Differentiation Processes for Social Stimuli with Different Degrees of Category Representativeness

The influence of the categorization process is investigated in the context of conceptions of categories as fuzzy sets, represented by prototypes. The experiment specifically considers two social categories corresponding to Italian regional groups: for each of these, stimuli were constructed which represented the respective categories in different degrees. We hypothesized that the accentuation of the degree in which individual exemplars represent a category, obtained by the addition of an attribute of the category, produces the effect of accentuating inter-category differences and intra-category similarities. Our results confirm the hypothesis regarding differentiation, but not that regarding assimilation. The effect of differentiation is strong at the category borders, i.e. for the less representative exemplars. A final issue considered is the theoretical problem of distinguishing, within the prototype of a category, between stereotypical attributes and those which permit categorial identification of individual cases.     

Contexts and experimentalism in the psychology of Gabriele Buccola (1875-1885)

Gabriele Buccola, since his untimely death, often has been mentioned as the first Italian psychologist who developed a strict program of laboratory research. Buccola, a Sicilian of Albanian ancestry, is a "case" in the history of Italian psychology. A self-taught positivist, he established a relation with the major representatives of the European positivism. Kraepelin mentions him as one of the precursors of his project of applying experimental psychology to psychopathology. Buccola actually carried out research on the psychological, chemical-biological, and psychopathological "modifiers" of reaction times, following an experimental program dealing mainly with the differential study both of basic and superior psychological processes, with mental hygiene ends. Historians of psychology agree in considering Buccola the first Italian laboratory psychologist to plan a program of research that was close to European psychological experimentalism.The present article, starting from an outline of Buccola's role in the rising Italian scientific psychology, recontextualizes his experimentalism in an international sphere. This operation, which is carried out through a careful survey of Buccola's entire production-both theoretical and more properly scientific-is based on the search of the Darwinian, Spencerian, and Haeckelian evolutionist themes emerging from Buccola's program of research-a program that was influenced by the variegated European experimental panorama and characterized by the vision of science as a knowledge capable of transforming the nature of man and of society.     

A comparison of dyadic interactions and coping with still‐face in healthy pre‐term and full‐term infants

Pre‐term birth has a significant impact on infants' social and emotional competence, however, little is known about regulatory processes in pre‐term mother‐infant dyads during normal or stressful interactions. The primary goals of this study were to investigate the differences in infant and caregiver interactive behaviour and dyadic coordination of clinically healthy pre‐term compared to full‐term infant‐mother dyads and to examine pre‐term infants' capacity for coping with stress using the face‐to‐face still‐face paradigm (FFSF). Fifty mother‐infant dyads, including 25 pre‐term infants and 25 full‐term infants were videotaped during the FFSF. All infants were 6–9 months of age (corrected for gestational age in the pre‐term group). Infant and maternal socio‐emotional expressivity and self‐regulatory behaviours were coded and measures of dyadic coordination (Matching, Reparation Rate, and Synchrony) were calculated. There were no significant differences in infant and caregiver socio‐emotional behaviours between the two groups and both groups demonstrated the still‐face (SF) effect and the reunion effect. There was a difference in self‐regulatory behaviour. Pre‐term infants were more likely than full‐term infants to use distancing (e.g., by turning away, twisting, or arching) from their mothers during the FFSF. Additionally, during the Reunion episode of the FFSF pre‐term infants showed more social monitoring compared to full‐term infants. Regardless of the birth status, the dyads showed less coordination and a slower rate of reparation during the Reunion episode than during the Play episode. The higher proportion of distancing in the pre‐term group and the increase in social monitoring suggest that even in normal interactions pre‐term infants may experience a higher level of stress and have less capacity for self‐regulation compared to the full‐terms and that pre‐term infants appear to use a compensatory strategy of increased social monitoring to cope with the stress of renegotiating the interaction during Reunion. The findings suggest that pre‐term infants have different regulatory and interactive capacities than full‐term infants.     

Conscious and unconscious processing of facial expressions: Evidence from two split‐brain patients

We investigated how the brain's hemispheres process explicit and implicit facial expressions in two ‘split‐brain’ patients (one with a complete and one with a partial anterior resection). Photographs of faces expressing positive, negative or neutral emotions were shown either centrally or bilaterally. The task consisted in judging the friendliness of each person in the photographs. Half of the photograph stimuli were ‘hybrid faces’, that is an amalgamation of filtered images which contained emotional information only in the low range of spatial frequency, blended to a neutral expression of the same individual in the rest of the spatial frequencies. The other half of the images contained unfiltered faces. With the hybrid faces the patients and a matched control group were more influenced in their social judgements by the emotional expression of the face shown in the left visual field (LVF). When the expressions were shown explicitly, that is without filtering, the control group and the partially callosotomized patient based their judgement on the face shown in the LVF, whereas the complete split‐brain patient based his ratings mainly on the face presented in the right visual field. We conclude that the processing of implicit emotions does not require the integrity of callosal fibres and can take place within subcortical routes lateralized in the right hemisphere.     

Egocentric metric representations in peripersonal space: A bridge between motor resources and spatial memory

Research on visuospatial memory has shown that egocentric (subject-to-object) and allocentric (object-to-object) reference frames are connected to categorical (non-metric) and coordinate (metric) spatial relations, and that motor resources are recruited especially when processing spatial information in peripersonal (within arm reaching) than extrapersonal (outside arm reaching) space. In order to perform our daily-life activities, these spatial components cooperate along a continuum from recognition-related (e.g., recognizing stimuli) to action-related (e.g., reaching stimuli) purposes. Therefore, it is possible that some types of spatial representations rely more on action/motor processes than others. Here, we explored the role of motor resources in the combinations of these visuospatial memory components. A motor interference paradigm was adopted in which participants had their arms bent behind their back or free during a spatial memory task. This task consisted in memorizing triads of objects and then verbally judging what was the object: (1) closest to/farthest from the participant (egocentric coordinate); (2) to the right/left of the participant (egocentric categorical); (3) closest to/farthest from a target object (allocentric coordinate); and (4) on the right/left of a target object (allocentric categorical). The triads appeared in participants' peripersonal (Experiment 1) or extrapersonal (Experiment 2) space. The results of Experiment 1 showed that motor interference selectively damaged egocentric-coordinate judgements but not the other spatial combinations. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the interference effect disappeared when the objects were in the extrapersonal space. A third follow-up study using a within-subject design confirmed the overall pattern of results. Our findings provide evidence that motor resources play an important role in the combination of coordinate spatial relations and egocentric representations in peripersonal space.     

the relationship between career and couple burnout: Implications for career and couple counseling

The importance of work and love for healthy functioning is well documented. This article addresses the relationship between them. The authors argue, based on a psychoanalytic‐existential perspective, that people's choice of work and love is related to similar unresolved childhood issues and that career burnout and couple burnout are related to failure in the existential quest aimed at solving these issues. The existence of a relationship between career burnout and couple burnout is demonstrated by several clinical examples and the results of an exploratory cross‐cultural study involving Israeli, Spanish, Portuguese, American, British, and Finnish students. Implications for career and couple counseling are drawn.     

On the Algebraizability of Annotated Logics

Annotated logics were introduced by V.S. Subrahmanian as logical foundations for computer programming. One of the difficulties of these systems from the logical point of view is that they are not structural, i.e., their consequence relations are not closed under substitutions. In this paper we give systems of annotated logics that are equivalent to those of Subrahmanian in the sense that everything provable in one type of system has a translation that is provable in the other. Moreover these new systems are structural. We prove that these systems are weakly congruential, namely, they have an infinite system of congruence 1-formulas. Moreover, we prove that an annotated logic is algebraizable (i.e., it has a finite system of congruence formulas,) if and only if the lattice of annotation constants is finite.