Locating dialogue a reply to flax

The thoughtful discussions of my paper by Alan Schore, Wilma Bucci, and James Fosshage raise important considerations about the relationship between theory, research, and the micromoment interactions constituting the activity of psychoanalysis. For the opportunity afforded by their contributions, and to Psychoanalytic Dialogues for publishing our exchanges, I express deep gratitude. I am initially impacted by the appreciation shown by my colleagues for the approach I am illustrating to clinical attention and its value for an expanded and, in certain ways, revised scope of psychoanalytic activity. In particular, I am appreciative of the ways that each commentator has taken up my emphasis on expanding psychoanalytic attention beyond symbolic pathways of exchange and has further contributed to understanding how this can occur. As part of a consideration of points of convergence and difference between us, I address how such convergences and differences shape both the values and pitfalls of comparisons across research, theory, and practice.     

The Politics of Language: A Discussion of Andrew Samuels’s “The ‘Activist Client’”

This commentary offers three suggestions or potential additions to Samuels’s fine and important article “The ‘Activist Client’” (this issue). First, it is suggested that hermeneutic theory would set a solid philosophical foundation for his political project, a foundation that could add to the article’s persuasiveness and assist the ability of others to apply his perspective to their own therapeutic practices. Two, certain linguistic terms Samuels uses are discussed as counterproductive to his goals, and alternative terms are suggested. Finally, Gadamer’s argument against the concept of empathy is offered as a supplement to Samuels’s intriguing use of Brecht’s approach.     

Patterns of moral judgment derive from nonmoral psychological representations

Ordinary people often make moral judgments that are consistent with philosophical principles and legal distinctions. For example, they judge killing as worse than letting die, and harm caused as a necessary means to a greater good as worse than harm caused as a side‐effect ( Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006 ). Are these patterns of judgment produced by mechanisms specific to the moral domain, or do they derive from other psychological domains? We show that the action/omission and means/side‐effect distinctions affect nonmoral representations and provide evidence that their role in moral judgment is mediated by these nonmoral psychological representations. Specifically, the action/omission distinction affects moral judgment primarily via causal attribution, while the means/side‐effect distinction affects moral judgment via intentional attribution. We suggest that many of the specific patterns evident in our moral judgments in fact derive from nonmoral psychological mechanisms, and especially from the processes of causal and intentional attribution.     

Crime and punishment: distinguishing the roles of causal and intentional analyses in moral judgment

Recent research in moral psychology has attempted to characterize patterns of moral judgments of actions in terms of the causal and intentional properties of those actions. The present study directly compares the roles of consequence, causation, belief and desire in determining moral judgments. Judgments of the wrongness or permissibility of action were found to rely principally on the mental states of an agent, while judgments of blame and punishment are found to rely jointly on mental states and the causal connection of an agent to a harmful consequence. Also, selectively for judgments of punishment and blame, people who attempt but fail to cause harm more are judged more leniently if the harm occurs by independent means than if the harm does not occur at all. An account of these phenomena is proposed that distinguishes two processes of moral judgment: one which begins with harmful consequences and seeks a causally responsible agent, and the other which begins with an action and analyzes the mental states responsible for that action.     

Murine vocalizations: Experimental validation of a novel detector

A new device to detect vocalizations by mice or rats is described. Of modest cost and incorporating integrated circuits and controls that permit rapid setting of center frequency and sensitivity, the device is based on phase-locked tone decoding and can operate at sonic or ultrasonic frequencies. Circuit operation and schematics are provided, as are data from two studies of mice in which reliable discrimination of distress and submission calls from background noise was demonstrated.     

A parallel printer port to matrix driver with high current DAC output

The circuit described here takes data from an IBM PC, or a compatible, parallel printer port and expands it to drive a matrix of devices. The matrix size is user definable up to a maximum size of 16 by 16 elements (256 elements), but as drawn is an 8 by 24 matrix (196 elements). Each element in the matrix can be inductive, resistive, or capacitive, with a maximum voltage of about 18 volts, and a total maximum current of 15 amps peak, or 8 amps continuous with adequate heat sinks (dissipating 80 watts maximum per driver device). Several matrix elements may be asserted simultaneously. The voltage applied across the matrix “rails” is controlled by a digital-to-analog converter with 4096 steps (12-bit accuracy).     

Revenge without responsibility? Judgments about collective punishment in baseball

Many cultures practice collective punishment; that is, they will punish one person for another's transgression, based solely on shared group membership. This practice is difficult to reconcile with the theories of moral responsibility that dominate in contemporary Western psychology, philosophy and law. Yet, we demonstrate a context in which many American participants do endorse collective punishment: retaliatory “beaning” in baseball. Notably, individuals who endorse this form of collective punishment tend not to hold the target of retaliation to be morally responsible. In other words, the psychological mechanisms underlying such “vicarious” forms of collective punishment appear to be distinct from the evaluation of moral responsibility. Consequently, the observation of collective punishment in non-Western cultures may not indicate the operation of fundamentally different conceptions of moral responsibility.     

Grammatical pattern learning by human infants and cotton-top tamarin monkeys

There is a surprising degree of overlapping structure evident across the languages of the world. One factor leading to cross-linguistic similarities may be constraints on human learning abilities. Linguistic structures that are easier for infants to learn should predominate in human languages. If correct, then (a) human infants should more readily acquire structures that are consistent with the form of natural language, whereas (b) non-human primates' patterns of learning should be less tightly linked to the structure of human languages. Prior experiments have not directly compared laboratory-based learning of grammatical structures by human infants and non-human primates, especially under comparable testing conditions and with similar materials. Five experiments with 12-month-old human infants and adult cotton-top tamarin monkeys addressed these predictions, employing comparable methods (familiarization-discrimination) and materials. Infants rapidly acquired complex grammatical structures by using statistically predictive patterns, failing to learn structures that lacked such patterns. In contrast, the tamarins only exploited predictive patterns when learning relatively simple grammatical structures. Infant learning abilities may serve both to facilitate natural language acquisition and to impose constraints on the structure of human languages.