Making conscious the unconscious in order to modify unconscious processing: Some mechanisms of therapeutic change1

This paper examines some of the mechanisms through which interpretation aimed primarily at increasing conscious awareness can nonetheless produce unconscious changes, the latter being deemed the basic aim of psychoanalysis. The concept of valency or motivational weight of the interpretation is proposed to assess which forces of the various motivational systems the interpretation mobilizes (hetero/self‐preservation, sensual/sexual, attachment, narcissistic, psychobiological regulation etc.), on which of the above‐mentioned systems interpretation relies, and which would oppose therapeutic intervention and why. Certain conditions are also analyzed that could explain the so‐called ‘change through the analytic relationship’, pointing out that, despite the major differences between this form of change and change through interpretation, both of them would share certain mechanisms. This conclusion leads to the need to qualify the idea that interpretation would be exclusively aimed at declarative memory, with no effects upon procedural memory. The paper examines the potential consequences for therapeutic techniques derived from recent fi ndings in neuroscience on so‐called labile state memory, and proposes the coupling of experiences as one of the analytical instruments used for therapeutic change. A clinical vignette is included to illustrate some of the theoretical and technical aspects considered.     

语篇阅读理解中人物性格模型的建构

采用实时窗口阅读技术,通过操纵特征段落性质和屏蔽段落长度两个变量,探讨人物性格模型在语篇阅读中的建构和影响因素。在研究所用材料中,特征段落描述能反映主人公性格的典型行为或不能反映其性格的一般行为,使其与目标句分别形成冲突或无关关系,考察读者能否利用这些内隐式的行为描述建构人物的性格模型。同时,改变屏蔽段落长度,形成局部或整体联贯两种条件,考察不同联贯类型的影响作用。结果发现：在不论整体还是局部联贯条件下,读者均能利用内隐的行为描述建构人物性格模型,并能应用该模型预期人物的后续行为。     

世界各国对克隆技术的态度引发的思考

克隆技术是现代生命科学领域的一项重要的技术,其发展引发了强烈的伦理争议并受到世界各国的广泛关注。世界各国对克隆技术的态度随着克隆技术的发展逐渐发生了改变。分析世界各国对克隆技术发展的反应,从中得出启示,将为我国相关政策的制定提供有益的指导。     

Aligning Spinoza with Descartes: An informed Cartesian account of the truth bias

There is a bias towards believing information is true rather than false. The Spinozan account claims there is an early, automatic bias towards believing. Only afterwards can people engage in an effortful re‐evaluation and disbelieve the information. Supporting this account, there is a greater bias towards believing information is true when under cognitive load. However, developing on the Adaptive Lie Detector (ALIED) theory, the informed Cartesian can equally explain this data. The account claims the bias under load is not evidence of automatic belief; rather, people are undecided, but if forced to guess they can rely on context information to make an informed judgement. The account predicts, and we found, that if people can explicitly indicate their uncertainty, there should be no bias towards believing because they are no longer required to guess. Thus, we conclude that belief formation can be better explained by an informed Cartesian account – an attempt to make an informed judgment under uncertainty.     

POST‐BIONIAN DEVELOPMENTS IN PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD THEORY: THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ANTONINO FERRO AND GIUSEPPE CIVITARESE

The Bi‐Personal Field: Experiences in Child Psychoanalysis. By Antonino Ferro. New York: Routledge, 1992 (1999). 232 pp. The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field. By Giuseppe Civitarese. New York: Routledge, 2008 (2010). 240 pp. The Necessary Dream: New Theories and Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. By Giuseppe Civitarese; translated by Ian Harvey. London: Karnac, 2013 (2014). 246 pp. The Analytic Field and Its Transformations. By Antonino Ferro and Giuseppe Civitarese. London: Karnac, 2015. 224 pp.     

The effects of active worrying on working memory capacity

According to the attentional control theory, worry, a crucial component of anxiety, impairs task performance through its direct effect on working memory capacity (WMC) by using up the limited resources available for performance thus reducing attentional control. We tested this hypothesis in the current study by examining the causal influence of active worrying on WMC in a sample of undergraduate university students (n?=?64) assigned either to a worry condition or to a non-worry control condition. Participants performed a change detection task before and after the worry/control manipulation. Mediation analyses showed that the level of self-reported worry mediated the effects of condition on change in WMC as demonstrated by the significant indirect effect of worry and the resulting non-significant direct effect of condition on change in WMC. Similar results were obtained when using state anxiety measures as mediating factors. Results of the current study are amongst the first to demonstrate that worry impairs WMC and as such have important implications for understanding the impact of worry.     

Context learning for threat detection

It is hypothesised that threatening stimuli are detected better due to their salience or physical properties. However, these stimuli are typically embedded in a rich context, motivating the question whether threat detection is facilitated via learning of contexts in which threat stimuli appear. To address this question, we presented threatening face targets in new or old spatial configurations consisting of schematic faces and found that detection of threatening targets was faster in old configurations. This indicates that individuals are able to learn regularities within visual contexts and use this contextual information to guide detection of threatening targets. Next, we presented threatening and non-threatening face targets embedded in new or old spatial configurations. Detection of threatening targets was facilitated in old configurations, and this effect was reversed for non-threatening targets. Present findings show that detection of threatening targets is driven not only by stimulus properties as theorised traditionally but also by learning of contexts in which threatening stimuli appear. Further, results show that context learning for threatening targets obstructs context learning for non-threatening targets. Overall, in addition to typically emphasised bottom-up factors, our findings highlight the importance of top-down factors such as context and learning in detection of salient, threatening stimuli.     

Individually constructed criteria for perception of urban transportation means – An approach based on Kelly’s personal construct theory

Understanding of acceptance of electric mobility has been typically discussed by a comparison of vehicles with different types of propulsion engines, battery electric vehicles and vehicles with an internal combustion engine. Nevertheless, electric mobility comprehends a combination of public transport and electric vehicles. The aim of this paper is to understand peoples’ outlook on electric mobility by identifying shared aspects of the assessment of battery electric vehicles and different user perspectives on transportation. A special research design in the form of repertory grids provides an opportunity to study the underlying causes of the cognitive perceptions and emotions relating to electric mobility. Cognitive interviews motivate respondents to reflect beyond the insights provided by standard forms of interview. Especially for the topic of battery electric vehicles, prejudices - for instance, those propagated by the media - are discarded and the actual requirements and patterns of mobility become visible. The special tasks involved in the interviews lead, for example, to deliberation on how to integrate battery charging processes into existing mobility patterns.This special method reveals that individuals take an interest in more characteristics of modes of transport than those that are usually analysed when researching electric mobility. In addition, three anticipation clusters can be identified for individuals with a higher affinity for cars. First, the perception of battery electric vehicles shows high levels of similarity to cars with internal combustion engines and that differentiating between types of engines is meaningless. Second, battery electric vehicles are perceived as a part of urban public transport. Third, battery electric vehicles are viewed as similar to pedelecs and segways, whereas questions of range, innovation and environmental aspects play a greater role in perceptions. These results lead to the conclusion that when studying the acceptance of BEVs, a comparison between cars with internal combustion engines and battery electric vehicles is not sufficient to grasp the complete user perspective. An analysis within the framework of a wider range of modes of transport is required in order to address people’s transportation needs.     

A study of metrics of distance and correlation between ranked lists for compositionality detection

Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is meaning-preserving, compositionality can be approximated as the semantic similarity between a phrase and a version of that phrase where words have been replaced by their synonyms. Different ways of representing such phrases exist (e.g., vectors (Kiela and Clark, 2013) or language models (Lioma, Simonsen, Larsen, and Hansen, 2015)), and the choice of representation affects the measurement of semantic similarity.We propose a new compositionality detection method that represents phrases as ranked lists of term weights. Our method approximates the semantic similarity between two ranked list representations using a range of well-known distance and correlation metrics. In contrast to most state-of-the-art approaches in compositionality detection, our method is completely unsupervised. Experiments with a publicly available dataset of 1048 human-annotated phrases shows that, compared to strong supervised baselines, our approach provides superior measurement of compositionality using any of the distance and correlation metrics considered.     

Police officers' beliefs about,and use of,cues to deception

Meta‐analytic findings indicate that people, including police officers, are generally poor at detecting low‐stakes deception. Related to this, investigations of behaviours that people reportedly use to make truth or lie judgements tend to conclude that people rely on incorrect stereotypes. However, consistent findings suggest that police officers are able to detect high‐stakes deception; this implies that, at least in some contexts, police officers utilise reliable cues to deception. The research presented here was an investigation of cues to deception used by police officers (N  = 69), when making veracity decisions about real world, high‐stakes communications. Data were collected on both free report cues, and also prescribed cues that were known (from previous research), to discriminate between liars and truth‐tellers in the communications that the police officers observed. Officers free reported using cues related to verbal content, emotion, body language, eyes, vocal cues, and external cues. Most prescribed cues were self‐reportedly used correctly by large majorities of the officers, suggesting that they may not rely on inaccurate stereotypes. Self‐report use of categories of free report cues, and prescribed cues, was not related to accuracy in detecting deception. As people may not always be aware of the behaviours on which their judgements are based, the relationships between some of the behaviours actually displayed in the communications, and group accuracy in detecting deception in those communications, were also investigated. Group accuracy was related to the presence of subjective, emotion‐related cues in the communications.