The power of ideas: esotericism,historicism, and the limits of discourse

This article is a response to the reviews by Giovanni Filoramo, Olav Hammer, Bernd-Christian Otto, Marco Pasi, and Michael Stausberg of Wouter J. Hanegraaff's book Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. The author attempts to clarify his view of the relation between history and theory, and between intellectual history and discourse theory in particular; he provides a summary of his motivations for writing the book and of its main argument; he concludes by addressing a number of theoretical issues raised by the respondents.     

A late locus of the distractor frequency effect in picture–word interference: Evidence from event-related potentials

In this study, we investigated how people deal with irrelevant contextual information during speech production. Two main models have been proposed. WEAVER++ assumes that irrelevant information is removed from the production system by an early blocking mechanism. On the other hand, the response exclusion hypothesis assumes a blocking mechanism that operates late, after lexical selection has finished. To delineate between these models, we focused on the distractor frequency effect (i.e., longer picture naming latencies in the context of low-frequency compared to high-frequency words) and measured ERPs concurrently. Behaviorally, the distractor frequency effect was replicated. In the ERPs, three effects were found. One effect occurred very early and is interpreted as an effect of low-level visual feature processing. The two other effects occurred after lexical access and are thus in line with the response exclusion hypothesis.     

Multi‐level aspects of social cohesion of secondary schools and pupils' feelings of safety

Background. School safety and corresponding feelings of both pupils and school staff are beginning to receive more and more attention. The social cohesion characteristics of a school may be useful in promoting feelings of safety, particularly in pupils. Aims. To conceptualize theoretically, and check empirically a two‐level model of social cohesion between and within schools, in order to explain a pupil's feelings of safety at school. Samples. Data were collected aided by a national Dutch survey in secondary education carried out via the Internet. In 2008, digital questionnaires were completed by about 78,800 pupils, 6,200 teachers and educational support staff, and 600 school managers. Methods. Data were checked for reliability and representativity. Social cohesion was indicated by self‐reported measures of individual pupils and by aggregating scale and item scores of school managers, teachers, and other support staff within schools. Multi‐level analysis using individual pupil data and school‐level data was performed using MLwiN. Results. A pupil's age, educational attainment level, experience of mild physical violence, prosocial rules of conduct and joint control of these rules, and school measures against playing truant, show positive influences on a pupil's feelings of safety at school. Negative influences are exerted by not feeling most at home in The Netherlands, peers taking drugs and weapons into school, and by experiencing social violence, severe physical violence, and sexual violence. Negative school effects exist simultaneously in severe physical violence experienced by teachers and other staff, and in curriculum differentiation applied by teachers and other staff; a positive school effect is school size. Some interaction effects between pupil and school‐level variables were explored. Conclusions. The variance at school level is relatively low compared with the variance at pupil level. However, a much higher percentage of variance at school level than at pupil level is explained with respect to the pupils' feelings of safety at school. The resulting two‐level model also reflects the streaming of pupils in Dutch secondary schools. To improve school safety, the national results emphasize the need to enhance prosocial behaviour rules and to enhance the shared control of these rules between teachers and pupils. They also emphasize the need for the school to take measures that prevent truancy and redefine curriculum differentiation procedures. National educational policy and research can combine efforts to assist schools in developing reliable and valid procedures to increase effectively safety in and around schools.     

Knowledge of a second language influences auditory word recognition in the native language

Many studies in bilingual visual word recognition have demonstrated that lexical access is not language selective. However, research on bilingual word recognition in the auditory modality has been scarce, and it has yielded mixed results with regard to the degree of this language nonselectivity. In the present study, we investigated whether listening to a second language (L2) is influenced by knowledge of the native language (L1) and, more important, whether listening to the L1 is also influenced by knowledge of an L2. Additionally, we investigated whether the listener's selectivity of lexical access is influenced by the speaker's L1 (and thus his or her accent). With this aim, Dutch-English bilinguals completed an English (Experiment 1) and a Dutch (Experiment 3) auditory lexical decision task. As a control, the English auditory lexical decision task was also completed by English monolinguals (Experiment 2). Targets were pronounced by a native Dutch speaker with English as the L2 (Experiments 1A, 2A, and 3A) or by a native English speaker with Dutch as the L2 (Experiments 1B, 2B, and 3B). In all experiments, Dutch-English bilinguals recognized interlingual homophones (e.g., lief [sweet]-leaf /li:f/) significantly slower than matched control words, whereas the English monolinguals showed no effect. These results indicate that (a) lexical access in bilingual auditory word recognition is not language selective in L2, nor in L1, and (b) language-specific subphonological cues do not annul cross-lingual interactions.     

Increased Stroop interference with better second-language reading skill

Skilled readers demonstrate remarkable efficiency in processing written words, unlike beginning readers for whom reading occurs more serially and places higher demands on visual attention. In the present study, we used the Stroop paradigm to investigate the relationship between reading skill and automaticity, in individuals learning a second language with a different orthographic system. Prior studies using this paradigm have presented a mixed picture, finding a positive, a negative, or no relationship between the size of Stroop interference and reading skills. Our results show that Stroop interference in the second language was positively related to reading skill (when controlled for interference in the first language). Furthermore, interference was positively related to objective but not subjective indices of the amount of exposure to the second language. We suggest that the lack of consistency in the results of earlier studies may be due, at least in part, to these studies looking at Stroop interference in isolation, rather than comparing interference between languages.     

Discrimination thresholds for haptic perception of volume, surface area, and weight

The present study investigated the human ability to discriminate the size of 3-D objects by touch. Experiment 1 measured the just noticeable differences (JNDs) for three tasks: (1) discrimination of volume without availability of weight information, (2) discrimination of volume with weight information available, and (3) discrimination of surface area. Stimuli consisted of spheres, cubes, and tetrahedrons. For all shapes, two reference sizes were used (3.5 and 12 cm(3)). No significant effect of task on the discriminability of objects was found, but the effects of shape and size were significant, as well as the interaction between these two factors. Post hoc analysis revealed that for the small reference, the Weber fractions for the tetrahedron were significantly larger than the fractions for the cube and the sphere. In Experiment 2, the JNDs for haptic perception of weight were measured for the same objects as those used in Experiment 1. The shape of objects had no significant effect on the Weber fractions for weight, but the Weber fractions for the small stimuli were larger than the fractions for the large stimuli. Surprisingly, a comparison between the two experiments showed that the Weber fractions for weight were significantly larger than the fractions for volume with availability of weight information. Taken together, the results reveal that volume and weight information are not effectively combined in discrimination tasks. This study provides detailed insight into the accuracy of the haptic system in discriminating objects' size. This substantial set of data satisfies the need for more fundamental knowledge on haptic size perception, necessary for a greater understanding of the perception of related properties, as well as of more general perceptual processes.     

Haptic perception of wetness

In daily life, people interact with textiles of different degrees of wetness, but little is known about the mechanics of wetness perception. This paper describes an experiment with six conditions regarding haptic discrimination of the wetness of fabrics. Three materials were used: cotton wool, sponge-structured viscose and thin viscose. Two ways of touching were investigated: static touching, in which only thermal cues were available, and dynamic touching, in which additional mechanical cues were available. For dynamic touching, average Weber fractions for discrimination were around 0.3, whereas for static touching, they ranged from 0.34 to 0.63. The results show that people can make use of the additional mechanical cues to significantly improve their discrimination performance. There was no significant difference between Weber fractions for the three materials, showing that wetness can be judged as a separate perceptual quantity, independent of the material.     

Designs for studying the effectiveness of long-term psychoanalytic treatments: balancing level of evidence and acceptability to patients

Long-Term Psychoanalytic Treatments (LTPT) include both long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy (LTPP) and psychoanalysis (PsAn). Current opinion seems to be that there is some evidence for the effectiveness of LTPP, but none for that of PsAn. This may be due in part to researchers not balancing the level of evidence of randomized controlled studies (RCTs), cohort studies, and pre-post studies with patients' acceptance of these various research designs used in studying the effectiveness of LTPT. After a review of the merits of eight possible control conditions for LTPT in RCTs and cohort studies, and a consideration of the limitations and merits of pre-post studies, it was found that RCTs pair high levels of evidence with limited degrees of patient acceptance, especially where PsAn is concerned. Cohort studies appear to provide at most a moderate level of evidence. Their acceptability is hardly better than that of RCTs, as it depends on the acceptability of control conditions similar to those of RCTs. The acceptability of pre-post studies is much better, but they can provide, at most, a moderate level of evidence. Apart from randomization, they can meet all methodological criteria for high-quality research (often they do not, but there are ways to correct this). In summary, in the long-term treatment of complex mental disorders with LTPT, RCTs often pair a high level of evidence with limited patient acceptance of the method. Compared to RCTs, cohort studies show a lower level of evidence without much gain in acceptability. Pre-post studies pair the highest level of acceptability with the lowest level of evidence of the three designs. Limited acceptability is not to be confused with no acceptability, nor moderate level of evidence with none.     

Walter the banker: the conjunction fallacy reconsidered

In a famous experiment by Tversky and Kahneman (Psychol Rev 90:293–315, 1983), featuring Linda the bank teller, the participants assign a higher probability to a conjunction of propositions than to one of the conjuncts, thereby seemingly committing a probabilistic fallacy. In this paper, we discuss a slightly different example featuring someone named Walter, who also happens to work at a bank, and argue that, in this example, it is rational to assign a higher probability to the conjunction of suitably chosen propositions than to one of the conjuncts. By pointing out the similarities between Tversky and Kahneman’s experiment and our example, we argue that the participants in the experiment may assign probabilities to the propositions in question in such a way that it is also rational for them to give the conjunction a higher probability than one of the conjuncts.