Depression impairs the ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions: Evidence from the Garner task

We assessed dysphoric and clinically distressed individuals' ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions using the Garner speeded‐classification task. Garner's paradigm tests the ability to selectively focus on a single relevant dimension while ignoring variations on other, irrelevant, ones. In the present task, the stimuli were faces of men and women expressing happy, angry, and neutral emotions. In Experiments 1 and 2, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants performed the Garner task, focusing on gender and ignoring emotion (Experiment 1) and focusing on emotion and ignoring gender (Experiment 2). Results suggest that dysphoric individuals exhibited more difficulty ignoring the emotional dimension of social stimuli even under specific instructions to do so than nondysphoric individuals. In Experiments 3 and 4, we replicated these results in clinically distressed and nondistressed individuals. The results of Experiment 3 further suggested that depression was more closely associated with the inability to selectively ignore emotion than was social anxiety. Experiment 4 confirmed that this failure of selective attention was specific to processing emotional, and not gender features. The implications of these findings for cognitive and interpersonal theories of depression are discussed.     

Hate (its vicissitudes and its relations) revisited: Part II - Groups and culture

Abstract

Part I of this paper discussed various dynamic aspects of hate in the individual developmental and clinical context. Part II, also an expansion of the author’s discussion of Harold Blum’s presentation on “Hate and its vicissitudes” in Prague in 2017, examines the theme of hate as a multidimensional dynamic group phenomenon. The paper uses various theoretical perspectives to focus on group unconscious processes and the group-specific dynamic of regression leading to an activation of primitive ego operations, unleashing destructive aggression as well as creative mobilization. Also considered are the implications in terms of destruction, adaptation, and creativity, in relation to group unconscious dynamic processes and intergenerationally trasmitted trauma and posttraumatic developments.     

Hate (its vicissitudes and its relations) revisited: Part I – Individual

Abstract

The present paper is an expansion of the author’s discussion of Harold Blum’s seminal presentation “Hate and its vicissitudes” in Prague in 2017. It aims at an elaboration of various aspects of hate and hatred as a complex dynamic intrapsychic and relational affective-cognitive state, alloyed, in different ways, with aggression and love. In this context, various theoretical perspectives concerning the multifaceted relation between hate, love, and sexuality, and hate and destructive aggression, and transformations between them, including the first study of neurobiological correlates of hate, will be raised and explored. Implication on destruction as well as psychic structuring, adaptation and creativity are also considered. The clinical vignettes illustrates the relevance of multiple theoretical conceptualizations in contemporary psychoanalytic practice.     

Continued relevance of Dante Alighieri’s Comedy that transformed the soul and the culture

Abstract

The following essay is a modified version of an invited presentation given in Florence, Italy in May 2017. It builds on and extends some of the previous psychoanalytic and multidisciplinary studies of Dante’s Divine Comedy as a “psychoanalysis of the Middle Ages” that greatly contributed to the incipient changes of the cultural episteme. The paper will explore and elaborate the continued relevance of Dantian proto-psychoanalytic insight into the complex role of regression, destruction, transgression, and conflict in generating growth, expansion, and creativity, and the ways in which ethics and erotics intertwine in a complex path towards unity, within the context of his multivocal presubjective, intrasubjective, and intersubjective inquiry leading to psychic reorganization. The liminal nature of Dante’s poetry, extending the symbolic and representational range in a way unprecedented in the vernacular literature of his time, vivifying and representing what is traditionally thought of as beyond representation, will also be considered in terms of its relevance to the contemporary psychoanalytic discourse.     

Does Global Democracy Require a World State?

Abstract

The question of whether global democracy requires a world state has with few exceptions been answered with an unequivocal ‘No’. A world state, it is typically argued, is neither feasible nor desirable. Instead, different forms of global governance arrangements have been suggested, involving non-hierarchical and multilayered models with dispersed authority. The overall aim of this paper is to addresses the question of whether global democracy requires a world state, adopting a so-called ‘function-sensitive’ approach. It is shown that such an approach is equipped to resist the predominant binary view of a world state (either accepting it or rejecting it) and offer a more differentiated and nuanced answer to this question. In brief, a basic presumption of a function-sensitive approach is that the content, justification and status of principles of democracy are dependent on the aim they are set out to achieve, what functions they are intended to regulate (e.g., decision-making, implementation, enforcement and evaluation), and the relationship between those functions. More specifically, within a function-sensitive framework, the paper sketches the contours of an account of global democracy consisting of five regulative principles and argues—utilizing the notion of ‘sufficient stateness’—that it would require supranational legislative entities and perhaps supranational judicial entities but not necessarily supranational executive entities.     

Differentiation is key: should employers offer something unique or the same yet better?

ABSTRACT

Researchers agree that employers should differentiate themselves from their competitors to become the employer of choice. However, from the recruitment literature, it is not clear how employers should differentiate their employment offers. Building upon the structural alignment theory, we investigated in two experimental studies whether offering something unique (i.e., non-alignable attributes; e.g., offer a benefit package when competitors do not) or offering the same yet better (i.e., alignable attributes; e.g., offer a bigger benefit package than competitors) is the most effective differentiation strategy for employment offers and whether this depends on job seekers’ work experience. Offering the same yet better affected job seekers’ preferences more positively than offering something unique in lowly complex judgement and decision-making situations (Study 1) as well as in highly complex judgement and decision-making situations if job seekers had more work experience (Study 2). Hence, our findings suggest that differentiation strategies matter: employers should differentiate by offering the same yet better, particularly when they look for highly experienced job seekers in highly complex judgement and decision-making situations.     

Learning strategy differentially impacts memory connections in children and adults

Even once children can accurately remember their experiences, they nevertheless struggle to use those memories in flexible new ways—as in when drawing inferences. However, it remains an open question as to whether the developmental differences observed during both memory formation and inference itself represent a fundamental limitation on children's learning mechanisms, or rather their deployment of suboptimal strategy. Here, 7–9-year-old children (N = 154) and young adults (N = 130) first formed strong memories for initial (AB) associations and then engaged in one of three learning strategies as they viewed overlapping (BC) pairs. We found that being told to integrate—combine ABC during learning—both significantly improved children's ability to explicitly relate the indirectly associated A and C items during inference and protected the underlying pair memories from forgetting. However, this finding contrasted with implicit evidence for memory-to-memory connections: Adults and children both formed A-C links prior to any knowledge of an inference test—yet for children, such links were most apparent when they were told to simply encode BC, not integrate. Moreover, the accessibility of such implicit links differed between children and adults, with adults using them to make explicit inferences but children only doing so for well-established direct AB pairs. These results suggest that while a lack of integration strategy may explain a large share of the developmental differences in explicit inference, children and adults nevertheless differ in both the circumstances under which they connect interrelated memories and their ability to later leverage those links to inform flexible behaviours.

Research Highlights

• Children and adults view AB and BC pairs related through a shared item, B. This provides an opportunity for learners to connect A–C in memory.
• Being encouraged to integrate ABC during learning boosted performance on an explicit test of A–C connections (children and adults) and protected from forgetting (children).
• Children and adults differed in when implicit A–C connections were formed—occurring primarily when told to separately encode BC (children) versus integrate (adults), respectively.
• Adults used implicit A–C connections to facilitate explicit judgments, while children did not. Our results suggest developmental differences in the learning conditions promoting memory-to-memory connections.