Subjective well-being in adolescence: New psychometric evidences on the satisfaction with life scale

The main purpose of the present study was to test the psychometric properties of the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) in a large sample of Spanish adolescents. The sample consisted of 1020 non-clinical adolescents with a mean age of 15.96 years (SD = 1.68). The level of internal consistency of the SWLS Total score by means of McDonald’s Omega was .85. The one-dimensional model displayed appropriate goodness of-fit indices. Strong measurement invariance for the one factor model across age and gender was found. Younger adolescents reported higher levels of life satisfaction. In addition, SWLS total score was negatively associated with behavioural and emotional. The study confirmed that the SWLS is a useful tool for the screening of self-reported life satisfaction in adolescents.     

Reading and Writing: Psychoanalytical Treatment in a Case of Paranoia

Difficulties encountered in clinical work with psychoses require psychoanalytical approaches different from those used for treating neurosis. The authors use a clinical case of a paranoiac patient to highlight the role played by writing, drawing, and painting in the psychoanalytical treatment of psychosis. They also discuss the role of the reader-analyst in this patient’s transferential process, which led to the emergence of a new subjectivity.     

Auditory categorization of complex sounds by rats (Rattus norvegicus)

Little research has explored the auditory categorization abilities of mammals. To better understand these processes, the authors tested the abilities of rats (Rattus norvegicus) to categorize multidimensional acoustic stimuli by using a classic category-learning task developed by R. N. Shepard, C. I. Hovland, and H. M. Jenkins (1961). Rats proved to be able to categorize 8 complex sounds on the basis of either the direction or rate of frequency modulation but not on the basis of the range of frequency modulation. Rats' categorization abilities were limited but improved slowly and incrementally, suggesting that learning was not facilitated by selective attention to acoustic dimensions.     

Goal orientations, motivational climate, equality, and discipline of Spanish physical education students

This study analyzes how dispositional goal orientations and perception of different motivational climates are related to the students' perception of sex-related egalitarian treatment and the appearance of disciplined or undisciplined behaviors in physical education classes. Analyses showed that ego orientation is a predictor of undisciplined behavior. Task orientation was positively associated to discipline. The perception of task-involving motivational climate is related to the students' perception of equal treatment. On the contrary, the perception of ego-involving climate has been linked positively to the prediction of the perception of sex discrimination in physical education classes and negatively to the perception of equality and the appearance of disciplined behavior. This study discusses the implications of these results related to teaching instructional actions in physical education classes.     

A new model of sensorimotor coupling in the development of speech

We present a computational model that learns a coupling between motor parameters and their sensory consequences in vocal production during a babbling phase. Based on the coupling, preferred motor parameters and prototypically perceived sounds develop concurrently. Exposure to an ambient language modifies perception to coincide with the sounds from the language. The model develops motor mirror neurons that are active when an external sound is perceived. An extension to visual mirror neurons for oral gestures is suggested.     

Does word frequency affect lexical selection in speech production?

We evaluated whether lexical selection in speech production is affected by word frequency by means of two experiments. In Experiment 1 participants named pictures using utterances with the structure “pronoun + verb + adjective”. In Experiment 2 participants had to perform a gender decision task on the same pictures. Access to the noun's grammatical gender is needed in both tasks, and therefore lexical selection (lemma retrieval) is required. However, retrieval of the phonological properties (lexeme retrieval) of the referent noun is not needed to perform the tasks. In both experiments we observed faster latencies for high-frequency pictures than for low-frequency pictures. This frequency effect was stable over four repetitions of the stimuli. Our results suggest that lexical selection (lemma retrieval) is sensitive to word frequency. This interpretation runs against the hypothesis that a word's frequency exerts its effects only at the level at which the phonological properties of words are retrieved.     

Flechsig and Freud: late 19th-century neurology and the emergence of psychoanalysis

The author analyzes the potential influences of Paul Flechsig's work on early Freudian theory, particularly on Sigmund Freud's 1966b/1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology. Gehirn und Seele, a discourse authored by Flechsig in 1894, is the focus of this analysis. The author believes that the links between the intellectual production of both German-speaking neurologists have been underrated to this day and attempts to establish that the early Freudian approach to many key issues in the history of psychoanalysis--dreams, unconscious processing, and drives, to name a few--was not unique but shared with some distinguished colleagues in neuropathology and psychiatry. Thus, he attempts to shed additional light on the transition from state-of-art neurology in the last decade of the 19th century to the creation of psychoanalysis as a discipline on its own.     

Bridging the gap between laboratory and applied research on response-independent schedules

In 1948, Skinner described the behavior of pigeons under response-independent schedules as “superstitious,” and proposed that the responses were reinforced by contiguous, adventitious food deliveries. Subsequently, response-independent schedules have been of interest to both basic and applied researchers, first to understand the mechanisms involved, and later, as “noncontingent reinforcement” (NCR) to reduce undesirable behavior. However, the potential superstitious effects produced by these schedules have been challenged, with some researchers arguing that antecedent variables play a significant role. This paper examines the evidence for adventitious reinforcement from both laboratory and applied research, the results of which suggest that antecedent, nonoperant functions may be important in fully understanding the effects of NCR. We propose an applied-basic research synthesis, in which attention to potential nonoperant functions could provide a more complete understanding of response-independent schedules. We conclude with a summary of the applied implications of the nonoperant functions of NCR schedules.