Reciprocal unconditional-conditional organization of the fundamental emotions and paraadaptive personality reactions

Paraadaptive personality reactions (PPR) are modes of behavior and experience on the borderline of normal psychology and psychopathology. In them the thinking is overdetermined or obsessive. Overdetermined PPR are well illustrated in common proverbs. The people’s wisdom has also knowledge of the obsessive (or “magic”) paraadaptive rituals for prevention of possible misfortunes (such as touching wood, keeping away from a black cat,etc.). One part of the PPR is described in the psychoanalytical literature as defense mechanisms. The analysis of thought dissociation in schizophrenia shows that the reciprocal relations could be considered as a basic principle of functional organization on all levels of nervous and psychic activity. Proceeding from this assumption, the author proposes the conception of a reciprocal neuropsychological unconditional-conditional affect-behavioral system (ABS). It consists of ten subsystems corresponding to the basic emotions. Each subsystem stimulates the personality toward predetermined forms of thinking and behavior. In adequate conditions the reciprocal processes in the ABS are well counterweighted and integrated. In some persons and in situations of greater affective “loading” this reciprocal balance is disorganized, which leads to PPR. In this paper a neuropsychological analysis is made of the overdetermined PPR, reflected in such proverbs as “Not being able to beat the donkey, he beats the packsaddle” and “The thief cries catch the thief.”     

Probability learning and Piagetian probability conceptions in children 5 to 12 years old

This study focused on the relations between performance on a three-choice probability-learning task and conceptions of probability as outlined by Piaget concerning mixture, normal distribution, random selection, odds estimation, and permutations. The probability-learning task and four Piagetian tasks were administered randomly to 100 male and 100 female, middle SES, average IQ children in three age groups (5 to 6, 8 to 9, and 11 to 12 years old) from different schools. Half the children were from Middle Eastern backgrounds, and half were from European or American backgrounds. As predicted, developmental level of probability thinking was related to performance on the probability-learning task. The more advanced the child's probability thinking, the higher his or her level of maximization and hypothesis formulation and testing and the lower his or her level of systematically patterned responses. The results suggest that the probability-learning and Piagetian tasks assess similar cognitive skills and that performance on the probability-learning task reflects a variety of probability concepts.     

How dreams are told: secondary revision--the critic, the editor, and the plagiarist

Secondary revision is a highly provocative concept arising out of Freud's attempts to explain the construction of dreams, but it remains relatively ill-defined. It includes three related, yet by no means identical aspects of the process by which the dream acquires its more or less final form during the experiencing, the remembering, and the telling. It represents one of the most interesting hypotheses dealing with the fluid world between sleeping and waking, a field which still presents us with a host of unanswered questions. Secondary revision not only reflects the higher levels of the dreamer's mental functioning superimposed on his biological substructure, but it also operates as a sensitive indicator of the cultural factors which have helped mold his personality. These factors include both the subculture of the analytic situation and the impact of society in the larger sense. I make reference to individual dreamers in analysis and to the world of dreams recorded in the past from our own and other cultures.     

Effects of gaze manipulation on subjective evaluation of neutral and phobia-relevant stimuli. A comment on Drake's (1987) 'Effects of Gaze Manipulation on Aesthetic Judgments: Hemisphere Priming of Affect'

Using neutral stimuli (mushrooms and flowers) and phobia-relevant stimuli (snakes and spiders), the present investigation examined the effect of gaze shifts on subjective evaluation of stimuli in female subjects (N = 29). One group of subjects had to orient to the right, whereas the other group had to orient to the left in order to see the stimuli. When left-handed subjects were excluded from the analysis, the results showed that subjects in the 'orient right' group gave a significantly more positive evaluation than subjects in the 'orient left' group. The results provide a replication of the phenomenon described by Drake (1987).     

Rats and bunnies: core kids in an American mall

Although adolescents use shopping malls as important places of congregation, very little attention has been paid to this phenomenon by social scientists. This paper reports on a qualitative, interview-based study of adolescents in a New England shopping mall. Regular, day-to-day frequenters (N = 23) were identified and interviewed extensively over a six-week period in 1988. These "core kids" exhibited a good deal of alienation from both family and school, and used the mall as a neutral ground on which to create a fragile but mutually supportive community of kind.     

Visual control of movement patterns and the grammar of action

In this experiment adult subjects copied three types of material (letters, reversed letters and geometric shapes) with and without sight of the hand and the writing trace. Without vision the number of movement segments decreased and the sequence and direction of movements were altered. This means that subjects did not use a fixed stored representation to produce items nor did they obey the rules of Goodnow and Levine's (1973) grammar of action. When spatial location is made more difficult by the removal of vision, movement production is simplified to reduce the number of relocations required. The use of consistent directions of movement depends on the ability to use visual control of spatial location.