Reflections on a Community Psychology Setting and the Future of the Field

The 50th anniversary of the Swampscott Conference offers an opportunity to reflect on a community psychology setting, The Consultation Center at Yale, that was formed in response to the 1963 Community Mental Health Act and the 1965 Swampscott Conference. The Center has flourished as a community psychology setting for practice, research, and training for 39 of the 50 years since Swampscott. Its creation and existence over this period offers an opportunity for reflection on the types of settings needed to sustain the field into the future.     

Primal emotional-affective expressive foundations of human facial expression

Emotional facial expressions provide important insights into various valenced feelings of humans. Recent cross-species neuroscientific advances offer insights into molecular foundations of mammalian affects and hence, by inference, the related emotional/affective facial expressions in humans. This is premised on deep homologies based on affective neuroscience studies of valenced primary emotional systems across species. Thus, emerging theoretical perspectives suggest that ancient cross-species emotional systems are intimately linked not only to emotional action patterns evident in all mammals, but also, by inference, distinct emotional facial expressions studied intensively in humans. Thus, the goal of the present theoretical work was to relate categories of human emotional facial expressions—e.g. especially of anger fear, joy and sadness—to respective underlying primary cross-mammalian emotional circuits. This can potentially provide coherent theoretical frameworks for the eventual molecular study of emotional facial expressions in humans.     

How motor practice shapes memory: retrieval but not extra study can cause forgetting

We investigated the retrieval specificity of retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) of motor sequences. In two experiments, participants learned sequential finger movements, each consisting of the movement of two fingers of either the left or the right hand. In the learning phase, these motor sequences were graphically presented and were to be learned as responses to simultaneously presented letter stimuli. Subsequently, participants selectively practiced half the items of one hand. A final recall test then assessed memory for all initially learned items. We contrasted different kinds of selective practice with each other. Whereas retrieval practice required retrieving motor sequences in response to letter stimuli from the learning phase, extra study was an extension of the learning phase, that is, participants performed motor sequences in response to the same animation graphic display as in the learning phase again accompanied by the letter stimulus. All practice conditions strengthened the practiced items, but only retrieval practice resulted in RIF. Thus, the strengthening of items through practice did not suffice to induce forgetting of related motor sequences. Retrieval was a necessary component for practice to shape memory for body movements by impairing the subsequent recall of motor sequences that were related to the practiced motor sequences.     

Aesthetic appreciation of poetry correlates with ease of processing in event-related potentials

Rhetorical theory suggests that rhythmic and metrical features of language substantially contribute to persuading, moving, and pleasing an audience. A potential explanation of these effects is offered by “cognitive fluency theory,” which stipulates that recurring patterns (e.g., meter) enhance perceptual fluency and can lead to greater aesthetic appreciation. In this article, we explore these two assertions by investigating the effects of meter and rhyme in the reception of poetry by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants listened to four versions of lyrical stanzas that varied in terms of meter and rhyme, and rated the stanzas for rhythmicity and aesthetic liking. The behavioral and ERP results were in accord with enhanced liking and rhythmicity ratings for metered and rhyming stanzas. The metered and rhyming stanzas elicited smaller N400/P600 ERP responses than their nonmetered, nonrhyming, or nonmetered and nonrhyming counterparts. In addition, the N400 and P600 effects for the lyrical stanzas correlated with aesthetic liking effects (metered–nonmetered), implying that modulation of the N400 and P600 has a direct bearing on the aesthetic appreciation of lyrical stanzas. We suggest that these effects are indicative of perceptual-fluency-enhanced aesthetic liking, as postulated by cognitive fluency theory.     

The influence of linguistic and cognitive factors on the time course of verb-based implicit causality

In three eye-tracking experiments the influence of the Dutch causal connective “want” (because) and the working memory capacity of readers on the usage of verb-based implicit causality was examined. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that although a causal connective is not required to activate implicit causality information during reading, effects of implicit causality surfaced more rapidly and were more pronounced when a connective was present in the discourse than when it was absent. In addition, Experiment 3 revealed that—in contrast to previous claims—the activation of implicit causality is not a resource-consuming mental operation. Moreover, readers with higher and lower working memory capacities behaved differently in a dual-task situation. Higher span readers were more likely to use implicit causality when they had all their working memory resources at their disposal. Lower span readers showed the opposite pattern as they were more likely to use the implicit causality cue in the case of an additional working memory load. The results emphasize that both linguistic and cognitive factors mediate the impact of implicit causality on text comprehension. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of the ongoing controversies in the literature—that is, the focusing-integration debate and the debates on the source of implicit causality.     

Impaired Memory Consolidation in Rats Produced with β-Adrenergic Blockade

Despite abundant evidence that systemic administration of adrenergic drugs and hormones can produce retrograde memory enhancement, the literature contains no clear demonstration that postlearning systemic administration of adrenergic antagonists produces retrograde amnesia. Here we demonstrate retrograde amnesia for a stressful learning task (a spatial water maze) with systemic administration of the β-adrenergic antagonist propranolol (5 mg/kg). The amnesic effect of the drug depended on the degree of learning in the subjects: Propranolol caused a robust retrograde amnesia in “good learners,” but did not significantly affect memory in “poor learners.” The findings provide critical additional support for the hypothesis that postlearning adrenergic activation modulates memory consolidation processes after emotionally stressful events and help explain previous failures to detect memory impairment after systemic administration of adrenergic blocking drugs.     

Doing What is Best

If doing what is best sets the right ideal of rational agency, then rational agents should do what they believe to be best. As long as we leave open the question what makes an option best, all plausible theories of rationality willfit into this framework. Consequently, rational agents will always want to do the things they believes to be best. This claim is an instance of what David Lewis calls the desire-as-belief thesis, which he has tried to refute. I reject Lewis' argument by criticizing his treatment of belief-change in respect of propositions about degrees of goodness.