Involuntary processing of social dominance cues from bimodal face-voice displays

Social-rank cues communicate social status or social power within and between groups. Information about social-rank is fluently processed in both visual and auditory modalities. So far, the investigation on the processing of social-rank cues has been limited to studies in which information from a single modality was assessed or manipulated. Yet, in everyday communication, multiple information channels are used to express and understand social-rank. We sought to examine the (in)voluntary nature of processing of facial and vocal signals of social-rank using a cross-modal Stroop task. In two experiments, participants were presented with face-voice pairs that were either congruent or incongruent in social-rank (i.e. social dominance). Participants’ task was to label face social dominance while ignoring the voice, or label voice social dominance while ignoring the face. In both experiments, we found that face-voice incongruent stimuli were processed more slowly and less accurately than were the congruent stimuli in the face-attend and the voice-attend tasks, exhibiting classical Stroop-like effects. These findings are consistent with the functioning of a social-rank bio-behavioural system which consistently and automatically monitors one’s social standing in relation to others and uses that information to guide behaviour.     

Revealing Gender Double Standards in the Parenthood Norm Depends on Question Order

Becoming a parent has been described as a dominant social norm, especially for women. Though some research has indicated changes toward more flexible gendered parenthood norms, methodological issues may be masking the continued presence of a gender double standard. In line with the condition for activation of double standards, we postulated that endorsement of the parenthood norm would vary depending on the response context. Our aim was to analyze the parenthood norm for women and for men taking into account the response context in a quantitative survey. In a French nationally-representative sample, more than 4,000 female and male adults were asked whether a woman/man can have a fulfilled life without having children in two questions presented in a random order. Based on the literature on question-order effects, the answer to the first question should be influenced by the participant’s personal background (e.g., gender, parental status), i.e., the personal background context, whereas the question asked second should be influenced by the comparison with the first question, i.e. the social relational context. In the personal background context, the own-gender parenthood norm was endorsed more strongly than the other-gender parenthood norm by both female and male participants. In contrast, in the social relational context, the parenthood norm for women was endorsed more strongly than the parenthood norm for men by both female and male participants. Our results showed a strong gender double standard observed only in the comparative context and illustrates the need to use appropriate survey methodology to examine the presence of gendered social norms.

     

The waiting room as boundary and bridge between self-States and unformulated experience

For both patient and analyst, the waiting room serves containing and expressive functions. The waiting room may serve as both a boundary between the analytic couple and a bridge to engagement. At times it can provide a means of titrating the intensity and duration of the affects activated by immersion in the analytic process: it can also serve to extend the boundaries of the analytic frame by providing a holding environment to facilitate metabolizing the impact of comings and goings. It also may be viewed as a membrane between self-states through which oscillating facets of dissociated or unformulated experience are enacted. Clinical material from the analysis of an adolescent girl illustrates these ideas.     

Independence of first- and second-order memories in newborn rabbits

The mammary pheromone promotes the acquisition of novel odorants (CS1) in newborn rabbits. Here, experiments pinpoint that CS1 becomes able to support neonatal learning of other odorants (CS2). We therefore evaluated whether these first- and second-order memories remained dependent after reactivation. Amnesia induced after CS2 recall selectively blocked this memory, when recall and amnesia of CS1 left the souvenir of CS2 safe; this finding partially differed from results obtained in adult mammals. Thus, in this model of neonatal appetitive odor learning, second-order memory seems to depend on first-order memory for its formation but not for its maintenance.     

Pleasant emotional induction broadens the visual world of young children

These experiments aimed at studying the influence of emotional context on global/local visual processing in children. Children 5 years old, known to present an immature global visual bias, and 8 years old, known to pay attention predominantly to global information, were placed in either a neutral or pleasant emotional context and subsequently presented with a global/local visual judgement task. As with previous findings for adults, both age groups presented a pronounced perceptual bias toward global information following exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, younger children, who do not present a global bias during the neutral exposure, presented the same preference for global information as older children when exposed to the pleasant context. These findings indicate that emotion may strongly affect visual perception in children, with important implications for educational practice and models of cognition.     

Cross-Language Perception of Cantonese Vowels Spoken by Native and Non-native Speakers

This study examined the effect of native language background on listeners’ perception of native and non-native vowels spoken by native (Hong Kong Cantonese) and non-native (Mandarin and Australian English) speakers. They completed discrimination and an identification task with and without visual cues in clear and noisy conditions. Results indicated that visual cues did not facilitate perception, and performance was better in clear than in noisy conditions. More importantly, the Cantonese talker’s vowels were the easiest to discriminate, and the Mandarin talker’s vowels were as intelligible as the native talkers’ speech. These results supported the interlanguage speech native intelligibility benefit patterns proposed by Hayes-Harb et al. (J Phonetics 36:664–679, 2008). The Mandarin and English listeners’ identification patterns were similar to those of the Cantonese listeners, suggesting that they might have assimilated Cantonese vowels to their closest native vowels. In addition, listeners’ perceptual patterns were consistent with the principles of Best’s Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best in Speech perception and linguistic experience: issues in cross-language research. York Press, Timonium, 1995).     

How Group Analysis Cures: An Exploration of Narcissistic Rage in Group Treatment

This paper addresses the use of group analysis in treating individuals for whom chronic narcissistic rage is a prominent feature of their character. Such individuals are often especially suspicious of participating in group experiences, as their sensitivity to slight and circumscribed empathy for others often leaves them vulnerable to being attacked and ostracized in groups. Their history often reveals experiences in which they were either the scapegoat of the family or of the playground, often both. Such individuals, however, may also long for inclusion and acceptance, and thus participation in a therapeutic group may be a particularly important part of their continued development. An extended clinical vignette illustrates how such work occurs within a therapeutic group using a self-psychological model. Narcissistic rage as manifested within the group-as-a-whole or groupself is also examined.     

Relative category-specific preservation in semantic dementia? Evidence from 35 cases

Category-specific deficits have rarely been reported in semantic dementia (SD). To our knowledge, only four previous studies have documented category-specific deficits, and these have focused on the living versus non-living things contrast rather than on more fine-grained semantic categories. This study aimed to determine whether a category-specific effect could be highlighted by a semantic sorting task administered to 35 SD patients once at baseline and again after 2 years and to 10 Alzheimer’s disease patients (AD). We found a relative preservation of fruit and vegetables only in SD.This relative preservation of fruit and vegetables could be considered with regard to the importance of color knowledge in their discrimination. Indeed, color knowledge retrieval is known to depend on the left posterior fusiform gyrus which is relatively spared in SD. Finally, according to predictions of semantic memory models, our findings best fitted the Devlin and Gonnerman’s computational account.