Linking work: from violence to subjectivization

For certain adolescents, the eruption of puberty sometimes carries the risk of a break in their psychic life: a break in their impression of continuity in existence, in the investment of their inner world, and in their relation to external objects. When these adolescents are unable to tolerate the discontinuity that accompanies the experience of adolescence, this can lead to pathologies of compulsive breaking away, depression, violence, or psychosis. Linking work, on the contrary, enables adolescence to become a transforming process on the psychic level and contributes to the dynamic character of the therapeutic process.     

Experimental philosophers,conceptual analysts,and the rest of us

Abstract

Theories of personal identity purport to specify truth conditions for sentences of the form ‘x‐at‐t_i is the same person as y‐at‐t_j. Most philosophers nowadays agree that such truth conditions are to be stated in terms of psychological continuity. However; opinions vary as to how the notion of psychological continuity is to be understood. In a recent contribution to this journal, Slors offers an account in which psychological continuity is spelled out in terms of narrative connectedness between mental states.The present paper argues that Slors’ theory either is no theory of personal identity at all or is too weak.Towards the end of the paper, it is indicated how the problem uncovered for Slors’ theory may be avoided.     

Early- and late-onset blindness both curb audiotactile integration on the parchment-skin illusion

It has been shown that congenital blindness can lead to anomalies in the integration of auditory and tactile information, at least under certain conditions. In the present study, we used the parchment-skin illusion, a robust illustration of sound-biased perception of touch based on changes in frequency, to investigate the specificities of audiotactile interactions in early- and late-onset blind individuals. Blind individuals in both groups did not experience any illusory change in tactile perception when the frequency of the auditory signal was modified, whereas sighted individuals consistently experienced the illusion. This demonstration that blind individuals had reduced susceptibility to an auditory-tactile illusion suggests either that vision is necessary for the establishment of audiotactile interactions or that auditory and tactile information can be processed more independently in blind individuals than in sighted individuals. In addition, the results obtained in late-onset blind participants suggest that visual input may play a role in the maintenance of audiotactile integration.     

Religious Dissociation and Economic Appraisal in Brazil

Research on the association between religion and health often neglects to provide an explicit theoretical mechanism of influence between faith and well-being. This research posits that dissociative behaviors, such as glossolalia, may provide a biological pathway that influences both physiological and psychological health. This paper argues that religious dissociation acts as a moderator between economic stressors and psychobiological appraisal. Brazil, with its economic inequality and preponderance of religious dissociative rituals, provides an ideal context to examine religious dissociation as a moderator of stress. Utilizing data from a cross section of Brazilian faiths, this paper examines: (1) Whether individuals with low socioeconomic status preferentially participate and experience religious dissociative states and (2) whether dissociative states are correlated with greater psychological appraisal of status.     

Facilitation effect of observed motor deviants in a cooperative motor task: Evidence for direct perception of social intention in action

Spatiotemporal parameters of voluntary motor action may help optimize human social interactions. Yet it is unknown whether individuals performing a cooperative task spontaneously perceive subtly informative social cues emerging through voluntary actions. In the present study, an auditory cue was provided through headphones to an actor and a partner who faced each other. Depending on the pitch of the auditory cue, either the actor or the partner were required to grasp and move a wooden dowel under time constraints from a central to a lateral position. Before this main action, the actor performed a preparatory action under no time constraint, consisting in placing the wooden dowel on the central location when receiving either a neutral (“prêt”–ready) or an informative auditory cue relative to who will be asked to perform the main action (the actor: “moi”–me, or the partner: “lui”–him). Although the task focused on the main action, analysis of motor performances revealed that actors performed the preparatory action with longer reaction times and higher trajectories when informed that the partner would be performing the main action. In this same condition, partners executed the main actions with shorter reaction times and lower velocities, despite having received no previous informative cues. These results demonstrate that the mere observation of socially driven motor actions spontaneously influences the low-level kinematics of voluntary motor actions performed by the observer during a cooperative motor task. These findings indicate that social intention can be anticipated from the mere observation of action patterns.     

Object manipulability affects children’s and adults’ conceptual processing

Research on kinds of concepts indicates that children use perceptual and functional information differently to form natural and artifact concepts. Beyond object domain, object manipulability appears to be a decisive factor in adult conceptual processing. Thus, the effect of object manipulability on conceptual processing was tested in 5- and 7-year-olds and adults using a picture matching task. Reaction times for identifying conceptual relations on the basis of perceptual similarity (e.g., jacket-coat) and contextual/functional information (e.g., jacket-hanger) were analyzed according to object manipulability and domain. Both children and adults were faster to identify contextual/functional relations for manipulable than for nonmanipulable objects. Conversely, they were faster to identify perceptual similarity relations for nonmanipulable than for manipulable objects, particularly for natural concepts. Results reveal an early distinction between concepts of manipulable and nonmanipulable objects. Implications for further research on concept formation and for embodied views of concepts are discussed.     

Overproduction timing errors in expert dancers

The authors investigated how expert dancers achieve accurate timing under various conditions. They designed the conditions to interfere with the dancers' attention to time and to test the explanation of the interference effect provided in the attentional model of time processing. Participants were 17 expert contemporary dancers who performed a freely chosen duration while walking and executing a bilateral cyclic arm movement over a given distance. The dancers reproduced that duration in different situations of interference. The process yielded temporal overproductions, validating the attentional model and extending its application to expert populations engaged in complex motor situations. The finding that the greatest overproduction occurred in the transfer-with-improvisation condition suggests that improvisation within a time deadline requires specific training.