What do we know about psycholinguistic effects?

Identifying clear and unequivocal psycholinguistic effects for lexical retrieval tasks has been the aim of a significant proportion of recent research activity. Debates have erupted concerning the existence or otherwise of particular effects on particular lexical tasks. Here, it is suggested that the reason for these debates is that researchers exercise choice in what variables they consider in their analysis. It is further illustrated that methods that have been employed for comparing the size of these effects between tasks can only lead to inconclusive results. It is suggested that psycholinguistic data may be better analysed using structural equation modelling methodologies. An example of such an approach is presented.     

The miracle of Maglavit (1935) and the Romanian psychology of religion

This paper examines the debates around the “miracle of Maglavit”, a shepherd's vision of God that took place in 1935 in Romania and attracted much contemporary popular and intellectual interest. The debates drew in arguments from doctors and theologians, who discussed the psychology of divine revelation and tried to elaborate the implications that such an event could have for the life of the Romanian nation. The paper places these debates in the context of wider contemporary discussions about psychology and religion. I argue that what Maglavit shows is that, in Romania at least, public debates about visionary experience in the 1930s were not only debates about its psychology, but of a psychology thoroughly imbricated with political concerns.     

Depression or anxiety: which is best able to predict patterns of lateralisation for the processing of emotional faces?

Previous research has shown that both anxiety and depression are associated with strength of lateralisation for the processing of emotive faces, although these clinical measures have always been considered in separate studies. In the present study, we measure depression and anxiety, within the same non-clinical sample, and consider whether these variables can predict strength of lateralisation, measured using the chimeric faces test. There are two key findings from this study. First, for females only, anxiety is negatively associated with right hemispheric superiority for processing of negative emotional expressions. Second, there was only one finding for depression, showing a relationship with strength of lateralisation for the processing of fearful faces that differed according to sex.     

Associative priming in faces: Semantic relatedness or simple co-occurrence?

In two experiments, we explored the effects of co-occurrence and semantic relationships in the associative priming of faces. In Experiment 1, pairs of computer-generated human faces were presented simultaneously (i.e., they co-occurred) with no associated semantic information attached to them. A significant facilitation effect in the subsequent recognition of these paired faces (priming) was observed. Thus, repeatedly presenting faces together while keeping semantic information to a minimum appears to be enough to produce associative priming. In Experiment 2, the computer-generated faces were associated with semantic information and again presented ipairs. Priming effects arising from co-occurrence and semantic relatedness were observed. The results from these experiments show that semantic relatedness is not the sole cause of the association between faces; co-occurrence plays a crucial role too. This conclusion has significant implications for the current computational models of face processing.     

Rereading Mircea Eliade's Youth Without Youth, a story of suspicion and camouflage

The article argues that Mircea Eliade's 1976 novella Youth Without Youth (which has been recently turned into a film by Francis Ford Coppola) offers an intriguing literary illustration of the concept of ‘camouflage’ so prominent in Eliade's scholarly writings. Youth Without Youth, revolving around the paradoxes of aging and of (biological) time, develops as a fantastic reverie, a mysterious gnostic parable under the appearances of a work of science fiction, and ultimately becomes a sort of rebus, made up of a large number of suggested enigmas within enigmas. It is, at the same time, an opportunity for the author to revisit phantasmatically a dramatic period of his life – the year 1938. Historical reality becomes fantastic, charged with symbols and riddles. The Eliadean dialectic between the sacred and the profane is interestingly doubled in this story by a dialectic between spying and hiding, surveillance and escape, suspicion and camouflage.     

Examining the hemispheric distribution of semantic information using lateralised priming of familiar faces

The way in which the semantic information associated with people is organised in the brain is still unclear. Most evidence suggests either bilateral or left hemisphere lateralisation. In this paper we use a lateralised semantic priming paradigm to further examine this neuropsychological organisation. A clear semantic priming effect was found with greater priming occurring when semantically related prime faces were presented to the left visual field than when presented to the right visual field. Possible explanations for this finding are discussed in terms of the bilateral distribution of different classes of semantic information, a possible role of associative processes within semantic priming and interhemispheric transfer.