Congruence or coherence? Emotional and physiological responses to colours in synaesthesia

Lexical–chromatic synaesthesia is a condition in which letters and/or words elicit percepts of synaesthetic colours, termed photisms. Anecdotal data suggest that synaesthetes are particularly sensitive to inconsistencies between their synaesthetic percepts and the real world, e.g., it can be annoying and unpleasant for them to see a letter printed in a colour different than the respective photism colour. For R, a synaesthete subject who participated in the present study, the photisms possess specific emotional values (a red photism is pleasing and attractive, green is repulsive and unpleasant, etc.). In contrast to the anecdotal data, R does not always find the colour–photism incongruence to be disturbing. More importantly, he states that it is the emotional coherence between the stimulus and the corresponding photism that matters. In a series of experiments, we studied this new concept of emotional coherence on three levels—subjective (self-report), behavioural, and physiological, corroborating R's introspective statements. Besides the implications of the concept of coherence itself, the results presented here suggest that even highly subjective cognitive constructs can be approached and measured experimentally, uncovering the workings of the underlying psychophysiological mechanisms.     

Parents' structuring of children's daily lives in relation to the quality and stability of children's friendships

This study focused on the implications of parents' structuring of their children's home lives for the friendships of their children. Participants were 224 elementary‐school children (108 girls and 116 boys) from four grade levels in two schools in Aix‐en‐Provence, France. Most of the families were of middle or high socio‐economic status. The participating children were seen twice during the same school year in order to assess the stability of their friendship choices and the quality of their friendships. We used Lautrey's (1989) questionnaire in order to assess the parents' styles in the structuring of family life and related child‐rearing practice. This questionnaire delineates three structuring styles: 1) rigid, characterized by considerable imposition of routines with little leeway for exceptional circumstances; 2) flexible, in which established routines can be modified as circumstances dictate; and 3) laissez‐faire, characterized by an absence of predictability and routine. We measured friendship quality by means of Friendship Quality Scale developed by Bukowski, Hoza, and Boivin (1989). This scale consists of 23 items representing five dimensions: companionship, help, security, closeness and conflict. This tool was designed to elicit children's perceptions of a specific relationship with a friend. Results indicated a significant link between parenting style and both of the dimensions of child friendship we studied. Children from homes characterized by a laissez‐faire style of parenting have friendships with more positive features than children from homes with flexible or rigid styles. We also found that friendships were generally less stable and rated as less positive than in similar studies conducted in other countries.     

Attentional distraction and time perception in children

The purpose of the present study was to test the effect of attentional distraction on temporal bisection performance in 5‐ and 8‐year‐old children. During a first learning phase, children were trained to discriminate on a temporal bisection task a short standard duration (2 sec) from a long one (8 sec), presented as visual stimuli. Later, in a second testing phase, intermediate durations (3, 4, 5, 6, 7 s), including the standard durations, were presented. Children's task still was to report if it was a short standard duration or a long one. In addition, during the non‐standard duration, a distracter either did or did not appear. Results showed increasing proportions of “it is the long standard duration” (response “long”) with increasing stimulus durations in both distracter and non‐distracter conditions. However, psychophysical functions were flatter in the 5‐year‐olds than in the 8‐year‐olds, revealing their lower sensibility to time. Nevertheless, the 5‐year‐olds' proportion of long responses was higher under the distracter than in the non‐distracter condition. Consequently, the point of subjective equality (PSE), corresponding to the stimulus duration to which the subject produced 50% of responses of “long” was lower under the distracter condition as compared to the non‐distracter condition. Conversely, for the 8‐year‐olds, the PSE was significantly higher in the distracter than in the non‐distracter condition. Five‐year old children overestimated the time in the presence of an attentional distracter, whereas 8‐year olds tended to underestimate it. The leftward shift and the rightward shift of the PSE in the 5‐ and the 8‐year‐olds, respectively, were accounted for by limited‐capacity attention in the five‐year olds.     

RECRIMINATION IN THE ANALYTIC SITUATION: A HYPOTHESIS ABOUT ITS INFLUENCE ON PSYCHOANALYTICAL GROUPS

This paper deals with certain distortions in communication generated by mutual recrimination that is the result of disturbances in the ideal agencies of both parties. Although the ideal ego, superego and ego ideal participate equally in reproach, it is the latter which is the most decisive. In clinical experience, recrimination may easily colour the analytic dialogue. In such cases, interpretation loses its sense of clarification and another type of dialogue replaces it. There, words are used to take possession of the other, for its autonomy is a threat to the static character of the pathology of mourning. The problem of recrimination has also tainted the development of psychoanalysis, to the point of disrupting the process of discovery itself. This paper deals with repercussions in the psychoanalytic movement and also in the elements that constitute its structure. Finally, different variations and disturbances in the psychoanalytic ideal are considered, as well as the involvement of the psychoanalytic institution in preserving or transforming the ideal. Here the importance of institutions and institutional ideals is emphasised. Finally, we suggest that ideals either encourage or hinder the working through of individual and collective mourning.     

The Role of Prototypical Situations in the Perceptions of Prejudice of African Americans1

Inman and Baron (1996) found that African Americans and Whites possess prototypes for racist behavior that involve Whites oppressing African Americans. However, prototypical content may be more detailed and specific for African Americans because of differing cultural experiences. In the present experiment, undergraduates read stories about interpersonal encounters representing prototypical and nonprototypical situations. Actor race ambiguity was manipulated by the presence or absence of photographs. As expected, Whites tended to make equal ratings of prejudiced behavior for prototypical and nonprototypical situations. However, African Americans perceived more prejudice in prototypical vignettes than in nonprototypical vignettes. They also perceived stronger prejudicial displays and more dispositional motivation for targets in prototypical vignettes. The results suggest that African Americans have heightened sensitivity to prejudice in specific situations, a factor that may contribute to racial confrontations and misunderstandings.     

Vagueness and Margin for Error Principles*

Timothy Williamson's potentially most important contribution to epistemicism about vagueness lies in his arguments for the basic epistemicist claim that the alleged cut‐off points of vague predicates are not knowable. His arguments for this are based on so‐called ‘margin for error principles’. This paper argues that these principles fail to provide a good argument for the basic claim. Williamson has offered at least two kinds of margin for error principles applicable to vague predicates. A certain fallacy of equivocation (on the meaning of ‘knowable’) seems to underlie his justification for both kinds of principles. Besides, the margin for error principles of the first kind can be used in the derivation of unacceptable consequences, while the margin for error principles of the second kind can be shown to be compatible with the falsity of epistemicism, under a number of assumptions acceptable to the epistemicist.     

On the Standard and Rational Completeness of some Axiomatic Extensions of the Monoidal T-norm Logic

The monoidal t-norm based logic MTL is obtained from Hájek's Basic Fuzzy logic BL by dropping the divisibility condition for the strong (or monoidal) conjunction. Recently, Jenei and Montgana have shown MTL to be standard complete, i.e. complete with respect to the class of residuated lattices in the real unit interval [0,1] defined by left-continuous t-norms and their residua. Its corresponding algebraic semantics is given by pre-linear residuated lattices. In this paper we address the issue of standard and rational completeness (rational completeness meaning completeness with respect to a class of algebras in the rational unit interval [0,1]) of some important axiomatic extensions of MTL corresponding to well-known parallel extensions of BL. Moreover, we investigate varieties of MTL algebras whose linearly ordered countable algebras embed into algebras whose lattice reduct is the real and/or the rational interval [0,1]. These embedding properties are used to investigate finite strong standard and/or rational completeness of the corresponding logics.     

Depressed mothers' newborns show longer habituation and fail to show face/voice preference

Twenty neonates of depressed and nondepressed mothers failed to show an initial visual preference for their mother's versus a female stranger's face/voice. Subsequently, infants were habituated to their mother's face and voice. Infants of depressed mothers required 1/3 more trials and almost twice as long to habituate. A posthabituation test with their mother and a different female stranger revealed a preference for the stranger's face for 9 out of the 10 newborns of the nondepressed mothers. Again, the infants of depressed mothers displayed no visual preference. These findings reveal differences in depressed mothers newborns' speed of habituation and face/voice preferences. ©2002 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.