Dissonance and abstraction: Cognitive conflict leads to higher level of construal

This study investigated the effects of cognitive conflict on abstract thinking. According to action‐identification theory, an ambiguous and unfamiliar situation might propel an individual to a more abstract mindset. Based on this premise, cognitive conflict was hypothesized to put people in an abstract mindset. The induced compliance paradigm, in which participants are asked to write a counter‐attitudinal essay under either low choice (producing little dissonance) or high choice (producing more dissonance), was employed. Results showed that an abstract mindset was in fact activated in the induced compliance paradigm, and this effect was more pronounced for participants having a more concrete mindset to begin with. The results suggest that the experience of cognitive conflict is closely related to increased abstraction.     

Training analysis and training models

This article has the intention of giving impulses to a hopefully more creative and open-minded discussion of the function of training analysis and the kind of training model we seem to take for granted in the Scandinavian countries, the Eitingon model. I will consider some historical background data on this model as well as some historical data on the development in France which have created an alternative model of training. Especially in Sweden, there has been a stormy debate during the last years about the training analyst functions and some members have actually decided to leave our association because of this. I would like to try to shift focus from just a ‘yes-or-no-perspective’? to a broader question of our psychoanalytical society’s purpose and structure and how the training-model could sustain it.     

Discrimination in the Housing Market as an Impediment to European Labour Force Integration: the Case of Iceland

Labour market integration, and the free movement of people, has been a key feature of the European Economic Area (EEA). In fact, the EEA states that the free movement of people is “perhaps the most important right for individuals, as it gives citizens of the 31 EEA countries the opportunity to live, work, establish business and study in any of these countries.” However, unless citizens within the EEA are granted equal possibilities, the free movement will be of less value. This paper sets out to study the role of the rental housing market, in particular from the perspective of equal possibilities between majority (domestic) and minority (foreign) groups in Iceland. With the largest minority group of the Icelandic workforce being Polish, it is important from an integration perspective to study potential differences between native and Polish workers in possibilities to enter the rental housing market. By conducting an Internet field experiment, we show that Polish men in fact face a more difficult situation on the rental housing market than others, which serves as an impediment to the free flow of labour for this group of immigrants.     

Hemispheric asymmetry and human associative learning: Interactions with attention

In a previous study (Hugdahl & Brobeck, 1986) it was shown that Pavlovian conditioning to an auditory verbal conditioned stimulus (CS) initially presented only to the left cerebral hemisphere was stronger than when the same CS was presented to the right hemisphere. This was followed up in the present study by controlling for the possibility that the effect was caused by laterally biased attention. The study was performed using the “dichotic extinction paradigm,” which consists of three different phases. During the habituation phase, the CS+ and CS- were presented binaurally and separated in time. During the acquisition phase, the CS+ was followed by a white-noise unconditioned stimulus (UCS). During the dichotic extinction phase, the CS+ and CS- were presented dichotically, i.e., simultaneous presentations on each trial. Half of the subjects had the CS+ in the right ear, and half had the CS+ in the left ear. Each group was further divided into two subgroups, with one subgroup instructed to attend only to the right ear input, and the other subgroup to attend only to the left ear input. During acquisition, larger electrodermal responses were obtained to the CS+ than to the CS-. During dichotic extinction, the CS+ right ear group showed superior resistance to extinction compared to the CS+ left ear group, with no effect of the manipulation of attention. The effect was, however, attenuated when levels of acquisition was used as covariates in an analysis of covariance. There were overall larger responses from the left hand recording.     

Brain asymmetry and autonomic conditioning: Sensitization control

In the present experiment we report effects of cerebral asymmetry, or laterality, during classical conditioning to facial emotional stimuli. Twenty-five female subjects were presented with slides of a happy face in one visual half-field (VHF), and simultaneously a slide of an angry face in the other VHF, followed by shock as the unconditioned stimulus (UCS). To control for effects of sensitization, a new stimulus, never associated with the UCS, was introduced in the extinction phase. Dependent measures were phasic heart rate responses (HR) and skin conductance responses (SCR). The HR results showed a significant right hemisphere effect for the CS-UCS association, that was not attributable to UCS sensitization. No significant effects were found for the SCRs. The basic HR finding was a right hemisphere superiority for learning of a conditioned association.