How a ten-year-old girl faced her death

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Ilse Hellman. From War Babies to Grandmothers: Forty-Eight Years in Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books &; The Institute of Psycho-Analysis. 1990. £16 (paperback).

James and Joyce Robertson. Separation and the Very Young. London: Free Association Books. 1989. £25.00 (hardback). Edward C. Melhuish and Peter Moss (eds.). Day Care for Young Children: International Perspectives. London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge. 1990. £12.99 (paperback).

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Caroline Case and Tessa Dalley (Editors): Working with Children in Art Therapy. Published by Tavistock/Routledge. London and New York, 1990. £14.9.     

Introduction: Fragmentation of the Unus Mundus

This panel is a series of presentations by a father and his three sons. The first is a critique of the concept of the Unus Mundus, an idea that goes back at least as far as Plato's Cave in western intellectual history. A longing for unchanging foundational ideas lies at the core of much of our culture, psychology, and theology. The subsequent presentations describe various unforeseen, destructive results stemming from the perspective of the Unus Mundus. The first example is of persons with Alzheimer's disease, whose singular subjectivity is often ignored because they are seen as a category. They are 'Alzheimer-ed', subtly enabling those around them to avoid an anxiety-producing encounter with their enigmatic otherness. Another important perspective is the modernist re-construction of city spaces that has resulted in the loss of an organic sense of containment. The lengthy horizon of the grand boulevards seemed like openings upon infinity, often provoking panic and agoraphobia, as seen in the work of Edvard Munch. Lastly, the genocidal tendencies of modern times epitomize the dangers of totalizing, Utopian ideas. Violent elimination may be visited upon groups or peoples who are deemed 'impure', as besmirching idealized social visions. Such examples illustrate some of the ethical dangers of conceptualizations related to the Unus Mundus.     

A systematic review of the relationship between religion and attitudes toward transgender and gender-variant people

Background: Prejudice against transgender people is widespread, yet in spite of the prevalence of this negativity relatively little is known about the antecedents and predictors of these attitudes. One factor that is commonly related to prejudice is religion, and this is especially true for prejudice targets that are considered to be “value violating” (as is the case for transgender individuals).

Method: In this paper, we present the findings of our systematic search of the literature on this topic and present the synthesized evidence. Our search strategy was conducted across five databases and yielded 29 studies (across 28 articles).

Results: We found consistent evidence that self-identifying as with either being “religious” or as Christian (and to a lesser extent, being Muslim) was associated with increased transprejudice relative to being nonreligious (and to a lesser extent, being Jewish). Additionally, we found consistent evidence that certain forms of religiosity were also related to transprejudice – specifically religious fundamentalism, church attendance, and interpretations of the bible as literal (transprejudice was unrelated to religious education).

Conclusion: Although this young, but important field of research is growing, more empirical exploration is needed to fully understand that nuances of the religion-transprejudice relationship.     

Separating figure from ground with a parallel network

The differentiation of figure from ground plays an important role in the perceptual organization of visual stimuli. The rapidity with which we can discriminate the inside from the outside of a figure suggests that at least this step in the process may be performed in visual cortex by a large number of neurons in several different areas working together in parallel. We have attempted to simulate this collective computation by designing a network of simple processing units that receives two types of information: bottom-up input from the image containing the outlines of a figure, which may be incomplete, and a top-down attentional input that biases one part of the image to be the inside of the figure. No presegmentation of the image was assumed. Two methods for performing the computation were explored: gradient descent, which seeks locally optimal states, and simulated annealing, which attempts to find globally optimal states by introducing noise into the computation. For complete outlines, gradient descent was faster, but the range of input parameters leading to successful performance was very narrow. In contrast, simulated annealing was more robust: it worked over a wider range of attention parameters and a wider range of outlines, including incomplete ones. Our network model is too simplified to serve as a model of human performance, but it does demonstrate that one global property of outlines can be computed through local interactions in a parallel network. Some features of the model, such as the role of noise in escaping from nonglobal optima, may generalize to more realistic models.     

Perceptual grouping in two visually reliant species: humans (Homo sapiens) and Australian sea lions (Neophoca cinerea).

Kurylo, van Nest, and Knepper (1997 Journal of Comparative Psychology 111 126-134) have recently shown that hooded rats are able to judge the global orientation of an array of elements if orientation is signalled by the perceptual-grouping principle of proximity, but not if it is signalled by element alignment. Using a procedure designed to overcome some potential problems with the experiment of Kurylo et al, we found the same distinction in the perceptual processing of Australian sea lions. The sea lions were able to judge the orientation of arrays containing strong proximity and similarity information, but performed at chance levels judging arrays in which element alignment signalled global orientation. Human subjects were able to judge all three pattern types quickly and accurately. This is strong evidence of a qualitative distinction in the way in which perceptual grouping operates in humans and the non-human species tested. Whether this distinction is a consequence of evolutionary or experiential factors is a question for future research, but the mere fact of a qualitative difference holds important implications for our understanding of perceptual grouping.