The impurity of “pure” indexicals

Within the class of indexicals, a distinction is often made between “pure” or “automatic” indexicals on one hand, and demonstratives or “discretionary” indexicals on the other. The idea is supposed to be that certain indexicals refer automatically and invariably to a particular feature of the utterance context: ‘I’ refers to the speaker, ‘now’ to the time of utterance, ‘here’ to the place of utterance, etc. Against this view, I present cases where reference shifts from the speaker, time, or place of utterance to some other object, time, or place. I consider and reject the claim that these counterexamples to the automatic indexical theory all involve non-literal uses of indexicals and argue that they cannot be explained away on the grounds that they involve conversational implicature or pretense.     

The associations between Self-Criticism and Dependency and incidental learning of interpersonal and achievement words

Personality trait-congruent implicit content processing was studied experimentally. In Experiment-1 (N = 132), individual differences in Self-Criticism were most strongly associated with incidental learning of negative achievement words, whereas individual differences in Dependency were most strongly associated with incidental learning of negative interpersonal words. In Experiment-2 (N = 172), individual differences interacted with processing tendencies in predicting negative affect. Highly dependent and highly self-critical individuals experienced higher negative affect if they were low in incidental learning of positive interpersonal words. Overall, these findings indicate that Self-Criticism and Dependency have significantly differential impacts on implicit cognitive processes.     

Selective attention and avoidance on a pictorial cueing task during stress in clinically anxious and depressed participants

Although it is well established that attentional biases exist in anxious populations, the specific components of visual orienting towards and away from emotional stimuli are not well delineated. The present study was designed to examine these processes. We used a modified spatial cueing task to assess the speed of engagement and disengagement from supraliminal and masked pictorial cues depicting threat, dysphoria, or neutral content in 36 clinically anxious, 41 depressed and 41 control participants. Participants were randomly assigned to a stress or neutral condition. During stress, anxious participants were slow to disengage from masked left hemifield pictures depicting threat or dysphoria, but were quick to disengage from supraliminal threat pictures. Information processing in anxious participants during stress was characterized by early selective attention of emotional stimuli, occurring prior to full conscious awareness, followed by effortful avoidance of threat. Depressed participants were distinct from the anxious group, displaying selective attention for stimuli depicting dysphoria, but not threat, during the neutral condition. In sum, attentional biases in clinical populations are associated with difficulties in the disengagement component of visual orienting. Further, a vigilant-avoidant pattern of attentional bias may represent a strategic attempt to compensate for the early activation of a fear response.     

Three ways to resist temptation: The independent contributions of executive attention, inhibitory control, and affect regulation to the impulse control of eating behavior

It is generally assumed that impulse control plays a major role in many areas of self-regulation such as eating behavior. However, the exact mechanisms that enable the control of impulsive determinants such as automatic affective reactions toward tempting stimuli are not well understood. “The present research investigated the separate moderator effects of three factors of impulse control, executive attention, inhibitory control, and affect regulation on the relationship between automatic affective reactions toward candy and subsequent candy consumption.” Results showed that all three factors reduced the influence of automatic affective reactions on eating behavior, indicating improved impulse control. Implications for self-regulation research are discussed.     

CONSTRUCTING RELIGION WITHOUT THE SOCIAL: DURKHEIM, LATOUR, AND EXTENDED COGNITION

I take up the question of how models of extended cognition might redirect the academic study of religion. Entering into a conversation of sorts with Emile Durkheim and Bruno Latour regarding the "overtakenness" of social agency, I argue that a robust portrait of extended cognition must redirect our interest in explaining religion in two key ways. First, religious studies should take up the methodological principle of symmetry that informs contemporary histories of science and begin theorizing the efficacy of gods as social actors. Second, theorists of religion should begin noting how the work required to construct spaces in which the gods appear depends on the construction of disciplined and capable subjects.     

Scale‐dependent automatic shifts in brand evaluation standards

Different schema-based expectations for competing brands can produce shifting evaluative standards in consumers' relative ratings of these brands. This shift in standards differentially affects objective (number-based) and subjective (word-based) rating scales. Several studies support the proposition that a brand rated as objectively inferior to another can be subjectively perceived as equivalent to—or even better than—the same brand. Such anomalous response inconsistency originates in consumers' recourse to different expectations for the competing brands and their automatic adjustment of expectations for the inferior brand when responding to subjective measures. The implicit relaxing of evaluative standards for the objectively dominated brand leads to an unconscious upward bias in its subjective ratings. The effect is moderated by consumer expertise and is asymmetric—it is not accompanied by an escalation of evaluative standards for objectively dominating brands.     

An experimental investigation of the automatic/voluntary dissociation in limb apraxia

The ability of apraxic patients to perform gestures in everyday life is a controversial issue. In this paper, we aimed to evaluate the automatic/voluntary dissociation (AVD) in four patients affected by clinically relevant limb apraxia. For this purpose, we sampled different kinds of gestures belonging to patients' motor repertoire and then assessed their production in a testing session. Our experimental procedure consisted of two steps: in the first phase, we recorded gestures produced by patients in two natural conditions; in the second phase, we assessed production of correctly produced tool-actions, and of spontaneous non tool-actions and meaningless conversational (cohesive and beats) gestures under different modalities. AVD was observed for all types of gestures, albeit to different degree in single patients. The present findings demonstrate that the context provides strong bottom-up cues for the retrieval of motor patterns, while artificial testing conditions impose an additional cognitive load.     

Controllability and resource dependence in automatic evaluation

Two studies addressed automaticity features of evaluative priming. In Study 1, participants could strategically eliminate and partially reverse priming effects although stimulus onset asynchrony between prime and target was short (275 ms) and time pressure considerable. In Study 2, priming effects under a concurrent memory load increased as measured working-memory capacity decreased. The results bear on the interpretation of evaluative priming as a measure of spontaneous evaluation, and they support an account of evaluative priming in terms of Stroop-like response conflict and synergy.     

Book reviews

Books reviewed:
Kirsch, Thomas B., The Jungians: A Comparative and Historical Perspective
Perera, Sylvia Brinton, Queen Maeve and Her Lovers.
Fonagy, Peter; Cooper, Arnold, Wallerstein, M. & Robert, S., (eds.) Psychoanalysis on the Move. The work of Joseph Sandler
Green, Andre, The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse,
Johnson, S. & Ruszcynski, S., (eds.) Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Independent Tradition
Vaidyanathan, T. G. & Kripal, J. J., (eds.) Vishnu on Freud's Desk – A Reader in Psychoanalysis and Hinduism.     

The Four Causes of Behavior

Comprehension of a phenomenon involves identifying its origin, structure, substrate, and function, and representing these factors in some formal system. Aristotle provided a clear specification of these kinds of explanation, which he called efficient causes (triggers), formal causes (models), material causes (substrates or mechanisms), and final causes (functions). In this article, Aristotle's framework is applied to conditioning and the computation-versus-association debate. The critical empirical issue is early versus late reduction of information to disposition. Automata theory provides a grammar for models of conditioning and information processing in which that constraint can be represented.