Beyond Pregenital Determination of Femininity and Masculinity (Discussion)1

Abstract

The authors investigate the relationship between the concept of functional pleasure as defined by Fenichel and a number of other psychoanalytic concepts. Considered in the light of this concept, the pleasure–unpleasure principle as defined by Freud is to be distinguished in terms of a pleasure principle and a principle of avoiding unpleasure. These are then reunified in the sense of an unpleasure–functional pleasure principle, to which the substitutive formations of the repressed are subjected. It is argued that, in the realization of substitutive formations of repressed genital–sexual instinctual wishes, the intentional erogenous pleasure changes into a functional pleasure, in which a successful defence finds its experiential expression.     

Characterization of lower-limbs inter-segment coordination during the take-off extension in ski jumping

Take-off, the most important phase in ski jumping, has been primarily studied in terms of spatio-temporal parameters; little is known about its motor control aspects. This study aims to assess the inter-segment coordination of the shank-thigh and thigh-sacrum pairs using the continuous relative phase (CRP). In total 87 jumps were recorded from 33 athletes with an inertial sensor-based system. The CRP curves indicated that the thighs lead the shanks during the first part of take-off extension and that the shanks rotated faster at the take-off extension end. The thighs and sacrum first rotated synchronously, with the sacrum then taking lead, with finally the thighs rotating faster. Five characteristic features were extracted from the CRP and their relationship with jump length was tested. Three features of the shank-thigh pair and one of the thigh-sacrum pair reported a significant association with jump length. It was observed that athletes who achieved longer jumps had their thighs leading their shanks during a longer time, with these athletes also having a more symmetric movement between thighs and sacrum. This study shows that inter-segment coordination during the take-off extension is related to performance and further studies are necessary to contrast its importance with other ski jumping aspects.     

Health performance of individuals within the Campbell paradigm

In this paper, we developed a comprehensive health performance measure that formally links individual health attitudes with the likelihood of engaging in a wide variety of health‐related behaviours from various domains such as sustenance, hygiene, and physical exercise. Within what Kaiser, Byrka, and Hartig (2010) call the Campbell paradigm, we equated general health attitude with what a person does to retain or promote his or her health. Thus, health behaviours, on one hand, were expected to form a homogeneous, transitively ordered class of behaviours. On the other hand, the very behavioural class was in turn thought to be the basis from which an individual's health attitude could be directly assessed. A sample of 391 adults provided us with survey data containing different sets of health behaviours as well as variables and personality measures that had been corroborated as health‐behaviour relevant in previous research. We found that self‐reports of 50 behaviours and expressions of appreciation for 20 of these behaviours from various domains formed a transitively ordered class of activities. In contrast to the conventional view in health psychology, in which attitudes are regarded as a psychological cause behind individual behaviour, and in contrast to conventional findings in health psychology, where behaviours appear to fall into numerous sets of more or less distinct domains of health‐enhancing activities (e.g., exercising or avoiding risks), our findings speak of the psychological and formal unity of health behaviour. Inevitably, attitude measures grounded in the Campbell paradigm gauge individual attitudes, and just as much, they measure the health performance of individuals.     

Toward a Unified Framework for the Study of Between-Person and Within-Person Structures: Building a Bridge Between Two Research Paradigms

The vast majority of empirical research in the behavioral sciences is based on the analysis of between-person variation. In contrast, much of applied psychology is concerned with the analysis of variation within individuals. Furthermore, the mechanisms specified by psychological theories generally operate within, rather than across, individuals. This disconnect between research practice, applied demands, and psychological theories constitutes a major threat to the conceptual integrity of the field. Following groundbreaking earlier work, we propose a conceptual framework that distinguishes within-person (WP) and between-person (BP) sources of variation in psychological constructs. By simultaneously considering both sources of variation, it is shown how to identify possible reasons for nonequivalence of BP and WP structures as well as establishing areas of convergence. For this purpose, we first introduce the concept of conditional equivalence as a way to study partial structural equivalence of BP and WP structures in the presence of unconditional nonequivalence. Second, we demonstrate the construction of likelihood planes to explore the causes of structural nonequivalence. Third, we examine 4 common causes for unconditional nonequivalence—autoregression, subgroup differences, linear trends, and cyclic trends—and demonstrate how to account for them. Fourth, we provide an empirical example on BP and WP differences in attentiveness.     

Revisiting the relation between contingency awareness and attention: Evaluative conditioning relies on a contingency focus

Although evaluative conditioning has occasionally been demonstrated in the absence of contingency awareness, many recent studies imply that its acquisition depends on the availability of attentional resources during conditioning. In previous experiments attention has typically been manipulated in a general way rather than looking at the particular focus of attention. The present study investigated the role of a focus on the CS–US contingency. Two separate distraction tasks were designed that either diverted attention from the stimuli or directed it to the stimuli while drawing attention away from the contingency between the stimuli. Both types of distraction were shown to eliminate evaluative conditioning. Significant evaluative conditioning was observed in a third group of participants who were required to attend the contingencies. A mediation analysis showed that the observed discrepancy in evaluative conditioning effects between groups was mediated by contingency awareness. The results imply that attention in terms of a stimulus focus is not sufficient for evaluative conditioning to occur. Rather, attention to the contingencies between stimuli appears to be crucial in evaluative conditioning, because it is supposed to foster the acquisition of contingency awareness.     

Top-down versus bottom-up: when instructions overcome automatic retrieval

Research on human action has extensively covered controlled and automatic processes in the transformation of stimulus information into motor action, and how conflict between both types of processes is solved. However, the question of how automatic stimulus–response (S–R) translation per se depends on top-down control states remains unanswered. The present study addressed this issue by manipulating top-down control state (instructed S–R mapping) and automatic bottom-up processing (retrieval of S–R memory traces) independently from each other. Using a color/shape task-switching paradigm, we compared cross-talk triggered by distractor stimuli, for which the instructed S–R mapping and the S–R associations compiled at the beginning of the experiment matched, with the cross-talk triggered by distractor stimuli, for which (re-)instructed mapping and compiled S–R associations did not match. We show that the latter distractors do not yield any cross-talk in RTs and even reversed cross-talk in error rates, demonstrating that automatic S–R retrieval is modulated by top-down control states.     

Semantic generalization of stimulus-task bindings

People find it difficult to switch between two tasks, even if they have time to prepare—the so-called residual task shift cost. We studied a switch of tasks from picture naming to word reading, using picture-word Stroop stimuli. Consistent with previous findings, we demonstrate that a large part of the observed task shift cost was due to priming from prior stimulus-response episodes, in which the current task stimulus was encountered in a competing task. We further show that this task-priming effect generalizes to semantically related stimuli, which opens the possibility that most or all of these residual shift costs reflect some sort of generalized proactive interference from previous stimulus-task episodes.     

Effects of syllable-frequency in lexical decision and naming: an eye-movement study

In three experiments we explored task-specific effects of syllable-frequency, following Perea and Carreiras' (1998) findings of a facilitative effect during naming and an inhibitory effect during lexical decision. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of first syllable-frequency on articulation duration suggested a process-specific effect during naming: a facilitative effect on construction of phonological output, but an inhibitory effect on lexical access. Eye-movement recording was used in Experiment 2 to disentangle these two processes. An inhibitory effect on eye-movement parameters during both lexical decision and naming supported the assumption that higher first syllable-frequency inhibits lexical access. Implications of a general inhibitory effect of syllable-frequency for computational models of word recognition, specifically for the multiple-trace memory (MTM) model of polysyllabic word naming (Ans, Carbonnel, & Valdois, 1998), are discussed.     

Differential involvement of NMDA and AMPA receptors within the nucleus accumbens in consolidation of information necessary for place navigation and guidance strategy of mice

Recent evidence now points to a role of glutamate transmission within the nucleus accumbens (Nacc) in spatial learning and memory. Unfortunately, the role of the distinct classes of glutamate receptors within this structure in mediating the different steps of the memorization process is not clear. The aim of this study therefore was to further investigate this issue, trying to assess the involvement of the two classes of glutamate receptors within the Nacc in consolidation of spatial information using an associative spatial task, the water maze. For this purpose, focal injections of the NMDA antagonist, AP-5, and of the AMPA antagonist, DNQX, have been performed immediately after the training phase, and mice have been tested for retention 24 h later. Two different versions of the water-maze task have been used: In the place version, animals could learn the position of the platform using visual distal cues, and in the cue version, the location of the platform was indicated by a single proximal cue. The results demonstrated that posttraining NMDA receptor blockade affects mice response in the place but not in the cue water-maze task. On the contrary, AMPA receptor blockade induced no effect in either version of the task. These data confirm a functional dissociation between glutamate receptors located in the Nacc in modulating spatial memory consolidation and indicate that they are specifically involved in consolidation of information necessary to acquire a place but not to a guidance strategy.