The unfolding meaning of intentionality and horizon in phenomenology

After a brief review of recent federal education legislation, in particular the No Child Left Behind Act, we present a model for educational assessment that does more than focus upon high-stakes testing. This model of educational assessment represents a mixed methods approach that school districts can adopt to assist them in becoming more proactive with respect to assessment. It utilizes both qualitative and quantitative research methods, is an example of participatory action research, and demonstrates the value of this mixed methods approach to assessment. Utilizing this model gives a district a sense of empowerment and control and, most important, provides a better understanding of the real issues and challenges that a school district faces. It provides school districts with an accurate assessment of the quality their schools by utilizing a comprehensive and longitudinal perspective that accurately reflects how successful the district is in educating its students.     

Moderators of the Dynamic Link Between Alcohol Use and Aggressive Behavior among Adolescent Males

Although longitudinal evidence has linked alcohol use with aggressive behavior during adolescence, most studies have failed to adequately control for the numerous between-individual differences that may underlie this association. In addition, few studies of adolescents have examined whether the nature of the within-individual association between alcohol use and aggression depends on individual and contextual factors. To address these limitations, this study examined the association between within-individual changes in alcohol use and aggressive behavior across adolescence and determined whether impulsive behavior, positive attitudes toward violence, violent peers, neighborhood crime, and race moderated this association. Data from 971 adolescent males assessed annually from ages 13 to 18 were analyzed using a within-individual regression panel model that eliminated all stable between-individual factors as potential confounds. Findings indicated that within-individual increases in alcohol use quantity from one’s own typical levels of drinking were concurrently associated with within-individual increases in aggressive behavior, and vice versa. However, increases in alcohol were more strongly linked to increases in aggressive behavior among boys with attitudes favoring violence and those who lived in high-crime neighborhoods. The association between alcohol and aggressive behavior was similar for White and Black young men. Interventions designed to reduce aggressive behaviors should consider targeting not only alcohol use, but also individual and environmental risk factors that contribute to this link.     

Human time and dreaming

One characteristic of massive trauma is a persistent feeling that time is frozen, i.e., an experience impossible to integrate into a psychic reality. In this paper, the author sets out to explore the dimension of time in the psychoanalytical situation in an effort to shed light on this question. The infant acquires an immediate sense of time through the rhythm of frustration and satisfaction, and out of these encounters, a fundamental dialogue evolves. This primary dialogue is internalised and is regarded as an indispensable structure for psychic life. The child's existence is impregnated by unconscious desires or beliefs of the adult world—enigmatic messages that will constitute an unconscious source of the child's own psychic reality. Timeless desires and enigmatic messages urge on a dreaming in attempts to carry over the psychical sense of time and the implacable time of existence. When we infuse a time dimension through our dreaming and our narratives, we give shape to our timeless wishes. The psychoanalytic situation arouses the primary dialogue and an elementary experience of time. Traumatic experiences are tantamount to the absence of the primary object and thereby the death of time. Dreaming becomes an endeavour to create a psychic space, the aim of which is to restore the primary dialogue. If circumstances obliterate all hope of re-establishing the bond to the primary object, the sense of time is destroyed as well. The author concludes that the experience of time and elaboration of traumatic experiences are closely connected.     

‘Nachträglichkeit’: The intermediary of an unassimilated impression and experience

In this paper, Freud's recommendations regarding the timing of interventions are reviewed, especially the work of pointing out and interpreting resistance-phenomena. This is compared to recent developments in psychoanalytic technique. Interventions, their timing and effect are illustrated by clinical material from three psychoanalyses. The possibility of integrating the different recommendations is discussed. An overall experience is that the most demanding work is that of making resistance-phenomena observable for both parties in the analytic situation. It is demonstrated how this precondition can be developed through the analyst's experience of the interaction, and thus give the time for intervention.     

Grasping spheres,not planets

Memory for objects helps us to determine how we can most effectively and appropriately interact with them. This suggests a tightly coupled interplay between action and background knowledge. Three experiments demonstrate that grasping circumference can be affected by the size of a visual stimulus (Experiment 1), whether that stimulus appears to be graspable (Experiment 2), and the presence of a label that renders that object ungraspable (Experiment 3). The results are taken to inform theories on conceptual representation and the functional distinction that has been drawn between the visual systems for perception and action.     

Immediate truth – Temporal contiguity between a cognitive problem and its solution determines experienced veracity of the solution

A temporal contiguity hypothesis for the experience of veracity is tested which states that a solution candidate to a cognitive problem is more likely to be experienced as correct the faster it succeeds the problem. Experiment 1 varied the onset time of the appearance of proposed solutions to anagrams (50 ms vs. 150 ms) and found for both correct and incorrect candidates that faster appearing solutions were more frequently judged as being correct, although participants were not aware of the difference in onset delay. Experiment 2 replicated this effect with mathematical equations, shorter onset latencies (0 ms vs. 50 ms), and a reversed sequence (presenting first the solution and then the problem). Experiment 3 showed that the probability of judging a word as the solution of a remote associate insight problem decreases linearly with increasing onset delay (50 ms, 150 ms, 300 ms). Possible neurobiological-cognitive explanations for this effect are proposed.     

From First Impression to Fairness Perception: Investigating the Impact of Initial Trustworthiness Beliefs

Evolutionary theory and neuroscientific evidence suggest that humans automatically infer the trustworthiness of others based on facial appearance. Building upon this knowledge base, this article presents three empirical studies that investigate the influence of initial impressions of trustworthiness on post‐event perceptions of justice. Across 2 vignette studies and 1 laboratory study, the results consistently suggest that pre‐event trustworthiness impressions exert significant indirect effects on post‐event justice perceptions. In Study 1 and 2, the effects of trustworthiness were mediated by individuals’ psychological state of trust and fairness‐related counterfactual thinking, respectively. In Study 3, the indirect effect of trustworthiness was transmitted through the psychological state of trust alone. The finding that initial trustworthiness impressions derived from surface cues (facial appearance) help shape subsequent perceptions of justice has important implications for justice theory and research.     

Do we map remembrances to the left/back and expectations to the right/front of a mental timeline? Space–time congruency effects with retrospective and prospective verbs

Recent experimental studies have shown that people code time in terms of a mental timeline which typically runs from left to right or from back to front. Determining the cognitive function of this mental timeline for language processing, however, is still an unsettled issue. Whereas the studies of Ulrich and Maienborn (2010) and Ulrich et al. (2012) argue against an automatic activation of the mental timeline for the interpretation of tense and temporal adverbials at sentence level, Sell and Kaschak (2011) observe an automatic activation for the processing of past- and future-related sentences in small stories. The present paper reports the results of three experiments which examine the processing of sentences with retrospective and prospective verbs (e.g., to remember, to regret vs. to expect, to announce) in present tense, which locate a second, embedded event in the past or the future. When temporal information was task-relevant, a space–time congruency effect emerged (Experiment 1). This suggests that the mental timeline is not only linked to overtly deictic linguistic material but may also be construed in a more intricate way through the compositional construction of sentence meaning. The congruency effect disappeared, however, when temporal information was task-irrelevant (Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that the mental timeline is not functionally involved in the cognitive processing of these especially demanding two-event sentences. The results of the present study support the conclusion that the relevant factor driving an automatic activation of the mental timeline is not the number of linguistically expressed events, but might rather be the number of sentential units.     

The effects of extending the CS-UCS interval on the effectiveness of the conditioning treatment for nocturnal enuresis

Previous studies of the “conditioning method” of enuresis treatment have confounded the effects of conditioning with those of nonspecific psychotherapeutic aspects of the procedure. The present study compared three groups of enuretic children: (1) under the conventional bell-light conditioning procedure; (2) under a similar procedure, but which involved a three-minute delay between wetting and alarm, and (3) under no-treatment conditions. Double-blind precautions were used. Results suggested that conditioning effects improvement over and above that effected by nonspecific influences. The findings are qualified by large variances in improvement, and by premature termination of the experiment.     

Making connections about brain connectivity

The Functional Brain Connectivity workshop was organized by Rolf K?tter and Karl Friston, and held in Düsseldorf, Germany, on 4-6 April, 2002.