HOW PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENTS CAN ENHANCE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEFENSE MECHANISMS

Psychological defense mechanisms are a powerful and often unappreciated force safeguarding mental health. Although rarely directed in this way, the most common forms of psychiatric treatment—psychotherapy and antidepressants—can enhance psychological defense mechanisms. Psychotherapy, through both specific and nonspecific factors, induces positive perspective shifts favoring positive cognitive distortions, including adaptive classical defense mechanisms and healthy attribution biases. Antidepressants, by altering very basic emotional information processing, such as facial expression recognition and emotional memories, also foster positive cognitive distortions. By shifting perceptions and thoughts in a positive direction, psychotherapy and antidepressants improve the capacity to dissociate from negative emotional stimuli.Brad Bowins, M.D., FRCP(C), is a staff psychiatrist at the University of Toronto Health Service and he is in private practice.     

The influence of an external symbol system on number parity representation, or What’s odd about 6?

The aim of this study was to investigate whether language-specific properties influence mental number processing. German Sign Language (DGS) numbers differ from those in spoken German not only in terms of modality but also in their basic language structure. A group of 20 congenitally deaf German signers participated in a number parity (odd/even) judgment task with DGS and printed German number words. The results indicated that two-handed DGS number signs are processed in a decomposed way. This language-specific effect also generalized to another linguistic number notation, German number words, but not to Arabic digit notation. These differences are discussed with respect to two possible routes to number parity.     

Authors and publication practices

Although authors are usually considered to be the main perpetrators of research and publication misconduct, any person involved in the process has the potential to offend. Editors may breach ethical standards particularly with respect to conflicts of interest. In the same way that authors are now required to declare competing interests, notably commercial affiliations, financial interests and personal connections, so must editors. Editors can influence the chances of acceptance or rejection of a paper by reviewer selection. Reviewers should also be ready to disclose conflicts of interest. They must ensure that their reviews are evidence based and free from destructive criticism driven by self interest. It seems likely that ultimately we will progressively move towards 'open' peer review in which both the authors and the reviewers are known to each other. There is an urgent need for increased transparency of the relationship between editors and owners. The events of the last few years indicate that unless this interface is fully understood by all parties, conflicts may arise. There is also a need for a radical overhaul in the relationship between journals, journal editors and the biomedical industry. It is now increasingly accepted that all clinical trials should be registered in a centrally held database and that protocols should include the primary and secondary outcome measures and the intended approach to data analysis thereby avoiding opportunistic post hoc analyses. However, the even more radical proposal that journals should cease to publish clinical trials sponsored by industry deserves wider debate.     

Language effects in magnitude comparison: small, but not irrelevant

It is assumed that number magnitude comparison is performed by assessing magnitude representation on a single analog mental number line. However, we have observed a unit-decade-compatibility effect in German which is inconsistent with this assumption (Nuerk, Weger, & Willmes, 2001). Incompatible magnitude comparisons in which decade and unit comparisons lead to different responses (e.g., 37_52 for which 3<5, but 7>2) are slower and less accurately responded to than compatible trials in which decade and unit comparisons lead to the same response (e.g., 42_57, for which 4<5 and 2<7). As overall distance was held constant, a single holistic magnitude representation could not account for this compatibility effect. However, because of the inversion property of the corresponding German two-digit number words ("einundzwanzig" ), the language-generality of the effect is questionable. We have therefore examined the compatibility effect with native English speakers. We were able to replicate the compatibility effect using Arabic notation. Thus, the compatibility effect is not language-specific. However, in cross-linguistic analyses language-specific modulations were observed not only for number words but also for Arabic numbers. The constraints imposed on current models by the verbal mediation of Arabic number comparison are discussed.     

On the relations between Heinrich Scholz and Jan Łukasiewicz

The aim of the present study is (1) to show, on the basis of a number of unpublished documents, how Heinrich Scholz supported his Warsaw colleague Jan ?ukasiewicz, the Polish logician, during World War II, and (2) to discuss the efforts he made in order to enable Jan ?ukasiewicz and his wife Regina to move from Warsaw to Münster under life-threatening circumstances. In the first section, we explain how Scholz provided financial help to ?ukasiewicz, and we also adduce evidence of the risks incurred by German scholars who offered assistance to their Polish colleagues. In the second section, we discuss the dramatic circumstances surrounding the ?ukasiewiczes' move to Münster in the summer of 1944.     

The internal family and the facts of life

Primitive defensive mechanisms innvolving splitting and projections are an essential process in the development of the infant. However, if these persist into adult life unmitigated by more depressive processes involving introjection and awareness of secure good objects they are shown to be inadequate to the task of coping with life crises, based as they are on the denial and distortion of reality. In this paper, I describe two patients who were seen in very different treatment settings and in whom such mechanisms were predominant. These began to fail when the patients were faced with difficult external events. These caused feelings of panic about impending mental disintegration. I then show how these patients sought to re-establish their primitive defensive structures.     

The uses of humor in life,neurosis and in psychotherapy: Part 1

Abstract

Joy and sadness, the comic and the tragic, making jokes and telling jokes, have been known in life, literature, the theater, and art since the dawn of civilization. Following in the footsteps of classical antiquity, Freud added to the philosophical analysis of humor the insights offered by the psychoanalytic method. The bridge was the cathartic method of treating neuroses, where discharge of affect was one of the foundations of technique, and the cathartic, or discharge, function of humor. Freud's analysis of humor, that “A joke … is the most social of all mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure” introduces Freud's first explicit formulation of an interpersonal approach to the human situation in health and disorder.     

Salience-controlled visual search: Are the brightest and the least bright targets found by different processes?

It has been proposed that maximum and minimum targets (like the brightest or the least-bright item of a sample) are found by different search processes, the latter but not the former being sensitive to the withdrawal of focal attention. The present study could not establish such a systematic difference and suggests that variations in search performance are due to variations in target salience. Bright targets among dim distractors were generally more salient than dim targets among bright dis-tractors (Experiment 1). In both conditions, search performance was deteriorated when attention was withdrawn (Experiment 2). Performance became identical when maximum and minimum targets were matched in salience; this was also confirmed for dark items on bright background (Experiment 3). The data underline the importance of salience in visual search but do not support the assumption that maximum and minimum target searches are qualitatively different in their demands on focal attention. Salience and attention rather seem to resemble complementary functions in visual search; the less salient a target is the more attention is required to detect it.     

The link between mental rotation ability and basic numerical representations

Mental rotation and number representation have both been studied widely, but although mental rotation has been linked to higher-level mathematical skills, to date it has not been shown whether mental rotation ability is linked to the most basic mental representation and processing of numbers. To investigate the possible connection between mental rotation abilities and numerical representation, 43 participants completed four tasks: 1) a standard pen-and-paper mental rotation task; 2) a multi-digit number magnitude comparison task assessing the compatibility effect, which indicates separate processing of decade and unit digits; 3) a number-line mapping task, which measures precision of number magnitude representation; and 4) a random number generation task, which yields measures both of executive control and of spatial number representations. Results show that mental rotation ability correlated significantly with both size of the compatibility effect and with number mapping accuracy, but not with any measures from the random number generation task. Together, these results suggest that higher mental rotation abilities are linked to more developed number representation, and also provide further evidence for the connection between spatial and numerical abilities.