Political Power and Race Relations in South Africa: African Attitudes Before and After the Transition

When an oppressed majority finally gains political power, what happens to its attitudes to its erstwhile oppressor, and to its perceptions and feelings about its socioeconomic disadvantages that were established during its oppression? Longitudinal data from pre- and post-transition surveys of black South African college and high school students indicate marked reductions in perceptions of and outrage about intergroup socioeconomic inequity and deprivation relative to English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking whites, but no change in attitudes toward these groups or toward whites in general. The findings are discussed in terms of contemporary theory and research on justice, intergroup relations, and group conflict. Some tentative implications for the prospects for a democratic political culture in South Africa are noted.     

Complex learning and information processing by pigeons: a critical analysis

Three models of conditional discrimination learning by pigeons are described: stimulus configuration learning, the multiple-rule model, and concept learning. A review of the literature reveals that true concept learning is not characteristic of the behavior of pigeons in matching-to-sample, oddity-from-sample, or symbolic matching studies. Instead, pigeons learn a set of sample-specific S^D rules. Transfer of the discrimination to novel stimuli, at least along the hue dimension, is predicted by a “coding hypothesis”, which holds that pigeons make a unique, but usually unobserved response, R₁, to each sample, and that the comparison stimulus chosen depends on which R₁ was emitted in the presence of the sample. Convincing evidence is found that pigeons do code sample hues, but there is little evidence that allows one to infer that the “coding event” must have behavioral properties. Parameters of the conditional discrimination paradigm are identified, and it is shown that by appropriate parametric manipulation, a variety of analogous tasks may be generated for both human and animal subjects. The tasks make possible the comparative study of complex learning, attention, memory, and information processing, with the added advantage that behavior processes may be compared systematically across tasks.     

Dialectics of Sign and Symbol and the Utterance of Archetype Theory

Debates surrounding Jung’s archetype theory could be characterized as tacit attempts to contend with the concept’s dual function as referring to something known to psychologists (sign) and standing for something that is fundamentally unknowable (symbol). This essay considers implications of the term “archetype,” outlines and critiques some of the conundrums of categorization and scientific credibility posed by Jung’s formulation of the theory, and prompts locating the archetypal “human quality” of being human in imaginaries of typical patterning of the experiential realm.     

The Authoritarian Personality, 50 Years Later: What Questions Are There for Political Psychology?

Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford's The Authoritarian Personality is probably the most deeply flawed work of prominence in political psychology. The methodological, procedural, and substantive errors of this study are well known, but they are frequently simply attributed to poor methodological judgments, issues of scaling (such as response set), or Freudian theories that legitimated circular interpretations. But a more fundamental bias arose from the attempt to empirically verify the existence of a "type" of person whom the researchers thought dangerous and with whom they did not empathize. This attempt involved two dangerous procedures: (1) the fusion of nominalist research procedures (in which empirical results were used to type respondents) with a realist interpretation of types (in which some people "just were" authoritarians and others not), and (2) a theoretically rich critique of the authoritarians and a lack of interest in the psychodynamics of liberals. This combination led to an intrinsically biased interpretive project that could not help but accumulate damning evidence about authoritarians. These subtler problems have haunted contemporary work in political psychology that avoids the methodological problems of Adorno et al.; Altemeyer's work on authoritarianism, which not only is free from the defects of the Adorno et al. study but also involves some methodologically exemplary experiments, is similarly distorted by asymmetries. The same fundamental problems seem to be at the heart of the weaknesses of the theory of symbolic racism to which critics have pointed. Political psychologists should regard The Authoritarian Personality as a cautionary example of bias arising from the choice of methodological assumptions.     

From symbolic law to narrative capacity: A paradigm shift in psychoanalysis?1

In the Freudian perspective, the primal phantasies, a refl ection of prehistory, oblige us through our phylogenetic heritage and its repetition in the ontogenetic to recognize the limits of generation and sex, to submit to the symbolic law represented by the father of the primal horde and to fi nd‐as is sought in the treatment‐one's ‘right’ place in the primal scene (Oedipus complex). Clinical experience with patients suffering from narcissistic disorders soon led certain analysts to propose a paradigm change, which has brought about important modifi cations to technique, but also, more recently, modifi cations at the level of metapsychology. Certain contemporary analysts have a conception of the subject focused on processes of interaction and communication between ‘thinking apparatuses’ in the here and now. The author shows that this current development is taking place in parallel with major trends in our postmodern era in which communication and negotiation replace former religious, mythical, philosophical, moral or political beliefs.     

Symbolic conceptions: the idea of the third

The idea of the third which appears in Jung's concepts of the transcendent function and the coniunctio also occurs in several psychoanalytic theories concerning the emergence of reflective and symbolic thought in childhood development (defined here as the development of 'imaginal capacity'). Noting the way this process is often conceived in terms of the metaphor of sexual intercourse leading to 'conception', this paper suggests that such images need to be understood as symbolic conceptions of the meaning-making functions of the human mind. This leads to a different view of psychoanalytic theories that attempt to account for the development of imaginal capacity in terms of the Oedipus complex. It is suggested that a) these functions must be operative in the mind before the Oedipal situation can become meaningful and b) that psychoanalytic theories are themselves symbolic conceptions which, like mythological narratives, seek to communicate and comprehend psychic reality through imaginal forms.     

身份认同：“换脸术”引发的哲学思考与解读

“换脸”打破了面孔和身份一一对应的关系,该如何理解术后“身份主体”问题呢？具身性和故事叙事的方式是以身体作为理解世界的视角或者通过对其生活经历的叙述界定身份问题,然而具身性忽视了脸的双重维度的区分,故事叙事则有主观重置的嫌疑。一种可能的路径是将新面孔看作过渡客体,逐渐将异组织移植同化为受者的完全一体化,“脸”作为一种符号使用,其意义在于日常生活的互动。这种策略可使受者在现实和虚幻之间作出区分,更易于重塑身份认同。虽然心理排异和“被侵占”等问题仍需进一步调整,但它仍不失为一种合理路径。

     

One ring to rule them all: Master discourses of enlightenment—and racism—from colonial to contemporary New Zealand

We interrogated historical continuity and change in discourses of enlightenment and racism through the analysis of 160 years of New Zealand Speeches from the Throne (1854–2014, 163 speeches). Enlightenment discourses of benevolence and perfectibility were prevalent in all periods, much more so than racism. ‘Old‐fashioned’ racism took the form of an assumed civilizational superiority (including accusations of ‘barbarism’) during colonization, with ‘modern’ racism taking forms like blaming Māori for not ‘productively’ using the land. Both declined to almost zero by the 20th century, undermining the idea of ‘old‐fashioned’ versus ‘modern’ racism. Utilitarian discourses peaked in the late 19th to early 20th centuries as justification for Māori land alienation. ‘Master discourses of enlightenment’ consisted of a central core of social representations that changed at the periphery, with a gradual expansion of symbolic inclusion of Māori in discourses of national identity to the point where biculturalism is the dominant discourse for elites today.     

A Review of Experimental Research on Embodied Creativity: Revisiting the Mind–Body Connection

A growing body of experimental work highlights the potential value of unstructured, interactive, or spontaneous motions, including gestures, dance, shifting body postures, physical object-manipulation, drawing, etc. to favorably impact creative performance. However, despite these favorable findings, to our knowledge, no systematic review has been conducted to explore the totality of evidence for embodied activities in this arena. Thus, the objective of this paper was to systematically evaluate the potential effects of embodied experimental manipulations on traditionally assessed creativity outcomes. A systematic review was conducted utilizing PubMed, PsychInfo, Sports Discus, and Google Scholar databases. The 20 studies evaluated employed a variety of methodological approaches regarding study design, embodied manipulation, and selection of specific creativity outcomes. Despite these variations, embodied movement robustly enhanced creativity across nearly all studies (90%), with no studies showing a detrimental effect. Based on the evaluation of the studies reviewed, several common themes emerged. These included the relevance of symbolic metaphors and distributed embodied cognitions, selection of embodied modality, specific measurement considerations, as well as the importance for implementing true, inactive control conditions in embodied creativity research. This review expands on these findings and places them in the context of improving future embodied creativity research.     

The role of cognitive architectures in general artificial intelligence

The term “Cognitive Architectures” indicates both abstract models of cognition, in natural and artificial agents, and the software instantiations of such models which are then employed in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The main role of Cognitive Architectures in AI is that one of enabling the realization of artificial systems able to exhibit intelligent behavior in a general setting through a detailed analogy with the constitutive and developmental functioning and mechanisms underlying human cognition. We provide a brief overview of the status quo and the potential role that Cognitive Architectures may serve in the fields of Computational Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research.