Do Master Narratives Change Among High School Students? A Characterization of How National History Is Represented

Master narratives frame students’ historical knowledge, possibly hindering access to more historical representations. A detailed analysis of students’ historical narratives about the origins of their own nation is presented in terms of four master narrative characteristics related to the historical subject, national identification, the main theme and the nation concept. The narratives of Argentine 8th and 11th graders were analyzed to establish whether a change toward a more complex historical account occurred. The results show that the past is mostly understood in master narrative terms but in the 11th grade narratives demonstrate a more historical understanding. Only identification appears to be fairly constant across years of history learning. The results suggest that in history education first aiming at a constructivist concept of nation and then using the concept to reflect on the national historical subject and events in the narrative might help produce historical understanding of a national past.     

The Dyadic Relationships Test: Creation and Validation of a Model-Derived,Visual-Verbal Instrument to Evaluate Couple Relationships. Part II

The second part of this article adds evidence to support the psychometric properties of the Dyadic Relationships Test (DRT), designed to evaluate dyadic relationships from a theoretical Selfhood model. This model was presented in an early publication (Cusinato & L'Abate, 2003) and in the first part of this article.     

Evaluation of a Structured Psychoeducational Intervention with Couples: The Dyadic Relationships Test (DRT)

Four cases are presented to illustrate the clinical usefulness of a new, statistically validated, visual-verbal test to evaluate couple relationships at seven different stages of the life cycle. Results from this test can be correlated with dimensions measured with another instrument, allowing to evaluate whether any progress has taken place as a result of structured or unstructured interventions.     

Likeness: A Hidden Ingredient in Family Therapy

The purpose of this paper is to show how one can progress from a validated theoretical model to its practical application in family therapy. The model applied in this case is the Likeness Continuum consisting of six degrees of Likeness: symbiosis, sameness, similarity, differentness, oppositeness, and alienation. A formal Task to evaluate this model in family therapy is attached to provide a basis for the evaluation of this model in the laboratory and in the therapy office.     

Detecting Perceiver Expectancies: The Role of Perceiver Distraction in Spontaneously Triggering Identity Negotiation

To examine whether social interaction processes can trigger naturally-occurring identity negotiation, the current research manipulated perceiver distraction and valence of perceivers' expectations about targets. Nondistracted perceivers corrected their behaviors and impressions for the influence of their expectancies. Distracted perceivers corrected their overt information-gathering behaviors, but appeared to exhibit their biases in subtle ways. Targets detected distracted perceivers' negative expectancies, and showed signs of engaging in identity negotiation processes by behaving contrary to their perceivers' expectancies. The results suggest that distraction may facilitate the emergence of subtle expectancy-biased perceiver behaviors, and may trigger targets to intuitively engage in identity negotiation processes.     

Rediscovering Meaning

The present crisis of the Western countries involves not just the world of politics, finance, and the economy, but also the ecosystem balance, the world of the values on which the model of social organization and economic development is based. The crisis is therefore systemic, epoch-making, and overcoming it will require radical changes, above all in the way we think, in our scale of values, and therefore our culture. On the other hand, for decades the world—in particular the West—has been experiencing a cultural sea-change that is challenging many of the pillars of society that have stood for centuries. The young people of today and their use of technological social networks to develop non-profit initiatives for social change may create a more positive future while maintaining our human values.     

Effects of contextual questions on experimentally induced dysphoria

In a replication and extension of Watkins, Teasdale, and Williams (2003), a scrambled sentences paradigm was used to test whether prompting contextual processing of negative cognitive primes would limit the activation of dysphoric mood. Participants were divided into two groups and, after a dysphoric mood induction procedure, were asked to unscramble sentences that either did or did not emphasise the contextual aspects of moods. Consistent with Watkins et al., participants’ despondency decreased significantly more in the contextual group than in the neutral group. This effect could not be accounted for by variations in the way sentences were unscrambled.     

István Mészáros,The Unconscious,and False Consciousness

Hungarian philosopher István Mészáros’ more recent work expands our understanding of consciousness in a way that is particularly relevant to psychoanalysis. He underscores the tragedy of consciousness, increasingly alienated from the totality of our social and individual being, and replaced by its false analog. To make sustainable an anachronistic type of vertical social structure, ideologists of false consciousness join arms with those who control society's historically developed means to reproduce itself and its members. This results in the social phenomenon of alienation, whereby actively produced false consciousness creates a correlate individual unconscious. Mészáros’ theory seems compatible with the psychoanalytic paradigms developed by Karen Horney and the Neo-Freudians.     

Cognitive and neuropsychological underpinnings of relational and conjunctive working memory binding across age

The ability to form associations (i.e., binding) is critical for memory formation. Recent studies suggest that aging specifically affects relational binding (associating separate features) but not conjunctive binding (integrating features within an object). Possibly, this dissociation may be driven by the spatial nature of the studies so far. Alternatively, relational binding may simply require more attentional resources. We assessed relational and conjunctive binding in three age groups and we included an interfering task (i.e., an articulatory suppression task). Binding was examined in a working memory (WM) task using non-spatial features: shape and colour. Thirty-one young adults (mean age = 22.35), 30 middle-aged adults (mean age = 54.80) and 30 older adults (mean age = 70.27) performed the task. Results show an effect of type of binding and an effect of age but no interaction between type of binding and age. The interaction between type of binding and interference was significant. These results indicate that aging affects relational binding and conjunctive binding similarly. However, relational binding is more susceptible to interference than conjunctive binding, which suggests that relational binding may require more attentional resources. We suggest that a general decline in WM resources associated with frontal dysfunction underlies age-related deficits in WM binding.