A Phenomenological Analysis of the Psychotic Experience

Six individuals with experience of psychosis were interviewed about their psychotic experiences. The material was analyzed using the empirical phenomenological psychological method. The results consist of a whole meaning structure, a gestalt, entailing the following characteristics: The feeling of estrangement in relationship to the world; the dissolution of time; the loss of intuitive social knowledge; the alienation of oneself, and finally; the loss of intentionality/loss of agency. In brief, the results show that an altered perception of the self and the world was an essential part of the psychotic experience where subjects described themselves as changed; something was sensed as being wrong as psychosis is perceptible but hard to communicate. The normal life-world experience was altered and reality seemed strange. Time perception seemed to be changed as temporality appeared dissolved and the experience of time was focused on the current moment excluding the future. The subjects described loss of intentionality, they were no longer agents in their actions but partly steered by others and they could feel as if their experiences were not theirs. The patients also describe problems regarding their ability to socialize and communicate with others. They seem to lose their intuitive social capacity and were prone to suspiciousness.     

Information integration in multiple cue judgment: a division of labor hypothesis

There is considerable evidence that judgment is constrained to additive integration of information. The authors propose an explanation of why serial and additive cognitive integration can produce accurate multiple cue judgment both in additive and non-additive environments in terms of an adaptive division of labor between multiple representations. It is hypothesized that, whereas the additive, independent linear effect of each cue can be explicitly abstracted and integrated by a serial, additive judgment process, a variety of sophisticated task properties, like non-additive cue combination, non-linear relations, and inter-cue correlation, are carried implicitly by exemplar memory. Three experiments investigating the effect of additive versus non-additive cue combination verify the predicted shift in cognitive representations as a function of the underlying combination rule.     

The psychophysiology of James Bond: phasic emotional responses to violent video game events

The authors examined emotional valence- and arousal-related phasic psychophysiological responses to different violent events in the first-person shooter video game "James Bond 007: NightFire" among 36 young adults. Event-related changes in zygomaticus major, corrugator supercilii, and orbicularis oculi electromyographic (EMG) activity and skin conductance level (SCL) were recorded, and the participants rated their emotions and the trait psychoticism based on the Psychoticism dimension of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire--Revised, Short Form. Wounding and killing the opponent elicited an increase in SCL and a decrease in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity. The decrease in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi activity was less pronounced among high Psychoticism scorers compared with low Psychoticism scorers. The wounding and death of the player's own character (James Bond) elicited an increase in SCL and zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity and a decrease in corrugator activity. Instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent may elicit high-arousal negative affect (anxiety), with high Psychoticism scorers experiencing less anxiety than low Psychoticism scorers. Although counterintuitive, the wounding and death of the player's own character may increase some aspect of positive emotion.     

Prepartum and postpartum open-field behavior and maternal responsiveness in mice bidirectionally selected for open-field thigmotaxis

The authors examined pre- and postpartum open-field (OF) behavior and maternal responsiveness in mice that they bidirectionally selected for OF thigmotaxis. The authors tested 40 female mice under 3 conditions: prepartum OF, postpartum OF, and a pup retrieval test. In both OF conditions, the high OF thigmotaxis (HOFT) mice were more thigmotactic but explored and reared less than the low OF thigmotaxis (LOFT) mice, indicating that the HOFT mice were more emotional. In the postpartum condition, the HOFT mothers also defecated more and ambulated less than the LOFT mothers. The increase in grooming after parturition was more conspicuous among the LOFT mothers than among the HOFT mothers. The LOFT mothers were also more attracted to their pups in the OF, but the retrieval test did not show any substantial line differences. The results suggested that the line difference in emotionality was more pronounced during lactation than during pregnancy, although parturition exerted no effect on thigmotaxis.     

The conceptualisation of the psychical in psychoanalysis

This article aims to clarify the psychoanalytic conceptualisation of the psychical, which includes a discussion of the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. The unconscious is conceived of as being on the border between the so-called 'ego's conscious intending' and a rudimentary body-ego experiencing. Phenomenological ideas on the essence of consciousness are used in order to help delineate the crucial differences between consciousness and the unconscious. Only consciousness is characterised by an awareness of itself, that is; self-consciousness. Furthermore, consciousness is characterised by an intentional, synthesising capacity, whereas the functioning of the unconscious, in its most radical form, is the opposite ofthe intentionality of consciousness. It is argued that the unconscious pre-supposes certain pre-sexual processes, in the form of a body-ego's formation of continuity, coherence and wholeness. The body-ego belongs to the sphere of consciousness/self-consciousness, even if self-consciousness is only given implicitly in the body-ego and not as a fully fledged ego cogito . Attention is drawn to neglected issues in psychoanalytic theorising, namely self-consciousness and the constitution of existence. The importance of this neglected area for the psychoanalytic process is illustrated with clinical examples.     

Impulsivity as a predictor of smoking and alcohol consumption

This prospective study examined the relationships between impulsivity, smoking and alcohol use in a large non-clinical sample of 601 men and 4832 women working in 12 Finnish hospitals. Data on impulsivity, smoking and alcohol consumption were collected by two questionnaires with a two-year interval. At baseline, impulsivity was associated with smoking and alcohol use. After controlling for baseline smoking, impulsivity predicted increased number of cigarettes smoked per day in women (p=0.08), but not in men. After controlling for alcohol use at baseline, impulsivity predicted increased alcohol consumption similarly in both genders (p<0.01). Higher impulsivity was also associated with increased likelihood of taking up smoking or becoming a heavy drinker (p<0.05). This evidence suggests that impulsivity contributes to increasing health risk behaviours.     

Ethnic matching between therapist and patient in psychotherapy: an overview of findings, together with methodological and conceptual issues

This article reviews the empirical support for ethnic matching between therapist and patient in psychotherapy. The research has 3 sources: analog studies, archival studies of number of attended sessions and dropout rates, and process-outcome studies of psychotherapy. Clinical trials studying ethnic matching are absent. Empirical support for ethnic matching suffers from low validity and is inconclusive, with few studies of actual psychotherapy. The research is hampered by poor conceptualization of key concepts, difficulties in forming ethnically homogeneous groups for comparisons, and an abundance of uncontrolled within-group variables. Therapist variables, for example cultural sensitivity, are rarely investigated. There is a need for large-scale psychotherapy studies with well-defined key concepts in which the impacts of within-group and therapist variables are investigated.     

Innovation across cultures: Connecting leadership,identification, and creative behavior in organizations

Innovation is considered essential for today's organizations to survive and thrive. Researchers have also stressed the importance of leadership as a driver of followers' innovative work behavior (FIB). Yet, despite a large amount of research, three areas remain understudied: (a) The relative importance of different forms of leadership for FIB; (b) the mechanisms through which leadership impacts FIB; and (c) the degree to which relationships between leadership and FIB are generalizable across cultures. To address these lacunae, we propose an integrated model connecting four types of positive leadership behaviors, two types of identification (as mediating variables), and FIB. We tested our model in a global data set comprising responses of N = 7,225 participants from 23 countries, grouped into nine cultural clusters. Our results indicate that perceived LMX quality was the strongest relative predictor of FIB. Furthermore, the relationships between both perceived LMX quality and identity leadership with FIB were mediated by social identification. The indirect effect of LMX on FIB via social identification was stable across clusters, whereas the indirect effects of the other forms of leadership on FIB via social identification were stronger in countries high versus low on collectivism. Power distance did not influence the relations.     

Working memory capacity modulates habituation rate: Evidence from a cross-modal auditory distraction paradigm

Habituation of the orienting response is a pivotal part of selective attention, and previous research has related working memory capacity (WMC) to attention control. Against this background, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in WMC contribute to habituation rate. The participants categorized visual targets across six blocks of trials. Each target was preceded either by a standard sound or, on rare trials, by a deviant. The magnitude of the deviation effect (i.e., prolonged response time when the deviant was presented) was relatively large in the beginning but attenuated toward the end. There was no relationship between WMC and the deviation effect at the beginning, but there was at the end, and greater WMC was associated with greater habituation. These results indicate that high memory ability increases habituation rate, and they support theories proposing a role for cognitive control in habituation and in some forms of auditory distraction.