Exposure to an urban environment alters the local bias of a remote culture

There is substantial evidence that populations in the Western world exhibit a local bias compared to East Asian populations that is widely ascribed to a difference between individualistic and collectivist societies. However, we report that traditional Himba - a remote interdependent society - exhibit a strong local bias compared to both Japanese and British participants in the Ebbinghaus illusion and in a similarity-matching task with hierarchical figures. Critically, we measured the effect of exposure to an urban environment on local bias in the Himba. Even a brief exposure to an urban environment caused a shift in processing style: the local bias was reduced in traditional Himba who had visited a local town and even more reduced in urbanised Himba who had moved to that town on a permanent basis. We therefore propose that exposure to an urban environment contributes to the global bias found in Western and Japanese populations.     

Differences in performance of young and old monkeys on a visuospatial memory task

Two groups of stumptailed macaques (Macaca arctoides) were compared in terms of performance on a visuospatial working memory task involving repeated presentations of an array of 15 doors, each of which concealed one food reward at the start of a session. Rewards obtained by the subject were not replaced. Errors were defined as responses to doors previously pushed open during the session. Both groups generally obtained all rewards and showed improved performance across sessions, but old monkeys consistently made more errors than young ones, especially in the latter half of a given session. Further, old monkeys were less diverse in the errors they made, indicating different response strategies by the two groups.     

The dynamics of contemporary therapies

Deviations of behavior induced in animals by motivational conflicts can be alleviated by pharmocologic, environmental and dyadic or group retraining procedures analogous to those employed clinically. To be successful in humans, basic therapeutic modalities involving rapport, anamnestic review, cognitive reorientations and guided rehabilitation should resonate with universal and urgent (Ur) aspirations for physical vitality, social security and existential serenity.Adapted from a Plenary Address to the Eighth World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association, Athens, Greece, October, 1989.Past President, American Psychiatric Association and Honorary Life President, World Association for Social Psychiatry.     

On Regretting Things I Didn't Do and Couldn't Have Done

One of the lines of investigation opened up by Wallace in The View from Here concerns the notion of regret: what it is, what it is rationally constrained by, and what are the proper objects of regret. A distinctive feature of Wallace's view is that regret is an intention‐like state, which, whilst backward‐looking, is bound up with our future directed practices of value. In this commentary, I set out Wallace's claims on regret, its rational constraints, and its objects, and raise some worries about Wallace's position on each of these three issues.