Shifting Winds: Using Ancestry DNA to Explore Multiracial Individuals’ Patterns of Articulating Racial Identity

This study explored how genotype information affects identification narratives of multiracial individuals. Twenty-one multiracial individuals completed individual interviews before and after receiving a DNA analysis to clarify their genetically based racial ancestry. Based on results, this article proposes patterns of articulating racial identity by multiracial individuals. Four patterns extend evolving research in multiracial identification, namely (1) the individual articulates a monoracial identity; (2) the individual articulates one identity, but this can shift in response to various conditions; (3) the individual articulates an extraracial identity, opting out of traditional categories applied to race; and (4) the person distinguishes traditional categories of race from culture and owns the two identities in different ways. Implications of these findings are discussed. First, adding new ancestry DNA information further muddles the neat categories of race, consistent with the view of race as socially constructed. Second, results emphasize the fluidity of identification for multiracial individuals. Third, DNA information challenges the neat percentages people tend to associate with their backgrounds. Particularly for younger multiracial individuals, there was less of a sense that race was a real thing and more that culture played a big part in how they saw themselves.     

A Spinozan lens onto the confusions of borderline relations

In this paper the author describes how, in his analytic work with difficult personality disorders, he uses a neo-Spinozan position or attitude of alpha-thinking and functioning to understand, clarify, and so to manage confused and confusing psychosomatic 'body-mind' and emotional relations, both internally and inter-personally. Two case examples are given, followed by reflections on technique and on the limits of mourning, transformation and irony. The author suggests that a private, ideational double-aspect, mind-body position may be helpful in working with these analysands. This analytic mode may create a radically different understanding by incorporating a relational system of containment, self-containment, observation and memory. In addition, the author gives his own version of the aetiology and dynamics of borderline states and relations, and weaves the two cases he reports on into reflections on his countertransferential responses, reactions, inter-actions and 'reverie' through the lens of a neo-Spinozan conceptual system.     

Recognition of faces of ingroup and outgroup children and adults

People are often more accurate in recognizing faces of ingroup members than in recognizing faces of outgroup members. Although own-group biases in face recognition are well established among adults, less attention has been given to such biases among children. This is surprising considering how often children give testimony in criminal and civil cases. In the current two studies, Euro-Canadian children attending public school and young adults enrolled in university-level classes were asked whether previously presented photographs of Euro-American and African American adults (Study 1) or photographs of Native Canadian, Euro-Canadian, and African American children (Study 2) were new or old. In both studies, own-group biases were found on measures of discrimination accuracy and response bias as well as on estimates of reaction time, confidence, and confidence-accuracy relations. Results of both studies were consistent with predictions derived from multidimensional face space theory of face recognition. Implications of the current studies for the validity of children's eyewitness testimony are also discussed.     

Alphabetic and nonalphabetic L1 effects in English word identification: a comparison of Korean and Chinese English L2 learners

Different writing systems in the world select different units of spoken language for mapping. Do these writing system differences influence how first language (L1) literacy experiences affect cognitive processes in learning to read a second language (L2)? Two groups of college students who were learning to read English as a second language (ESL) were examined for their relative reliance on phonological and orthographic processing in English word identification: Korean students with an alphabetic L1 literacy background, and Chinese students with a nonalphabetic L1 literacy background. In a semantic category judgment task, Korean ESL learners made more false positive errors in judging stimuli that were homophones to category exemplars than they did in judging spelling controls. However, there were no significant differences in responses to stimuli in these two conditions for Chinese ESL learners. Chinese ESL learners, on the other hand, made more accurate responses to stimuli that were less similar in spelling to category exemplars than those that were more similar. Chinese ESL learners may rely less on phonological information and more on orthographic information in identifying English words than their Korean counterparts. Further evidence supporting this argument came from a phoneme deletion task in which Chinese subjects performed more poorly overall than their Korean counterparts and made more errors that were phonologically incorrect but orthographically acceptable. We suggest that cross-writing system differences in L1s and L1 reading skills transfer could be responsible for these ESL performance differences.     

Masked priming is abstract in the left and right visual fields

Two experiments assessed masked priming for words presented to the left and right visual fields in a lexical decision task. In both Experiments, the same magnitude and pattern of priming was obtained for visually similar (kiss-KISS) and dissimilar (read-READ) prime-target pairs. These findings provide no support for the hypothesis that word identification is mediated by separate and lateralized abstract and specific visual form systems. Strikingly, equivalent priming was observed when primes and targets were presented to the same or opposite visual fields, suggesting that priming occurs after visual information from the two hemispheres is integrated.     

A few thoughts about the mind,the brain,and a child with early deprivation

Infant brain research is having an increasing impact on child psychotherapy and our understanding of the neurobiological effects of trauma and neglect. This paper outlines the 'experience-dependent' nature of brain development in infancy and the concept of critical periods in such development. The effects of deprivation on child development are illustrated and case material from a child who was institutionalized during his second year is used as a basis for posing questions about the nature of the mind and the brain. In spite of his deprivation, he was able to communicate imaginatively. Schore's proposal for the use of early interventions is put forward to counter discouragement that can be engendered by work with severely deprived children.     

The fear of confession? High Catholic collective narcissism and low secure identification with Catholics predict increased pedophilia myth acceptance

Over the past 30 years, the Catholic Church has been rocked by a series of child sexual abuse scandals worldwide. Some of the religious officials suggested that the children are partly to blame for being sexually abused by priests. We assumed that such convictions (i.e., pedophilia myth acceptance) should be associated with a defensive commitment to one's religious group, captured by religious collective narcissism. In two studies conducted among Polish participants (Study 1, longitudinal, n = 719; Study 2, cross-sectional, n = 357), we found that pedophilia myth acceptance was positively predicted by Catholic narcissism but negatively by secure identification with Catholics. We additionally demonstrated that the effect of Catholic narcissism on pedophilia myth acceptance was mediated by a siege mentality with respect to the religious in-group. We discuss the role of different types of group commitment in predicting in-group criticism and prejudice against underaged victims of sexual abuse.     

Electing to Take Control: Political Identification and Personal Control

Engaging in the political process is one way that individuals can exert control over society in general. Yet, emerging research suggests that engaging with political groups also helps people feel more in control of the course of their own lives. The present research examined whether this is always the case, using the natural experiment afforded by political events to probe the psychological mechanisms underpinning the relationship between group identification and personal control. Two cross-sectional studies conducted immediately after the 2016 Presidential election (total N = 752) and one longitudinal study conducted immediately before and after the 2020 Presidential election (N = 743) investigated the relationship between political group identification and personal control. Together, the studies tested whether this relationship is weakened under conditions of low agency (i.e., in a group that lost the election) and low predictability (i.e., immediately following a surprise election outcome). The results suggest that the relationship between political identification and personal control is robust except in the case of low agency and low predictability. The studies contribute to understanding the processes that link group-level political factors with individual-level psychological outcomes.     

Semantic transparency in free stems: The effect of Orthography-Semantics Consistency on word recognition

A largely overlooked side effect in most studies of morphological priming is a consistent main effect of semantic transparency across priming conditions. That is, participants are faster at recognizing stems from transparent sets (e.g., farm) in comparison to stems from opaque sets (e.g., fruit), regardless of the preceding primes. This suggests that semantic transparency may also be consistently associated with some property of the stem word. We propose that this property might be traced back to the consistency, throughout the lexicon, between the orthographic form of a word and its meaning, here named Orthography-Semantics Consistency (OSC), and that an imbalance in OSC scores might explain the “stem transparency” effect. We exploited distributional semantic models to quantitatively characterize OSC, and tested its effect on visual word identification relying on large-scale data taken from the British Lexicon Project (BLP). Results indicated that (a) the “stem transparency” effect is solid and reliable, insofar as it holds in BLP lexical decision times (Experiment 1); (b) an imbalance in terms of OSC can account for it (Experiment 2); and (c) more generally, OSC explains variance in a large item sample from the BLP, proving to be an effective predictor in visual word access (Experiment 3).     

Commentary on “Transformations in hallucinosis and the receptivity of the analyst” by Civitarese

After summarizing Civitareses complex and stimulating thoughts, merits of his conceptualization are emphazised firstly before coming to drawbacks of it. As a supplementary perspective on the conceptualisation (TH) of Civitares the commentary is focused on a slightly different approach. Transformation into hallucinosis is linked to excessive forms of projective identification., which can have massive influence on the analyst, thus pressing him into (behavioral) patterns similar to what was phantazised, or hallucinated or deluded by the patient about the relationsship. If the analyst is after a shorter or longer period able to recognize, how near he is or was to the Patient's deluded or hallucinated Constructions of his world, this will give him a further source to sense and to examine the patients experience.