What are symbols symbols of? Situated action,mythological bootstrapping and the emergence of the Self

This paper addresses the question of how symbols should be understood in analytical psychology and psychoanalysis. The point of view examined focuses on the recent turn to more cognitive and developmental models in both disciplines and briefly reviews and critiques the evolutionary and cognitive arguments. The paper then presents an argument based on dynamic systems theory in which no pre-existing template or structure for either mind or behaviour is assumed. Within the dynamic systems model the Self is viewed as an emergent phenomenon deriving from the dynamic patterns existing in a complex system that includes the physiological characteristics of the infant, the intentional attributions of the caregiver and the cultural or symbolic resources that constitute the environment. The symbol can then be seen as a discrete, and in important ways an autonomous, element in the dynamic system. Conclusions are drawn for further research into the nature of the symbol with implications for both theory and practice in analytical psychology and psychoanalysis.     

Interactions between Knowledge,Action and Commitment within Agent Dynamic Logic

This paper considers a new class of agent dynamic logics which provide a formal means of specifying and reasoning about the agents activities and informational, motivational and practical aspects of the behaviour of the agents. We present a Hilbert-style deductive system for a basic agent dynamic logic and consider a number of extensions of this logic with axiom schemata formalising interactions between knowledge and commitment (expressing an agent s awareness of her commitments), and interactions between knowledge and actions (expressing no learning and persistence of knowledge after actions). The deductive systems are proved sound and complete with respect to a Kripke-style semantics. Each of the considered logics is shown to have the small model property and therefore decidable.Presented by Ewa Orlowska     

The influence of adults' actions on children's inferences about word meanings

This article first establishes the effect of adults' actions on children's inferences about the shape and material of solid objects, based on data from Japanese 2-, 4-, and 6-year-olds. Japanese 2-year-olds are already sensitive to adults' actions in making inferences, and children become more adept at this as they become older. The invariance of the phenomenon of the effect of actions is then discussed in terms of three of its aspects: across age groups, across languages (the universality of the effect), and across tasks in lexical development. It is suggested that while specific linguistic characteristics (e.g., the means of individuation of entities), and complexity of object shape probably influence the effect of actions, action effects may have a potentially invariant/universal aspect.     

How to Identify Negative Actions with Positive Events

It is often assumed that, while ordinary actions are events, ‘negative actions’ (omissions, refrainments, etc.) are absences of events. I claim that a negative action is an ordinary, ‘positive’ event that plays a certain role. I argue that my approach can answer standard objections to the identity of negative actions and positive events.     

Ostracism drives group moralization and extreme group behavior

ABSTRACT

Sharing beliefs, particularly moral beliefs, is a way to establish social connections. We hypothesized that ostracism leads people who are high in the need to belong to adhere to the moral beliefs of an ingroup, and that moralizing the beliefs of one’s group increases the willingness to endorse extreme behavior on behalf of the group. Across two studies, participants were ostracized or included, rated the moral relevance of their group values, and indicated their endorsement of extreme behavior on behalf of the group. Across studies, ostracism increased group moralization in participants high in the need to belong. In Study 2, group moralization translated into endorsement of extreme behavior. Our findings suggest that morality serves a binding function that may be channeled into extreme behaviors. (120 words)     

Fabricated Illness: Working within the Family System to Find a Pathway to Health

The term medically unexplained symptoms refers to a clinical presentation where the child's symptoms and impairment cannot be explained by any known organic pathology, and may include conversion disorders, somatoform pain disorders, factitious disorder, and factitious disorder by proxy. In this case study, we present our treatment of a 9‐year‐old girl with a 2‐year history of medically unexplained abdominal cramping and vaginal discharge. During the 9 months that we worked with this family, we were never able to clarify in our own minds the source of the child's symptoms—that is, who was responsible for their induction or who was the instigator or maintainer of the exaggerated symptoms. Nor did we come to fully understand the function of the symptoms in the family system. Our case report does not answer either of these questions. Instead, we describe how we worked with the family despite the ongoing ambiguities as to why the symptoms were occurring and who was inducing them. The functional outcome was disappearance of symptoms, return to full school attendance, and improved parenting behavior.     

Conscious awareness of action potentiates sensorimotor learning

Many everyday skills are unconsciously learned through repetitions of the same behaviour by binding independent motor acts into unified sets of actions. However, our ability to be consciously aware of producing newly and highly trained motor skills raises the question of the role played by conscious awareness of action upon skill acquisition. In this study we strengthened conscious awareness of self-produced sequential finger movements by way of asking participants to judge their performance in terms of maximal fluency after each trial. Control conditions in which participants did not make any judgment or performance-unrelated judgments were also included. Findings indicate that conscious awareness of action, enhanced via subjective appraisal of motor efficiency, potentiates sensorimotor learning and skilful motor production in optimising the processing and sequencing of action units, as compared to the control groups. The current work lends support to the claim that the learning and skilful expression of sensorimotor behaviours might be grounded upon our ability to be consciously aware of our own motor capability and efficiency.     

Effects of personality traits and characteristics of child sexual abuse on maternal reactions and support

Objective

This study aimed to examine the relationship between maternal and contextual factors including maternal personality traits, the quality of mother–child relationship, the characteristics of sexual abuse and maternal outcomes: (1) maternal reactions including feelings of anger and responsibility, anger and perceptions of responsibility of the child, and (2) maternal support provided to the child following the disclosure of sexual abuse.

Modeling Nonstationary Emotion Dynamics in Dyads using a Time-Varying Vector-Autoregressive Model

Emotion dynamics are likely to arise in an interpersonal context. Standard methods to study emotions in interpersonal interaction are limited because stationarity is assumed. This means that the dynamics, for example, time-lagged relations, are invariant across time periods. However, this is generally an unrealistic assumption. Whether caused by an external (e.g., divorce) or an internal (e.g., rumination) event, emotion dynamics are prone to change. The semi-parametric time-varying vector-autoregressive (TV-VAR) model is based on well-studied generalized additive models, implemented in the software R. The TV-VAR can explicitly model changes in temporal dependency without pre-existing knowledge about the nature of change. A simulation study is presented, showing that the TV-VAR model is superior to the standard time-invariant VAR model when the dynamics change over time. The TV-VAR model is applied to empirical data on daily feelings of positive affect (PA) from a single couple. Our analyses indicate reliable changes in the male’s emotion dynamics over time, but not in the female’s—which were not predicted by her own affect or that of her partner. This application illustrates the usefulness of using a TV-VAR model to detect changes in the dynamics in a system.