THE EXPERIENCE OF HOME AND THE SPACE OF CITIZENSHIP

I argue that, although we are inherently intersubjective beings, we are not first or most originally “public” beings. Rather, to become a public being, that is, a citizen—in other words, to act as an independent and self‐controlled agent in a community of similarly independent and self‐controlled agents and, specifically, to do so in a shared space in the public arena—is something that we can successfully do only by emerging from our familiar, personal territories—our homes. Finding support in texts from philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences, I construe the claim that citizenship is a developed stance as a spatial issue. I conclude that a state (or, for that matter, a philosophy) that takes the human being to begin as an isolated individual agent fails to recognize the essential spatial relationships on which we depend—namely, those arising through our way of being‐at‐home in the world; and, as a result, such a stance not only misconstrues the parameters on which citizenship is itself possible but also risks developing a social situation that encourages behaviors we see in the agoraphobic—namely, the behaviors of alienated and fundamentally homeless human beings.     

Phonological similarity and the irrelevant speech effect: Implications for models of short-term verbal memory

Three experiments studied the interaction between irrelevant speech and phonological similarity within both the remembered and the irrelevant auditory material. Phonological similarity within the remembered list impaired performance in both baseline and irrelevant speech conditions, whereas phonological similarity between the remembered and ignored irrelevant items did not influence performance. Although there was a tendency for similarity within the irrelevant items to reduce interference, this proved to be a less robust finding. Implications for the theoretical interpretation of the irrelevant speech effect are discussed.     

Social Support in Marriage

The current study examines the role of perceived adequacy of social support provided by spouses for both marital and individual functioning. Married individuals from a college sample (N = 177) recorded the adequacy of specific supportive behaviors provided by the spouse on a daily basis for 7 days. Perceived support adequacy was correlated in the expected direction with marital quality, depressive symptomatology, and perceived stress. Furthermore, hierarchical multiple regressions indicated that perceived support adequacy accounts for significant unique variance in marital quality, depressive symptomatology, and perceived stress, even after controlling for social desirability. Discussion focuses on limitations of the study and implications of the findings for clinical work with couples.     

“Last Night I Dreamed I Went to Manderly Again”: Vicissitudes of Maternal Identifications in Late Female Adolescence

To move forward into sexual maturity with a sense of bodily agency, the girl must internalize identifications with the mother as a sexual adult in her own right. These new identifications arouse intense internal conflict brought on by internalization with its unconscious association with destructive oral aggression and the archaic fear of retaliatory maternal rage. The unconscious dilemma is how to metabolize the sexual mother and also keep her alive as an internal resource. I present material from analytic sessions and literature to illustrate a characteristic defensive fantasy of late adolescence and the underlying conflicts that the fantasy conceals and attempts to ward off. This fantasy links aggression, internalization, and associated unconscious phantasies of oral sadism. Internalization may be derailed if the daughter's conflicts around aggression are felt to be intolerable. When all goes reasonably well, the late-adolescent girl tolerates the intense aggression associated with internalization and metabolizes representations of the sexual mother as a resonating internal presence that supports and enhances progressive development.     

Mental rotation of letters,pictures, and three-dimensional objects in German dyslexic children

This study examines mental rotation ability in children with developmental dyslexia. Prior investigations have yielded equivocal results that might be due to differences in stimulus material and testing formats employed. Whereas some investigators found dyslexic readers to be impaired in mental rotation, others did not report any performance differences or even superior spatial performance for dyslexia. Here, we report a comparison of mental rotation for letters, three-dimensional figures sensu Shepard and Metzler, and colored pictures of animals or humans in second-grade German dyslexic readers. Findings indicate that dyslexic readers are impaired in mental rotation for all three kinds of stimuli. Effects of general intelligence were controlled. Furthermore, dyslexic children were deficient in other spatial abilities like identifying letters or forms among distracters. These results are discussed with respect to the hypotheses of a developmental dysfunction of the parietal cortex or a subtle anomaly in cerebellar function in dyslexic readers.     

Improved Insight into and Prediction of Network Dynamics by Combining VAR and Dimension Reduction

To understand within-person psychological processes, one may fit VAR(1) models (or continuous-time variants thereof) to multivariate time series and display the VAR(1) coefficients as a network. This approach has two major problems. First, the contemporaneous correlations between the variables will frequently be substantial, yielding multicollinearity issues. In addition, the shared effects of the variables are not included in the network. Consequently, VAR(1) networks can be hard to interpret. Second, crossvalidation results show that the highly parametrized VAR(1) model is prone to overfitting. In this article, we compare the pros and cons of two potential solutions to both problems. The first is to impose a lasso penalty on the VAR(1) coefficients, setting some of them to zero. The second, which has not yet been pursued in psychological network analysis, uses principal component VAR(1) (termed PC-VAR(1)). In this approach, the variables are first reduced to a few principal components, which are rotated toward simple structure; then VAR(1) analysis (or a continuous-time analog) is applied to the rotated components. Reanalyzing the data of a single participant of the COGITO study, we show that PC-VAR(1) has the better predictive performance and that networks based on PC-VAR(1) clearly represent both the lagged and the contemporaneous variable relations.     

Emotion processing and regulation in women with morbid obesity who apply for bariatric surgery

Emotional eating, the tendency to eat when experiencing negative affect, is prevalent in morbid obesity and may indicate that ways to deal with emotions are disturbed. Our aim was to compare emotion processing and regulation between 102 women with morbid obesity who apply for bariatric surgery and 102 women from the general population (control group) and to examine in the group with morbid obesity the association of emotion processing and regulation with emotional eating. The group with morbid obesity reported higher scores on difficulty identifying feelings (alexithymia, p?=?0.002) and suppression of emotions (p?=?0.003) than the control group. In the women with morbid obesity, more negative affect and a higher difficulty identifying feelings were correlated with more emotional eating (r?=?0.36 and r?=?0.35, p?<?0.001). Our study suggests that negative emotions and unhealthy emotion processing may play a role in emotional eating, and it indicates the possible relevance of emotion processing and emotional regulation as initiating or perpetuating mechanisms in morbid obesity.     

Community as Outsider Witness: Utilising Community Members in the Reconstitution of Problem-Saturated Identities

This study explored community members' ability to enlist discourses affirming of psychiatric patients' quest for generative identities. The participants were members of the public who attended an exhibition of psychiatric patients' artwork (n = 7, age range 18–55). A Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to analyse the research interviews. Results revealed that the majority of community members used dominant cultural discourses to speak about psychiatric patient-artists. These discourses conferred a problem-saturated identity on to psychiatric patients. We conclude that community members can be recruited as outsider witnesses to support psychiatric patients' search for generative identities, provided community members resist discourses that produce problem-saturated identity conclusions.     

Can Toddlers Learn Vocabulary from Television? An Experimental Approach

This study was inspired by the rise in television targeting toddlers and preverbal infants (e.g., Teletubbies, Baby Mozart). Overall, we investigated if very young children who are in the early stages of language acquisition can learn vocabulary quickly (fast map) from television programs. Using a fast mapping paradigm, this study examined a group (n = 48) of toddlers (15–24 months) and their ability to learn novel words. Utilizing a repeated measures design, we compared children's ability to learn various novel words in 5 different conditions. These included the presentation and identification of a novel word by an adult speaker via live presentation when the toddler was attending (i.e., joint reference), an adult via live presentation when the toddler was not attending, an adult speaker on television, and an edited clip from a children's television program (Teletubbies). Overall, the toddlers were most successful in learning novel words in the joint reference condition. They were significantly less successful in the children's program condition. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between age and condition on children's performance. Both younger (15–21 months) and older (22–24 months) participants identified the target objects when they were taught the novel word by an adult speaker; however, it appeared that children under the age of 22 months did not identify the target item when they were taught the novel word via the television program.     

Cognitive-behavioural Treatment of a Patient Suffering from Menière's Disease

Abstract

Vertigo and dizziness may cause considerable discomfort and feelings of uncertainty. It is no surprise that vertigo is the most disabling symptom in Menière's disease, an inner ear disorder. The other two cardinal symptoms are tinnitus and hearing impairment. In this study, one severely disabled woman was treated with a cognitive-behavioural treatment comprising, among other components, relaxation training, stabilization of gaze, cognitive restructuring and behavioural task setting. The patient responded well to the treatment, during which her vertigo attacks disappeared. During the follow-up period, she experienced vertigo attacks again, but after two booster sessions the vertigo attacks vanished for the rest of the follow-up period. The results are further discussed.