Freedom – the abyssal ground of Freudian psychoanalysis

Freedom is an a priori condition for the way in which Freudian psychoanalysis thematizes the development, the structure and the dynamics of our psychic life; the human psyche is essentially constituted by freedom. What this really means is that psychoanalysis lacks a foundation or ground – both as a psychological science and as a kind of clinical treatment. Freedom is the abyssal ground of psychoanalysis.     

The Genealogy of “Empirical Post-structuralist” STS,Retold in Two Conjunctures: The Legacy of Hegel and Althusser

Recent discussions in science and technology studies (STS) about the risks of science and technology have led to political economy occupying centre stage. Closely related to political economy as a field of investigation are a number of overarching concepts, such as class, capitalism and interest. However, reliance on such concepts is rejected in post-Actor Network Theory STS. This stand-off over overarching categories can be traced back to two conjuntures in the genealogy of STS. First, the influence of Hegel and his concept of “totality”; and second, the influence from anti-hegelian French epistemology with its celebration of the opposite concept, that of “multiplicity”.     

Does activating justice help or hurt in promoting forgiveness?

Do justice values promote or obstruct forgiveness? This question has received virtually no empirical attention, even though past theorizing suggest two different answers. The literature on forgiveness suggests that justice constitutes a barrier to forgiveness, suggesting that the activation of justice values should decrease the probability of forgiveness. Conversely, the literature on justice and human values indicates that justice and forgiveness are positively associated, suggesting that the activation of justice should enhance the probability of forgiveness. Consistent with the latter line of reasoning, three studies, using complementary priming methods, provide converging evidence for the prediction that the activation of justice promotes (rather than obstructs) forgiveness. Implications for extant theory regarding forgiveness and justice are discussed.     

Relationship between anxiety and dyspnea on exertion in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Dyspnea limits exercise in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and is known to induce anxiety. Little is known whether anxiety contributes to exercise-induced dyspnea, which in turn might influence the outcome of diagnostic tests. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between general anxiety and dyspnea on exertion in patients with COPD. Ninety patients with stable COPD participated; 44 men, mean age 61 (standard deviation (SD) 10.4), and mean forced expiratory volume in 1 second (%pred.) 40.5 (SD 16.9). All participants performed pulmonary function tests and an incremental cycle ergometry. The Modified Borg Scale was used to measure the level of dyspnea on exertion. Anxiety symptoms were assessed with the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Data were analyzed using Spearman's correlations and multivariate regression. Dyspnea on exertion was correlated with general anxiety (r=.31), age (r=-.30), and exercise capacity (r=.27). Regression analysis showed that general anxiety was associated with dyspnea on exertion, adjusted for sex, age, baseline dyspnea, and exercise capacity. Consequently, it is reasoned that results of exercise training and activities in daily living may be influenced negatively by anxiety-worsened dyspnea. Attention should be given to anxiety management in patients with COPD to optimize exercise training.     

Dynamic prototypicality effects in visual search

In recent studies, researchers have discovered a larger neural activation for stimuli that are more extreme exemplars of their stimulus class, compared with stimuli that are more prototypical. This has been shown for faces as well as for familiar and novel shape classes. We used a visual search task to look for a behavioral correlate of these findings regarding both simple geometrical shapes and more complex, novel shape classes. The latter stimulus set enabled us to control for the physical properties of the shapes, establishing that the effects are solely due to the positions of the particular stimuli in a particular shape space (i.e., more extreme versus more central in shape space) and not to specific shape features. The results indicate that finding an atypical instance of a shape class among more prototypical ones is easier and faster than the other way around. The prototypical status of a shape in our experiment could change very quickly, that is, within minutes, depending on the subset of shapes that was shown to the participants. Manipulating the degree of familiarity toward the shapes by selectively increasing familiarity for the extreme shapes did not influence our results. In general, we show that the prototypical status of a stimulus in visual search is a highly dynamic property, depending on the distribution of stimuli within a shape space but not on familiarity with the prototype.     

A Boundary Mixture Approach to Violations of Conditional Independence

Conditional independence is a fundamental principle in latent variable modeling and item response theory. Violations of this principle, commonly known as local item dependencies, are put in a test information perspective, and sharp bounds on these violations are defined. A modeling approach is proposed that makes use of a mixture representation of these boundaries to account for the local dependence problem by finding a balance between independence on the one side and absolute dependence on the other side. In contrast to alternative approaches, the nature of the proposed boundary mixture model does not necessitate a change in formulation of the typical item characteristic curves used in item response theory. This has attractive interpretational advantages and may be useful for general test construction purposes.     

Emergence of perceptual Gestalts in the human visual cortex: the case of the configural-superiority effect

Many Gestalt phenomena have been described in terms of perception of a whole being not equal to the sum of its parts. It is unclear how these phenomena emerge in the brain. We used functional MRI to study the neural basis of the behavioral configural-superiority effect (i.e., visual search is more efficient when an odd element is part of a configuration than when it is presented by itself). We found that searching for the odd element in a display of four line segments (parts) was facilitated by adding two additional line segments to each of them (creating whole shapes). Functional MRI-based decoding of neural responses to the position of the odd element revealed a neural configural-superiority effect in shape-selective regions but not in low-level retinotopic areas, where decoding of parts was more pronounced. These results show how at least some Gestalt phenomena in vision emerge only at the higher stages of visual information processing and suggest that feed-forward processing might be sufficient to produce such phenomena.     

Attentional capture and hold: the oculomotor correlates of the change detection advantage for faces

The present study investigated the influence of semantic information on overt attention. Semantic influence on attentional capture and hold mechanisms was explored by measuring oculomotor correlates of the reaction time (RT) and accuracy advantage for faces in the change detection task. We also examined whether the face advantage was due to mandatory processing of faces or an idiosyncratic strategy by participants, by manipulating preknowledge of the object category in which to expect a change. An RT and accuracy advantage was found for detecting changes in faces compared to other objects of less social and biological significance, in the form of greater attentional capture and hold. The faster attentional capture by faces appeared to overcompensate for the longer hold, to produce faster and more accurate manual responses. Preknowledge did not eliminate the face advantage, suggesting that faces receive mandatory processing when competing for attention with stimuli of less sociobiological salience.     

A Note in Defence of Ratificationism

Andy Egan argues that neither evidential nor causal decision theory gives the intuitively right recommendation in the cases The Smoking Lesion, The Psychopath Button, and The Three-Option Smoking Lesion. Furthermore, Egan argues that we cannot avoid these problems by any kind of ratificationism. This paper develops a new version of ratificationism that gives the right recommendations. Thus, the new proposal has an advantage over evidential and casual decision theory and standard ratificationist evidential decision theory.