When majority members exclude ethnic minorities: The impact of shame on the desire to object to immoral acts

In recent years, ethnic minorities have experienced an increase in acts of exclusion. In two studies, we demonstrated how ingroup members' felt shame about such immoral behavior explained their desire to pro‐socially object to this immorality by distancing from the perpetrating ingroup and by wanting to support the affected minorities. We showed how the desire to pro‐socially object varies as a function of national identification. As expected, nationally attached identifiers' felt shame for the immoral behavior was linked with greater willingness to pro‐socially object to it. The opposite pattern was found for nationally glorifying identifiers. In the second study, we found that anger directed at the ingroup partially explained the relationship between group‐based shame and the pro‐social desire to object. The results contribute to the literature on shame and pro‐social motivations by showing that distancing from the perpetrating ingroup can be considered as a pro‐social strategy rather than a defensive one.     

Clinical applications of Matte Blanco's thinking

Ignacio Matte Blanco (1908–1995) left very few specific indications about the applications of his theoretical notions to his interpretative style. The author shows how he uses Matte Blanco to formulate some of his own interpretations. The first part of the paper uses clinical vignettes to illustrate some of Matte‐Blanco's concepts. Their theoretical vocabulary is thus made explicit. Then two psychoanalytic sessions are discussed at greater length, together with one from a therapy, so that the use of Matte‐Blanco's notions can be seen clearly, allowing for a fresh perspective on areas of psychoanalytic theory, particularly dreams, psychopathology viewed according to the proportions of asymmetrical and symmetrical functioning in the patient's bi‐logical mental system, the multidimensionality of the unconscious, the structural unconscious, the emotion‐thought relationship, projective identification, resistance, and negative therapeutic reaction. The practical consequences of all this are elaborated, particularly the ensuing possibility of ‘thinking with the patient' in the session. This enables the patient to introject a form of mental functioning in which the asymmetrical mode is not invaded by the symmetric mode (a parallel can be seen here with the Bionian concept of dialogue between the psychotic and non‐psychotic parts of the mind).     

Social Identification and Well-Being Following a Terrorist Attack: A Longitudinal Study of Israeli Adolescents

The authors examined the role of familial and national social identification in shaping the well-being (positive self-esteem [PSE] and satisfaction with life [SL]) among Israeli adolescents following a terrorist attack. Adolescents living in an attacked town (n = 259; M age = 16.19 years, SD = 0.74 years) and adolescents living in a not attacked town (n = 281; M age = 16.14 years, SD = 0.69 years) were studied longitudinally at 3 weeks and 1 year after the attack. Family identification promoted SL concurrently and PSE concurrently and longitudinally in both groups. Israeli identification hindered subsequent PSE and SL among trauma exposure group adolescents. The authors apply the findings to explain the protective and detrimental potential of social identification following traumatic experiences.     

Servant Leadership and Follower Outcomes: Mediating Effects of Organizational Identification and Psychological Safety

This study investigated the mediating role of organizational identification and psychological safety in the relationship between servant leadership and two employee outcomes: employee voice and negative feedback seeking behavior. The sample for this study comprised of 174 full-time employees drawn from a large food company based in Pakistan. Results showed that organizational identification and psychological safety partially mediated the effects of servant leadership on voice and negative feedback seeking behavior. The theoretical and practical implications of this research are discussed.     

A closer look at the discrimination outcomes in the IAT literature

To what extent the IAT (Implicit Association Test, Greenwald et al., 1998) predicts racial and ethnic discrimination is a heavily debated issue. The latest meta‐analysis by Oswald et al. (2013) suggests a very weak association. In the present meta‐analysis, we switched the focus from the predictor to the criterion, by taking a closer look at the discrimination outcomes. We discovered that many of these outcomes were not actually operationalizations of discrimination, but rather of other related, but distinct, concepts, such as brain activity and voting preferences. When we meta‐analyzed the main effects of discrimination among the remaining discrimination outcomes, the overall effect was close to zero and highly inconsistent across studies. Taken together, it is doubtful whether the amalgamation of these outcomes is relevant criteria for assessing the IAT's predictive validity of discrimination. Accordingly, there is also little evidence that the IAT can meaningfully predict discrimination, and we thus strongly caution against any practical applications of the IAT that rest on this assumption. However, provided that the application is thoroughly informed by the current state of the literature, we believe the IAT can still be a useful tool for researchers, educators, managers, and students who are interested in attitudes, prejudices, stereotypes, and discrimination.     

ON THE ANALYST'S IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PATIENT: THE CASE OF J.‐B. PONTALIS AND G. PEREC

The writer Georges Perec was in psychoanalysis with Jean‐Bertrand Pontalis for four years in the early 1970s. In this essay, the author presents the exceptional interest this analyst took in this patient and the ways in which that interest manifested itself in his work, psychoanalytic and otherwise. Many correlative factors suggest that identificatory processes persisted beyond the treatment and were maintained into Pontalis's later life. While this paper is primarily intended to provide evidence to support this view of a specific case, the author closes by reflecting that this may be a more general phenomenon and the reasons for this.     

How Collective Participation Impacts Social Identity: A Longitudinal Study from India

A key issue for political psychology concerns the processes whereby people come to invest psychologically in socially and politically significant group identities. Since Durkheim, it has been assumed that participation in group‐relevant collective events increases one's investment in such group identities. However, little empirical research explicitly addresses this or the processes involved. We investigated these issues in a longitudinal questionnaire study conducted at one of the world's largest collective events—a month‐long Hindu festival in north India (the Magh Mela). Data gathered from pilgrims and comparable others who did not attend the event show that one month after the event, those who had participated (but not the controls) exhibited heightened social identification as a Hindu and increased frequency of prayer rituals. Data gathered from pilgrims during the festival predicted these outcomes. Specifically, perceptions of sharing a common identity with other pilgrims and of being able to enact one's social identity in this event helped predict changes in participants' identification and behavior. The wider significance of these data for political psychology is discussed.     

Reading and related skills in Grades 6, 7, 8 and 9: French normative data from EVALEC

IntroductionTo appropriately assess reading difficulties, tests designed according to an appropriate theoretical framework and based on normative data are required.ObjectiveWe used EVALEC (Sprenger-Charolles, Colé, Béchennec, & Kipffer-Piquard, 2005) to collect data on the word-level reading skills and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness, phonological short-term memory, and rapid naming) of middle school children (Grades 6 to 9, about 80 in each grade).MethodIn the tests focused on word-level reading skills, the effects of regularity (regular vs. irregular words), lexicality, and length (short vs. long irregular words and pseudowords) were examined. Accuracy and processing times were recorded for all tests.ResultsThe effects of both regularity and lexicality were significant, whatever the measure and independently of grade. Both accuracy and speed were lower for longer pseudowords, whereas length did not have a significant effect on irregular word latencies and, surprisingly, long irregular words were read more accurately than short ones. Reading level as assessed by a standardized test (Lefavrais, 2005) was not predicted by phonological short-term memory; rapid naming (color names) and phonemic awareness were both predictors but, in both cases, only response times predicted reading level.ConclusionThese results, and particularly those from the reading tasks, are discussed in relation to models of written-word recognition developed to account for the reading of multisyllabic items (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010) in orthographies shallower than English (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2014).     

Effects of literacy on semantic verbal fluency in an immigrant population

Objective: A significant impact of limited schooling and illiteracy has been found on numerous neuropsychological tests, which may partly be due to the ecological relevance of the tests in the context of illiteracy. The aims of this study were to compare the performance of illiterate and literate immigrants on two semantic criteria for the verbal fluency test, and examine the influence of acculturation on test performances.

Method: Performances of 20 cognitively unimpaired illiterate and 21 literate Turkish immigrants aged ≥50 years were compared on an animal and supermarket criterion for the semantic verbal fluency test. Also, the influence of acculturation on test performances was examined.

Results: Significantly poorer performance of the illiterate compared to the literate group was found for the animal criterion, whereas no differences were found for the supermarket criterion that was considered more ecologically relevant for illiterate individuals. A significant interaction effect was found between the semantic criteria and literacy group, which was mainly related to a large effect of semantic criteria within the illiterate group. Adjusting for years of residence in Denmark and acculturation score did not affect this interaction effect.

Conclusions: Overall, our results are in line with previous studies comparing semantic fluency in illiterate and literate individuals. The results lend further support to the strong associations between literacy, semantic verbal fluency performance and ecological relevance of the semantic criterion and extend previous findings to immigrants with different cultural experiences related to the acculturation process.     

Projective identification and working through of the countertransference: A multiphase model

Referring to Melanie Klein's unpublished views on projective identification, Bion's theory of container/contained and Money‐Kyrle's understanding of countertransference as a process of transformation, the author develops a multiphase model of projective identification. He differentiates five subphases of (1) adhesion, (2) penetration, (3) linking of the projection with an internal object of the analyst, (4) transformation and (5) re‐projection. In the author's view the differentiation of overlapping subphases may be helpful to better localize problems of working through the countertransference. Some technical implications are illustrated by brief clinical vignettes. To conclude, the paper discusses typical impasses and options for interpretation.