The Suicide of Seymour Glass

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the suicide of Seymour Glass, a major character in J. D. Salinger's fiction and utilizes the “psychological autopsy” technique as a framework for investigating the psychodynamics of Seymour's death. Based upon materials provided throughout Salinger's stories, the suicide is analyzed in terms of five major elements related to Seymour's emotional state and manifest behaviors: (1) details of the death; (2) personal history; (3) level of perturbation; (4) personality and life-style; and (5) intention and lethality of the act. Additionally, this essay posits various interpretations of the suicide and allows for insights into the psychodynamic functioning of a major literary character.     

Perceptual biases in processing facial identity and emotion

Normal observers demonstrate a bias to process the left sides of faces during perceptual judgments about identity or emotion. This effect suggests a right cerebral hemisphere processing bias. To test the role of the right hemisphere and the involvement of configural processing underlying this effect, young and older control observers and patients with right hemisphere damage completed two chimeric faces tasks (emotion judgment and face identity matching) with both upright and inverted faces. For control observers, the emotion judgment task elicited a strong left-sided perceptual bias that was reduced in young controls and eliminated in older controls by face inversion. Right hemisphere damage reversed the bias, suggesting the right hemisphere was dominant for this task, but that the left hemisphere could be flexibly recruited when right hemisphere mechanisms are not available or dominant. In contrast, face identity judgments were associated most clearly with a vertical bias favouring the uppermost stimuli that was eliminated by face inversion and right hemisphere lesions. The results suggest these tasks involve different neurocognitive mechanisms. The role of the right hemisphere and ventral cortical stream involvement with configural processes in face processing is discussed.     

Personal Respect, Private Property, And Market Economy: What Critical Theory Can Learn From Hegel

The aim of the present paper is to show that Hegel’s concept of personal respect is of great interest to contemporary Critical Theory. The author first analyzes this notion as it appears in the Philosophy of Right and then offers a new interpretation of the conceptual relation between personal respect and the institutions of (private) property and (capitalist) markets. In doing so, he shows why Hegel’s concept of personal respect allows us to understand markets as possible institutionalizations of this kind of recognition, and why it is compatible with a critique of neoliberal capitalism. He argues that due to these features Hegel’s notion of personal respect is of great interest to theoreticians within the tradition of critical theory.

Social anxiety and problematic alcohol consumption: the mediating role of drinking motives and situations

Social anxiety is inconsistently associated with alcohol use variables. To elucidate factors that contribute to the relationship between social anxiety and problematic alcohol use, the present study investigated drinking motives and drinking situations in an undergraduate sample (N = 293). Social anxiety was significantly correlated with endorsement of enhancement drinking motives (i.e., drinking to enhance positive experiences or emotions) but not social or coping motives. Social anxiety was also correlated with endorsement of drinking in the following high-risk situations: unpleasant emotions, conflict with others, social pressure, and testing personal control. Importantly, enhancement motives and each of these drinking situations mediated the relationship between social anxiety and alcohol-related problems. Findings suggest that alcohol use to enhance positive affect or in response to these specific situations may account for the risk for alcohol-related problems among those with social anxiety.     

Naturalistic evaluation of suicidal ideation: variability and relation to attempt status

Suicidal ideation has been thought to have a relatively stable course across weeks and months. However, daily changes in levels of ideation have not been adequately examined despite the importance of potential variability clinically and conceptually. For example, it has been suggested that variability in suicidal ideation may become less closely tied to variability in other mood symptoms (e.g., depression, hopelessness) among individuals with multiple suicide attempts. The present report had two related goals: (1) to prospectively evaluate suicidal ideation and related mood symptoms, and (2) to determine whether suicide attempt status predicted a decreased association between ideation and other mood symptoms. Non-clinical participants (N=108) with varying levels of suicidal ideation and number of previous suicide attempts completed the beck hopelessness scale (BHS), beck depression inventory (BDI), and suicide probability scale (SPS) every day for 4 weeks. Findings suggested considerable variability in suicidal ideation, especially for multiple attempters. Multiple attempt status predicted a decreased association between suicidal ideation and depression, although the results were only marginally significant. These findings have implications for conceptual models of suicide risk as well as assessment and treatment of suicidal individuals.     

Interpersonal loss in the context of family caregiving: Implications of communal relationships theory

Abstract

Much is known about the emotional costs of providing care to an ill or disabled family member. However, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to investigating how caregiver distress is related to interpersonal loss (i.e., reactions to changes in the typical day-to-day support behaviors that formerly characterized the caregiver–care recipient relationship). Drawing on the theory of communal relationships (e.g., Clark & Mills, 1979, 1993), this study proposes that the magnitude of interpersonal loss that caregivers experience, as well as its contributions to depressed affect, both directly and indirectly (through impact of interpersonal loss on perceived caregiving burden) are likely to depend on the type of relationship that existed between caregiver and care recipient prior to the onset of illness or disability. In this context, several hypotheses and directions for further research are proposed. It is hoped that future researchers will incorporate loss measures into their research and consider how aspects of preexisting relationships influence associations among interpersonal loss and variables (e.g., burden, social support) known to predict caregiver well-being.     

Temporal processing characteristics of the Ponzo illusion

Many visual illusions result from assumptions of our visual system that are based on its long-term adaptation to our visual environment. Thus, visual illusions provide the opportunity to identify and learn about these fundamental assumptions. In this paper, we investigate the Ponzo illusion. Although many previous studies researched visual processing of the Ponzo illusion, only very few considered temporal processing aspects. However, it is well known that our visual percept is modulated by temporal factors. First, we used the Ponzo illusion as prime in a response priming task to test whether it modulates subsequent responses to the longer (or shorter) of two target bars. Second, we used the same stimuli in a perceptual task to test whether the Ponzo illusion is effective for very short presentation times (12 ms). We observed considerable priming effects that were of similar magnitude as those of a control condition. Moreover, the variations in the priming effects as a function of prime-target stimulus-onset asynchrony were very similar to that of the control condition. However, when analyzing priming effects as a function of participants’ response speed, effects for the Ponzo illusion increased in slower responses. We conclude that although the illusion is established rapidly within the visual system, the full integration of context information is based on more time-consuming and later visual processing.     

Learning new vocabulary in German: the effects of inferring word meanings,type of feedback,and time of test

In the present study, introductory-level German students read a simplified story and learned the meanings of new German words by reading English translations in marginal glosses versus trying to infer (i.e., guess) their translations. Students who inferred translations were given feedback in English or in German, or no feedback at all. Although immediate retention of new vocabulary was better for students who used marginal glosses, students who inferred word meanings and then received English feedback forgot fewer translations over time. Plausible but inaccurate inferences (i.e., those that made sense in the context) were more likely to be corrected by students who received English feedback as compared with German feedback, providing support for the beneficial effects of mediating information. Implausible inaccurate inferences, however, were more likely to be corrected on the delayed vocabulary test by students who received German feedback as compared with English feedback, possibly because of the additional contextual support provided by German feedback.     

Synesthesia: Strong and Weak

In this review, we distinguish strong and weak forms of synesthesia. Strong synesthesia is characterized by a vivid image in one sensory modality in response to stimulation in another one. Weak synesthesia is characterized by cross-sensory correspondences expressed through language, perceptual similarity, and perceptual interactions during information processing. Despite important phenomenological dissimilarities between strong and weak synesthesia, we maintain that the two forms draw on similar underlying mechanisms. The study of strong and weak synesthetic phenomena provides an opportunity to enrich scientists' understanding of basic mechanisms involved in perceptual coding and cross-modal information processing.     

Appraisals,emotions and emotion regulation: An integrative approach

The present work aims to investigate the relation between appraisals, emotions, and emotion regulation strategies by creating a structural equation model which integrates these three aspects of the emotion process. To reach this aim, Italian students (N = 610) confronted with their high school diploma examination completed a questionnaire 3 weeks before the beginning of the exam. Results showed that they experienced primarily three types of emotions—anxiety/fear, frustration/powerlessness, positive emotions—which were related to specific appraisal profiles. Importantly, these appraisal profiles and emotions were associated with the use of different strategies for regulating emotions: anxiety/fear was associated with focusing on the exam, drug use, and an inability to distance oneself from the exam; frustration/powerlessness, with use of suppression, distancing, and drugs; positive emotion, with reappraisal and problem focused strategies. The effectiveness of these different strategies will be discussed.