The wealth paradox: Prosperity and opposition to immigration

The idea that economic downturns and economic deprivation provoke tensions and intergroup hostility is remarkably pervasive. These accounts often work from the premise that economic crises and poverty provide “fertile soil” for populist parties and leaders with an anti-immigrant agenda. This may explain why we intuitively expect that “hard times” produce “harsh attitudes” towards minorities. However, there is also robust empirical evidence showing that intergroup hostility (and anti-immigration sentiments more specifically) can (i) surge in times of economic prosperity, and (ii) be widespread among relatively affluent groups. In this article, I will review evidence showing that intergroup hostility (such as anti-immigrant sentiments) can be equally prevalent in times of relative gratification as well as in times of relative deprivation (accounting for the “Wealth Paradox”). In the second part of this contribution, I will explore these processes through the lens of classic social identity theorising focusing on the way that status anxiety, status threat, and fear of falling among members of wealthier groups are shaped by the permeability of group boundaries and the security of wealth positions. I argue that social identity theorising, typically applied to explain the behaviour of low status groups, can provide a parsimonious and integrative account for why and when high status (i.e., as a result of affluence and prosperity) may be associated with hostility towards minorities rather than with greater tolerance.     

The semantic structure of emotion words across languages is consistent with componential appraisal models of emotion

Appraisal theories of emotion, and particularly the Component Process Model, claim that the different components of the emotion process (action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences) are essentially driven by the results of cognitive appraisals and that the feeling component constitutes a central integration and representation of these processes. Given the complexity of the proposed architecture, comprehensive experimental tests of these predictions are difficult to perform and to date are lacking. Encouraged by the “lexical sedimentation” hypothesis, here we propose an indirect examination of the compatibility of the theoretical assumptions with the semantic structure of a set of major emotion words as measured in a cross-language and cross-cultural study. Specifically, we performed a secondary analysis of the large-scale data set with ratings of affective features covering all components of the emotion process for 24 emotion words in 27 countries, constituting profiles of emotion-specific appraisals, action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences. The results of a series of hierarchical regression analyses to examine the prediction of the theoretical model are highly consistent with the claim that appraisal patterns determine the structure of the response components, which in turn predict central dimensions of the feeling component.     

Unique contribution of semantic representations to immediate memory: an individual-differences approach

Studies have reported dissociations between the contributions of semantic and phonological representations to immediate remembering, found through experimental manipulations as well as specific clinical cases. Also, some studies based on the analysis of individual differences reported that a semantic cued recall task has a variance unshared with the immediate memory tasks which tap the contribution of phonological representations. However, another study suggested that cued recall performance could reflect a wider ability to cluster information by category. Furthermore, no studies of individual differences have investigated the unique semantic contribution in the visual domain. Therefore, the present study used specific immediate recognition memory tasks that have been used to investigate the semantic contribution in the verbal and visual domains. The results demonstrate the unshared variance that reflects the semantic contribution in both the verbal and the visual domain, and some commonality in these variances across the domains.     

Semantic and visual relatedness of distractors impairs episodic retrieval of pictures in a divided attention paradigm

We used a divided attention (DA) paradigm to infer the representational codes needed to support episodic retrieval of pictures, by measuring susceptibility to memory interference from different distracting tasks. Participants made recognition memory decisions to semantically categorized sets of pictures while simultaneously making size judgments to a set of visually-presented distractor pictures. Recognition accuracy was worse and response times were slower under DA conditions relative to full attention (FA), regardless of semantic relatedness of distractors to targets (Experiment 1). Similarly, we found no differential memory interference under DA relative to FA when distractor pictures were either visually (but not semantically), semantically (but not visually), or unrelated to the targets (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, memory interference was significantly larger under DA at retrieval when distractors were both semantically and visually similar to the targets. Findings suggest episodic memory for pictures requires access to either visually- or semantically-based representations for optimal performance.     

Word recognition in Alzheimer's disease: Effects of semantic degeneration

Impairments of word recognition in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been less widely investigated than impairments affecting word retrieval and production. In particular, we know little about what makes individual words easier or harder for patients with AD to recognize. We used a lexical selection task in which participants were shown sets of four items, each set consisting of one word and three non‐words. The task was simply to point to the word on each trial. Forty patients with mild‐to‐moderate AD were significantly impaired on this task relative to matched controls who made very few errors. The number of patients with AD able to recognize each word correctly was predicted by the frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability of the words, but not by their length or number of orthographic neighbours. Patient Mini‐Mental State Examination and phonological fluency scores also predicted the number of words recognized. We propose that progressive degradation of central semantic representations in AD differentially affects the ability to recognize low‐imageability, low‐frequency, late‐acquired words, with the same factors affecting word recognition as affecting word retrieval.     

Bilingualism and reading difficulties: an exploration in episodic and semantic memory

This study was designed to investigate the effect of bilingualism and reading difficulties (RD) on episodic and semantic memory. The subjects included 190 children (aged 9–12 years): 45 Iranian-Swedish bilinguals and 59 Swedish monolinguals with typically developed reading, along with 41 bilinguals and 45 monolinguals with RD. To measure episodic memory, subject-performed and verbal tasks were used for encoding, and both free and cued recall were used for retrieval. Letter and category fluency tasks were used to test semantic memory. In action memory, bilingual children with RD benefited less from enactment encoding form compared to children with typically developed reading. Additionally, bilingual with RD had lower rates of recollection in category fluency compared to their monolingual counterparts. However, in letter fluency, there was not found a difference between performances of bilinguals and monolinguals with RD. We discuss the involvement of long-term memory in both bilingualism and reading.     

‘For Beauty is nothing but the barely endurable onset of Terror’: Outline of a general psychoanalytic aesthetics

Even close to 80 years after Freud's words that psychoanalysis “has scarcely anything to say about beauty” (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, SE 21, p. 82) the question of a specific psychoanalytic aesthetic is still faced with a deficit in theory. Since aesthetics is related to Aisthesis, the Greek word for ‘perception’, a psychoanalytic aesthetic can solely emerge from a psychoanalysis of perceptive structures. The term ‘kinaesthetic semantic’ is introduced in order to exemplify via music how perceptive experiences must be structured for them to be experienced as beautiful. The basic mechanisms – repetition of form (rhythm, unification) and seduction (deviation, surprise) – are defined. With the help of these mechanisms an intensive contact between perceiving object and kinetic subject, the physical self, is established. The intensive relatedness is a requirement for the creative process in art and also for psychic growth on the subject's level. The described basic mechanisms of the aesthetic process in music can also be encountered in painting and poetry. By the means of a self‐portrait by Bacon it will be examined how, in art, terror and traumatization are represented via targeted disorganization of beauty endowing mechanisms, hence finding an enabling form of confrontation and integration of fended contents.     

Scrutinizing the Emotional Nature of Intuitive Coherence Judgments

Dual‐system models propose that cognitive processing can occur either intuitively or deliberately. Unlike deliberate decision strategies, intuitive ones are assumed to have an emotional component attached to the decision process. We tested if intuitive decisions are indeed accompanied by an emotional response while deliberate decisions are not. Specifically, we conducted a psychophysiological study in which participants were instructed to decide either intuitively or deliberately if three simultaneously presented words were semantically coherent or incoherent (triad task). The degree of emotionality of these two decision strategies (intuitive vs. deliberate) was compared using changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) and the reaction time (RT) effect of an affective priming paradigm as primary measurements. Based on a valence‐arousal model, our results revealed that intuitive and deliberate judgments do not differ as to their emotional valence but that they do differ in emotional arousal. Most notably, sympathetic activation during intuitive judgments was significantly lower compared to sympathetic activation during deliberate judgments. Our results reflect that a relaxed state of mind—manifested in low sympathetic activity—could underlie the holistic processing that is assumed to facilitate the proliferation of semantic associations during coherence judgments. This suggests that coherence judgments made under an (instructed) intuitive decision mode have a specific psychophysiological signature and that arousal is the differentiating component between intuitive and deliberate decision strategies. © 2016 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

行动语义、客体背景和判断任务对客体动作承载性的影响

客体动作承载性指人们知觉客体时同时激活的针对客体的行动。当Gibson最初提出动作承载性概念时, 他认为客体的这种属性是可以自动激活的。然而近年来越来越多的证据显示, 在知觉和行动的关系中, 行动语义知识和客体所处背景对客体动作承载性具有调节作用, 表现在人们可以根据这些自上而下的信息选择针对客体的适当的行动。此外, 不同的判断任务在引发客体动作承载性效应上具有特异性, 表现在若判断任务仅需知觉客体表层属性时, 不能激活对客体的动作, 进而不能产生客体动作承载性; 若判断任务需要对客体进行深层加工时, 才会激活对客体的动作。未来研究还需要进一步探究行动语义知识和客体所处背景影响客体动作承载性发生的原因和机制, 以及不同判断任务中出现结果特异性的原因。     

On Toleration,Charity, and Epistemic Fallibilism

In this paper I examine some presuppositions of toleration and pluralism and explore two models, viz., a deontological and a consequentialist model, respectively, which could support the view that rational agents should act in a tolerant way. Against the background which is offered by the first model, I give two arguments in favor of the view that people are better off and more rational if they act in a tolerant way. The first argument draws upon a principle of charity which is usually applied in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, but which could, equally well, work with regard to foundational issues in ethics and philosophy of action. The second argument is built upon the epistemic principle of fallibilism and it is meant to show that acting in a tolerant way is the rational thing to do from this perspective.