Self- and social perception of physical appearance in chest wall deformity

This study analyzes self- and social perception of physical appearance in patients with chest wall deformity (CWD), including both pectus carinatum and pectus excavatum. Self-perception of appearance in 76 patients with CWD and social perception of patients' appearance by 20 adult and 20 adolescent raters was assessed using the Appearance Rating Scale (Stangier et al., 2000) and evaluated for agreement and multivariate correlates. Results indicate no agreement between self- and social rating. Based on mean scores patients rated their appearance significantly more negatively than adult raters but only slightly different than adolescent raters. Adolescent raters' judgment of the patients' appearance was related to CWD characteristics, while self-rating rather seems to be related to psychosocial factors. Because adolescents are a relevant peer group for adolescent patients with CWD their evaluation of the appearance might influence patients' self-image and might affect their psychological functioning. Effective interventions focusing on social interactions are needed.     

Sink positive: Linguistic experience with th substitutions influences nonnative word recognition

We used eyetracking, perceptual discrimination, and production tasks to examine the influences of perceptual similarity and linguistic experience on word recognition in nonnative (L2) speech. Eye movements to printed words were tracked while German and Dutch learners of English heard words containing one of three pronunciation variants (/t/, /s/, or /f/) of the interdental fricative /θ/. Irrespective of whether the speaker was Dutch or German, looking preferences for target words with /θ/ matched the preferences for producing /s/ variants in German speakers and /t/ variants in Dutch speakers (as determined via the production task), while a control group of English participants showed no such preferences. The perceptually most similar and most confusable /f/ variant (as determined via the discrimination task) was never preferred as a match for /θ/. These results suggest that linguistic experience with L2 pronunciations facilitates recognition of variants in an L2, with effects of frequency outweighing effects of perceptual similarity.     

Abh?ngigkeitserkrankungen und Pers?nlichkeitsst?rungen

Substance use disorders and personality disorders often co-occur in clinical treatment. In this review the association between substance use disorders and personality disorders is described and discussed. Clinical and neurobiological data as well as psychodynamic concepts are included to focus on the therapeutic implications for patients with these comorbidities. The consumption of substances often begins as a kind of self-medication. Patients suffering from severe personality disorders need these substance effects to avoid severe destructive affects and to regulate their self-esteem. Patients with chronic substance dependence often show changes in brain structure. In the dependency stage of addiction clinical symptoms can make the diagnosis of a specific personality disorder very difficult. The treatments can be classified by the severity of substance use disorders and personality disorders. Substance misuse can be treated with psychotherapy. In substance dependence, specific forms of addiction therapy should be included. In patients with the frequent comorbidity of substance use disorders and severe personality disorders, disorder-specific treatment can be used with good results.     

Brands on the brain: Do consumers use declarative information or experienced emotions to evaluate brands?

An fMRI study was conducted with unfamiliar and familiar (strong and weak) brands to assess linguistic encoding and retrieval processes, and the use of declarative and experiential information, in brand evaluations. As expected, activations in brain areas associated with linguistic encoding were higher for unfamiliar brands, but activations in brain areas associated with information retrieval were higher for strong brands. Interestingly, weak brands were engaged simultaneously in both processes. Most importantly, activations of the pallidum, associated with positive emotions, for strong brands and activations of the insula, associated with negative emotions, for weak and unfamiliar brands suggested that consumers use experienced emotions rather than declarative information to evaluate brands. As a result, brand experiences should be considered a key driver of brand equity in addition to brand awareness and cognitive associations.     

D1/D5 dopamine receptors modulate spatial memory formation

We investigated the effect of the intra-CA1 administration of the D1/D5 receptor antagonist SCH23390 and the D1/D5 receptor agonist SKF38393 on spatial memory in the water maze. When given immediately, but not 3h after training, SCH23390 hindered long-term spatial memory formation without affecting non-spatial memory or the normal functionality of the hippocampus. On the contrary, post-training infusion of SKF38393 enhanced retention and facilitated the spontaneous recovery of the original spatial preference after reversal learning. Our findings demonstrate that hippocampal D1/D5 receptors play an essential role in spatial memory processing.     

An Emancipatory Topology of Desire

Abstract

In this article, I explore how the emancipatory potential of the human capacity to desire and be desired can contribute to more inclusive, sustainable, and convivial futures. I differentiate four manifestations of desire: (1) the consuming aspect of desire with acts of deliberate noncapitalist desire, (2) the arousing aspect of desire encouraging acts of playful profanation, (3) the identity-shaping aspect of desire enabling acts of radical unbecoming, and (4) the future-shaping aspect of desire associated with acts of courageous deviantness. Examples of practices that highlight the emancipatory potential of the different manifestations are discussed.     

Collective Affordances

Abstract

This article develops an ecological framework for understanding collective action. This is contrasted with approaches familiar from the collective intentionality debate, which treat individuals (with collective intentions) as fundamental units of collective action. Instead, we turn to social ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory and argue that they provide a promising framework for understanding collectives as the central unit in collective action. However, we submit that these approaches do not yet appreciate enough the relevance of social identities for collective action. To analyze this aspect, we build on key insights from social identity theory and synthesize it with embodied and ecological accounts of perception and action. This results in the proposal of two new types of affordances. For an individual who enacts her “embodied social identity” of being a member of a particular collective, there can be what we call embodied social identity affordances. Moreover, when several individuals dynamically interact with each other against the background of their embodied social identities, this might lead to the emergence of a collective, which we understand as a dynamically constituted and ecologically situated perception-action system consisting of several individuals enacting relevant embodied social identity affordances. Building on previous work in social ecological psychology, we suggest that there can be genuine collective affordances, that is, affordances whose subject is not an individual, but a collective.