The Perspective of Islamic Fundamentalists and the Limits of Rational Choice Theory

How can we best understand Islamic fundamentalism? As fundamentalism has become an increasingly significant political force, many different interpretations have been offered, with fundamentalism explained as both a rational reaction against modernity and as a pathological retreat from reality. We argue here that part of the scholarly failure to understand and deal with the growth of religious fundamentalism results from a failure to recognize the importance of cognitive differences in worldviews held by fundamentalists. By providing an empirical analysis of how fundamentalists see the world—what we identify as a fundamentalist perspective—we hope to supply an important missing piece in the literature on fundamentalism. To do so, we utilized a narrative and survey interview technique to contrast the worldviews of fundamentalists with those of comparable Muslims who are not fundamentalists. Our analysis suggests Islamic fundamentalism attracts because it provides a basic identity, an identity which in turn provides the foundation for daily living. The fundamentalist perspective itself is best understood through reference to a worldview which makes no distinction between public and private, in which truth is revealed by revelation, and reason is subservient to religious doctrine. Religious dictates dominate on all basic issues, and only within the confines of the fundamentalist identity are choices decided by a cost/benefit calculus.     

Chromatic information processing: Rate depends on stimulus location in the category and psychological complexity

Summary Colors are typically categorized, and color sensations can be conceived to lie on a continuum of psychological complexity from simple, sensations provoked by colors that fall near the centers of color categories and that convey predominately a single percept (like blue), to complex, sensations provoked by colors that fall near boundaries between color categories and that convey two percepts (like blue-green). In three experiments we assessed the effect of the location of colors in a category (their psychological complexity) on the rate at which observers identified and classified them. In Experiment 1, observers named category center colors faster than boundary colors. A subsidiary experiment with range-shifted stimuli showed that observers were not merely bisecting a stimulus continuum. In Experiment 2, observers classified a variety of category centers more rapidly than a variety of boundaries. In Experiment 3, observers who first practiced classifying color centers or boundaries as such later classified category centers faster than boundaries. A subsidiary experiment showed that this differential was not selective to particular response category labels. Neither Experiment 2 nor Experiment 3 showed any differential effect of visual field of presentation. The advantage of category center or simple over boundary or complex sensations in chromatic information processing is discussed in terms of the physiological sensitivity of the visual system to color.     

Depressive thoughts limit working memory capacity in dysphoria

Dysphoria is associated with persistence of attention on mood-congruent information. Longer time attending to mood-congruent information for dysphoric individuals (DIs) detracts from goal-relevant information processing and should reduce working memory (WM) capacity. Study 1 showed that DIs and non-DIs have similar WM capacities. Study 2 embedded depressive information into a WM task. Compared to non-DIs, DIs showed significantly reduced WM capacity for goal-relevant information in this task. Study 3 replicated results from Studies 1 and 2, and further showed that DIs had a significantly greater association between processing speed and recall on the depressively modified WM task compared to non-DIs. The presence of inter-task depressive information leads to DI-related decreased WM capacity. Results suggest dysphoria-related WM capacity deficits when depressive thoughts are present. WM capacity deficits in the presence of depressive thoughts are a plausible mechanism to explain day-to-day memory and concentration difficulties associated with depressed mood.     

Group Treatment of the Mother-Daughter Relationship

This article explores the analytic therapy group as a spiritual community that can deepen the implications of group transference. From this perspective, group-as-a-whole dynamics include a spiritual dimension in addition to the recapitulation of the family of origin. Clinical vignettes are introduced from a midphase group to illustrate a means of working with spiritual and religious themes psychodynamically through managing them like dreams. Amplification and interpretation of the symbolic themes guide members through the transference to the family of origin. There, members gain access to childhood memories and to the childhood transitional space of religious experience where they created their God representations as a means of solving their self and object dilemmas. The working-through process facilitates the integration or transformation of new self and God images.     

Choice reactions with a null stimulus event

A procedure for producing a null stimulus (S₀) in a CRT task is described. The S₀ produced is shown to elicit reactions that have characteristics of responses given to stimuli (S₁) that appear in regular CRT tasks. It was also discovered that, in this procedure, the initiation of S₀ sampling comes earlier than that of S₁ when S₀ and S₁ appear in the same CRT task. The nature of S₀ as well as the apparent reasons for its early sampling are discussed.