PARRHESIA,PHAEDRA, AND THE POLIS: ANTICIPATING PSYCHOANALYTIC FREE ASSOCIATION AS DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE

This essay explores the mostly unexamined analogy of psychoanalytic free association to democratic free speech. The author turns back to a time when free speech was a matter of considerable discussion: the classical period of the Athenian constitution and its experiment with parrhesia. Ordinarily translated into English as “free speech,” parrhesia is startlingly relevant to psychoanalysis. The Athenian stage—in particular, Hippolytus (Euripides, 5th century BCE)—illustrates this point. Euripides's tragic tale anticipates Freud's inquiries, exploring the fundamental link between free speech and female embodiment. The author suggests that psychoanalysis should claim its own conception of a polis as a mediated and ethical space between private and public spheres, between body and mind, and between speaking and listening communities.     

Stigma by Association Among Family Members of People with a Mental Illness: A Qualitative Analysis

People with mental illness are not the sole recipients of stigmatisation; their immediate family members may be subjected to stigma by association. Through semi‐structured interviews, we investigated experiences of stigma by association among 23 immediate family members of people with mental illness. Participants reported experiencing stigma by association from community members, mental health professionals, and civil servants. Familial relationship, co‐residence, and the gender of participants appeared to play a role in their stigma experiences; parents and spouses reported different manifestations of stigma by association than siblings and children, participants who lived together with their family member with mental illness reported increased experiences of stigma by association, and in contrast to male participants, female participants reported others thinking they are overprotective and as such perpetuated, maintained, or sustained their family members' mental illness. The relevance of these factors points to the need for tailored education and emotional support provision to family members of people with mental illness. Moreover, in‐service training for mental health professionals should include the development of relevant social skills that enable the recognition of familial relationships and roles, and family members' fears, concerns, and problems. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Face-name memory training in subjective memory decline: how does office-based training translate to everyday situations?

This study aimed to examine whether people with subjective memory decline (SMD) benefit from face-name memory training (single session) as much as older adult controls in an office-based setting. Approximately 2 months later, groups were reassessed for translation to a naturalistic setting. In the office setting, there was a significant interaction between stimulus type (cued name; uncued name) and training condition (spaced retrieval, semantic association, no training), but no group differences nor interactions. Semantic association was only beneficial for cued names, whereas spaced retrieval was beneficial in cued and uncued conditions. In the naturalistic setting, however, there were no training effects. Naturalistic performance was predicted by demographics, cognition, and motivation. All groups reported improved memory control beliefs and contentment. Our study demonstrates the benefit of simple memory strategies for older adults, including those with SMD, in office-based settings. Translation to everyday settings is complex and may require prior intervention to increase motivation.     

Two flaws concerning belief accounts of implicit biases

The current scientific discourse offers two opposing viewpoints about the roots of implicit biases: are they belief states or subdoxastic attitudes? The goal of this paper is to show that belief accounts of implicit biases are (1) too demanding and (2) lack a satisfying reasoning theory. Firstly, I will outline the concept of attitude and its relation to implicit biases. Next, I will briefly outline Mandelbaum’s view, who gives a paradigmatic example of a belief account of implicit biases. Afterward, I will concern two flaws and discuss them in more detail. This shows that all current belief accounts of implicit biases do not emphasize these critical points enough, which makes them unsatisfying.     

Leibniz,Pufendorf, and the Possibility of Moral Self-Governance

In his On the Duties of Man and Citizen, seventeenth century natural law theorist Samuel Pufendorf argues that the source of obligation lies in ‘the command of a superior’. This so-called ‘voluntarist’ position was famously criticized by the ‘rationalist’ Gottfried Leibniz. However, I wish to highlight several neglected aspects of the debate. Leibniz implicitly proposes a solution to a central moral problem: how one can be obligated voluntarily. His answer reflects a sort of motivational internalism, whereby the ideas of justice provide some motive cause of action, and virtue provides the rest. In this way, the agent acts voluntarily by making the principles of justice the principles of her action. Secondly, I show how this argument for the principles depends implicitly on his ‘science of right’, established in his earliest writings on jurisprudence. These principles are constituent of the nature of rational substance. It then becomes clear that Leibniz had long developed a foundation for self-governance, similar to Kantian autonomy, consisting in the agent's internal moral power to act (jus) and moral necessity to act (obligation). These points are exposed through a close reading of Leibniz's criticisms of Pufendorf on the end, object and efficient cause of natural law.     

You are my happiness: Socially enriched happiness belief predicts life satisfaction,especially among the poor

ABSTRACT

What three words come to your mind in response to “happiness”? Using a free-association task [cf. Nelson, D. L., McEvoy, C. L., & Dennis, S. (2000). What is free association and what does it measure? Memory and Cognition, 28, 887–899], this research finds that the number of social words (e.g. family, love) provided in link to happiness predicts people’s actual life satisfaction level. However, this association was significantly moderated by the person’s self-perceived financial state. The contingency between holding a socially-oriented belief about happiness and experienced life satisfaction was significant among members of low socioeconomic status (SES), but not among the high SES group. This pattern was replicated across two divergent samples (Asian college students, Study 1; American adults, Study 2), regardless of one’s extraversion level (Studies 1, 2) and availability of social support (number of friends, Study 2). Given the overlapping function of money and social relationships (instrumental in promoting survival), believing in the social nature of happiness seems to be more central in the life satisfaction of those with less financial resource.     

Bridging the gap between explicit and implicit measurement of personality: The questionnaire-based implicit association test

This study presents the questionnaire-based implicit association test (qIAT), a method that resembles the assessment procedures of self-report scales and allows an implicit assessment of constructs measured by such instruments. The qIAT measures the speed of association between ordinary questionnaires’ items (i.e., short statements rather than single words) and true versus false self-related sentences. Participants completed self-report measures of all Big-Five domains and the qIAT that measured extraversion. The qIAT implicit extraversion score showed good levels of internal consistency and it correlated with explicit extraversion but not with other explicit scales, thus supporting the convergent and discriminant validity of this measure. It also predicted a criterion behavior, and this prediction was incremental to self-report assessment of the same set of items. The qIAT opens the door for the indirect assessment of numerous psychological phenomena measured by existing self-report scales.     

Identification with the aggressor and the ‘normal traumas’: clinical implications

Ferenczi's (1933) surprisingly unknown concept of identification with the aggressor – an abuse victim's ‘eliminating’ her own subjectivity and ‘becoming’ precisely what an attacker needs her to be – has radical implications for our understanding of analytic technique. Its very frequent occurrence also forces us to broaden our understanding of what constitutes trauma. Ferenczi saw the experience of ‘traumatic aloneness’ or ‘emotional abandonment’ as the key element of trauma, since this is what enforces the traumatic responses of dissociation and identification with the aggressor. Identification with the aggressor operates in the analytic relationship in both patient and analyst. This has various consequences, including the structuring of the relationship through unconscious collusions – mutually coordinated, defensive identifications designed to help both participants feel secure. This view of the analytic relationship has clinical implications in at least four areas: the understanding of the patient's free associations, which may reflect the patient's compliance with the analyst's wishes rather than the contents of the patient's own unconscious; the need for some kind of mutuality of analysis; the traumatizing potential of the analyst's authority; and the tendency of some patients to take blame and responsibility reflexively, as a way of protecting the analyst.     

Women's experiential journey toward voluntary childlessness: An interpretative phenomenological analysis

Voluntary childlessness is a relatively novel yet growing phenomenon. This idiographic study explored three women's experiential journeys toward voluntary childlessness. Semi‐structured interviews were carried out and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Themes identified were: Owning the choice to be childless, social expectations, and models of mothering. Despite defining ‘voluntary childlessness’ as an unequivocal decision, the women's experiential accounts revealed an intrinsic fluidity in their journeys toward childlessness. Factors including beliefs in equality, independence and career aspirations competed with constructs of mothering/motherhood, partnership and choice to create a complex tapestry of contributory factors in these women's childlessness. The findings question the notion of choice and particularly women's ownership of that choice. The journeys toward childlessness these women shared reveal a synthesis of agentic decision‐making, personal histories and challenging lifestyle choices bound up within an existential need to be a woman. More research is needed to determine the place of voluntary childlessness within society. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Word associations contribute to machine learning in automatic scoring of degree of emotional tones in dream reports

Scientific study of dreams requires the most objective methods to reliably analyze dream content. In this context, artificial intelligence should prove useful for an automatic and non subjective scoring technique. Past research has utilized word search and emotional affiliation methods, to model and automatically match human judges’ scoring of dream report’s negative emotional tone. The current study added word associations to improve the model’s accuracy. Word associations were established using words’ frequency of co-occurrence with their defining words as found in a dictionary and an encyclopedia. It was hypothesized that this addition would facilitate the machine learning model and improve its predictability beyond those of previous models. With a sample of 458 dreams, this model demonstrated an improvement in accuracy from 59% to 63% (kappa = .485) on the negative emotional tone scale, and for the first time reached an accuracy of 77% (kappa = .520) on the positive scale.