Soul in the world: symbolic culture as the medium for psyche

Whilst the loss of a sense of living connection with the material world is mainly associated with the scientific revolution in seventeenth century Europe, it can be traced back to Plato's introduction of a hierarchy between soul and body. Jung's attempted solution to this – esse in anima – is ingenious but maintains the Cartesian split by which the aliveness of the world is reduced to a projection of psychic forces (the archetypes). An alternative approach is proposed, rooted in the Aristotelean emphasis on practical activity that sees the soul as a function of our way of being in the world. Human cognition is extended and distributed by our social and material engagement with the world, especially via collective representations whose symbolic character is constitutive of the reality of the world in which we live. Despite the dominance of ‘scientific Cartesian’ representations in the modern Western world, there remain numerous instances of participation mystique that cannot be captured by the Cartesian notion of projection. These indicate an opening to ways of being in the world that may lead us out of the impasse of the Cartesian matrix.     

Explaining the Inexplicable: Differences in Attributions for the Holocaust in Germany,Israel, and Poland

Seventy years have passed since the Holocaust, but this cataclysmic event continues to reverberate in the present. In this research, we examine attributions about the causes of the Holocaust and the influence of such attributions on intergroup relations. Three representative surveys were conducted among Germans, Poles, and Israeli Jews to examine inter‐ and intragroup variations in attributions for the Holocaust and how these attributions influence intergroup attitudes. Results indicated that Germans made more external than internal attributions and were especially low in attributing an evil essence to their ancestors. Israelis and Poles mainly endorsed the obedient essence attribution and were lowest on attribution to coercion. These attributions, however, were related to attitudes towards contemporary Germany primarily among Israeli Jews. The more they endorsed situationist explanations, and the less they endorsed the evil essence explanation, the more positive their attitude to Germany. Among Germans, attributions were related to a higher motivation for historical closure, except for the obedience attribution that was related to low desire for closure. Israelis exhibited a low desire for historical closure especially when attribution for evil essence was high. These findings suggest that lay perceptions of history are essential to understanding contemporary intergroup processes.     

Does Talker‐Specific Information Influence Lexical Competition? Evidence From Phonological Priming

In this study, we examined whether the lexical competition process embraced by most models of spoken word recognition is sensitive to talker‐specific information. We used a lexical decision task and a long lag priming experiment in which primes and targets sharing all phonemes except the last one (e.g., /bagaR/“fight” vs. /baga?/“luggage”) were presented in two separate blocks of stimuli. In Experiment 1, the competitor prime block was presented only once to listeners, and no modulation of the competitor priming effect as a function of a talker change between the primes and targets was observed. However, attenuation in the competitor priming effect in the case of a talker change between the primes and targets was observed in Experiment 2 in which the competitor prime block was presented five times to listeners. We discuss our findings in reference to hybrid models of spoken word recognition in which repetition of words with the same talker could be a key factor in the formation and access to talker‐dependent representations.     

Accuracy of Basic Knowledge of Traumatic Historical Events: The Armenian Genocide

This research assumes that accuracy of shared historical knowledge of genocide might help new generations cope with the trauma lived by previous generations, while the longer the denial of a genocide the more fragmented the macronarrative and the longer the collective trauma. The Armenian genocide (1915) is generally represented in opposite ways by the Turks and Armenians. The study explores the knowledge accuracy of the 1915 events before and after the centennial commemoration of the genocide and uses convenience samples from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Romania, United States, Venezuela, and a representative sample (Romania, N = 1231). The major findings suggest a very low basic knowledge of genocide, with a few exceptions, despite a significant increase of this knowledge after the 100-year commemoration.     

Changing perspective within and across environments

Perspective change within a single environment is a slow and effortful process. However, little research has addressed perspective change across multiple environments. Using a task-set switching paradigm, subjects judged spatial relationships between target locations from differing perspectives. Response times were longer when successive trials probed different perspectives. However, this cost was greater when perspective was changed within a single environment compared to when it was changed across two environments. This result indicates that the processing of perspective change, and perhaps general spatial reasoning, differs in these two cases. Implications for theories of perspective change and environmental knowledge are discussed.     

Rhyming words and onset-rime constituents: an inquiry into structural breaking points and emergent boundaries in the syllable

Geudens and Sandra, in their 2003 study, investigated the special role of onsets and rimes in Dutch-speaking children's explicit phonological awareness. In the current study, we tapped implicit phonological knowledge using forced-choice similarity judgment (Experiment 1) and recall of syllable lists (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, Dutch-speaking prereaders judged rime-sharing pseudowords (/fas/-/mas/) to sound more similar than pseudowords sharing an equally sized nonrime unit (/fas/-/fak/). However, in a syllable recall task (/tepsilonf/, /ris/, /nal/), Dutch-speaking prereaders were as likely to produce recombination errors that broke up the rime (/tepsilons/) as to produce errors that retained the rime (/repsilonf/). Thus, a rime effect was obtained in a task that highlighted the phonological similarity between items sharing their rimes, but this effect disappeared in tasks without repetition of rime units. We conclude that children's sensitivity to rimes depends on similarity relations and might not reflect a fixed perceived structure of spoken syllables.     

“God may NOT be a Personexcl;”: A Case of Cultural Construction of God Representations

This article raises the fundamental questions of God representations: What is the origin and nature of God representations in the context of culture? The subsequent questions that flow from this major question include: What are the psychoanalytic notions of culture and cultural experience? And what is the relationship between the self and God representation? Given the emphasis placed upon the nature of “individual” representational experience in psychoanalytic literature, this article presents a challenge to psychoanalytic object-relations theory by explicating the case of the Korean cultural construction of God representations. The author argues that to understand one’s images of God one needs to consider the relationship between the mental images one has constructed prior to one’s acquisition of language and cultural constructs that are collectively represented and symbolically embodied through the use of language.