Funcionalismo y ciencia cognitiva,lenguaje y pensamiento,modularidad y conexionismo: Entrevista con Jerry A. Fodor

RESUMEN

La obra de Jerry A. Fodor ha tenido una determinante influencia en el desarrollo de la llamada “Psicología Cognitiva“. Durante todo ese tiempo el profesor Fodor ha publicado una gran cantidad de artículos y libros que actualmente se consideran clásicos de la psicología. Su influencia va más allá de la psicología y se le considera uno de los pioneros de la llamada “ciencia cognitiva”. En esta entrevista, realizada y presentada por el profesor García-Albea, Fodor hace un recuento de su biografía, obra y, también, de las relaciones que ha mantenido con otros autores de la filosofía y la psicología clásicos, como él, dentro de la ciencia cognitiva. Nos habla además, el profesor Fodor, de los principales conceptos de su teoría: lengua del pensamiento, modularidad, teoría funcionalista, etc. Para finalizar esta entrevista, el entrevistado realiza una reflexión sobre las teorías dominantes en ciencia cognitiva, y comenta el futuro de la psicología a la luz de las actuales propuestas en investigación.     

Personality determinants of the commitment to the profession of art

The model of commitment presented in the present report postulates personality to be the crucial element in the development and maintenance of commitment to the profession of art. The objectives of the research reported here were to (a) demonstrate the typicality of the artist personality and (b) identify the traits which characterize committed and uncommitted artists. Three groups of artists were compared: mature established artists described as committed over a lifetime, committed art students, and uncommitted art students. The instrument used to evaluate personality was the Adjective Check List (ACL; Gough 8c Heilbrun, 1983). Both committed and uncommitted artists presented a typical personality structure; but in contrast to the committed, the uncommitted were characterized by low self‐esteem, a negative self‐image, impaired motivation, low staying power, and an inability to find a clear direction. Both art students and mature artists agreed about the order of importance of 11 factors considered to be determinants of committment. They both placed particular emphasis on autonomy, possibility to experiment, ease of inspiration, and early identification with the profession.     

A tale of four countries: How Bowlby used his trip through Europe to write the WHO report and spread his ideas

Attachment theory, developed by child psychiatrist John Bowlby, is considered a major theory in developmental psychology. Attachment theory can be seen as resulting from Bowlby's personal experiences, his psychoanalytic education, his subsequent study of ethology, and societal developments during the 1930s and 1940s. One of those developments was the outbreak of World War II and its effects on children's psychological wellbeing. In 1950, Bowlby was appointed WHO consultant to study the needs of children who were orphaned or separated from their families for other reasons and needed care in foster homes or institutions. The resulting report is generally considered a landmark publication in psychology, although it subsequently met with methodological criticism. In this paper, by reconstructing Bowlby's visit to several European countries, on the basis of notebooks and letters, the authors shed light on the background of this report and the way Bowlby used or neglected the findings he gathered.     

Dimensions of Religion and Spirituality: A Longitudinal Topic Modeling Approach

In lieu of the traditional text data analysis methods, structural topic modeling was utilized to analyze the text contents of 255 self-report inventories of religion and spirituality (R/S) published from 1929 to 2017. The study had two objectives: (a) to clarify and identify the latent dimensions of R/S inherent in the items of the measures; and (b) to examine and demonstrate the usefulness of a longitudinal topic modeling in the study of R/S. We identified 5,617 unique text terms from the measures and fitted topic models on those terms to extract latent dimensions called topics. We also simultaneously analyzed the longitudinal effect of publication decade (i.e., 1950s–2010s) on the topics. A topic model with three topics was chosen to best support the data: Experience of Transcendence (Topic 1), Engagement in Transcendence (Topic 2), and Essence of Transcendence (Topic 3). In addition, the longitudinal analysis revealed that Topic 1 showed a continual increase over the decades, while Topics 2 and 3 both demonstrated a gradual decrease, in effect matching the general trend of Topic 1's increasing popularity in society and the academia.     

Support groups for parents with an adult child suffering from bipolar disorder

Confronted with the disconcerting behaviour exhibited by their children, parents of bipolar patients are in severe distress. Research focuses on the study of the ‘burden’ that the pathology puts on caregivers, owing to their experience of depression, sometimes combined with the presence of hostile attitudes and negative affects. In France, parents of adult patients encounter an initial specific difficulty: they are not systematically included in the care management system. Thanks to the initiative of an association of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, the authors set up a psychoanalytic support group for the parents of ‘bipolar’ adults. The diagnosis of a bipolar disorder is established by a psychiatrist within a medical structure. Support groups for parents do exist in France, but their experiences have not led to scientific publications on this specific topic. Existing publications focus on other types of pathology and other therapeutic approaches. In this article, we will highlight how this type of psychoanalytic support group, with operating rules based on the theoretical work of Anzieu, can help parents of patients with bipolar disorders. Group participants accepted the principle of a research study that maintained their anonymity. We collected and analysed qualitative data from the first year of the group, so we highlight the specific difficulties of these parents, faced with chronic disease. The relevance of our qualitative study also resides in the data collected over a period of time, enabling us to see the progress made, and encouraging us to reflect on the place of psychoanalytic groups for parents, as well as on the care management of this pathology.     

Education as hospitality: welcoming foreigners into a common world

ABSTRACT

The present article aims at examining the specific difficulties that the school form – the modern educational institution par excellence – faces in order to attain hospitality as the raison d'être of the educational process. Educational activity is here understood as a form of hospitality which involves caring for the newcomers and for the physical and symbolic place into which they arrive. A cinematographical narrative drawn from Bégaudeau’s Entre les Murs supplements this analysis of some of the challenges we are faced with when dealing with students from different national backgrounds, beliefs and forms of life.     

Validation of the Visual Analogue Scale for Anxiety-Revised and school refusal across anxiety profiles

Background/Objectives

This paper aimed to validate the Spanish version of scores of the Visual Analogue Scale for Anxiety-Revised (VAA-R) in child population, and to verify the existence of anxiety profiles and to relate them to school refusal.