The adventurous emigration of the Ferencziana: Contribution to their history

Abstract

This article retraces the long winding path followed by important documents on and by Freud and Ferenczi, first crossing the European continent in the flames of war and other horrors, and later being hosted by several cities. Eventually, after Judith Dupont's gift of her Paris archives to the Freud Museum in London in 2013, the collection of papers donated by Enid Balint to the custody of this author and kept for two decades in Geneva was finally deposited in the Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society, also in London. Some other details and anecdotes of this long trip are also evoked.     

TENI: A comprehensive battery for cognitive assessment based on games and technology

TENI (Test de Evaluación Neuropsicológica Infantil) is an instrument developed to assess cognitive abilities in children between 3 and 9 years of age. It is based on a model that incorporates games and technology as tools to improve the assessment of children’s capacities. The test was standardized with two Chilean samples of 524 and 82 children living in urban zones. Evidence of reliability and validity based on current standards is presented. Data show good levels of reliability for all subtests. Some evidence of validity in terms of content, test structure, and association with other variables is presented. This instrument represents a novel approach and a new frontier in cognitive assessment. Further studies with clinical, rural, and cross-cultural populations are required.     

The ball vanishes in the air: can we blame representational momentum?

In the vanishing ball illusion (VBI), the magician throws a ball up into the air twice and then pretends to do a third throw. On the third (fake) throw, the audience sees the ball go up and then disappear. In this article, we study the psychological mechanisms at play in this magic trick. We test the hypothesis that the illusion is based on representational momentum (RM), a psychological phenomenon in which the observer perceives the stopping point of a moving scene as being located farther ahead in the direction of motion than it really is. To determine whether the mechanisms involved in VBI are similar to those underlying RM, we compared the results of a standard VBI task to those obtained on an RM task designed to be very close to the VBI task. The results showed that VBI sensitivity was not associated with a higher anticipation score on the RM task. Unexpectedly, we found that participants who were sensitive to the illusion even obtained a weaker RM effect. We discuss several hypotheses that might account for these results.     

Joking for Gender Equality: Subversive Humor Against Sexism Motivates Collective Action in Men and Women with Weaker Feminist Identity

Sex Roles - Subversive humor has historically been considered a way of protesting, raising awareness, and seeking change. However, to date, no known empirical research has explored the consequences...     

Investigating the Links Between Cultural Values and Belief in Conspiracy Theories: The Key Roles of Collectivism and Masculinity

Research suggests that belief in conspiracy theories (CT) stems from basic psychological mechanisms and is linked to other belief systems (e.g., religious beliefs). While previous research has extensively examined individual and contextual variables associated with CT beliefs, it has not yet investigated the role of culture. In the current research, we tested, based on a situated cultural cognition perspective, the extent to which culture predicts CT beliefs. Using Hofstede's model of cultural values, three nation-level analyses of data from 25, 19, and 18 countries using different measures of CT beliefs (Study 1, N = 5323; Study 2a, N = 12,255; Study 2b, N = 30,994) revealed positive associations between masculinity, collectivism, and CT beliefs. A cross-sectional study among U.S. citizens (Study 3, N = 350), using individual-level measures of Hofstede's values, replicated these findings. A meta-analysis of correlations across studies corroborated the presence of positive links between CT beliefs, collectivism, r = .31, 95% CI = [.15; .47], and masculinity, r = .39, 95% CI = [.18; .59]. Our results suggest that in addition to individual differences and contextual variables, cultural factors also play an important role in shaping CT beliefs.     

Facial electromyography reveals dissociable affective responses in social and non-social cooperation

While economic standard theory explains cooperation in terms of rational decision-making, empirical studies suggest that humans have social preferences for cooperating with others. We investigated the specificity of these social preferences for interactions with human, relative to non-human, agents in a prisoner’s dilemma game. To obtain insights into emotional processes during cooperation, we measured activity of the corrugator supercilii muscle as indicator of spontaneous emotional responding during cooperation. After unreciprocated defection (free-riding), participants switched more often to a cooperative strategy and showed increased corrugator activity (suggesting more negative emotional responses) when playing with a human relative to a computer. This suggests that humans have a specific preference for cooperating with other humans and that cooperation may be promoted by unpleasant affect in response to the outcome of one’s own “free-riding”.     

Increased conspiracy beliefs among ethnic and Muslim minorities

In the present study, we tested whether Muslim minority members are more susceptible to conspiracy theories than majority members in the Netherlands. We examined conspiracy theories that are relevant (portraying the Muslim community as victim or Jewish people as perpetrators) and irrelevant for participants' Muslim identity (about the 2007 financial crisis, and other theories such as that the moon landings were fake). Results revealed that Muslims believed both identity‐relevant and irrelevant conspiracy theories more strongly than non‐Muslims. These differences could not be attributed to the contents of Muslim faith: Ethnic minority status exerted similar effects independent of Muslim identity. Instead, evidence suggested that feelings of both personal and group‐based deprivation independently contribute to belief in conspiracy theories. We conclude that feelings of deprivation lead marginalized minority members to perceive the social and political system as rigged, stimulating belief in both identity‐relevant and irrelevant conspiracy theories.     

The Flushtration Count Illusion: Attribute substitution tricks our interpretation of a simple visual event sequence

When faced with a difficult question, people sometimes work out an answer to a related, easier question without realizing that a substitution has taken place (e.g., Kahneman, 2011, Thinking, fast and slow. New York, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux). In two experiments, we investigated whether this attribute substitution effect can also affect the interpretation of a simple visual event sequence. We used a magic trick called the ‘Flushtration Count Illusion’, which involves a technique used by magicians to give the illusion of having seen multiple cards with identical backs, when in fact only the back of one card (the bottom card) is repeatedly shown. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that most participants are susceptible to the illusion, even if they have the visual and analytical reasoning capacity to correctly process the sequence. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that participants construct a biased and simplified representation of the Flushtration Count by substituting some attributes of the event sequence. We discussed of the psychological processes underlying this attribute substitution effect.     

Categories, prototypes and memory systems in Alzheimer's disease

Recent studies indicate that category learning is mediated by multiple neuronal systems. It has been shown that patients with marked impairments in executive functions, explicit memory and procedural learning can categorize the exemplars and prototype of a previously trained category. Simple, self-organizing neuronal networks can explain prototype learning and related dysfunctions in Alzheimer's disease, and provide a model of how prototype learning is mediated by circumscribed mechanisms in the visual cortex.     

Macbeth and the Joystick: Evidence for moral cleansing after playing a violent video game

The “Macbeth effect” denotes the phenomenon that people wish to cleanse themselves physically when their moral self has been threatened. In this article we argue that such a threat to one's moral self may also result from playing a violent video game, especially when the game involves violence against humans. The cleansing effect should be particularly strong among inexperienced players who do not play video games on a regular basis, because frequent players may apply other strategies to alleviate any moral concerns. Seventy students played one of two violent video games and were then asked to select 4 out of 10 gift products, half of which were hygiene products. Inexperienced players reported more moral distress when the game involved violence against humans (compared to violence against objects), and selected more hygiene products in this condition than frequent video game players. Frequent players, on the other hand, reported less moral distress, irrespective of the game they played.