On Unconscious Communications and Covert Enactments: Some Reflections on Their Role in the Analytic Situation

By means of an extended clinical example, this paper focuses on the impact that unconscious communications in the form of nonverbal behavior may have on the course and outcome of an analysis.

Responding to sudden catastrophic illnesses in their fathers, patient and analyst created enactments aimed at blinding them to hard truths about their relationships with this parent.

Serving as powerful resistances that led to a stalemate and all but ended treatment, these nonverbal enactments had to be recognized, confronted, and understood by both participants before analytic work could be resumed and progress achieved in this analysis.     

Tracing the Path from Personality — via Cooperativeness — to Conservation

Ecological behaviour is often conceptualized as an instance of cooperating in a social dilemma situation. Thus, it has been argued to relate to dispositional tendencies of moral virtue and pro‐social orientation. To embed such notions in models of basic personality, we herein predicted that the recently proposed sixth basic personality factor, Honesty–Humility — which specifically pertains to individual differences in cooperativeness — is linked to environmental attitudes and ecological behaviour. Results from two studies (N = 137 and N = 531, respectively) supported these hypotheses and showed that Honesty–Humility explains incremental variance beyond the remaining, more classical five factors of personality. In addition, mediation analyses revealed that Honesty–Humility exerts part of its influence via individual differences in pro‐social value orientations. Individual tendencies to cooperate in social dilemma situations could thus be shown to form a bridge between basic personality dimensions and ecological behaviour. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When we like what we know – A parametric fMRI analysis of beauty and familiarity

This paper presents a neuroscientific study of aesthetic judgments on written texts. In an fMRI experiment participants read a number of proverbs without explicitly evaluating them. In a post-scan rating they rated each item for familiarity and beauty. These individual ratings were correlated with the functional data to investigate the neural correlates of implicit aesthetic judgments. We identified clusters in which BOLD activity was correlated with individual post-scan beauty ratings. This indicates that some spontaneous aesthetic evaluation takes place during reading, even if not required by the task. Positive correlations were found in the ventral striatum and in medial prefrontal cortex, likely reflecting the rewarding nature of sentences that are aesthetically pleasing. On the contrary, negative correlations were observed in the classic left frontotemporal reading network. Midline structures and bilateral temporo-parietal regions correlated positively with familiarity, suggesting a shift from the task-network towards the default network with increasing familiarity.     

The impact of context on pattern category learning and representation

Context traditionally has been regarded in vision research as a determinant for the interpretation of sensory information on the basis of previously acquired knowledge. Here we propose a novel, complementary perspective by showing that context also specifically affects visual category learning. In two experiments involving sets of Compound Gabor patterns we explored how context, as given by the stimulus set to be learned, affects the internal representation of pattern categories. In Experiment 1, we changed the (local) context of the individual signal classes by changing the configuration of the learning set. In Experiment 2, we varied the (global) context of a fixed class configuration by changing the degree of signal accentuation. Generalization performance was assessed in terms of the ability to recognize contrast-inverted versions of the learning patterns. Both contextual variations yielded distinct effects on learning and generalization thus indicating a change in internal category representation. Computer simulations suggest that the latter is related to changes in the set of attributes underlying the production rules of the categories. The implications of these findings for phenomena of contrast (in)variance in visual perception are discussed.     

Perceiving minority members as individuals: the effects of relative group size in social categorization

According to the account by comparative distinctiveness, minorities draw attention by virtue of their relative size, leading to more individuation and more stereotyping of their members. Using the ‘Who said what?’ paradigm by Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, and Ruderman ( 1978 ) in Klauer and Wegener's ( 1998 ) modified version, relative group size of gender categories and age categories was varied in a pilot study and a main experiment, respectively. In the pilot study, memory for discussion statements and in both studies, memory for individuating information increased as subgroup size decreased. Rating measures obtained in the main experiment revealed most stereotyping of minority members. The findings thereby support major predictions of the account by comparative distinctiveness, but demonstrate dissociations between different modes of category‐based processing, i.e. category memory, reconstructive category use, and stereotyping. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emergent Individuals

We explain the thesis that human mental states are ontologically emergent aspects of a fundamentally biological organism. We then explore the consequences of this thesis for the identity of a human person over time. As these consequences are not obviously independent of one's general ontology of objects and their properties, we consider four such accounts: transcendent universals, kind-Aristotelianism, immanent universals, and tropes. We suggest there are reasons for emergentists to favour the latter two accounts. We then argue that within such ontologies, emergentism about properties pushes one to the stronger claim that there are emergent individuals, though not individuals which are dual to person's bodies — substance emergentism, but not substance dualism.     

Self‐Priming in Production: Evidence for a Hybrid Model of Syntactic Priming

Syntactic priming in language production is the increased likelihood of using a recently encountered syntactic structure. In this paper, we examine two theories of why speakers can be primed: error‐driven learning accounts (Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) and activation‐based accounts (Pickering & Branigan, 1999; Reitter, Keller, & Moore, 2011). Both theories predict that speakers should be primed by the syntactic choices of others, but only activation‐based accounts predict that speakers should be able to prime themselves. Here we test whether speakers can be primed by their own productions in three behavioral experiments and find evidence of structural persistence following both comprehension and speakers’ own productions. We also find that comprehension‐based priming effects are larger for rarer syntactic structures than for more common ones, which is most consistent with error‐driven accounts. Because neither error‐driven accounts nor activation‐based accounts fully explain the data, we propose a hybrid model.