Shame and the temporality of social life

Shame is notoriously ambivalent. On one hand, it operates as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion, installing or reinforcing patterns of silence and invisibility; on the other hand, the capacity for shame may be indispensible for ethical life insofar as it attests to the subject’s constitutive relationality and its openness to the provocation of others. Sartre, Levinas and Beauvoir each offer phenomenological analyses of shame in which its basic structure emerges as a feeling of being exposed to others and bound to one’s own identity. For Sartre, shame is an ontological provocation, constitutive of subjectivity as a being-for-Others. For Levinas, ontological shame takes the form of an inability to escape one’s own relation to being; this predicament is altered by the ethical provocation of an Other who puts my freedom in question and commands me to justify myself. For Beauvoir, shame is an effect of oppression, both for the woman whose embodied existence is marked as shameful, and for the beneficiary of colonial domination who feels ashamed of her privilege. For each thinker, shame articulates the temporality of social life in both its promise and its danger.     

Spontaneous use of tools as straws in great apes

Great apes can use multiple tools to extract food embedded in substrates and can invent new ways to exploit those resources. We tested five bonobos, five chimpanzees, and six orangutans in a task in which they had to use (and modify) a tool as a straw to drink the juice located inside a container. Experiment 1 showed that four orangutans and one chimpanzee invented the use of a piece of electric cable to get the juice. Experiment 2 investigated whether subjects could transform a non-functional hose into a functional one by removing blockages that impeded the free flow of juice. Orangutans outperformed chimpanzees and bonobos by differentially removing those blockages that prevented the flow of juice, often doing so before attempting to extract the juice. In Experiment 3, we presented chimpanzees and orangutans with four 3-tool sets (each tool set contained a single straw-like tool) and allowed them to select one tool. Unlike chimpanzees, orangutans succeeded in selecting the straw-like tool above chance levels without having to physically manipulate it. We suggest that orangutans’ superior performance is related to their greater reliance on mouth actions during foraging. Experiment 4 investigated whether orangutans were also capable of selecting the suitable tool not by its appearance, but by the effects that it produced. After witnessing the experimenter blow bubbles or absorb liquid with a functional tool but fail to accomplish the same thing with the non-functional tool, orangutans failed to select the functional tool above chance levels.     

Tool choice on the basis of rigidity in capuchin monkeys

Wild capuchin monkeys select stone tools to crack open nuts on the basis of their weight and friability, two non-visual functional properties. Here, we investigated whether they would select new stick-like tools on the basis of their rigidity. In Experiment 1, subjects faced an out-of-reach reward and a choice of three unfamiliar tools differing in color, diameter, material, and rigidity. In order to retrieve the reward, capuchins needed to select the rigid tool exemplar. Capuchins gathered information regarding tools’ pliability either by (1) manipulating the tools themselves (manipulation condition), (2) observing a human demonstrator repeatedly bending the tools (observation condition), or (3) seeing the tools placed on a platform without any manipulation taking place (visual static condition). Subjects selected the rigid tool above chance levels in both the manipulation and observation conditions, but not in the visual static condition. In Experiment 2, subjects needed to select and use a flexible tool to access a liquid reward (as opposed to the rigid tool, as in previous experiment). Again, capuchins selected above chance levels the appropriate tool (i.e., flexible), thus demonstrating a good appreciation of the relation between the tool properties and the task requirements.     

When does mimicry affect evaluative judgment?

We investigated the effect of subliminally presented happy or angry faces on evaluative judgments when the facial muscles of participants were free to mimic or blocked. We hypothesized and showed that subliminally presented happy expressions lead to more positive judgments of cartoons compared to angry expressions only when facial muscles were not blocked. These results reveal the influence of socially driven embodied processes on affective judgments and have also potential implications for phenomena such as emotional contagion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).     

Why do you play? The development of the motives for online gaming questionnaire (MOGQ)

Although the majority of research focuses on the risks and disadvantages of online gaming, the present authors suggest that online games also represent new ways of satisfying basic human needs within the conditions of modern society. The aim of our present study was to reveal and operationalize the components of the motivational basis of online gaming. A total 3,818 persons (90.6% males; mean age 20.9 years, SD = 5.81) were recruited through websites providing online games. A combined method of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was applied. The results confirmed our preliminary model as we identified seven motivational factors (social, escape, competition, coping, skill development, fantasy, and recreation), which were used to develop the 27-item Motives for Online Gaming Questionnaire (MOGQ). The seven dimensions identified seem to cover the full range of possible motives for gaming, and the MOGQ proved to be an adequate measurement tool to assess these motives.     

The semantic organization of the animal category: evidence from semantic verbal fluency and network theory

Semantic memory is the subsystem of human memory that stores knowledge of concepts or meanings, as opposed to life-specific experiences. How humans organize semantic information remains poorly understood. In an effort to better understand this issue, we conducted a verbal fluency experiment on 200 participants with the aim of inferring and representing the conceptual storage structure of the natural category of animals as a network. This was done by formulating a statistical framework for co-occurring concepts that aims to infer significant concept-concept associations and represent them as a graph. The resulting network was analyzed and enriched by means of a missing links recovery criterion based on modularity. Both network models were compared to a thresholded co-occurrence approach. They were evaluated using a random subset of verbal fluency tests and comparing the network outcomes (linked pairs are clustering transitions and disconnected pairs are switching transitions) to the outcomes of two expert human raters. Results show that the network models proposed in this study overcome a thresholded co-occurrence approach, and their outcomes are in high agreement with human evaluations. Finally, the interplay between conceptual structure and retrieval mechanisms is discussed.     

The modulation of spatial congruency by object-based attention: analysing the "locus" of the modulation

Earlier studies have demonstrated that spatial cueing differentially reduces stimulus-stimulus congruency (e.g., spatial Stroop) interference but not stimulus-response congruency (e.g., Simon; e.g., Lupiá?ez & Funes, 2005). This spatial cueing modulation over spatial Stroop seems to be entirely attributable to object-based attention (e.g., Luo, Lupiá?ez, Funes, & Fu, 2010). In the present study, two experiments were conducted to further explore whether the cueing modulation of spatial Stroop is object based and/or space based and to analyse the "locus" of this modulation. In Experiment 1, we found that the cueing modulation over spatial Stroop is entirely object based, independent of stimulus-response congruency. In Experiment 2, we observed that the modulation of object-based attention over the spatial Stroop only occurred at a short cue-target interval (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony; SOA), whereas the stimulus-response congruency effect was not modulated either by object-based or by location-based attentional cueing. The overall pattern of results suggests that the spatial cueing modulation over spatial Stroop arises from object-based attention and occurs at the perceptual stage of processing.     

Maintenance and Transformation of Problematic Self-Narratives: A Semiotic-Dialogical Approach

This study focuses on how the emergence of innovative moments (IMs), which are exceptions to a person’s dominant self-narrative (i.e., his or her usual way of understanding and experiencing), progresses to the construction of a new self-narrative. IMs challenge a person’s current framework of understanding and experiencing, generating uncertainty. When uncertainty is excessively threatening, a semiotic strategy to deal with it often emerges: attenuation of novelty’s meanings and implications by a quick return to the dominant self-narrative. From a dialogical perspective, a dominant voice (which organizes one’s current self-narrative) and a non-dominant or innovative voice (expressed during IMs) establish a cyclical relation, mutual in-feeding, blocking self-development. In this article, we analyze a successful psychotherapeutic case focusing on how the relation between dominant and non-dominant voices evolves from mutual in-feeding to other forms of dialogical relation. We have identified two processes: (1) escalation of the innovative voice(s) thereby inhibiting the dominant voice and (2) dominant and innovative voices negotiating and engaging in joint action.     

Weighing the past and the future in decision making

Prior irreversible investments of money, time, or effort referred to as sunk costs frequently lead to decisions to continue a chosen course of action despite that this is irrational. With the aim of demonstrating that such escalation of commitment is a special case of a more general phenomenon, two experiments were carried out employing undergraduates as participants. Experiment 1 showed for fictitious personal and business investment scenarios that both prior losses and gains (sunk outcomes) affected choices to continue or discontinue the investment. In Experiment 2 the effect of sunk outcomes was reduced although not eliminated by a monetary bonus that in one condition depended on the future outcomes of the second gamble in two-stage gambles, in another condition on the future returns in personal investment scenarios. In support of a more inclusive theory subsuming escalation of commitment, the decisions were affected by both past and future outcomes and both gains and losses.     

Animacy in the adjunction of Spanish RCs to complex NPs

The present paper focuses on the role of animacy in the processing of relative clauses (RCs) after complex NPs. We follow research by the Desmet et al. team on Dutch in exploring the role of animacy in Spanish RCs. We present data from a corpus study and two self-paced experiments and we compare the three studies and the Dutch and Spanish results. Our main objective is to fill important gaps in past research on the processing of adjunction ties in Spanish and to offer a more detailed exploration of grain effects in exposure-based accounts. In particular, we have sought both to analyse the match between corpus studies and online processing in Spanish much more closely than it has been until now and to see whether animacy could revert the well-established tendency of Spanish RCs to attach high inside the complex noun phrase.