The Self in Movement: Being Identified and Identifying Oneself in the Process of Migration and Asylum Seeking

How migration influences the processes of identity development has been under longstanding scrutiny in the social sciences. Usually, stage models have been suggested, and different strategies for acculturation (e.g., integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization) have been considered as ways to make sense of the psychological transformations of migrants as a group. On an individual level, however, identity development is a more complex endeavor: Identity does not just develop by itself, but is constructed as an ongoing process. To capture these processes, we will look at different aspects of migration and asylum seeking; for example, the cultural-specific values and expectations of the hosting (European) countries (e.g., as identifier), but also of the arriving individuals/groups (e.g., identified as refugees). Since the two may contradict each other, negotiations between identities claims and identity assignments become necessary. Ways to solve these contradictions are discussed, with a special focus on the experienced (and often missing) agency in different settings upon arrival in a new country. In addition, it will be shown how sudden events (e.g., 9/11, the Charlie Hebdo attack) may challenge identity processes in different ways.     

God and The Possibility of Random Creation

In this paper I discuss a number of problems associated with the suggestion that it is possible for God to randomly select a possible world for actualization.

The role of in-group identification in infra-humanization

People tend to infra-humanize by attributing more human essence to their in-group than to out-groups. In the present article, we focus on the attribution of primary and secondary emotions to operationalize the human essence. We propose that, in order to infra-humanize, people need to be categorized in meaningful groups. In addition, we argue that what differentiates meaningful from nonmeaningful groups is that the people essentialize, perceiving members of the group as sharing an underlying, common essence. Also, we hypothesize that participants will identify more with their in-group in the case of meaningful groups. Three types of groups were created to manipulate the meaningfulness of the categorization. Participants were either randomly assigned to a group or they chose their group as a function of their preferences for a colour or the type of career they wished to pursue. As expected, infra-humanization occurred only where the categorization's criterion was meaningful. In addition, in-group identification, but not essentialism, mediated the impact of the categorization criteria on the tendency to infra-humanize. Data also showed that infra-humanization is different from classic in-group favouritism. This is because in-group favouritism, but not infra-humanization, was observed in the situation where group membership was based on random assignment. In other words, for infra-humanization to occur mere categorization is not enough; meaningfulness is also needed. For in-group favouritism to arise, the knowledge of being part of a group is a sufficient prerequisite. The discussion focuses on conditions for reducing infra-humanization and on the relationship between in-group favouritism and out-group derogation.     

Categorization and affect: evidence for intra-hemispheric interactions

Both emotional reactivity and categorization have long been studied within the framework of hemispheric asymmetry. However, little attempt has been made to integrate both research areas using any form of neuropsychological research, despite behavioral data suggesting a consistent relationship between affective and categorization processes. The primary goal of the current study was to examine the possibility of a laterally mediated interaction between emotional reactivity and the cognitive process of categorization. Using a split visual fields categorization task combined with affect inducing procedures, we hypothesized that the relationship between state affect and categorization would be dependent on the nature of state affect and on the hemisphere targeted. Results offered support for this hypothesis, showing that state affect related changes in categorization appeared only in the hemisphere commonly associated with both a specific affective state and categorization strategy employed. Findings are discussed in terms of possible evidence for a hemispheric arousal effect underlying the relationship between affect and categorization.     

Prerogatives Without Restrictions?

Philosophical Studies -     

The Poset of All Logics III: Finitely Presentable Logics

Studia Logica - A logic in a finite language is said to be finitely presentable if it is axiomatized by finitely many finite rules. It is proved that binary non-indexed products of logics that are...     

Late‐ but not early‐onset blindness impairs the development of audio‐haptic multisensory integration

Integrating different senses to reduce sensory uncertainty and increase perceptual precision can have an important compensatory function for individuals with visual impairment and blindness. However, how visual impairment and blindness impact the development of optimal multisensory integration in the remaining senses is currently unknown. Here we first examined how audio‐haptic integration develops and changes across the life span in 92 sighted (blindfolded) individuals between 7 and 70 years of age. We used a child‐friendly task in which participants had to discriminate different object sizes by touching them and/or listening to them. We assessed whether audio‐haptic performance resulted in a reduction of perceptual uncertainty compared to auditory‐only and haptic‐only performance as predicted by maximum‐likelihood estimation model. We then compared how this ability develops in 28 children and adults with different levels of visual experience, focussing on low‐vision individuals and blind individuals that lost their sight at different ages during development. Our results show that in sighted individuals, adult‐like audio‐haptic integration develops around 13–15 years of age, and remains stable until late adulthood. While early‐blind individuals, even at the youngest ages, integrate audio‐haptic information in an optimal fashion, late‐blind individuals do not. Optimal integration in low‐vision individuals follows a similar developmental trajectory as that of sighted individuals. These findings demonstrate that visual experience is not necessary for optimal audio‐haptic integration to emerge, but that consistency of sensory information across development is key for the functional outcome of optimal multisensory integration.     

Literatur in Examensarbeiten

After the Second World War up to the 1980s Harald Schultz-Hencke’s so-called German neopsychoanalysis was an important theoretical reference for psychoanalysts in the German Psychoanalytical Society (DPG). Simultaneously, however, references were increasingly being made to quintessential psychoanalytical sources which of course had an impact on the psychoanalytical training. The references in final papers of a DPG psychoanalytical institute from 1971–2008 were compared to the references in clinical papers of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. It can be shown that the influence of German neopsychoanalysis in the final theses of the psychoanalytical institute in question has diminished since the 1990s and has become irrelevant in the twenty-first century.     

Unravelling Criteria for Assessing the Performance of Salespeople: A Causal Analysis

Abstract

In the past, academic research on sales force performance has used either objective performance data or subjective managerial ratings to measure sales performance. Consistent with corporate practices, objective and subjective performance measures were used in this research project. The relationships among three components of performance: specific task behaviors, specific goal achievement and overall performance were examined. A casual analysis suggests that managerial evaluations of overall sales performance are influenced by their perceptions of specific selling behaviors and the degree to which sales people attain specified performance goals.