Threat Perception and Perspective Taking as Mediators Between Competitive Victimhood and Evaluations of Collective Action: The Gezi Park Protests

The 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey, which are one of the major social movements in the last decade, have sharpened the sociopolitical polarization in the country. The present study employed a moderated mediation model in which symbolic threat, realistic threat, and perspective taking were examined as mediators between competitive victimhood and opposing groups’ differential evaluations of the protests. Further, the pro‐Gezi versus the anti‐Gezi group membership was hypothesized to moderate the mediation effects. Proponents (N = 337) and opponents (N = 138) of the protests were asked to respond to the measures corresponding to the variables in the model. Results revealed that for protest supporters, competitive victimhood predicted evaluations of the protests through realistic threat, but not through symbolic threat; in contrast, for opponents, it predicted evaluations of the protests through symbolic but not realistic threat. Further, perspective taking turned out to be a weak mediator. The results are discussed in terms of the differential power relationships between the groups in the cultural and political domains.     

Can Creativity Beat Death? A Review and Evidence on the Existential Anxiety Buffering Functions of Creative Achievement

The relationship between creativity and symbolic immortality had been long acknowledged by scholars. In a review of the literature, we found 12 papers that empirically examined the relationship between creativity and mortality awareness using a Terror Management Theory paradigm, overall supporting the notion that creativity plays an important role in the management of existential concerns. Also, a mini meta‐analysis of the impact of death awareness on creativity resulted in a small‐medium weighted mean effect. We examined the existential anxiety buffering functions of creative achievement as assessed by the Creative Achievement Questionnaire in a sample of 108 students. It was found that at high, but not low, levels of creative goals, creative achievement was associated with lower death‐thought accessibility under mortality salience in comparison to controls. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical report of the anxiety buffering functions of creative achievement among people for whom creativity constitutes a central part of their cultural worldview. The current findings support the notion that creative achievement may be an avenue for symbolic immortality, particularly among individuals who value creativity. Implications for understanding death‐related creativity motivations and their impact on individuals and society and for the promotion of creative achievement and creative motivation are discussed.     

Symbols and self preservation in severe disturbance

The author considers a particular way in which symbolic functioning and the sense of self fail in certain cases of severe disturbance. When containment of the infant fails, the experience is a violent one. If the infant is projected into by an 'invasive object', the infant can incorporate this experience both as a bodily and a proto-mental registration. The experience then remains within the psyche-soma and subsequent development is built 'around' the consequences of the trauma. Clinical illustrations are provided to demonstrate this phenomenon in the analytic setting.     

Poetics in the shadow of the other's language: The melancholic discourse of the trilingual poet Amelia Rosselli

In this paper, I propose a psychoanalytic reading of some of the writings of Amelia Rosselli, a trilingual poet who, at the age of seven, lost her father Carlo, who was persecuted and murdered by Mussolini's regime. History and her history conflate into personal and collective trauma which defies human possibilities to work through and mourn. Rosselli's work testifies to such predicament of the human subject of the 20th century, his/her dislocation, alienation and internal irreconcilable divisions. In particular I examine Diary in three tongues, which is the most autobiographical of her works and a self‐analytic piece, written after the conclusion of her second analysis. In the Diary, Rosselli employs textual strategies which convey the fragmentation and destructuring of language, where her traumatic experience resides as a wound inflicted to the symbolic order. I propose that her writings contain her unconscious memories in an estranged and melancholic language which becomes the crucible to express her impossible mourning, in a complex mixture of Eros and Thanatos which allowed her to survive psychically and to create a very personal experimental poetic discourse which made her a literary figure of international acclaim. My primary engagement will be with Freud's theory of mourning and melancholia and its successive elaboration by Kristeva, who maintains that the melancholic discourse finds its expression in the pre‐verbal and infra‐verbal aspects of language, which she calls ‘semiotics’, in dialectic articulation with its symbolic components. Drawing on literary texts, significant inferences can be made on the psychoanalytic listening to the prosodic aspects of language as the carrier of inchoate forms of representation of that which exceeds language: trauma, raw affects, mnemic traces, that is, the unrepresented and/or unrepresentable.     

The development of the first symbolic uses in Mexican children from the pragmatics of object / Desarrollo de los primeros usos simbólicos en niños mexicanos desde la pragmática del objeto

This paper longitudinally studies the emergence and evolution of the first symbolic uses of objects in Mexican children. We observed eight children in triadic interaction with one of their parents and 10 objects in a semi-structured situation at nine, 12, 15 and 18 months old. The children began to use objects symbolically at 12 months, and the duration and frequency increased with age. The highest percentage of the total frequency of symbolic uses, of the four levels identified, was level 1. The frequency of level 4, where two or more symbolic actions occur one after the other, giving rise to ‘symbolic narratives’, increased according to age. These data confirm that knowledge of the rules of canonical uses of objects are the meanings which first symbols base themselves on and that children use the symbolic uses that they are aware of to create ‘symbolic narratives’.     

Biologically Plausible,Human‐Scale Knowledge Representation

Several approaches to implementing symbol‐like representations in neurally plausible models have been proposed. These approaches include binding through synchrony (Shastri & Ajjanagadde, 1993 ), “mesh” binding (van der Velde & de Kamps, 2006 ), and conjunctive binding (Smolensky, 1990 ). Recent theoretical work has suggested that most of these methods will not scale well, that is, that they cannot encode structured representations using any of the tens of thousands of terms in the adult lexicon without making implausible resource assumptions. Here, we empirically demonstrate that the biologically plausible structured representations employed in the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA) approach to modeling cognition (Eliasmith, 2013 ) do scale appropriately. Specifically, we construct a spiking neural network of about 2.5 million neurons that employs semantic pointers to successfully encode and decode the main lexical relations in WordNet, which has over 100,000 terms. In addition, we show that the same representations can be employed to construct recursively structured sentences consisting of arbitrary WordNet concepts, while preserving the original lexical structure. We argue that these results suggest that semantic pointers are uniquely well‐suited to providing a biologically plausible account of the structured representations that underwrite human cognition.     

Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action as a Function of Racial Identity Among African American College Students

Variations in support for affirmative action were assessed in a sample of 181 African American college students in Massachusetts. These students generally endorsed affirmative action, and endorsement varied positively as a function of the belief that one had personally benefited from affirmative action. Aspects of racial identity, indexed by the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity, also predicted variations in attitudes toward affirmative action, over and above background factors and personal benefit. Consistent with realistic group conflict theory, the most influential aspects of identity were centrality (i.e., the degree to which group identity is central to personal identity), private regard (i.e., pride in the group), and an oppressed minority ideology (i.e., a viewpoint that emphasizes the similarities between African Americans and other oppressed groups).     

《周易》与类比推理

中国古代无逻辑的观点源自逻辑一元论。本文认为,人类思维形式的多样性决定了逻辑的多元性。人类对思维形式的认识,还处于初期阶段;随着人类认识活动的不断发展,新的思维形式还会层出不穷。由于文化背景的差异,不同地区的人对思维形式的选择不尽相同。西方人注重演绎,中国人注重类比。《周易》就是一个属于类比性质的符号推理系统,一直规范影响着中国人的思维活动。华夏民族将象形文字发展为象意文字,决定了"以象尽意"的《周易》符号推理系统的形成。中国人注重体悟自然、追寻智慧的求道精神,是《周易》推理系统得以千年传承的哲学基础。类比推理是中国文化发展的必然选择,也是中国文化继往开来的主要思维方式。     

Supportive interventions and nonsymbolic mental functioning

The author aims to show how supportive interventions are the analyst's most relevant therapeutic means to helping patients with a feeble symbolic system transform nonsymbolic episodes and reestablish symbolic mental functioning. Symbolic and nonsymbolic modes of mental functioning are first outlined. Supportive interventions are redefined as an analyst's effort at improving a patient's nonsymbolic mental functioning, by using principally pragmatic or interactive aspects of communication to deal with her or his patient's nonsymbolic in-session experiences. These interventions are psychoanalytic when transference focused, in so far as they foster the symbolization and transformation of more primitive (nonsymbolic) layers of the transference. Some probable mechanisms underlying the effect of supportive interventions on nonsymbolic functioning include the modification of mental procedures. Supportive interventions also help restore symbolic mental elaboration through the gratification of a basic ego or self-need, bringing about a temporary relief from psychic pain, with increased affect tolerance and a renewed capacity to use symbols. This soothing effect accounts for a missing link in Bion's model of the elaborative effect of the analyst's reverie.