“Man Is a Wolf to Man”: Disorders of Dehumanization in Psychoanalysis

A key component of dehumanization is the loss of personal credibility experienced by victims whose trauma and abuse have gone unwitnessed or unconfirmed. The scant or doubtful attention to victimization in orthodox psychoanalytic theory, where the late introduction of the destructive instinct favored analysis of the predator, has only underscored the victim's anonymity—a conspicuous shortcoming in our time of genocide and crimes against humanity. Yet victimization, as illustrated in this paper's case material, reveals relational conflict as compelling as classical intrapsychic conflict: between urges to keep silent or to speak and between concealment and habituation to human abandonment or reparative search for witness. What therapeutic neutrality is to psychic reality, therapeutic witness is to the recovery of social reality and one's right to live in it.     

Factor Analytic Structure and Validity of the Parental Feelings Inventory: A Brief Report

Previous research has highlighted the important role of parental emotions in parent–child interactions and child development. The present study presents the Parental Feelings Inventory (PFI), a new rating scale designed to assess parental emotions within the parenting role. The PFI presents emotion adjectives and asks parents to indicate the degree to which they experience that emotion in their role as parents. This study investigates the factor analytic structure and psychometric properties of this scale in a sample of parents with 3-year-old children. Participants included 149 mothers and 107 fathers of preschool-age children. The results provide support for a three-factor solution (Angry, Happy, and Anxious/Sad). This scale demonstrated good reliability and correlated with other measures of parent and child functioning. These findings provide support for the overall utility of the PFI as a measure of emotional experiences in the parenting role.     

Supposition and representation in human reasoning

We report the results of three experiments designed to assess the role of suppositions in human reasoning. Theories of reasoning based on formal rules propose that the ability to make suppositions is central to deductive reasoning. Our first experiment compared two types of problem that could be solved by a suppositional strategy. Our results showed no difference in difficulty between problems requiring affirmative or negative suppositions and very low logical solution rates throughout. Further analysis of the error data showed a pattern of responses, which suggested that participants reason from a superficial representation of the premises in these arguments and this drives their choice of conclusion. Our second experiment employed a different set of suppositional problems but with extremely similar proofs in terms of the rules applied and number of inferential steps required. As predicted by our interpretation of reasoning strategies employed in Experiment 1, logical performance was very much higher on these problems. Our third experiment showed that problems that could be solved by constructing an initial representation of the premises were easier than problems in which this representation was not sufficient. This effect was independent of the suppositional structure of the problems. We discuss the implications of this research for theories of reasoning based on mental models and inference rules.     

Background beliefs and evidence interpretation

In this paper we argue that it is often adaptive to use one's background beliefs when interpreting information that, from a normative point of view, is incomplete. In both of the experiments reported here participants were presented with an item possessing two features and were asked to judge, in the light of some evidence concerning the features, to which of two categories it was more likely that the item belonged. It was found that when participants received evidence relevant to just one of these hypothesised categories (i.e. evidence that did not form a Bayesian likelihood ratio) they used their background beliefs to interpret this information. In Experiment 2, on the other hand, participants behaved in a broadly Bayesian manner when the evidence they received constituted a completed likelihood ratio. We discuss the circumstances under which participants, when making their judgements, consider the alternative hypothesis. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our results for an understanding of hypothesis testing, belief revision, and categorisation.     

Matching bias and set sizes: A discussion of Yama (2001)

Yama (2001) has presented an ingenious series of experiments in which he attempts to separate two accounts in the literature of the cause of “matching bias” in conditional reasoning. One account is that the bias arises from the way in which people process negations and the other is that it is due to the larger set sizes associated with negative propositions, rather than negation per se. Yama's experiments show influences of both negation and set size, from which he concludes that both factors contribute to the matching bias that is normally observed. In this note, it is argued that this conclusion is at odds with other findings in the literature, particularly those investigating implicit negation as the cause of the bias. Introducing explicit negations has been shown to remove matching bias completely and not partially, as Yama's account must predict. A possible reconciliation is proposed in terms of subtle contextual differences introduced by Yama's experiments.     

"Pulling Teeth and Torture" : Musical Memory and Problem Solving

A concert pianist the second author videotaped herself learning J.S. Bach's Italian Concerto Presto, and commented on the problems she encountered as she practised. Approximately two years later the pianist wrote out the first page of the score from memory. The pianist's verbal reports indicated that in the early sessions she identified and memorised the formal structure of the piece, and in the later sessions she practised using this organisation to retrieve the memory cues that controlled her playing. The practice and recall data supported this account. Both were organised by the formal structure of the music. Practice segments were more likely to start and stop at boundaries of the formal structure than at other locations, and recall was higher for the beginnings of sections than for later portions. Like other forms of expert memory, pianistic memory appears to be based on use of a highly practised retrieval scheme which permits rapid retrieval of information from long-term memory.     

Dual processes,evolution and rationality

In three experiments we tested hypotheses derived from the goal specificity literature using a real-world physics task. In the balance-scale paradigm participants predict the state of the apparatus based on a configuration of weights at various distances from the fulcrum. Non-specific goals (NSG) have been shown to encourage hypothesis testing, which facilitates rule discovery, whereas specific goals (SG) do not. We showed that this goal specificity effect depends on task difficulty. The NSG strategy led to rule induction among some participants. Among non-discoverers, SG participants were faster and more accurate on difficult problems than NSG participants. The use of misleading exemplars (scale configurations that obscured the rule governing outcomes) led to fixation on inappropriate hypotheses for NSG but not SG participants. When more diagnostic learning exemplars were used, NSG non-discoverers still performed worse than SG participants on difficult problems. SG participants also outperformed NSG participants on a post-test of difficult problems. These findings qualify the generality of goal specificity effects.     

Situational variables related to aggression in institutional settings

For decades, aggressive behavior among psychiatric inpatients has been identified as disruptive to the therapeutic environment and a workplace hazard. Most previous research has focused on individual patient risk factors with less attention paid to the situational, environmental, or therapeutic milieu factors that could influence violence rates. This review outlines the prominent areas discussed in situational factor research and presents recent theoretical models that integrate these factors. Based on the identified shortcomings in the available literature, suggestions for future research directions are offered.     

Debiasing by instruction: The case of belief bias

Abstract

The study is concerned with the question of whether robust biases in reasoning can be reduced or eliminated by verbal instruction in principles of reasoning. Three experiments are reported in which the effect of instructions upon the belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning is investigated. Belief bias is most clearly marked by a tendency for subjects to accept invalid conclusions which are a priori believable. Experiment 1 attempted to replicate and extend an experiment reported by Newstead, Pollard, Evans and Allen (1992). In contrast with their experiment, it was found that belief bias was maintained despite the use of augmented instructions which emphasised the principle of logical necessity. Experiment 2 provided an exact replication of the augmented instructions condition of Newstead et al., including the presence of problems with belief-neutral conclusions. Once again, significant effects of conclusion believability were found. A third experiment examined the use of elaborated instructions which lacked specific reference to the notion of logical necessity. The use of these instructions significantly reduced the effects of belief on the reasoning observed.

Taking the current findings together with the experiment of Newstead et al., the overall conclusion is that elaborated instructions can reduce the belief bias effect in syllogistic reasoning, but not eliminate it. This conclusion is discussed with reference to (1) the practical implications for improving thinking and reasoning via verbal instruction and (2) the nature of the belief bias phenomenon.