The Evaluation of Psychoanalytical Practice in Stockholm

The authors discuss several surveys that cover the practices of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in the Stockholm region. They compare these practices with other psychiatrists in both the private and the public sector. In addition, they discuss the results from an attempt towards continuous evaluation of psychoanalytical practices and their treatment standards including an evaluation of the development of individual psychoanalytical processes.     

The hypnotic use of language — a Heideggerian interpretation

Abstract

This paper shows that Heidegger's theory of language has implications for our understanding of hypnosis. A Heideggerian interpretation of samples of trance inductions brings to light the fact that the hypnotic use of language differs from the everyday language in two major dimensions: in hypnosis, language “call” things into being, thus becoming “something more than a simple, practical means of communicating with others and a means of controlling nature” and in hypnosis, humans enter into a reversed relationship with language, a relationship in which it is language, rather than the hypnotist, that “speaks.”     

EMERGENCE AND NON‐PERSONAL THEOLOGY

In response to recent theories of emergence which attempt to examine system dynamics and the evolution of complexity from physics to biology and consciousness, a number of theologians have attempted to distill religious insights from a philosophical concept of emergence. Recent work by Terrence Deacon, however, which emphasizes constraint and a process understanding of complexity, undercuts significant features in emergent theologies, namely the privileging of certain loci within emergent complexity, an emphasis on efficient causation, and, theologically, an agential and personal God. The final section of this article, using the example of Navaho religious thought, argues that other religious insights which centralize norm‐ativity, global features of complexity, and are depersonalized, have greater traction with current scientific theories of emergence.     

The Recruiting Interview as Perceived by College Student Applicants for Sales Positions

The recruiting interview experience as perceived by college students applying for sales positions is the subject of this research study. The results, based on actual recruiting interviews through placement centers at two university campuses, describe the relative importance of various factors in the job offer and recruiting process, including characteristics of the recruiter. Analysis shows how these factors relate to the applicant's perceived success of the interview, the chance of getting a job offer, and the chance of accepting a job offer.     

Does Perceived Realism Really Matter in Media Effects?

Memory, perceived realism, and emotional responses to documentary and fictional film excerpts were investigated experimentally using adult participants. Documentary stimuli were perceived as more factual than their fiction counterparts at both semantic and syntactic levels. However, contrary to expectations, memory for visual and verbal information and the intensity of emotional reactions were greater overall for fiction films. Films whose content corresponded to well-known social themes and film genres also had a greater influence on memory and emotions. In general, it appears that perceived factuality does not have as compelling an influence on adults as it does on younger viewers. Results are interpreted in terms of the differences between cinematic attributes of documentary and fiction films and between the cognitive processes activated by these two film genres and by different themes.     

Modality exclusivity norms for 400 nouns: The relationship between perceptual experience and surface word form

We present modality exclusivity norms for 400 randomly selected noun concepts, for which participants provided perceptual strength ratings across five sensory modalities (i.e., hearing, taste, touch, smell, and vision). A comparison with previous norms showed that noun concepts are more multimodal than adjective concepts, as nouns tend to subsume multiple adjectival property concepts (e.g., perceptual experience of the concept baby involves auditory, haptic, olfactory, and visual properties, and hence leads to multimodal perceptual strength). To show the value of these norms, we then used them to test a prediction of the sound symbolism hypothesis: Analysis revealed a systematic relationship between strength of perceptual experience in the referent concept and surface word form, such that distinctive perceptual experience tends to attract distinctive lexical labels. In other words, modality-specific norms of perceptual strength are useful for exploring not just the nature of grounded concepts, but also the nature of form–meaning relationships. These norms will be of benefit to those interested in the representational nature of concepts, the roles of perceptual information in word processing and in grounded cognition more generally, and the relationship between form and meaning in language development and evolution.     

Action-centred negative priming: Evidence for reactive inhibition

Experiments are described in which the spatial relationship between a stimulus and respondent is held constant in terms of visual and body-centred coordinates, while the complexity of the response is manipulated. It is demonstrated that the degree of complexity of an action directed to the same spatial location determines the level of negative priming observed. This result supports the notions that (1) inhibitory selection mechanisms act on action-centred representations, and (2) the level of inhibition is reactive to the relative potency of the evoked action. The results are also discussed in terms of alternative explanations of negative priming. It is concluded that the results are inconsistent with theories that do not involve inhibitory selection mechanisms.     

Eliciting salient beliefs in research on the theory of planned behaviour: The effect of question wording

The authors of the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and its extension, the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) recommend that researchers who use these theories to investigate the determinants of a given behaviour should first conduct an elicitation study to identify the modal salient beliefs in the target population. In spite of the importance accorded to salient beliefs by the TRA/TPB, the elicitation stage has received little research attention. This paper reports a detailed analysis of beliefs about “being more physically active in the next 12 months.” A general population sample of 213 adults completed a questionnaire while attending a research centre for a series of tests. The findings showed that the beliefs that were elicited by questions designed to prompt affective outcomes (like or enjoy, dislike or hate) differed systematically from those that were elicited by the traditional questions designed to prompt instrumental out-comes (advantages and disadvantages). Whether this resulted in different final sets of modal salient beliefs was found to depend on the particular decision rule that was employed. An alternative decision rule is proposed, based on maximizing the degree of overlap between the modal set and the full set of salient beliefs generated by the sample. The index of overlap can be used to gauge the adequacy of using a modal set of a given size to represent the salient beliefs of the whole sample. In the current dataset, the optimal modal set for “advantages and disadvantages” was associated with only 26 percent overlap with the salient beliefs of the whole sample, which was judged to be insufficient. In such cases, a better strategy may be to ask participants to generate and rate their own beliefs.