Towards a better use of psychoanalytic concepts: A model illustrated using the concept of enactment

It is well known that there is a lack of consensus about how to decide between competing and sometimes mutually contradictory theories, and how to integrate divergent concepts and theories. In view of this situation the IPA Project Committee on Conceptual Integration developed a method that allows comparison between different versions of concepts, their underlying theories and basic assumptions. Only when placed in a frame of reference can similarities and differences be seen in a methodically comprehensible and reproducible way. We used “enactment” to study the problems of comparing concepts systematically. Almost all psychoanalytic schools have developed a conceptualization of it. We made a sort of provisional canon of relevant papers we have chosen from the different schools. The five steps of our method for analyzing the concept of enactment will be presented. The first step is the history of the concept; the second the phenomenology; the third a methodological analysis of the construction of the concept. In order to compare different conceptualizations we must know the main dimensions of the meaning space of the concept, this is the fourth step. Finally, in step five we discuss if and to what extent an integration of the different versions of enactment is possible.     

Children's Judgments of Certainty and Uncertainty on a Problem Where the Possible Solutions Differ in Likelihood

In this study the author examined why children and adults think they need to eat. Preschoolers through adults were provided with physiological, social, psychological, and routine causes for eating breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner, and were asked to either agree or disagree with the causal responses provided. A 4 Reason × 4 Meal repeated measures analysis of variance revealed significant main effects for meals and reasons, as well as significant Meal × Reason and Meal × Reason × Grade interactions. The effect sizes ranged from 0.1 to 0.7. Across all age groups, participants acknowledged physiological needs and desires (fulfilling hunger and needs to stay healthy) and routine (e.g., it is dinner time) as the primary causes for eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, for snack physiological needs were the primary reason. Second-grade students onward spontaneously produced biological justifications such as the need for energy and nutrition as important reasons for food consumption. These results lend support to the developmental model that children's and adults’ understanding of eating changes in middle childhood.     

The sanctity of life: The role of purity in attitudes towards abortion and euthanasia

Although abortion and euthanasia are highly contested issues at the heart of the culture war, the moral foundations underlying ideological differences on these issues are mostly unknown. Given that much of the extant debate is framed around the sanctity of life, we argued that the moral foundation of purity/sanctity—a core moral belief that emphasises adherence to the “natural order”—would mediate the negative relationship between conservatism and support for abortion and euthanasia. As hypothesised, results from a nation-wide random sample of adults in New Zealand (N = 3360) revealed that purity/sanctity mediated the relationship between conservatism and opposition to both policies. These results demonstrate that, rather than being motivated by a desire to reduce harm, conservative opposition to pro-choice and end-of-life decisions is (partly) based on the view that ending a life, even if it is one's own, violates God's natural design and, thus, stains one's spiritual purity.     

Parochial Altruism and Political Ideology

Parochial altruism refers to the propensity to direct prosocial behavior toward members of one's own ingroup to a greater extent than toward those outside one's group. Both theory and empirical research suggest that parochialism may be linked to political ideology, with conservatives more likely than liberals to exhibit ingroup bias in altruistic behavior. The present study, conducted in the United States and Italy, tested this relationship in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, assessing willingness to contribute money to charities at different levels of inclusiveness—local versus national versus international. Results indicated that conservatives contributed less money overall and were more likely to limit their contribution to the local charity while liberals were significantly more likely to contribute to national and international charities, exhibiting less parochialism. Conservatives and liberals also differed in social identification and trust, with conservatives higher in social identity and trust at the local and national levels and liberals higher in global social identity and trust in global others. Differences in global social identity partially accounted for the effects of political ideology on donations.     

目标倾向的理论研究述评

本文系统地回顾了目标倾向及其理论结构的研究,当代流行的成就动机观点认为,在成就目标上,个体的目标倾向可以分为学习目标倾向和统政目标价向。学习目标倾向的特征是寻求挑战,掌握新知识,面对失败时会付出更大的努力必政目标价向的特征是寻求良好的能力评价,避免不良的能力评价,回避挑战,遇到障碍、失败时绩效下降。目前多数研究认为,学习目标倾向和绩效目标倾向是相互独立的结构,而非同一结构的两极。目标倾向主要属于个体的心理特质,同时也受到环境因素的影响。     

A Note on Finiteness in the Predicative Foundations of Arithmetic

Recently, Feferman and Hellman (and Aczel) showed how to establish the existence and categoricity of a natural number system by predicative means given the primitive notion of a finite set of individuals and given also a suitable pairing function operating on individuals. This short paper shows that this existence and categoricity result does not rely (even indirectly) on finite-set induction, thereby sustaining Feferman and Hellman's point in favor of the view that natural number induction can be derived from a very weak fragment of finite-set theory, so weak that finite-set induction is not assumed. Many basic features of finiteness fail to hold in these weak fragments, conspicuously the principle that finite sets are in one-one correspondence with a proper initial segments of a (any) natural number structure. In the last part of the paper, we propose two prima facie evident principles for finite sets that, when added to these fragments, entail this principle.     

Evidence for task-dependent categorization in infancy

Two experiments compared infants' attention to the categorical distinction between people and animals in object-examining and sequential-touching tasks. In Experiment 1, 10- and 13-month-old infants distinguished between animals and people in an object-examining task. In this task, infants are familiarized with individual exemplars from one category, and then their response to exemplars from another category is measured. In Experiment 2, 13- and 16-month-old infants, but not 10-month-old infants, attended to the same distinction in a sequential-touching task. In this task, infants are presented with several exemplars from two categories simultaneously, and the order in which they touch those objects is assessed. Evaluation of infants' touching behavior in Experiment 2 also revealed developmental changes in how they approached this task. The combined results of these two experiments confirm the general trend reported in the literature and begin to provide insight into developmental changes that contribute to infants' ability to apply their categorization skills in different task contexts.     

Cross-modality priming for individual words in memory for coherent texts

This study explores implicit memory within the domain of text processing. Three experiments were designed to study cross-modality priming in a word-stem completion test following presentation of target words in the context of a coherent text. Four main results emerged. First, we found a significant priming effect for words previously studied in a text, this priming is higher with low-frequency words than with high-frequency words. Second, subjects demonstrated more repetition priming when study and test modalities matched than when they were different. Third, the magnitude of the priming effect in the visual condition varied with the perceptual processing of the text read. Fourth, priming effects did not depend on subjects' remembering of the words of text read as measured by a yes/no recognition test since no modality effect was found in this latter memory test. These results challenge Levy's (1993) view and are discussed in the framework of the transfer-appropriate processing view proposed by Roediger, Weldon and Challis (1989).     

网民对“人祸”事件的道德情绪特点——基于微博大数据研究

本研究采用大数据研究方法,对爬取的"动车事故"发生后40天内的94,562条相关微博进行情感分析,以探讨网民对"人祸"的道德情绪特点,同时对不同群体情绪表达差异进行探讨。结果发现:(1)网民对于动车事故主要表达的道德情绪有:愤怒、鄙视、厌恶、同情和爱。(2)包含不同道德基础的事件与不同的道德情绪相关联;(3)对于愤怒、厌恶和鄙视,男性普遍有更高的表达倾向和表达强度,而女性更倾向于表达爱和同情且强度更高;(4)对于爱和同情,团体VIP用户组表达的可能性和强度都高于其他用户;个体VIP用户比非VIP用户更可能表达愤怒、鄙视和厌恶,而团体VIP用户表达这类情绪的强度最小。研究表明,虚拟网络中人们道德情绪特点依然符合道德基础理论;不同群体在表达道德情绪时的差异性是对道德基础理论相关研究的补充。总言之,数据挖掘技术和情感分析方法是进行情绪研究的有效手段。     

A philosophical critique of psychological studies of emotion: the example of jealousy

The aim of this article is to provide a critical review of recent writings about jealousy in psychology, as seen from a philosophical perspective. At a more general level of inquiry, jealousy offers a useful lens through which to study generic issues concerned with the conceptual and moral nature of emotions, as well as the contributions that philosophers and social scientists can make to understanding them. Hence, considerable space is devoted to comparisons of psychological and philosophical approaches to emotion research in general. It turns out that although (Aristotle-style) arguments about the necessary conceptual features of jealousy qua specific emotion, do carry philosophical mileage, they may fail to cut ice with psychologists who tend to focus on jealousy as a broad dimension of temperament. The review reveals a disconcerting lack of cross-disciplinary work on jealousy: the sort of work that has moved the discourse on other emotions (such as gratitude) forward in recent years.