Transference focused psychotherapy: overview and update

This paper describes a specific psychoanalytic psychotherapy for patients with severe personality disorders, its technical approach and specific research projects establishing empirical evidence supporting its efficacy. This treatment derives from the findings of the Menninger Foundation Psychotherapy Research project, and applies a model of contemporary psychoanalytic object relations theory as its theoretical foundation. The paper differentiates this treatment from alternative psychoanalytic approaches, including other types of psychoanalytic psychotherapy as well as standard psychoanalysis, and from three alternative non-analytical treatments prevalent in the treatment of borderline patients, namely, dialectic behavior therapy, supportive psychotherapy based on psychoanalytic theory, and schema focused therapy. It concludes with indications and contraindications to this particular therapeutic approach derived from the clinical experience that evolved in the course of the sequence of research projects leading to the empirical establishment of its efficacy.     

Justice‐sensitive interpretations of ambiguous situations

The accessibility of concepts related to justice and injustice is proposed as a basic cognitive mechanism underlying the personality trait of justice sensitivity. To provide evidence for this assertion, the manner in which justice sensitivity shapes the interpretation of an ambiguous situation was investigated. It was found that, without priming, and after injustice is primed, persons high in justice sensitivity tend to perceive greater injustice in an ambiguous situation than persons low in justice sensitivity. If the restoration of justice is primed, however, persons high in justice sensitivity tend to interpret the ambiguous situation as more just when compared to persons low in justice sensitivity. Results are discussed with regard to a process‐oriented explanation of emotional and behavioural effects of justice sensitivity.     

心理理论研究三十年：回顾与反思

自Premack和Woodruff于1978年提出心理理论至今,心理理论研究已走过了30年的历程。当前心理理论研究已经成为发展心理学、心灵哲学、认知科学所关注的热门课题。文章回顾了心理理论研究的缘起和概念、内容与基本范式、问题与困境,在此基础上反思了心理理论研究困境与解释模型的关系,并对该领域未来研究方向做了展望。     

Modulation of long-term memory by arousal in alexithymia: The role of interpretation

Moderate physiological or emotional arousal induced after learning modulates memory consolidation, helping to distinguish important memories from trivial ones. Yet, the contribution of subjective awareness or interpretation of arousal to this effect is uncertain. Alexithymia, which is an inability to describe or identify one’s emotional and arousal states even though physiological responses to arousal are intact, provides a tool to evaluate the role of arousal interpretation. Participants scoring high and low on alexithymia (N = 30 each) learned a list of 30 words, followed by immediate recall. Participants then saw either an arousing (oral surgery) or neutral video (tooth brushing). Memory was tested 24-h later. Physiological response to arousal was comparable between groups, but subjective response to arousal was impaired in high alexithymia. Yet, delayed word recognition was enhanced by arousal regardless of alexithymia status. Thus, subjective response to arousal, i.e., cognitive appraisal, was not necessary for memory modulation to occur.     

同声传译过程中的工作记忆与双语控制研究

同声传译是一项受时间限制的高度复杂的双语活动,译员在接收原语输入的同时要进行译入语输出。同传中译员要经过原语接收、理解、转换、译入语表达等一系列过程。近年来有研究者开始尝试同声传译过程中的工作记忆研究,认为工作记忆是同传作业的关键因素,并提出工作记忆在同传中的扩展模型。本文主要就同声传译的关键特征与多任务处理模型、工作记忆在同传中的作用机制和译入语提取时的双语控制机制等问题进行简要介绍,并提出了进一步的研究思路。     

Addressing parts of the self

In this paper the author addresses the problem of framing an interpretation that properly takes account of the degree of splitting and projection the analyst encounters in a patient at a particular time. If the patient has needed to split off and project unacceptable parts of the self, the analyst has to consider how useful it is to describe this situation to the patient, who may no longer be in contact with the disavowed parts. The disadvantage of this situation is that an interpretation that refers to different parts of the personality may make sense intellectually, but may in fact reinforce the patient's defensive structure. The author describes one case in which such a situation prevailed, and contrasts this with a second case in which a greater degree of integration had developed, with accompanying internal conflict and pain. In this latter case it seems paradoxically more appropriate for the analyst to include, in his interpretations, references to the struggle between different parts of the personality.     

What Are Degrees of Belief?

Probabilism is committed to two theses:

Electrophysiological Evidence of Different Interpretative Strategies in Irony Comprehension

We explore the hypothesis that induction of holistic or analytic strategies influences comprehension and processing of highly contextualized expressions of ordinary language, such as irony. Twenty undergraduate students were asked to categorize as coherent or incoherent a group of sentences. Each sentence completed a previous story, so that they could be ironical, literal or nonsensical endings. Participants were asked to evaluate whether each sentence was coherent or incoherent. Half of them were initially instructed to consider whether the sentences made sense (holistic condition); the other half were instructed to consider whether the sentences were congruent or incongruent (analytic condition). Behavioral responses and Event Related Potentials were registered during the experiment. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results allow clearly distinguishing between the holistic and the analytic strategies. The fact that the same set of stimuli elicits different ERP waveforms, depending on the strategy with which they are analyzed, suggests that different cognitive processes and different areas of the brain are operating in each case.