Dispositional aspects of body focus and idiopathic environmental intolerance attributed to electromagnetic fields (IEI‐EMF)

Body focus is often considered an undesirable characteristic from medical point of view as it amplifies symptoms and leads to higher levels of health anxiety. However, it is connected to mindfulness, well‐being and the sense of self in psychotherapy. The current study aimed to investigate the contribution of various body focus related constructs to acute and chronic generation and maintenance of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). Thirty‐six individuals with idiopathic environmental intolerance to electromagnetic fields (IEI‐EMF) and 36 controls were asked to complete questionnaires assessing negative affect, worries about harmful effects of EMFs, health anxiety (HA), body awareness, and somatosensory amplification (SSA), and to report experienced symptoms evoked by a sham magnetic field. Body awareness, HA, SSA, and EMF‐related worries showed good discriminative power between individuals with IEI‐EMF and controls. Considering all variables together, SSA was the best predictor of IEI‐EMF. In the believed presence of a MF, people with IEI‐EMF showed higher levels of anxiety and reported more symptoms than controls. In the IEI‐EMF group, actual symptom reports were predicted by HA and state anxiety, while a reverse relationship between symptom reports and HA was found in the control group. Our findings show that SSA is a particularly important contributor to IEI‐EMF, probably because it is the most comprehensive factor in its aetiology. IEI‐EMF is associated with both a fear‐related monitoring of bodily symptoms and a non‐evaluative body focus. The identification of dispositional body focus may be relevant for the management of MUS.     

Are modern health worries associated with somatosensory amplification,environmental attribution style,and commitment to complementary and alternative medicine?

Relationship among modern health worries (MHWs), somatosensory amplification (SSA), and attributional styles was investigated in a cross-sectional questionnaire study. A total of 99 university students, 104 patients visiting their General Practitioners, and 102 future alternative therapists completed questionnaires assessing MHWs, SSA, negative affect (NA), and psychological, somatic and normalizing (environmental) attribution styles. Significant correlation between SSA and MHWs was found in all three samples. MHWs and psychological attribution style were significantly associated with Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)-orientation in the regression equation even after controlling for SSA, NA, and sociodemographic variables. MHWs were independent from any attribution styles in the student and patient samples, while significant correlations with all three styles were found in the CAM group. Previously described association between MHWs and SSA was replicated in three different samples. The connection between MHWs and CAM preference seems to be independent from SSA, NA or any particular attribution style.     

Forced confabulation affects memory sensitivity as well as response bias

A signal detection analysis assessed the extent to which forced confabulation results from a change in memory sensitivity (d _a ), as well as response criterion (β). After viewing a crime video, participants answered 14 answerable and 6 unanswerable questions. Those in the voluntary guess condition had a “don’t know” response option; those in the forced guess condition did not. One week later, the same questions were answered using a recognition memory test that included each participant’s initial responses. As was predicted, on both answerable and unanswerable questions, participants in the forced guess condition had significantly lower response criteria than did those who voluntarily guessed. Furthermore, on both answerable and unanswerable questions, d _a scores were also significantly lower in the forced than in the voluntary guess condition. Thus, the forced confabulation effect is a real memory effect above and beyond the effects of response bias; forcing eyewitnesses to guess or speculate can actually change their memory.     

The Ferenczi cult: its historical and political roots

I examine how Sándor Ferenczi has survived in the cultural memory of psychoanalysis, and why myths and legends have been created around his life and work. It seems that he could not escape the fate of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, most notably, that of Freud and Jung: their life and work have become an object of cultic respect for the followers, diabolic figures for the enemies. Quasi-religious cultivation of the “great man” is an often observable phenomenon in literature, politics, history and in science, and it has several political and ideological functions. These functions may help to increase the inner cohesion and the group identity of the cultic community, to defend the group against external threats. Psychoanalysis has always been vulnerable to myth formation; first, for obvious sociological reasons, and, secondly, for reasons originating in the nature of therapy. The cultic functions can be realized in several ways, such as, for example, the ritualization of the transmission of knowledge, and the “biography as passion” that is, attempts to create a biographical narrative in which all life history moments crystallize around the great man's central theme. Most of the biographies on the life of great psychoanalysts are of this kind – and Ferenczi is no exception. A historiography of psychoanalysis must follow the path of modern historiography in general, which attempts at deconstructing both myths and counter-myths about persons, events and processes, in political, as well as in cultural and intellectual history. By examining the structure of myth formation about psychoanalysts we can learn a lot about how ideas are operating in changing social contexts.     

Weakness and compulsion: the essential difference

This paper aims to defend the common-sense view that we exempt compulsive agents from responsibility to the extent that they are unable to choose what they do and hence they cannot control their actions by their choices. This view has been challenged in a seminal paper by Gary Watson, who claimed that akratic agents lack control in the same sense but they are responsible nonetheless. In the first part of the paper, I critically examine the arguments Watson advances for this claim first in his original paper and then in some more recent works. I conclude that his account is based on the widely held assumption that both compulsive behavior and weakness of the will must be understood as a direct result of some inner motivational conflict. In the second part, I argue for an alternative understanding of the difference between weakness and compulsion. My claim is that compulsion is a cognitive rather than a motivational deficiency, since the compulsive, unlike the weak-willed, does not desire to perform the action which she actually performs. Furthermore, I argue that compulsive agents cannot control their actions by their choices because they have a distorted view of their own actional abilities. In the final part of the paper, I discuss a consequence of this account to the conditional analysis of free will as a condition of responsibility.     

Stimulus dependence and cross-modal interference in sequence learning

A central issue in sequence learning is whether learning operates on stimulus-independent abstract elements, or whether surface features are integrated, resulting in stimulus-dependent learning. Using the serial reaction-time (SRT) task, we test whether a previously presented sequence is transferrable from one domain to another. Contrary to previous artificial grammar learning studies, there is mapping between pre- and posttransfer stimuli, but contrary to previous SRT studies mapping is not obvious. In the pre-transfer training phase, participants face a dot-counting task in which the location of the dots follows a predefined sequence. In the test phase, participants face an auditory SRT task in which the spatial organization of the response locations is either the same as spatial sequence in the training phase, or not. Sequence learning is compared to two control conditions: one with a non-sequential random-dot counting in the training phase, and one with no training phase. Results show that sequential training proactively interferes with later sequence learning, regardless of whether the sequence is the same or different in the two phases. Results argue for the existence of a general sequence processor with limited capacity, and that sequence structures and sequenced elements are integrated into a single sequential representation.     

Seasonality of suicide in eastern Europe: a comment on "Evidence for lack of change in seasonality of & suicide from Timis County,Romania"

The seasonality of suicide in Hungary declined from the 1980s to the 1990s, contradicting the recent conclusion of Voracek, et al.     

Memory in 3‐month‐old infants benefits from a short nap

A broad range of studies demonstrate that sleep has a facilitating role in memory consolidation (see Rasch & Born, 2013 ). Whether sleep‐dependent memory consolidation is also apparent in infants in their first few months of life has not been investigated. We demonstrate that 3‐month‐old infants only remember a cartoon face approximately 1.5–2 hours after its first presentation when a period of sleep followed learning. Furthermore, habituation time, that is, the time to become bored with a stimulus shown repetitively, correlated negatively with the density of infant sleep spindles, implying that processing speed is linked to specific electroencephalographic components of sleep. Our findings show that without a short period of sleep infants have problems remembering a newly seen face, that sleep enhances memory consolidation from a very early age, highlighting the importance of napping in infancy, and that infant sleep spindles may be associated with some aspects of cognitive ability.     

Perceptual effect on motor learning in the serial reaction-time task

Although the Serial Reaction-Time Task has been an effective tool in studying procedural learning, there is still a debate as to whether learning in the task is effector-based, stimulus-based, or response-based. In this article, the authors contribute to this debate by contrasting response- and stimulus-based learning by manipulating them selectively and simultaneously. Results show that (a) participants learned response sequences in the absence of stimulus-specific perceptual sequence information but (b) not stimulus sequences without corresponding response information. In a third condition, response sequence and stimulus frequency information were in conflict, and each effect decreased learning in the other domain. Overall, our findings show that learning in these tasks is primarily motor-based, but it is also constrained by relatively salient perceptual information. Together with earlier findings in the literature, the findings also suggest a task and stimulus-arrangement-specific interaction between motor and perceptual learning, where relevance and salience of the specific information plays a crucial role.