��ber das Wesen der psychotischen Wahnbildung

The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of the delusional construction so as to render it susceptible to a therapeutic approach. Particular attention is devoted to the nature and structure of delusion and its relation to the healthy part of the personality. In the author??s view, delusion is a psychopathological construction that makes it impossible for the patient to understand his own experience. The delusional construction is similar to a dream-like sensorial production but, unlike a real dream, it remains in the waking memory and creates characters which live independently of the ??dreamer??s?? awareness. It is a dream that never ends. The delusional imagination is so deeply rooted in the patient??s mental functioning that, even after systematic analysis, the delusional world, which had seemed to disappear, re-emerges under new configurations. This paper particularly deals with the difficulty in working through the psychotic episode and in ??deconstructing?? the delusional experience because of the terror connected with it.     

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.     

‘Reflections on Little Rock’ and Reflective Judgment

Reflections on Little Rock (RLR) is one of Hannah Arendt’s most controversial writings. Read from the perspective of the political philosopher, it appears even more contentious than her famous remarks in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the last two decades, a number of critical contributions have been published addressing this essay, highlighting how it casts serious doubts on the correctness of Arendt’s dealing with the racial question and, more generally, on the tenability of central elements of her political thought – e.g., her distinction between the political and the social. However, only occasional – and, as I will try to demonstrate, quite imprecise – analyses of the implications of RLR for an understanding of Arendt’s view of judgment have been produced. The aim of the present article is to reread what both Arendt’s position on judgment and its main contemporary reformulation, advanced by Linda Zerilli, imply for the making of political choices in pluralistic societies. Special attention will be also paid to the relation between the particular and the universal in Arendtian thought. In the first section I will reconstruct the main (factual and argumentative) weaknesses of RLR, while in the second a detailed assessment of the criticisms relating RLR and Arendt’s view of judgment will be provided. Finally, in the last section I will discuss at length Zerilli’s conception of feminist judgment.     

The perirhinal cortex and long-term familiarity memory.

To analyse the functions of the perirhinal cortex, the activity of single neurons in the perirhinal cortex was recorded while macaques performed a delayed matching-to-sample task with up to three intervening stimuli. Some neurons had activity related to working memory, in that they responded more to the sample than to the match image within a trial, as shown previously. However, when a novel set of stimuli was introduced, the neuronal responses were on average only 47% of the magnitude of the responses to the set of very familiar stimuli. Moreover, it was shown in three monkeys that the responses of the perirhinal cortex neurons gradually increased over hundreds of presentations (mean = 400 over 7-13 days) of the new set of (initially novel) stimuli to become as large as those to the already familiar stimuli. Thus perirhinal cortex neurons represent the very long-term familiarity of visual stimuli. Part of the impairment in temporal lobe amnesia may be related to the difficulty of building representations of the degree of familiarity of stimuli. A neural network model of how the perirhinal cortex could implement long-term familiarity memory is proposed using Hebbian associative learning.     

When There Is Not Enough to Go Around: How Black People’s Perceptions of Competition for Black Mates Affects Forced Black Identity Ascriptions of Black/White Multiracial People

Using a resource scarcity framework, the current study investigated whether Black people’s perceptions of competition for Black mates related to ascribing a Black identity onto Black/White Multiracial people. Participants took online questionnaires that assessed competition for Black mates, likelihood of forcing a Black identity onto a self-identified Black/White Multiracial person, essentialism, and contact with Multiracial people. Results indicated that increased perceptions of competition for Black mates was related to increased forced Black identity onto self-identified Black/White Multiracial people, above and beyond levels of essentialism and contact. This relationship was stronger for sexual minorities. The current research supports the proposition that scarcity of resources (i.e., mates) affects ideologies regarding Black/White Multiracial people’s identities.     

Sándor Ferenczi,A Classical and Contemporary Psychoanalyst

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - The article intends to show how Ferenczi is a genuine precursor for many of the themes which lie at the center of the current psychoanalytic...     

Introducing the concept of neurobiological foundation of Rorschach responses using the example of Oral Dependent Language

We introduce the concept of “neurobiological foundation” of Rorschach interpretations as an extension of the concept of behavioral representation as a foundation for interpretation of R‐PAS variables. Here, we propose that if there is a parallelism between the mental, verbal and perceptual behaviors occurring within the microcosm of the Rorschach task and those occurring in the external environment [behavioral foundation], then the same brain regions engaged by the test‐taker when producing of a given code, should be engaged also when reproducing, in the external environment, the same psychological processes underlying that specific Rorschach code [neurobiological foundation]. To investigate this concept, we used archival, fMRI data and tested whether producing Oral Dependency Language (ODL) responses would associate with increased activation in brain regions associated with dependency‐related, psychological processes. Results from a sample of 21 non‐clinical volunteers partially confirmed our hypothesis, providing some support to the neurobiological foundation of the ODL code.     

The role of money in the excitement of gambling

Many gamblers claim that gambling is intrinsically exciting, with money playing only a secondary role. To examine the effects of the expectancy of winning money, the authors randomly assigned 243 male college student gamblers to 1 of 6 experimental or 1 of 3 control conditions. Control participants either simply watched a videotaped horse race or they picked a horse, but without wagering; that horse later turned out to be either the winner of the race or the runner-up. Experimental participants wagered $1 on a horse for a chance of winning either USD 2, USD 7, or USD 15, with half winning and half losing their wagers. Wagering led to increased heart rates and subjective excitement as a function of the expected payoff and of winning as opposed to losing the wager. The study was replicated with 200 female college student gamblers with similar results. These findings support the notion that the excitement of gambling is tied to the expectancy of winning money.     

Gesture and metaphor comprehension: Electrophysiological evidence of cross-modal coordination by audiovisual stimulation

In recent years, studies have suggested that gestures influence comprehension of linguistic expressions, for example, eliciting an N400 component in response to a speech/gesture mismatch. In this paper, we investigate the role of gestural information in the understanding of metaphors. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants viewed video clips of an actor uttering metaphorical expressions and producing bodily gestures that were congruent or incongruent with the metaphorical meaning of such expressions. This modality of stimuli presentation allows a more ecological approach to meaning integration. When ERPs were calculated using gesture stroke as time-lock event, gesture incongruity with metaphorical expression modulated the amplitude of the N400 and of the late positive complex (LPC). This suggests that gestural and speech information are combined online to make sense of the interlocutor’s linguistic production in an early stage of metaphor comprehension. Our data favor the idea that meaning construction is globally integrative and highly context-sensitive.