrelevant issue in Study 1, certain about themselves in Study 2, or uncertain about their group memberships in Study 3) expressed more disagreement with others' opinions. Additionally, Study 3 demonstrated that this effect is specific to minority opinions and does not emerge on majority opinions. In Study 4, the relation between self-uncertainty and disagreement with others' opinions was strongest among participants with both low implicit and high explicit self-esteem, who respond to self-threats in particularly defensive ways.     

Theory structuralism in a rigid framework

This paper develops the first parts of a logical framework for the empirical sciences, by means of a redefinition of theory structuralism as originally developed by Joseph Sneed, Wolfgang Stegmüller, and others, in the context of a ??rigid?? logic as based on a fixed (therefore rigid) ontology. The paper defends a formal conception of the empirical sciences that has an irreducible ontological basis and is unable, in general, to provide purely structural characterizations of the domain of a theory. The extreme rationalist utopia of a characterization of the real world ??up to isomorphism??, therefore, is rejected.     

I,me, mine: Automatic attentional capture by self‐related stimuli

Drawing on decades of research suggesting an attentional advantage for self‐related information, researchers generally assume that self‐related stimuli automatically capture attention. However, a literature review reveals that this claim has not been systematically examined. We aimed to fill in this dearth of evidence. Following a feature‐based account of automaticity, we set up four experiments in which participants were asked to respond to a target preceded by a cue, which was self‐related or not. In Experiment 1, larger cuing effects (faster reaction times to valid versus invalid trials) were found with a participant's own name compared with someone else's name. In Experiment 2, we replicated these results with unconscious cues. Experiment 3 suggested that these effects are not likely driven by familiarity. In Experiment 4, participants experienced greater difficulties from having their attention being captured by their own compared with someone else's name. We conclude that attentional capture by self‐related stimuli is automatic in the sense that it is unintentional, unconscious, and uncontrolled. Implications for self‐regulation and intergroup relations are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.