The Relationship of Parental Attachment and Psychological Separation to the Psychological Functioning of Young Adults

Abstract

The authors explored the interrelations between attachment patterns and psychological separation from parents as well as the contribution of these variables to adaptive psychological functioning. Among 153 university students in Greece, there was a positive association between security of attachment and freedom from guilt, anxiety, and resentment toward one's parents (conflictual independence); in contrast, there was an inverse relation between security of attachment and independence from parents in relation to emotional, functional, and attitudinal independence. Compared with the insecurely attached students, the securely attached students also scored higher on measures of self-esteem and lower on measures of anxiety and loneliness.     

B. F. Skinner: The Writer and His Definition of Verbal Behavior

Skinner's definition of verbal behavior, with its brief and refined versions, has recently become a point of controversy among behavior analysts. Some of the arguments presented in this controversy might be based on a misreading of Skinner's (1957a) writings. An examination of Skinner's correspondence with editors of scientific journals shows his sophisticated mastery of English and his knowledge of contemporary approaches of linguistics, and might help to settle the meaning of the passages involved in the controversy. A more precise definition of verbal behavior, deduced from Skinner's distinction between verbal and nonverbal operants, is suggested, and a possible reason why Skinner did not define verbal behavior in the terms proposed by this alternative definition is discussed. The alternative definition is more compatible with a functional approach to behavior and highlights what is specific to verbal behavior by pointing to the conventions of the verbal community. Some possible consequences of adopting this alternative definition are described.     

Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology

The democratic egalitarian ideal requires that everyone should enjoy equal power over the world through voting. If it is improper to vote twice in the same election, why should it be permissible for dual citizens to vote in two different places? Several possible excuses are considered and rejected.     

The imagination of the body: The logic of imagination and the metaphor of therapeutic space in the therapeutic community of Thalassa House

In this paper the author discusses the metaphors of the community in Thalassa House, a therapeutic community in Hungary of which he is both the founder and leader.     

David Liberman's legacy

This article presents, in the author's own vision, his attempt to consider (and update) the work of an original thinker of contemporary psychoanalysis (in the present). Following a short overview of his biographical data and distinctive traits as maestro and man, it then tries to capture the implications and panoramic vision of Liberman's work, the prevailing questions and problems of psychoanalysis to which it responds. In the author's opinion this involves a serious attempt to systematize clinical psychoanalysis on the basis of singularity and of tolerance to human diversity, with the greatest precision and scientific rigour admitted by the psychoanalytic discipline – avoiding cliché on the one hand and what we might call the mystification of the Oracle on the other. The successive stages of Liberman's production are indicated in terms of the auxiliary disciplines (communication theory, semiotics and linguistics) which he used for his ever more precise systematization of clinical psychoanalysis finally leading to his proposals on ‘style’ and his vision of the psychopathology of over‐adaptation and psychosomatic instances. Other concepts which this paper highlights are: Liberman's conception of analytic dialogue as framed by human interaction; his theorization which stems from this particular empirical base making use of ‘operational definitions’ and ‘intermediary formulations’; his operational definition of transference; and the inclusion of setting inside the ‘analytic situation’.     

The mental representation of integers: an abstract-to-concrete shift in the understanding of mathematical concepts

Mathematics has a level of structure that transcends untutored intuition. What is the cognitive representation of abstract mathematical concepts that makes them meaningful? We consider this question in the context of the integers, which extend the natural numbers with zero and negative numbers. Participants made greater and lesser judgments of pairs of integers. Experiment 1 demonstrated an inverse distance effect: When comparing numbers across the zero boundary, people are faster when the numbers are near together (e.g., −1 vs. 2) than when they are far apart (e.g., −1 vs. 7). This result conflicts with a straightforward symbolic or analog magnitude representation of integers. We therefore propose an analog-x hypothesis: Mastering a new symbol system restructures the existing magnitude representation to encode its unique properties. We instantiate analog-x in a reflection model: The mental negative number line is a reflection of the positive number line. Experiment 2 replicated the inverse distance effect and corroborated the model. Experiment 3 confirmed a developmental prediction: Children, who have yet to restructure their magnitude representation to include negative magnitudes, use rules to compare negative numbers. Taken together, the experiments suggest an abstract-to-concrete shift: Symbolic manipulation can transform an existing magnitude representation so that it incorporates additional perceptual-motor structure, in this case symmetry about a boundary. We conclude with a second symbolic-magnitude model that instantiates analog-x using a feature-based representation, and that begins to explain the restructuring process.     

Metaphor and the Reshaping of Our Cognitive Fabric

Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell view our world of meanings as a fabric of concepts and relations. Metaphor bends this fabric, superimposing one concept on another. While Gerhart and Russell are right to view metaphor as a cognitive rather than a purely linguistic phenomenon, their model misses the danger inherent in a cognitive restructuring that leaves some features of a concept highlighted and others backgrounded. When the bending of the conceptual fabric becomes permanent, the essential metaphorical insight is lost, leaving a skewed understanding of reality. We have a tendency to retain the metaphorically altered cognitive topography while forgetting its nonliteral genesis. Thus, the metaphoric process is one from which proceeds not only insight but also, necessarily, misconception.     

形式语用学视角中的生活世界理论

哈贝马斯吸收和整合了当代各种语言哲学的成就,形成了自己的语言哲学——形式语用学。这一理论通过对言语行为的意义与它的有效性要求之间内在关联性的分析,指出了言语行为的意义只有在交往行为中才能呈现出来。在解释言语行为的最终来源问题上,哈贝马斯引入胡塞尔的“生活世界”理论,并对它进行了形式语用学的改造。形式语用学的生活世界理论消解了胡塞尔生活世界理论中的先验性,同时又拓宽了韦伯的行为合理化理论视域。     

The ideal scaffolding of language: Husser's fourth Logical Investigation in the light of cognitive linguistics

One of the central issues in linguistics is whether or not language should be considered a self-contained, autonomous formal system, essentially reducible to the syntactic algorithms of meaning construction (as Chomskyan grammar would have it), or a holistic-functional system serving the means of expressing pre-organized intentional contents and thus accessible with respect to features and structures pertaining to other cognitive subsystems or to human experience as such (as Cognitive Linguistics would have it). The latter claim depends critically on the existence of principles governing the composition of semantic contents. Husserl's fourth Logical Investigation is well known as a genuine precursor for Chomskyan grammar. However, I will establish the heterogeneous character of the Investigation and show that the whole first part of it is devoted to the exposition of a semantic combinatorial system cognate to the one elaborated within Cognitive Linguistics. I will thus show how theoretical results in linguistics may serve to corroborate and shed light on those parts of Husserl's Fourth Investigation that have traditionally been dismissed as vague or simply ignored.     

Paraconsistent Informational Logic

We introduce a Paraconsistent Informational Logic that formalizes the idea of conjectures which are acceptable as to the quality and the variety of the information that they convey with respect to a given theory T, even if they are classically inconsistent with T. The work constitutes an extension of a previously developed Informational Logic for classical frameworks, where a new notion of logical entropy measure H on formulas and on proofs plays a central role.