Content of maternal open-ended questions and statements in reminiscing with their 4-year-olds: links with independence and interdependence orientation in European contexts

Mother's open-ended questions and elaborative statements during reminiscing were analysed for their content (child agency, co-agency, non-social, and social context) in three cultural contexts. Participants were 115 mothers and their 4-year-old children: 35 dyads from Berlin, Germany, 42 from Stockholm, Sweden, and 38 from Tallinn, Estonia. Across samples the most prominent content was talk about non-social context followed by co-agency and child agency. Tallinn mothers asked the children to talk about themselves, and Berlin mothers asked the children to talk about themselves together with other people, more frequently than they talked about these contents themselves. The content was related to the cultural orientations of mothers assessed through questionnaires: the Berlin mothers whose independence/ interdependence ratio was higher talked less about other people and asked the children fewer questions about other people; the Stockholm mothers with a higher independence/interdependence ratio talked more about child agency. In Tallinn both correlations existed on a trend level. The results are discussed in the light of common conversational practices and mothers' orientation to independence and interdependence in these cultural contexts.     

Behavioral and physiological responses of young horses to different weaning protocols: a pilot study

In this study, effects of weaning on behavioral and physiological stress parameters in young horses (foals) were determined. Foals were weaned either simultaneously without the presence of adult horses (group A, n?=?6), or in the presence of two adult females familiar but unrelated to the foals (group B, n?=?5), or weaned consecutively by removing two mother horses per day (group C, n?=?6). Behavior, locomotion, salivary cortisol concentration, beat-to-beat (RR) interval, heart rate variability (HRV) and weight were determined. Group A foals lost weight for 2 days (mean?±?SEM) -?8.3?±?1.6?kg, p?相似文献   

Navigation assistance: a trade-off between wayfinding support and configural learning support

Current GPS-based mobile navigation assistance systems support wayfinding, but they do not support learning about the spatial configuration of an environment. The present study examined effects of visual presentation modes for navigation assistance on wayfinding accuracy, route learning, and configural learning. Participants (high-school students) visited a university campus for the first time and took a predefined assisted tour. In Experiment 1 (n = 84, 42 females), a presentation mode showing wayfinding information from eye-level was contrasted with presentation modes showing wayfinding information included in views that provided comprehensive configural information. In Experiment 2 (n = 48, 24 females), wayfinding information was included in map fragments. A presentation mode which always showed north on top of the device was compared with a mode which rotated according to the orientation of the user. Wayfinding accuracy (deviations from the route), route learning, and configural learning (direction estimates, sketch maps) were assessed. Results indicated a trade-off between wayfinding and configural learning: Presentation modes providing comprehensive configural information supported the acquisition of configural knowledge at the cost of accurate wayfinding. The route presentation mode supported wayfinding at the cost of configural knowledge acquisition. Both presentation modes based on map fragments supported wayfinding. Individual differences in visual-spatial working memory capacity explained a considerable portion of the variance in wayfinding accuracy, route learning, and configural learning. It is concluded that learning about an unknown environment during assisted navigation is based on the integration of spatial information from multiple sources and can be supported by appropriate visualization.     

Improving executive functions in 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds: Evaluation of a small group intervention in prekindergarten and kindergarten children

Research suggests a central role of executive functions for children's cognitive and social development during preschool years, especially in promoting school readiness. Interventions aiming to improve executive functions are therefore being called for. The present study examined the effect of a small group intervention implemented in kindergarten settings focusing on basic components of executive functions, i.e., working memory, interference control and cognitive flexibility. A total of 135 children enrolled in Swiss prekindergarten (5‐year‐olds) and kindergarten (6‐year‐olds) were involved. Results revealed that the small group intervention promoted gains in all three included components of executive functions: prekindergarten children substantially improved their working memory and cognitive flexibility processes, whereas significant training effects were found for the kindergarten children in interference control. Implications of these findings for early intervention programs and for tailoring preschool curricula are discussed, particularly with respect to children's school readiness. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Threat-relevance impairs executive functions: negative impact on working memory and response inhibition

The effects of emotional stimulus content on attention are well-known. In contrast, the impact of emotional information on higher executive control functions is undetermined. To elucidate the role of negative emotion in cognitive control, 56 adult female participants performed a combined working memory and response inhibition task, with threat-relevant (spider and snake) and neutral (flower and mushroom) stimuli. Threat-relevant stimuli impaired performance, by causing prolonged response times to working memory items and increased response inhibition error rate relative to neutral stimuli. The impaired response inhibition was only evident when threat-relevant stimuli co-occurred with working memory matches, in line with a common resource pool view of executive functions and emotion processing. Individual differences in reported fear of spiders were associated with differences of inhibitory control, while fear of snakes was associated with impaired overall accuracy on working memory trials. The results are discussed in relation to the dual-competition framework for interaction between executive functions and emotion (Pessoa, 2009).     

Ill-health in Sweden 2005: Discontent in a modern welfare society and its relation to globalization

Abstract

The growing ill-health in Sweden is related to the crisis of the welfare state and to globalization and the expansion of a new virtual reality affecting the conceptualization of time and space, as well as to wider areas of human interaction, thinking, and ethical judgment. Fear and anxiety are emotional states of mind that have widespread effects on an individual level as well as on the whole of society.     

The Ferenczi cult: its historical and political roots

I examine how Sándor Ferenczi has survived in the cultural memory of psychoanalysis, and why myths and legends have been created around his life and work. It seems that he could not escape the fate of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, most notably, that of Freud and Jung: their life and work have become an object of cultic respect for the followers, diabolic figures for the enemies. Quasi-religious cultivation of the “great man” is an often observable phenomenon in literature, politics, history and in science, and it has several political and ideological functions. These functions may help to increase the inner cohesion and the group identity of the cultic community, to defend the group against external threats. Psychoanalysis has always been vulnerable to myth formation; first, for obvious sociological reasons, and, secondly, for reasons originating in the nature of therapy. The cultic functions can be realized in several ways, such as, for example, the ritualization of the transmission of knowledge, and the “biography as passion” that is, attempts to create a biographical narrative in which all life history moments crystallize around the great man's central theme. Most of the biographies on the life of great psychoanalysts are of this kind – and Ferenczi is no exception. A historiography of psychoanalysis must follow the path of modern historiography in general, which attempts at deconstructing both myths and counter-myths about persons, events and processes, in political, as well as in cultural and intellectual history. By examining the structure of myth formation about psychoanalysts we can learn a lot about how ideas are operating in changing social contexts.     

The exclusion of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy from the publicly financed medical health sector in Sweden

Abstract

Schreber's fantasy of turning into a woman to be fertilized by God and produce a new race of mankind was a major motive for Superintendent of Sonnenstein, Dr Guido Weber, to maintain that Schreber was a case of chronic and incurable paranoia and unfit for life in society, failing to see the difference between the concrete and the metaphorical. Schreber not only proved Weber wrong, but prophetically anticipated a number of issues in current awareness of gender psychology and gender roles in society.

In Schreber's system the two principal elements of his delusions (his transformation into a woman and his favored relation to God) are linked by the assumption of a feminine attitude towarh God. It will be our task to show that there is an essential genetic relation between these two elements. Otherwise we shall be like a man holding a sieve under a he-goat while some one else milks it. Sigmung Freud