SEEKING COMFORT IN AN UNCOMFORTABLE CHAIR

The author explores the concept of comfort in relation to the setting. The concept of comfort, an unusual word in the psychoanalytic lexicon, describes the intuitive and complex experience of patient and analyst being together in the analytic office. The couch and the chair are not the only tools of the setting, but they are potential instruments with which to study the therapeutic process, both in high‐frequency therapy and in lower‐frequency treatments. To describe the transformations that an alternative experience of comfort can promote, the author looks at the intersection of this concept with the body–mind relationship and with the Bionian concept of binocular vision.     

ON THE BIRTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD THEORY,PART 1

Defining Psychoanalysis: Achieving a Vernacular Expression, by Ian Miller. London: Karnac, 2016. 116 pp. The Pioneers of Psychoanalysis in South America: An Essential Guide, edited by Nydia Lisman‐Pieczanski and Alberto Pieczanski. London/New York: Routledge, 2015. 537 pp. Reading Italian Psychoanalysis, edited by Franco Borgogno, Alberto Luchetti, and Luisa Marino Coe. London/New York: Routledge, 2016. 738 pp.     

Personalized Occupational Transformations: Narratives from Two Occupational Therapists’ Experiences with Complex Therapeutic Processes

Recovery and occupation-centered practices with persons with severe psychiatric disabilities involve many dynamic issues and processes. This study aimed to develop an understanding of how the therapeutic process unfolds in occupational therapy among persons with severe psychiatric disabilities living in sheltered or supported housing. Repeated interviews were conducted with two occupational therapists working in sheltered and supported housing facilities. Narrative analysis was used to analyze their stories. The findings reveal “personalized occupational transformations” describing significant events of interaction establishing therapeutic processes to promote personal agency and social recovery while targeting meaningful activities based on each resident’s wishes.     

Counterintuitive effects of negative social feedback on attention

Which stimuli we pay attention to is strongly influenced by learning. Stimuli previously associated with reward outcomes, such as money and food, and stimuli previously associated with aversive outcomes, such as monetary loss and electric shock, automatically capture attention. Social reward (happy expressions) can bias attention towards associated stimuli, but the role of negative social feedback in biasing attentional selection remains unexplored. On the one hand, negative social feedback often serves to discourage particular behaviours. If attentional selection can be curbed much like any other behavioural preference, we might expect stimuli associated with negative social feedback to be more readily ignored. On the other hand, if negative social feedback influences attention in the same way that other aversive outcomes do, such feedback might ironically bias attention towards the stimuli it is intended to discourage selection of. In the present study, participants first completed a training phase in which colour targets were associated with negative social feedback. Then, in a subsequent test phase, these same colour stimuli served as task-irrelevant distractors during a visual search task. The results strongly support the latter interpretation in that stimuli previously associated with negative social feedback impaired search performance.     

Can People Identify “Deceptive” or “Misleading” Items that Tend to Produce Mostly Wrong Answers?

In many domains, two‐alternative forced‐choice questions produce more correct responses than wrong responses across participants. However, some items, dubbed “deceptive” or “misleading”, produce mostly wrong answers. These items yield poor calibration and poor resolution because the dominant, erroneous response tends to be endorsed with great confidence, even greater than that of the correct response. In addition, for deceptive items, group discussion amplifies rather than mitigates error while enhancing confidence in the erroneous response. Can participants identify deceptive items when they are warned about their existence? It is argued that people's ability to discriminate between deceptive and non‐deceptive items is poor when the erroneous responses are based on the same process assumed to underlie correct responses. Indeed, participants failed to discriminate between deceptive and non‐deceptive perceptual items when they were warned that some of the items (Experiment 1) or exactly half of the items (Experiment 2) were deceptive. A similar failure was observed for general‐knowledge questions (Experiment 3) except when participants were informed about the correct answer (Experiment 4). Possibly, for these tasks, people cannot escape the dangers lurking in deceptive items. In contrast, the results suggest that participants can identify deceptive problems for which the wrong answer stems from reliance on a fast, intuitive process that differs from the analytic mode that is likely to yield correct answers (Experiment 5). The practical and theoretical implications of the results were discussed. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Accountability Systems and Group Norms: Balancing the Risks of Mindless Conformity and Reckless Deviation

In dynamic task environments, decision makers are vulnerable to two types of errors: sticking too closely to the rules (excessive conformity) or straying too far from them (excessive deviation). We explore the effects of process and outcome accountability on the susceptibility to these errors. Using a multiple‐cue probability‐learning task, we show that process accountability encourages conformity errors and outcome accountability promotes deviation errors. Two additional studies explore the moderating effects of self‐focused and other‐focused group norms. Self‐focused norms reduce the effect of process accountability on excessive conformity. Other‐focused norms reduce the effect of outcome accountability on excessive deviation. Our results qualify prevailing claims about the benefits of process over outcome accountability and show that those benefits hinge on prevailing group norms, on the effectiveness of prescribed decision rules, and on the amount of irreducible uncertainty in the prediction task. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Memory skills mediating superior memory in a world-class memorist

Laboratory studies have investigated how individuals with normal memory spans attained digit spans over 80 digits after hundreds of hours of practice. Experimental analyses of their memory skills suggested that their attained memory spans were constrained by the encoding time, for the time needed will increase if the length of digit sequences to be memorised becomes longer. These constraints seemed to be violated by a world-class memorist, Feng Wang (FW), who won the World Memory Championship by recalling 300 digits presented at 1 digit/s. In several studies we examined FW’s memory skills underlying his exceptional performance. First FW reproduced his superior memory span of 200 digits under laboratory condition, and we obtained his retrospective reports describing his encoding/retrieval processes (Experiment 1). Further experiments used self-paced memorisation to identify temporal characteristics of encoding of digits in 4-digit clusters (Experiment 2), and explored memory encoding at presentation speeds much faster than 1 digit/s (Experiment 3). FW’s superiority over previous digit span experts is explained by his acquisition of well-known mnemonic techniques and his training that focused on rapid memorisation. His memory performance supports the feasibility of acquiring memory skills for improved working memory based on storage in long-term memory.     

False feedback and beliefs influence name recall in younger and older adults

Feedback is an important self-regulatory process that affects task effort and subsequent performance. Benefits of positive feedback for list recall have been explored in research on goals and feedback, but the effect of negative feedback on memory has rarely been studied. The current research extends knowledge of memory and feedback effects by investigating face–name association memory and by examining the potential mediation of feedback effects, in younger and older adults, through self-evaluative beliefs. Beliefs were assessed before and after name recognition and name recall testing. Repeated presentation of false positive feedback was compared to false negative feedback and a no feedback condition. Results showed that memory self-efficacy declined over time for participants in the negative and no feedback conditions but was sustained for those receiving positive feedback. Furthermore, participants who received negative feedback felt older after testing than before testing. For name recall, the positive feedback group outperformed the negative feedback and no feedback groups combined, with no age interactions. The observed feedback-related effects on memory were fully mediated by changes in memory self-efficacy. These findings advance our understanding of how beliefs are related to feedback in memory and inform future studies examining the importance of self-regulation in memory.