Sexual languages/cultural bodies: Transforming psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper explores what transformation is necessary for a psychoanalytic practice that is sensitive to the languages of lesbian, gay and bisexual identities in their cultural and historical specificity. It draws on phenomenological texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty, the writing of the psychoanalyst Franz Fanon and also of the feminist theorist and novelist, Audre Lorde. It argues for a practice that challenges the dominant language of psychoanalysis with its dualisms of inner/outer, conscious/unconscious, mind/body, and universal notions of drives and mechanisms. The clinical example of the work of women in a therapy workshop entitled ‘Am I a Lesbian?’ highlights the critical importance of the specificity of language, whether verbal, visual or gestural, and its relation to embodiment in psychotherapy.     

Blessed fetishism: Language ideology and embodied worship among Pentecostals in Java

A prominent trend of late Christianity has been a cultivation of ‘unmediated’ inspiration realised in embodied worship, notably glossolalia, ecstasy and verbal exuberance. Speaking unfathomable language and embracing spontaneous feelings, Pentecostals in Java have relied on and reworked local language ideologies by passionately employing both the babbling and yelling forms of code-switching in Indonesian, English, Hebrew and glossolalia, in an aspiration to achieve ‘true worshiper-hood’. A closer scrutiny of some elements of this embodied worship against the larger religiously heterogeneous context, furthermore, reveals the salient impacts of cross-religious relations on the process of shaping Pentecostal Christianity. This article argues that specific forms of Pentecostal worship can be better understood when situated in Muslim–Christian relations. Specifically, they speak to a thriving form of religious fetishism that is locally primed for a distinct voice out of the flourishing movements of Islamic resurgence.     

Fetal Testosterone,Socio‐Emotional Engagement and Language Development

The present study investigated the relations among fetal testosterone, child socio‐emotional engagement and language development in a sample of 467 children (235 boys) from the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study. Bioavailable testosterone concentration measured in umbilical cord blood taken at birth was found to be significantly negatively correlated with socio‐emotional engagement and vocabulary development for boys but not for girls. Socio‐emotional engagement mediated the effect of boys' fetal testosterone levels on their vocabulary development. However, the size of the effects was small, and fetal testosterone and socio‐emotional engagement were no longer significant predictors of boys' vocabulary scores after accounting for the effects of other predictors including maternal age and education, parity, and parent–child book reading. It is concluded that further research into these associations is warranted in both typical and atypical development and that this research would profit from including a broader focus on the role that proximal processes such as socio‐emotional engagement, joint attention and imitation have in mediating the developmental effects of prenatal factors such as fetal testosterone exposure. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Short article one's own face is hard to ignore

One's own face possesses two properties that make it prone to grab attention: It is a face, and, in addition, it is a self-referential stimulus. The question of whether the self-face is actually an especially attention-grabbing stimulus was addressed by using a face–name interference paradigm. We investigated whether interference from a flanking self-face on the processing of a target classmate's name was stronger than interference from a classmate's flanking face on the processing of one's own name as the target. In a control condition a third familiar face served as the flanker for both decisions from the participant's own name and from the classmate's name. The presentation of the self-face as a flanker produced significantly more interference on the identification of a classmate's name than the presentation of that classmate's face did on the identification of one's own name. This result was due to the interfering power of the self-face and not to a particular resistance of one's name to interfering facial stimuli. We argue that the emotional value or the high familiarity of one's own face may explain its attention-grabbing property.     

Sign,Image and Language in The Book of Changes CYijing 易经）

It is challenging to estimate the degree to which the system of the Trigrams and Hexagrams in The Book of Changes （Yijing） had an impact on the whole history of Chinese thought. The universal paradigm from which it was derived formed the basis of a semiotic theory of evolution which, because of structural analogies, was applied to all fields and aspects of human life where decision making and action in correspondence with a cosmic principle was required. To achieve that goal, countless commentaries on and interpretations of the Yijing have been written. They can be divided into two schools. The first used the Yijing as a book for divination, in combination with manifestations of the universe and nature. The second interpreted it with a philosophical background, making it part of the tradition of Confucian thought. Modem scholars have also contributed some new approaches to the Yijing. My paper is based on the assumption that the Trigrams and Hexagrams of the Yijing cannot be understood in a purely representational way. They do not represent things apart from their relation to human needs or consciousness. Because of the co-determination of text and reader as a task without determinate end-points, it proves to be a unique case of effective-history. In the Yijing, there is no real line between culture and nature, sign/image/language and fact, the universe of semiosis and other universes. With its use of signs, images and language, the Yijing confirms that the universe of semiosis is the universe of heaven, earth and man. Against this background, my explanations will not only focus on the Trigrams and Hexagrams. My paper will also deal with the following topics： （1） interpenetration of linguistic meaning and objective reality and （2） the social nature of verbal or literary expression.     

Hopeful + Hoping = Hope: unique experiential features in the measurement of emotion

Abstract

Distinct differences have been found between hope and optimism based on retrospective stories. This study sought to replicate those findings when anticipating outcomes in real-time and examine whether they are affected by different lexical formulations of the word hope. One-hundred and two participants read two first-person, chronological vignettes. They rated their hope, optimism, fear, and worry about the anticipated outcome following each part of the story; they also rated their appraisals of importance, likelihood, and perceived control. Half of the participants read adjective forms of the states (e.g. hopeful) and half read verb forms (e.g. hoping). Differences in ratings for the adjective and verb forms were found for hope but not the other anticipatory states, and both forms of hope were found to differ from optimism. Implications of these lexical differences for understanding and measuring the experience of hope are discussed.     

Segmentation by lexical subtraction in Hungarian speakers of second-language English

Using cross-modal form priming, we compared the use of stress and lexicality in the segmentation of spoken English by native English speakers (L1) and by native Hungarian speakers of second-language English (L2). For both language groups, lexicality was found to be an effective segmentation cue. That is, spoken disyllabic word fragments were stronger primes in a subsequent visual word recognition task when preceded by meaningful words than when preceded by nonwords: For example, the first two syllables of corridor were a more effective prime for visually presented corridor when heard in the phrase anythingcorri than in imoshingcorri. The stress pattern of the prime (strong–weak vs. weak–strong) did not affect the degree of priming. For L1 speakers, this supports previous findings about the preferential use of high-level segmentation strategies in clear speech. For L2 speakers, the lexical strategy was employed regardless of L2 proficiency level and instead of exploiting the consistent stress pattern of their native language. This is clear evidence for the primacy and robustness of segmentation by lexical subtraction even in individuals whose lexical knowledge is limited.     

The role of visual spatial attention in adult developmental dyslexia

The present study investigated the nature of visual spatial attention deficits in adults with developmental dyslexia, using a partial report task with five-letter, digit, and symbol strings. Participants responded by a manual key press to one of nine alternatives, which included other characters in the string, allowing an assessment of position errors as well as intrusion errors. The results showed that the dyslexic adults performed significantly worse than age-matched controls with letter and digit strings but not with symbol strings. Both groups produced W-shaped serial position functions with letter and digit strings. The dyslexics' deficits with letter string stimuli were limited to position errors, specifically at the string-interior positions 2 and 4. These errors correlated with letter transposition reading errors (e.g., reading slat as “salt”), but not with the Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) task. Overall, these results suggest that the dyslexic adults have a visual spatial attention deficit; however, the deficit does not reflect a reduced span in visual–spatial attention, but a deficit in processing a string of letters in parallel, probably due to difficulty in the coding of letter position.     

The development of Japanese passive syntax as indexed by structural priming in comprehension

A number of previous studies reported a phenomenon of syntactic priming with young children as evidence for cognitive representations required for processing syntactic structures. However, it remains unclear how syntactic priming reflects children's grammatical competence. The current study investigated structural priming of the Japanese passive structure with 5- and 6-year-old children in a visual-world setting. Our results showed a priming effect as anticipatory eye movements to an upcoming referent in these children but the effect was significantly stronger in magnitude in 6-year-olds than in 5-year-olds. Consistently, the responses to comprehension questions revealed that 6-year-olds produced a greater number of correct answers and more answers using the passive structure than 5-year-olds. We also tested adult participants who showed even stronger priming than the children. The results together revealed that language users with the greater linguistic competence with the passives exhibited stronger priming, demonstrating a tight relationship between the effect of priming and the development of grammatical competence. Furthermore, we found that the magnitude of the priming effect decreased over time. We interpret these results in the light of an error-based learning account. Our results also provided evidence for prehead as well as head-independent priming.