Keeping the “cognitive” in cognitive neuroscience, the “affective” in affective neuroscience, and the “behavioral” in behavioral neuroscience: The CABN mission for the next five years

The fields of cognitive, affective, and behavioral neuroscience have been with us for many years now, and have served to spawn an ever growing body of research that has helped to clarify the mechanisms by which the brain gives rise to the diverse processes that govern our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. These fields of research have grown exponentially as more and more tools have become available for invasive and noninvasive measures of brain function in both humans and animals, and as information about the human and animal genomes has increased. These advances in neurosciencebased tools have clearly advanced our knowledge and understanding of brain—behavior relationships. However, there is also a danger that lurks in the shadows of these methodological and empirical advances. This danger is that the enticement of understanding neural processes sometimes leads us to forget about the exact phenomena that we ultimately wish to understand and explain—namely, cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes. What do I mean by danger? I mean the concern that we often seem to prioritize the sophistication of our neural and genetic tools and theorizing over our psychological tools and theorizing, and that we may overlook the absence of linkage between neural (e.g., imaging results at a range of levels) or genetic findings and well—grounded psychological theories about specific cognitive, affective, or behavioral mechanisms. In other words, we can be seduced by the “call of the brain mechanism,” without a reminder of the phenomena we wish to explain.     

As If Religion Matters: Teaching the Introductory Course as if it Does

This essay chronicles the academic odyssey of a young professor who sets out to revise the department's Introduction to Religion course only to realize that she must first clarify her vocational commitments before she can create a teachable course. She is convinced through working with many students who express disdain or even hostility toward the subject matter that she wants to model a relationship to the subject matter that says religion matters, but is uncertain how to do this. After an autobiographical foray into her academic upbringing in active learning, the author articulates four values to model in her teaching: personal relevance, academic responsibility, ethics, and community. The author then engages current scholarship in active learning, and narrates the process of translating those four values into concrete course goals and particular assignments. The essay concludes with an assessment of teaching the revised course.     

Cognition in schizophrenia: does working memory work?

Recent research suggests that disturbances in social and occupational functioning in individuals with schizophrenia may be more influenced by the severity of cognitive deficits than by the severity of symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions. In this article, I review evidence that one component of cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia is a deficit in working memory, associated with disturbances in the dopamine system in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. I suggest that although the cognitive deficits in schizophrenia include working memory dysfunction, because they arise from a disturbance in executive control processes (e.g., the representation and maintenance of context), they extend to a range of cognitive domains. Finally, I discuss the need for further research on the ways in which contextual processing deficits may influence other aspects of this illness, including emotional processing.     

The feminization of the female oedipal complex, Part I: a reconsideration of the significance of separation issues

Freud's insights about the oedipus complex have been universalized to include the psychology of the girl. The authors argue that this crucial developmental phase for girls has uniquely feminine characteristics that have not been fully recognized or cohesively incorporated into psychoanalytic theories. This paper addresses these differences, which are based on characteristic patterns of object relationships, typical defenses, and social considerations. The authors argue that "female oedipal" is an oxymoron, and propose that this constellation be named "the Persephone complex" after the Greek myth of Persephone, which seems to capture better the typical situation of the little girl. They focus on the issue of separation and its complicated and necessary role in the triangular situation of females. Using illustrations from clinical material, the authors argue that the frequent appearance of separation material linked to triangular heterosexual competitive fantasies can and should be differentiated from material in which ideas about separation stem from dyadic and earlier issues. Misunderstanding how these separation conflicts tie into triangular "oedipal" relationships can lead to a "preoedipalization" of the dynamics of girls and women.     

The femininization of the female oedipal complex, Part II: Aggression reconsidered

This paper examines and explores the manifestations of aggressive impulses in the so-called female oedipal complex. The authors describe how competitive aggression on the part of young girls, seemingly missing in children's stories and myths, is unconsciously inhibited, disguised, or externalized. They report similar phenomena in women patients involved in triangular conflicts, and present a selected review of the literature on the inhibition of aggression within the female triangular situation. Stressing dynamic patterns in the object relationships in the female triangular situation, the authors offer a psychological explanation for this inhibition. They present clinical material to demonstrate how overt murderous and competitive aggression toward the mother appears after considerable analytic work. They conclude that girls and women frequently relinquish a sense of agency over both aggression and sexuality in dealing with triangular conflicts, to preserve a safe relationship with their mothers.     

Context-processing deficits in schizotypal personality disorder

Research suggests that schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) is a part of the spectrum of schizophrenia-related illnesses. This article hypothesizes that a deficit in the representation and maintenance of context is a core cognitive disturbance in schizophrenia and that SPD individuals should demonstrate context-processing deficits. To test this hypothesis, the authors administered 3 versions of their AX-CPT task, designed to assess context processing, to 35 healthy controls and 26 individuals with DSM-IV SPD. They also administered working memory and selective attention tasks. SPD individuals displayed context representation deficits similar to those found in schizophrenia but did not show the same additional deficits in context maintenance. Context processing was strongly associated with working memory and selective attention performance in the SPD individuals.     

Topic—vehicle interaction in metaphor comprehension

Property comparison models of metaphor comprehension assume that the topic and vehicle terms in metaphors are both understood to be referring to their conventional literal referents. In contrast, the interactive property attribution model (Glucksberg, McGlone, & Manfredi, 1997) assumes that the vehicle is understood to be referring to a metaphoric category that includes the topic's literal referent as a member. A priming paradigm was used to test the implications of these different models. Prior to interpreting a metaphor, participants read (1) the topic or vehicle concept alone, (2) a sentence ascribing a metaphor-relevant property to one concept, or (3) a sentence ascribing a metaphor-irrelevant property to one concept. All of the prime types facilitated metaphor comprehension with the exception of sentences ascribing metaphor-irrelevant properties to vehicles. The failure of these sentences (but not their topic counterparts) to facilitate metaphor comprehension is attributable to their priming an inappropriate literal interpretation of the vehicle term. These results are consistent with the claim that irrelevant information is suppressed during language comprehension (Gernsbacher, 1990) and support the interactive property attribution model.