The Positive Side of Stereotypes: Jewish Anarchists in Early-twentieth-Century Buenos Aires

During the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, anarchism represented the most important faction of the radical left in the Atlantic world. This movement attracted a disproportionately high number of Jews. During the same period Buenos Aires became both an important magnet for Jewish immigration and one of the main centers of anarchist activism in the world. This article shows how the Jewish presence in the anarchist movement of the city became, in an amazingly short time and almost ex nihilo, so visible that it turned into a stereotype. The article then attempts to provide an explanation for this phenomenon that relies on a sociological and comparative perspective and questions notions of Jewish exceptionalism and arguments based on the eschatology and ethics of Judaism. Finally, it explores how stereotypes that function at one level as signifiers of alterity and mechanisms of exclusion, can, at another social level, promote acceptance and check anti-Semitism.     

Effects of social and affective content on exogenous attention as revealed by event-related potentials

The social content of affective stimuli has been proposed as having an influence on cognitive processing and behaviour. This research was aimed, therefore, at studying whether automatic exogenous attention demanded by affective pictures was related to their social value. We hypothesised that affective social pictures would capture attention to a greater extent than non-social affective stimuli. For this purpose, we recorded event-related potentials in a sample of 24 participants engaged in a digit categorisation task. Distracters were affective pictures varying in social content, in addition to affective valence and arousal, which appeared in the background during the task. Our data revealed that pictures depicting high social content captured greater automatic attention than other pictures, as reflected by the greater amplitude and shorter latency of anterior P2, and anterior and posterior N2 components of the ERPs. In addition, social content also provoked greater allocation of processing resources as manifested by P3 amplitude, likely related to the high arousal they elicited. These results extend data from previous research by showing the relevance of the social value of the affective stimuli on automatic attentional processing.     

The number 747 is named faster after seeing Boeing than after seeing Levi's: Associative priming in the processing of multidigit Arabic numerals

Two experiments are reported in which naming multidigit Arabic numerals was shown to depend on the context in which the numbers were presented. Number naming and number decisions were faster after an associative prime (e.g., 747 preceded by the word Boeing) than after an unre- lated prime, both in unmasked and masked priming conditions. On the basis of these findings, we conclude that number naming is not always based on a quantity-based semantically mediated pathway.     

The effects of pre-exposure on escape from a Morris pool

In two experiments rats were pre-exposed to the landmarks surrounding a Morris pool while they swam to a platform with a beacon attached to it. They were then required to escape from the pool by finding the platform, without the beacon, in a new position. When the platform remained in the same place for each pre-exposure session, but was moved from session to session, then subsequent escape from the pool was more rapid than when the landmarks were not visible during pre-exposure (Experiment 1). But when the platform was moved from trial to trial during pre-exposure, then subsequent escape from the pool was disrupted (Experiments 1 and 2). It is proposed that pre-exposure to the landmark alters the attention that is paid to them, which then influences how readily the landmarks can be used to identify the new position of the platform.     

Die Organisation des Kollektivlebens

Ohne Zusammenfassung