Effects of deterrence on intensity of group identification and efforts to protect group identity

Group identification serves important functions such as motivating group members to work towards group goals and sustaining their efforts to maintain a positive group identity. Thus increasing or decreasing group identification has implications for group members’ commitment to achieving group goals. We propose that group identification and group-level efforts to protect group identity can be reduced or enhanced by deterrents to feeling identified with the ingroup. To test this idea, we exposed participants to different types of deterrents to group identification: a reason for not liking the ingroup (Study 1), difficulty of achieving an ingroup goal (Study 2), and a threat to ingroup positive identity (Study 3). Group identification and strength of efforts to achieve a group goal increased with the strength of deterrence, to the point where it decreased in the strong deterrent condition. Implications for intergroup motivation and social identity are discussed.     

The assessment of subjective visual vertical: comparison of two psychophysical paradigms and age-related performance

Perception of the subjective visual vertical (SVV) is usually assessed by asking to subjects, in complete darkness, to adjust the position of a luminous rod that is variably tilted (i.e., by the method of adjustment [ADJ]). Conversely, the two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) method requires subjects to categorize, as tilted either clockwise (CW) or counterclockwise (CCW), stimuli that are presented on a computer screen and are variably tilted from vertical. In this study, we aimed to compare the results of these two methods and investigate age-related effects on the SVV. SVV was assessed in 102 healthy individuals, 50 women and 52 men, with a mean age of 45.7 (range 20–91), using both ADJ (ten trials, initial 1°, 2°, 4°, 8°, or 12° bar tilts both CW and CCW) and 2AFC (120 stimuli with a 1°–32° variable tilt). Also, 50 of the subjects performed the ADJ test twice, with different bar lengths. We estimated bias and threshold for the two methods, and found that neither measure differed across the methods. Age was a significant predictor of threshold (2AFC, R ² = .141; ADJ, R ² = .190; p < .001), implying lower sensitivity with increasing age. Moreover, the ADJ method showed a significant increase of bias when the initial tilt was farthest from vertical, whereas the rod length was irrelevant. SVV measures obtained with the ADJ and 2AFC methods were comparable, but the latter measures were more resistant to artifacts that might affect the measurement. The lower sensitivity found in older persons may have an influence on their ability to interact with the environment and may contribute to impairment of postural control.     

Preference for the sites of fighting in two teleost species

Males of two species of freshwater fish (convict cichlids and Italian freshwater gobies) fought with conspecifics and subsequently remained near the visual and spatial cues that had been paired with those social encounters. These data show that postfight preference for combat sites is a phenomenon of some generality among teleosts. The likely role of learning in establishing postfight preferences for the locales of aggression is discussed.     

Phonological short-term store and the nature of the recency effect: Evidence from neuropsychology

The recency effect in immediate recall of lists of unrelated words was investigated in P.V., a left hemisphere-damaged patient, who had a grossly reduced auditory verbal span, attributed to a selective impairment of a phonological short-term store. No recency effect was evident in free recall of auditorily presented material. When the patient was instructed to recall the final items of the list first, the recency performance remained defective, even though P.V. was able to adopt a recall from end order. In the case of visual presentation, P.V.'s free recall performance was within the normal range and a clear recency occurred in the recall from end condition. These results are consistent with the view that the standard recency effect in immediate free recall of auditorily presented material represents the output of a phonological short-term store to which ordinal retrieval strategies, in P.V.'s case unimpaired, are applied. Finally, the contributions of the phonological short-term store and the process of rehearsal to the recency effect and to immediate memory span performance are discussed.     

History,Paranoia, Fragmentation1

In his book Aion, Jung describes something like a quasi-Hegelian progressive historical realization of the Self in a perspective similar to Fernand Braudel’s longue durée history. This article deals with a similar perspective, as it tries to focus on what we may call a “cultural complex” yet within its unfolding in historical time and belonging not to just one specific cultural group, but to a large cultural basin, which we may indicate as the “West”. This complex marks the birth and development of modernity. The depth, pervasiveness and duration of this cultural complex permeates the lives and psychologies of all of those that are part of it. Therefore, every analytical project must take into account the underlying emotional, epistemic and social field within which this complex constellates. One of the main features of this (trans)cultural complex, strictly connected with the progressive fragmentation of the self and the transformation of the numinosum with its meaning-giving force, is paranoia. This article analyses the historical and cultural features that produce paranoia and fragmentation and determine paranoid symptoms and attitudes.     

Progression and Verification of Situation Calculus Agents with Bounded Beliefs

We investigate agents that have incomplete information and make decisions based on their beliefs expressed as situation calculus bounded action theories. Such theories have an infinite object domain, but the number of objects that belong to fluents at each time point is bounded by a given constant. Recently, it has been shown that verifying temporal properties over such theories is decidable. We take a first-person view and use the theory to capture what the agent believes about the domain of interest and the actions affecting it. In this paper, we study verification of temporal properties over online executions. These are executions resulting from agents performing only actions that are feasible according to their beliefs. To do so, we first examine progression, which captures belief state update resulting from actions in the situation calculus. We show that, for bounded action theories, progression, and hence belief states, can always be represented as a bounded first-order logic theory. Then, based on this result, we prove decidability of temporal verification over online executions for bounded action theories.