Understanding Jung: recent biographies and scholarship

The tendency to associate Jung with Freud has undergone a change and both are increasingly perceived as founders of depth psychological schools whose exact relationship is unclear. The separation of the two was largely due to Jung's rejection by the psychoanalytic community because of his perceived spiritual inclinations. Recent scholarship has emphasized these spiritual inclinations in both a positive and negative way and brought to light Jung's non-Freudian sources, while other Jungian practitioners are seeking a closer association with psychoanalysis. This conflicting development is related to tendencies in Jung himself that are evident in his own life and in research conducted into the writing and publication of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Though the status of the latter as Jung's autobiography has been called into question there remains the necessity to explain the myth of Jung's life enshrined there and the impact this has had on a public looking for meaning in a time of considerable change.     

Positioning Asian Americans in social cognition

Asian Americans are increasingly positioned at the center of current events, yet extant theories and approaches in social psychology (and social cognition specifically) may not adequately capture how Asian Americans are perceived and treated in the current American racial landscape. We propose three directions to propel social cognition research on Asian Americans. First, research emphasizes Asian Americans' perceived high status (e.g., the model minority stereotype) while often overlooking their perceived foreignness. The two-dimensional Racial Position Model elucidates the consequences of being stereotyped as perpetual foreigners for Asian Americans and their relations with other racial and ethnic groups. Second, research and laypeople alike consider East Asian Americans to be the prototypical Asian Americans, thereby excluding subgroups such as South and Southeast Asian Americans. Considering the ethnic diversity of Asian Americans challenges and extends existing social psychological theories. Lastly, much of psychological research approaches race in isolation without considering its intersection with other identities such as gender. An intersectional framework offers insights into how Asian Americans' gender and race overlap in our social cognition. More nuanced research on Asian Americans is needed to fully understand race relations in the 21st century and we hope these three interconnected directions can guide researchers who are interested in the topic.     

An anchoring theory of lightness perception

A review of the field of lightness perception from Helmholtz to the present shows the most adequate theories of lightness perception to be the intrinsic image models. Nevertheless, these models fail on 2 important counts: They contain no anchoring rule, and they fail to account for the pattern of errors in surface lightness. Recent work on both the anchoring problem and the problem of errors has produced a new model of lightness perception, one that is qualitatively different from the intrinsic image models. The new model, which is based on a combination of local and global anchoring of lightness values, appears to provide an unprecedented account of a wide range of empirical results, both classical and recent, especially the pattern of errors. It provides a unified account of both illumination-dependent failures of constancy and background-dependent failures of constancy, resolving a number of long-standing puzzles.     

Hypnotic overdoses and fairy tales: Snow White and the uses of disenchantment

In most Western countries, more than two-thirds of attempted suicides are among women suffering from drug overdoses. Explanations for women's use of less violent methods include the wish to avoid disfiguration, the influence of upbringing, and sex differences in cultural expectations. Many women under stress have a weaker intention to die, and their suicidal act is generally less a deliberate search for death than a desire to live another life, indicating a need to escape from a difficult situation. In this respect, the suicidal woman's desire to sleep through an overdose coma is very significant. We call to mind the strength of the kinship between death and sleep. Reinterpreting the fairy tale "Snow White" and making a parallel with some contemporary clinical cases, we show that the illusion of a nondefinitive death is often assimilated, in Western culture, with a step toward rebirth.     

Right hemisphere language processing: Lateral difference with imageable and nonimageable ambiguous words

Influence of imageability on hemispheric processing difference is studied in a lexical decision task with semantic priming. Homographs and ambiguous words were biased according to the prime toward their low or high imageable meanings and unilaterally presented in the visual field. A right visual field (RVF) superiority was observed; it was nonsignificant for the high imageable (HI) meaning but significant for the low imageable (LI) meaning of the ambiguous words. Thus the results seem to favor a bilateral hemispheric representation of HI words and a unilateral left representation of LI words. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed to the various models of ambiguous word access processing.     

Total surface of temporoparietal intrasylvian cortex: diverging left-right asymmetries

Measurements of the total convoluted surface area of cortex buried in the temporoparietal transition of the Sylvian fissure were performed using "three-dimensional" magnetic resonance morphometry in 10 randomly selected human cadaver brains. The measurements comprised the planum temporale, which covers the superior temporal gyrus posterior to Heschl's first transverse gyrus, and the caudally adjacent walls of the descending and ascending rami of the Sylvian fissure. Also, the total convoluted surface of the planum temporale was compared with its superficially exposed surface as determined by photographical planimetry after brain section, so that the index of cortical folding of the planum temporale could be estimated. The following results were obtained: Cortical folding of the planum temporale did not differ significantly between left and right hemispheres (p greater than .6). The total and the superficially exposed surface of the planum temporale showed significant leftward asymmetry (p less than or equal to .0078). In contrast, the total surface of cortex buried in the caudal segments of the Sylvian fissure posterior to the planum exhibited significant rightward asymmetry (p less than or equal to .016). The combined cortical surface area buried in the whole posterior Sylvian fissure caudal to the first transverse gyrus did not show significant left-right asymmetry (p greater than 0.3). The data suggest divergent lateral asymmetries in the posterior intrasylvian region with excesses of superior temporal cortex in left hemispheres and of supramarginal cortex in right hemispheres.     

Sexual experience and recall of sexual vs. nonsexual information

The effects of both sex guilt and sexual experience on the ability to remember sexual and nonsexual information were examined Male and female subjects were asked to read and then recall facts from vignettes that concerned sexual and nonsexual dilemmas As expected, the sexually inexperienced subjects made more mistakes than did the experienced subjects when recalling sexual information There were no differences between the groups in recall of nonsexual information, and there were no differences associated with the sex guilt variable In addition, one subgroup of the sample was singled out as being particularly interesting from an applied perspective Previous research has identified high-guilt, high-experience women as being an at-risk group for unwanted pregnancy In fact, these women did have difficulty in remembering the sexual information Moreover, there was a clear bias in their recall pattern toward remembering information in favor of being sexually active Results are presented in terms of the relationship between sexual experience and sexual schemata, and between sex guilt and emotionality