The taken-for-granted world: A study of the relationship between A. Schutz and J. Ortega y Gassed

This paper is a comparative study of Alfred Schutz and Jose Ortega y Gasset, with special attention to their respective characterization of social reality. For this purpose, the author draws on the explicit references Schutz and Ortega directed towards one another and develops a critical comparison of their theoretical systems. In addition to the reciprocal references which appear in their published works, valuable documentary evidence is provided by Schutz's letters and, first and foremost, by his marginal notes preserved in his own copy of Ortega y Gasset's Man and People. As far as the critical comparison of Schutz's and Ortega's theories is concerned, the weight of the discussion falls on Ortega's Man and People. A careful reading of this essay allows us to successively invoke the key components of Schutz's phenomenological characterization of the structures of the life-world. According to this strategy, and after some preliminary sections devoted to contextual, biographical, and sociocultural matters, the following topics are comparatively discussed: (1) the philosophical foundations of sociology, with particular attention to Ortega's doctrine of the Other as potential danger; (2) the taken-for-granted dimensions of the social world; (3) the multiple spheres of reality, and their structuration around the fundamental core of the radical reality of the I (for Ortega) or the paramount reality of everyday life, as the intersubjective world of culture (for Schutz); (4) the influence of pragmatism on their theoretical systems; (5) their strikingly similar characterization of the perspectivist stratification of the social world; (6) the inexhaustible complexity of the problem of intersubjectivity. Obviously, the common influence of Husserl, Weber, Scheler, and Bergson casts light upon the comparative consideration of any of these issues.     

Rational choices in wason's selection task

Sixty-eight subjects were asked to solve a series of six Wason selection problems by physically turning relevant cards over until they could say whether the rule was correct or false. In the first experiment most of the subjects misunderstood the rule they were asked to verify, different subjects misunderstanding in different ways, but commonly reading (a) top/underneath for one side/other side and (b) a dual conditional for if..., then.... However, a majority of subjects thereafter responded in complete logical consistency with the rule as they understood it to be. When the misunderstandings revealed in the first experiment were themselves presented as rules to be verified in a second experiment, performance was much more logical than is usually reported. It is concluded that the illogicality commonly associated with Wason's selection task is only apparent.     

Surprise in the Context of Achievement: The Role of Outcome Valence and Importance

Five experiments examined the eliciting conditions of surprise in achievement situations. The present research tested an extension of the commonly accepted approach of regarding surprise as an emotion elicited by the unexpectedness of events. Specifically, the present extension posits that outcome valence and importance have effects on expectancy formation and thereby on surprise if expectancies are disconfirmed. It is posited that an achievement outcome's valence, importance, and expectancy are confounded because positive valence and high importance of an outcome are correlated with high desirability, which in turn increases expectancy. Consequently, an important failure should contain the highest expectancy-disconfirmation and thus elicit the highest surprise. Furthermore, in contrast to a thesis proposed by Weiner, Russel, and Lerman (1978, 1979), surprise was expected to be independent of the attribution of an outcome to luck or chance. The results of all five studies supported the present reasoning in experiments using vignettes (Studies 1 to 4), as well as in an actual achievement situation (Study 5). All of these studies provide empirical evidence of the predicted interaction effect between outcome valence and importance on surprise elicitation via expectancy-disconfirmation and thus lend support to the present extension of the expectancy-disconfirmation approach. But contrary to the approach suggested by Weiner et al., no general or causal relationships were found between attributions and surprise.     

Comprehension of symbolic gestures in aphasia

One-hundred-and-twenty-eight patients with unilateral hemispheric damage (53 aphasics, 26 nonaphasic left, and 49 right brain-damaged patients) and 25 normal controls were given a test of symbolic gesture comprehension and other tests of verbal comprehension and of reproduction of symbolic gestures. On the test of symbolic gesture interpretation aphasic patients performed significantly worse than any other group of brain-damaged patients. Within the aphasic patients the inability to understand the meaning of symbolic gestures was highly related to the number of semantic errors obtained at a verbal comprehension test. On the contrary, only a mild relationship was found between comprehension and reproduction of symbolic gestures. Some implications of these findings are discussed.     

A preliminary report on the use of a new method of presenting the Rorschach Test to evaluate the relationship of couples

The authors present a new relational Rorschach Test for couples. First, the Rorschach is given individually, then it is administered to the couple together, when they have the task of agreeing on one interpretation for each card. All ten cards are used. The protocols, transcribed from the video tape, are analysed in order to evaluate:

• the typology of the dyad in the light of the concepts of symmetry and complementarity;

• communication within the dyad in terms of: single messages, single message sequences, and of the evaluation of the subjects capacity to understand each other;

• data obtained through task performance such as, which partner formulates the interpretation agreed on and which one decides on the interpretation.

An application of the method to a couple, one of whom is alcoholic, is presented.     

Thermal sensitivity and cardiovascular reactivity to stress in healthy males

This paper examines the association of cardiovascular reactivity with thermal thresholds (detection and unpleasantness). Heart period (HP), systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressure of 42 health young males were recorded during a cardiovascular reactivity task (a videogame based upon Sidman's avoidance paradigm). Thermal sensitivity, assessing detection and unpleasantness thresholds with radiant heat in the forearm was also estimated for participants. Participants with differential scores in the cardiovascular variables from base line to task > or = P65 were considered as reactors and those how have differential scores < or = P35 were considered as non-reactors. Significant differences were observed between groups in the unpleasantness thresholds in blood pressure (BP) but not in HP. Reactors exhibited significant higher unpleasantness thresholds than non-reactors. No significant differences were obtained in detection thresholds between groups.     

Self-esteem, self-affirmation, and schadenfreude

In two studies we demonstrated that self-esteem has a negative relationship with schadenfreude toward a high achiever and that this relationship was mediated by the self-threat evoked by this high achiever. Moreover, we showed that this indirect relationship was contingent on an opportunity to affirm the self. When no self-affirmation opportunity was available, low self-esteem participants experienced a stronger self-threat when confronted with a high achiever, and this self-threat increased their schadenfreude, whereas this response was attenuated when they were given an opportunity to self-affirm. These findings indicate that the misfortunes of others can evoke schadenfreude because they provide people with an opportunity to protect or enhance their self-views.     

Mining twitter: A source for psychological wisdom of the crowds

Over the last few years, microblogging has gained prominence as a form of personal broadcasting media where information and opinion are mixed together without an established order, usually tightly linked with current reality. Location awareness and promptness provide researchers using the Internet with the opportunity to create “psychological landscapes”—that is, to detect differences and changes in voiced (twittered) emotions, cognitions, and behaviors. In our article, we present iScience Maps, a free Web service for researchers, available from and . Technologically, the service is based on Twitter’s streaming and search application programming interfaces (APIs), accessed through several PHP libraries, and a JavaScript frontend. This service allows researchers to assess via Twitter the effect of specific events in different places as they are happening and to make comparisons between cities, regions, or countries regarding psychological states and their evolution in the course of an event. In a step-by-step example, it is shown how to replicate a study on affective and personality characteristics inferred from first names (Mehrabian & Piercy, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 755–758 1993) by mining Twitter data with iScience Maps.Results from the original study are replicated in both world regions we tested (the western U.S. and the U.K./Ireland); we also discover base rate of names to be a confound that needs to be controlled for in future research.     

The semantic organization of the animal category: evidence from semantic verbal fluency and network theory

Semantic memory is the subsystem of human memory that stores knowledge of concepts or meanings, as opposed to life-specific experiences. How humans organize semantic information remains poorly understood. In an effort to better understand this issue, we conducted a verbal fluency experiment on 200 participants with the aim of inferring and representing the conceptual storage structure of the natural category of animals as a network. This was done by formulating a statistical framework for co-occurring concepts that aims to infer significant concept-concept associations and represent them as a graph. The resulting network was analyzed and enriched by means of a missing links recovery criterion based on modularity. Both network models were compared to a thresholded co-occurrence approach. They were evaluated using a random subset of verbal fluency tests and comparing the network outcomes (linked pairs are clustering transitions and disconnected pairs are switching transitions) to the outcomes of two expert human raters. Results show that the network models proposed in this study overcome a thresholded co-occurrence approach, and their outcomes are in high agreement with human evaluations. Finally, the interplay between conceptual structure and retrieval mechanisms is discussed.