Reconstructing the Sacred: Evolving Conceptualizations of Religious Faith in Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice

Freud's original understanding of religion was categorically depreciative, and tended to portray religious faith in exclusively western and patriarchal terms (S. Freud, 1913/1989, 1927/1989). More recently, many of Freud's assertions about religion have been questioned. The psychoanalytic contributions of W. D. Fairbairn (1954), and D. W. Winnicott (1971) as well as the work of feminist scholars (N. Chodorow, 1974, 1989; C. Gilligan, 1993) and multicultural theorists (A. Roland, 1996) have profoundly shaken the metapsychological substructure upon which Freud rested his critique of spiritual faith. This paper describes how a gradual historical evolution has occurred in psychoanalytic theory, so that the work of such theorists as A. M. Rizutto (1979), M. H. Spero (1992), and H. Kohut (1984, 1985) now delineates the adaptive and creative place that religious experience can have in human development and psychological life.     

Factors Influencing Employee Beliefs That Pay Is Tied to Performance

The unique relationship of perceived pay level equity, perceived appraisal accuracy, merit increase satisfaction, trust in supervisor, and trust in top management to employee beliefs that pay is tied to performance was investigated in a sample of 658 managerial, professional, and clerical employees. Pay level equity, merit increase satisfaction, and trust in top management exhibited a significant unique relationship. Post hoc analysis found appraisal accuracy exhibited a significant unique relationship with belief that pay is tied to performance among employees receiving a lower or higher than expected performance appraisal, but not among employees receiving the expected performance appraisal.     

The influence of competition and performance goals on decoding complex emotions

Motivation and Emotion - The present research examines the processes through which competitive contexts influence performance in an understudied domain: social perception. In two experiments (one...     

Planned Straight or Biased to Be So? The Influence of Visual Feedback on Reaching Movements

Abstract

Behavioral studies consistently find that subjects move their hand along straight paths despite considerations that suggest reaches should be curved. Literature on this topic makes it clear that the experimentally displayed feedback influences how subjects reach. Could the standard visual feedback, a displayed cursor, explain the lack of path curvature in experimental results? To address this question, we conducted three experiments to examine reach behavior in the absence of the standard visual feedback. In the first experiment, we found significant increases in curvature as visual feedback was progressively extinguished across groups. A second experiment revealed that practiced reaches became curved after the standard visual feedback was removed. A final experiment found that subjects’ reaches made before and after a brief display of visual feedback were similar, indicating a preference for specific curved trajectories. Our results suggest that the consistently straight reaches often observed could be due to a bias to move the displayed cursor straight, which when removed reveal subject-specific preferences for reaches that are often curved.     

A Restricted Four-Parameter IRT Model: The Dyad Four-Parameter Normal Ogive (Dyad-4PNO) Model

Psychometrika - Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the four-parameter item response theory model as a way to capture guessing and slipping behaviors in responses. Research has shown,...     

A Sparse Latent Class Model for Cognitive Diagnosis

Psychometrika - Cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) are latent variable models developed to infer latent skills, knowledge, or personalities that underlie responses to educational, psychological,...     

Myths and misconceptions about hypnosis and suggestion: Separating fact and fiction

We present 21 prominent myths and misconceptions about hypnosis in order to promulgate accurate information and to highlight questions for future research. We argue that these myths and misconceptions have (a) fostered a skewed and stereotyped view of hypnosis among the lay public, (b) discouraged participant involvement in potentially helpful hypnotic interventions, and (c) impeded the exploration and application of hypnosis in scientific and practitioner communities. Myths reviewed span the view that hypnosis produces a trance or special state of consciousness and allied myths on topics related to hypnotic interventions; hypnotic responsiveness and the modification of hypnotic suggestibility; inducing hypnosis; and hypnosis and memory, awareness, and the experience of nonvolition. By demarcating myth from mystery and fact from fiction, and by highlighting what is known as well as what remains to be discovered, the science and practice of hypnosis can be advanced and grounded on a firmer empirical footing.     

Development of letter-specific processing: the effect of reading ability

During development, perceptual processing is tuned to inputs in the environment such that certain frequently encountered classes of stimuli are processed more effectively than similar comparison stimuli. Letters represent a class of stimuli that are encountered frequently in the environment, at least in literate cultures. Thus, the present study examined the development of letter-specific processing in children 6-19 years old by comparing the difference between performance on a letter-matching task and an unfamiliar non-letter-matching task in different subject groups. Results revealed an increase in letter-specific processing with development. Moreover, comparisons of letter-specific processing in groups of subjects matched either in age or reading ability indicate that the emergence of letter-specific processing is linked to increased reading skill, rather than increased age per se. Findings support theories of perceptual expertise, which suggest that skilled processing drives the specialization of perceptual mechanisms for certain classes of stimuli.