Primary process in competitive archery performance: Effects of flotation REST

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether or nor the floating form of Restricted Environmental Stimulation Technique (REST) may be exploited within the field of competitive archery to reinforce primary process (inner-directed) orientation and thereby enhance the quality of coaching and training. Floatation REST consists of a procedure whereby an individual is immersed in a water-tank filled with saltwater of an extremely high salt concentration. The experiment was performed over the course of two weekends with a 6-week interval. Twenty participating archers, 13 male and 7 female, were recruited. The between-group factor was “adjudged skill.” The within-group factor was provided by an Armchair condition in which the participants sat in an armchair for 45 min after which they were required to shoot four salvo series of three shots each, as a comparison to the Flotation-Rest condition whereby the participants were required to lie in a floating-tank for 45 min just prior to shooting. Results indicated that: (a) the participants experienced less perceived exertion during marksmanship in the floating condition, (b) the elite archers performed more consistently in the Flotation-REST condition, (c) the least and most proficient archers had lower muscle tension in the Extensor Digitorum in the Flotation REST condition.     

On the Importance of the Setting in the Psychoanalytic Situation

In this article, we explore the process of psychoanalytical listening in the context of language. We demonstrate through a clinical example how listening may act as a facilitator of a person's linguistic style, but also how the defence of negation blocks the same process. Guided by the modern speculations on the function of metaphor, we show how listening has been expressed in various metaphors and other “tropes” of language by psychoanalysts, and also how useful metaphors can be in our listening to patients.     

The Twofold Assumption: A Response to Cole-Turner,Moritz, Peters and Peterson

Abstract

The article discusses points and perspectives offered by the four respondents to the R.J. Russell Fellow Lectures for 2013/14. Joshua M. Moritz and Ron Cole-Turner bring in new material from biblical and patristic traditions relevant for the proposal of deep incarnation. How does the concept of deep incarnation fare in relation to tradition and science? Ted Peters and Daniel J. Peterson raise questions about the compatibility between a compatibilist view of divine action and creaturely freedom on the one hand, and ideas of kenosis on the other. Which models of kenosis models are workable, and which forms of compatibilism?     

The precuneus and the insula in self-attributional processes

Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-serving bias: that is, people’s tendency to attribute positive events to internal causes (themselves) and negative events to external causes (other persons/circumstances). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of the cognitive processes implicated in self-serving attributions using social situations that differed in their emotional saliences. We administered an attributional bias task during fMRI scanning in a large sample of healthy subjects (n = 71). Eighty sentences describing positive or negative social situations were presented, and subjects decided via buttonpress whether the situation had been caused by themselves or by the other person involved. Comparing positive with negative sentences revealed activations of the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Self-attribution correlated with activation of the posterior portion of the precuneus. However, self-attributed positive versus negative sentences showed activation of the anterior portion of the precuneus, and self-attributed negative versus positive sentences demonstrated activation of the bilateral insular cortex. All significant activations were reported with a statistical threshold of p ≤ .001, uncorrected. In addition, a comparison of our fMRI task with data from the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire, Revised German Version, demonstrated convergent validity. Our findings suggest that the precuneus and the PCC are involved in the evaluation of social events with particular regional specificities: The PCC is activated during emotional evaluation, the posterior precuneus during attributional evaluation, and the anterior precuneus during self-serving processes. Furthermore, we assume that insula activation is a correlate of awareness of personal agency in negative situations.     

Emotion regulation,disgust sensitivity,and psychophysiological responses to a disgust-inducing film

Abstract

Using a disgust-inducing film, Gross (1998) showed that the instruction to suppress mimic expression (suppression) triggered physiological arousal, while the instruction to think about the film in order to adopt a detached and unemotional attitude (reappraisal) reduced affective strain compared to a condition instructing subjects simply to watch the film (watch). The present paper investigates, if disgust sensitivity has a moderating role in this context. Physiological, subjective, and behavior responses were recorded in 120 males divided according to high/low disgust sensitivity who were exposed to the disgust-inducing film used by Gross. The instruction effects reported by Gross could not be replicated. However, high disgust-sensitive subjects were more physiologically and emotionally aroused than low disgust-sensitive subjects. Interactions between disgust sensitivity and the three film instructions can possibly be traced back to a repressive coping style of subjects with low disgust sensitivity.     

The Emotional Christ: Bonaventure and Deep Incarnation1

This article has the twofold aim of bringing the Christology of St. Bonaventure into dialogue with contemporary attempts to formulate an informational worldview, and with the recent theological proposal of deep incarnation. It is argued that even though Bonaventure is a pre‐modern theologian, he anticipates central aspects of a contemporary informational worldview based on differential information, structural information, and semantic information. Moreover, the article explores Bonaventure's unique combination of a “high” exemplarist Christology with a “low” Franciscan view of the humility of Christ. While Bonaventure shares seminal concerns of deep incarnation, his strong view of divine perfection prohibits him from assuming that the divinity of Christ embraces the full gamut of human emotions and anxieties related to the future.     

Algorithmic complexity for psychology: a user-friendly implementation of the coding theorem method

Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity has long been believed to be impossible to approximate when it comes to short sequences (e.g. of length 5-50). However, with the newly developed coding theorem method the complexity of strings of length 2-11 can now be numerically estimated. We present the theoretical basis of algorithmic complexity for short strings (ACSS) and describe an R-package providing functions based on ACSS that will cover psychologists’ needs and improve upon previous methods in three ways: (1) ACSS is now available not only for binary strings, but for strings based on up to 9 different symbols, (2) ACSS no longer requires time-consuming computing, and (3) a new approach based on ACSS gives access to an estimation of the complexity of strings of any length. Finally, three illustrative examples show how these tools can be applied to psychology.