Helping patients by analyzing self-criticism

This paper is addressed to patients' need for help with punitive self-critical attitudes. Such help has not always been sufficiently provided by psychoanalysts, owing to an unrecognized failure of neutrality. Historically, a gradual overemphasis on the concept of an unconscious sense of guilt has acted as a barrier to the appreciation of shame. An alternative concept, punitive unconscious self-criticism, which stands in contrast to constructive self-criticism and is common to the painful affects of guilt, shame, humiliation, and depression, can facilitate helpful analytic treatment. Heinz Kohut's contributions are examined. His analytic stance is differentiated from his theories of development. In the former, characterized by an affirmative attitude, he takes a position of functional neutrality toward shame and pays consistent though unstated attention to the effects of punitive unconscious self-criticism. The affirmative attitude can be employed without adoption of Kohut's self psychology, i.e., without abandoning the basic psychoanalytic approach to mental conflict and development. The concept of punitive unconscious self-criticism and the concept of divergent conflict, provide sufficient explanatory power. Clinical examples are used to illustrate these ideas.     

Hedges enhance memory but inhibit retelling

We examined the effects of hedges and the discourse marker like on how people recalled specific details about precise quantities in spontaneous speech. We found that listeners treated hedged information differently from like-marked information, although both are thought to be indicators of uncertainty or vagueness. In addition, hedges had different effects depending on whether speakers were (1) retelling conversations to another person or (2) answering questions about material they had heard. When retelling to another person, listeners were more likely to report information that was either unmarked or marked with a like than hedged information (Experiment 1). Yet when answering questions by themselves, hedges enhanced memory for details, in comparison with likes (Experiment 2). Hedges appear to provide pragmatic cues about what information is reliable enough to repeat in a conversational context. But although hedged information may be left out, it is not forgotten.     

Eye movements and the perceptual span in silent and oral reading

Previous research has examined parafoveal processing during silent reading, but little is known about the role of these processes in oral reading. Given that masking parafoveal information slows down silent reading, we asked whether a similar effect also occurs in oral reading. To investigate the role of parafoveal processing in silent and oral reading, we manipulated the parafoveal information available to readers by changing the size of a gaze-contingent moving window. Participants read silently and orally in a one-word window and a three-word window condition as we monitored their eye movements. The lack of parafoveal information slowed reading speed in both oral and silent reading. However, the effects of parafoveal information were larger in silent reading than in oral reading, because of different effects of preview information on both when the eyes move and how often. Parafoveal information benefitted silent reading for faster readers more than for slower readers.     

Film violence and the American civil religion: A Girardian analysis of the birth of a nation

In concert with an evolving scholarship rethinking relations between media, religion, and culture, this article revisits one of the key media events of the twentieth century: D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation. It locates Griffith's picture in relation to the problems of American Protestantism during the early part of the last century, and discusses the film as a response to the upheavals of modernisation in the United States. Applying a theoretical perspective based in the ideas of Rene Girard, it examines the way in which the film's appeal to white nationalist sentiment was organised in terms of sacrifice, and argues that Griffith was quite deliberately seeking to transform the religious bases of American national identity.     

Narrative and Rhetorical Approaches to Problems of Education. Jerome Bruner and Kenneth Burke Revisited

Over the last few decades there has been a strong narrative turn within the humanities and social sciences in general and educational studies in particular. Especially Jerome Bruner’s theory of narrative as a specific ‘mode of knowing’ was very important for this growing body of work. To understand how the narrative mode works Bruner proposes to study narratives ‘at their far reach’—as an art form—and on several occasions he refers to the dramatistic pentad as an important method for ‘unpacking’ narratives. The pentad proposed by Bruner to study narratives was developed by the American philosopher and rhetorician Kenneth Burke and is embedded in his general linguistic theory of dramatism. From an educational perspective Bruner’s reference to the work of Burke has not been elaborated upon thus far. In this paper we aim to take Bruner’s suggestion at hand and explore how his educational theory of narrative as a mode of knowing can indeed be enriched by Kenneth Burke’s theory and method of dramatism. We claim that specifically the rhetorical framework that is developed by dramatism offers an important perspective about perspectives for education in a context that is increasingly confronted with a plurality of interpretive frameworks.     

The recovery of blocked memories in repeated recall tests

There is continued controversy over the possibility of blocked and subsequently recovered accurate memories. Memory blocking produced by a retrieval biasing procedure followed by recovery through repeated testing was demonstrated in two experiments. Predictions derived from the retrieval bias explanation and from the level of cumulative recall (LOCR) concerning hypermnesia for blocked material were tested. Expt 1 disconfirmed the retrieval bias hypothesis that the blocked material would remain blocked. However, there was no accelerated recovery despite the lower rate of recall for the bias group compared to the control group as predicted based on LOCR. Expt 2 replicated the Expt 1 findings and used metamemory tasks to further explore the recovery process. The data led the authors to conclude that accurate recovery of memory with corresponding high confidence is possible through repeated testing provided suggestive questioning and misinformation are not presented.