Ambivalent subjects: Psychoanalysis,women’s sexuality in India and the writings of Sudhir Kakar

Indian women’s sexuality shares an intimate relationship with the regulatory forces of Hindu religious law. This paper explores the writings of psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar and the narratives of women interviewees, along with clinical experiences with women, to paint a picture of women’s sexuality’s interlocked with cultural misogyny. Noting the creative adaptations that women make to enjoy sex in this polis, the paper also asks questions about how the insights of psychoanalytic feminism may serve as a ‘third’ in this interlocking.     

Bilingualism and the increased attentional blink effect: evidence that the difference between bilinguals and monolinguals generalizes to different levels of second language proficiency

The attentional blink task involves rapid serial presentation of visual stimuli, two of which the participants have to report. The usual finding is that participants are impaired at reporting the second target if it appears in close temporal proximity to the first target. Previous research has shown that the effect is stronger in bilinguals than monolinguals. We investigated whether the difference between monolinguals and proficient bilinguals can be extended to bilinguals of different proficiency levels. Therefore, we replicated the paradigm in a large sample of Hindi–English bilinguals with different proficiency levels of English, as measured with a validated vocabulary test. We additionally measured the participants’ intelligence with the raven progressive matrices. We found that the size of the attentional blink effect correlates with the degree of second language proficiency and not with the degree of intelligence. This indicates that research on executive control functions can be done with bilinguals of different proficiency levels. Our results are also in line with recent findings showing that the attentional blink effect is not primarily due to limited processing resources.     

Power motivates interpersonal connection following social exclusion

Research has systematically documented the negative effects of social exclusion, yet little is known about how these negative effects can be mitigated. Building on the approach-inhibition theory of power (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003), we examined the role of power in facilitating social connection following exclusion. Four experiments found that following exclusion, high power (relative to low power) individuals intend to socially connect more with others. Specifically, following exclusion, individuals primed with high power sought new social connections more than those primed with low power (Studies 1–4) or those receiving no power prime (Study 1). The intention to seek social connection as a function of power was limited to situations of exclusion, as it did not occur when individuals were included (Studies 3 and 4). Approach orientation mediates the effect of power on intentions to connect with others (Studies 2 and 4).     

Learning to Troubleshoot: Multistrategy Learning of Diagnostic Knowledge for a Real-World Problem-Solving Task

This article presents a computational model of the learning of diagnostic knowledge, based on observations of human operators engaged in real-world troubleshooting tasks. We present a model of problem solving and learning in which the reasoner introspects about its own performance on the problem-solving task, identifies what it needs to learn to improve its performance, formulates learning goals to acquire the required knowledge, and pursues its learning goals using multiple learning strategies. The model is implemented in a computer system which provides a case study based on observations of troubleshooting operators and protocol analysis of the data gathered in the test area of an operational electronics manufacturing plant. The model not only addresses issues in human learning, but, in addition, is computationally justified as a uniform, extensible framework for multistrategy learning.     

The effect of sadness on global-local processing

Gable and Harmon-Jones (Psychological Science, 21(2), 211-215, 2010) reported that sadness broadens attention in a global-local letter task. This finding provided the key test for their motivational intensity account, which states that the level of spatial processing is not determined by emotional valence, but by motivational intensity. However, their finding is at odds with several other studies, showing no effect, or even a narrowing effect of sadness on attention. This paper reports two attempts to replicate the broadening effect of sadness on attention. Both experiments used a global-local letter task, but differed in terms of emotion induction: Experiment 1 used the same pictures as Gable and Harmon-Jones, taken from the IAPS dataset; Experiment 2 used a sad video underlaid with sad music. Results showed a sadness-specific global advantage in the error rates, but not in the reaction times. The same null results were also found in a South-Asian sample in both experiments, showing that effects on global/local processing were not influenced by a culturally related processing bias.     

Making Choices: Ethical Decisions in a Global Context

The changing milieu of research—increasingly global, interdisciplinary and collaborative—prompts greater emphasis on cultural context and upon partnership with international scholars and diverse community groups. Ethics training, however, tends to ignore the cross-cultural challenges of making ethical choices. This paper confronts those challenges by presenting a new curricular model developed by an international team. It examines ethics across a very broad range of situations, using case studies and employing the perspectives of social science, humanities and the sciences. The course has been developed and taught in a highly collaborative way, involving researchers and students at Zhejiang University, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Brown University. The article presents the curricular modules of the course, learning outcomes, an assessment framework developed for the project, and a discussion of evaluation findings.     

Explaining effervescence: Investigating the relationship between shared social identity and positive experience in crowds

We investigated the intensely positive emotional experiences arising from participation in a large-scale collective event. We predicted such experiences arise when those attending a collective event are (1) able to enact their valued collective identity and (2) experience close relations with other participants. In turn, we predicted both of these to be more likely when participants perceived crowd members to share a common collective identity. We investigated these predictions in a survey of pilgrims (N = 416) attending a month-long Hindu pilgrimage festival in north India. We found participants' perceptions of a shared identity amongst crowd members had an indirect effect on their positive experience at the event through (1) increasing participants' sense that they were able to enact their collective identity and (2) increasing the sense of intimacy with other crowd members. We discuss the implications of these data for how crowd emotion should be conceptualised.     

Testosterone–status mismatch lowers collective efficacy in groups: Evidence from a slope-as-predictor multilevel structural equation model

The study of the biological underpinnings of behavior is in its nascent stages in the field of management. We study how the hormone testosterone (T) is related to status and collective efficacy in a group. We assessed salivary testosterone of 579 individuals in 92 teams. We find that T does not predict status within the group. We also tested the effects of a mismatch between T and status in the group on the collective efficacy of the group. Using a novel slope-as-predictor multilevel structural equation model, we find that the greater the mismatch between T and status in the group (i.e., the more negative the within-group correlation among T and status), the lower is the collective efficacy of the group. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study of the biological underpinnings of group behavior in organizations.