The Will to Truth,the Death Drive and the Will to Power

This paper claims that Freud’s idea of the death drive is analogous to the will to truth in traditional philosophy and can be better understood as a truth drive. The argument is based upon Nietzsche’s interpretation of the will to truth as a concealed will to death. This interpretation emphasizes the opposition between truth and life; truth is a concept of constancy while life is a concept of change. Freud’s recognition of the conservative nature of the drives brings him to the paradoxical conclusion of the existence of a death drive. It is paradoxical, for Freud, since it considers death as a fundamental principle of life and as its aim. The paper suggests that by replacing the concept of death by the concept of truth and using Nietzsche’s idea of “the will to power” this paradox can be resolved without losing Freud’s insight of the dialectic nature of psychological life.

     

Salient Volunteering Behavior Increases Monetary Risk‐taking

Research finds that engaging in prosocial behavior has many positive psychological outcomes (e.g., enhanced well‐being, optimism, perceived control, and a boost in self‐concept), and research on monetary risk‐taking reveals these psychological outcomes are associated with increased risk‐taking. Merging these findings, we propose that when people's volunteering behavior is made salient in their minds, they take more monetary risks. Making research participants’ volunteering behavior salient by having them recall an act of prior volunteering (studies 1 and 3), choosing whether to volunteer (study 2), or choosing one of two volunteering activities (study 4), four experiments (and a fifth reported in the Appendix S2) reveal increased risk‐taking across several monetary‐risk outcomes (incentive‐compatible gambles, allocation of a windfall gain, and a behavioral risk‐taking measure involving escalating risk). Lastly, when the decision maker attributes a decision to volunteer to an external source, the effect of salient volunteering on monetary risk‐taking attenuates.     

Unmasking the inhibition of return phenomenon

Conventional wisdom holds that a nonpredictive peripheral cue produces a biphasic response time (RT) pattern: early facilitation at the cued location, followed by an RT delay at that location. The latter effect is called inhibition of return (IOR). In two experiments, we report that IOR occurs at a cued location far earlier than was previously thought, and that it is distinct from attentional orienting. In Experiment 1, IOR was observed early (i.e., within 50 msec) at the cued location, when the cue predicted that a detection target would occur at another location. In Experiment 2, this early IOR effect was demonstrated to occur for target detection, but not for target identification. We conclude that previous failures to observe early IOR at a cued location may have been due to attention being directed to the cued location and thus “masking” IOR.     

Cue and target processing modulate the onset of inhibition of return

Inhibition of return (IOR) is modulated by task set and appears later in discrimination tasks than in detection tasks. Several hypotheses have been suggested to account for this difference. We tested three of these hypotheses in two experiments by examining the influence of cue and target level of processing on the onset of IOR. In the first experiment, participants were required to respond to both the cue and target. The pattern of results showed that deeper processing of the cue or target advanced the onset of IOR. In the second experiment, participants were not required to respond to the cue and a reverse pattern of results emerged, which replicated the general findings in cuing tasks. We conclude that in more-demanding tasks, an additional process slows down the processing of a nonpredictive cue in order to enhance the processing of the target.     

Distributed attentional deficits in chronic methamphetamine abusers: evidence from the Attentional Network Task (ANT)

Objective

The goal of the present study was to examine distributed attentional functions in long-term but currently abstinent methamphetamine (MA) abusers using a task that measures attentional alertness, orienting, and conflict resolution.

Methods

Thirty currently abstinent MA abusers (1 month-5 years) and 22 healthy non-substance using adults were administered a multimodal version of the Attentional Network Task (ANT-I). In this task subjects identified the direction of a centrally presented arrow using a key press. Analyses examined the interaction between alerting tones, location cueing and congruency between the target arrows and flanking distractor stimuli.

Results

All participants were faster when an auditory tone preceded the trial onset (p < 0.001), on trials in which a valid cue preceded the location of the target arrow (p < 0.001), and on congruent trials (i.e., when all display arrows faced in the same direction) (p < 0.001). Of primary interest was the finding that MA abusers were more influenced by the conflict between the peripheral arrows and the central target arrow (p = 0.009). There were also correlations between length of drug sobriety and executive function as well as between drug-induced psychiatric symptoms and alertness.

Conclusions

These results suggest that chronic MA abusers display cognitive deficits that may reflect a specific vulnerability to distraction on a task of executive function. These findings are consistent with other studies that have reported deficits in anterior attentional systems and top-down cognitive control.     

The specificity triad: notions of disease and therapeutic specificity in biomedical reasoning

Biomedicine is typically defined as the branch of medicine that is based on the principles of biology and biochemistry. A central tenet for biomedicine is the notion of disease and therapeutic specificity, i.e. the idea of tailored treatments for discrete disorders underpinned by specific pathologies. The present paper is concerned with how notions of disease and therapeutic specificity guide biomedical reasoning. To that end, the author proposes a model – the specificity triad – that draws on late philosopher and physician Ludwik Fleck’s concept of “style of thought” to offer a frame for investigating the intricate process through which links between disorders, mechanisms, and therapeutics are established by biomedicine. Next by applying the specificity triad model to scrutinize research efforts in two discrete areas of medicine—psychiatry and regenerative medicine—this paper seeks to stimulate pertinent discussions in and about biomedicine. These include discussions on the ambiguous epistemic status of psychiatry within contemporary biomedicine, as well as the relationship between developmental biology — historically relatively disjointed from biomedical enterprise — and the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine.     

Promotional Games: Trick or Treat?

Some marketers use game settings to offer deals. Though research has studied the conditions under which consumers engage in such games, we know little about how they respond to deal offers won through the gaming process. We hypothesize that when faced with deal offers from games, such as scratch cards or trivia quizzes, consumers who are high (vs. low) in choice freedom needs often feel reactance and reject the offer. We find converging evidence for this prediction in both controlled experiments (studies 1 and 3) and in a field study (study 2), when using ethnic backgrounds as a proxy for participants’ choice freedom needs (study 1), when directly measuring these needs (study 2), and when manipulating beliefs about the importance of free choice (study 3).     

What Goes Up Apparently Needn't Come Down: Asymmetric Predictions of Ascent and Descent in Rankings

In eight studies, we document an upward mobility bias, or a tendency to predict that a rise in rankings is more likely than a decline. This asymmetry was observed in predictions of classroom performance, NBA and NFL standings, business school rankings, and employee performance rankings. The bias was found for entities people care about and want to see improve their standing, as well as entities in which people are not invested. It appears to result from people's tendency to give considerable weight to a focal agent's intentions and motivation, but to give less weight to the intentions of competitors and other factors that would thwart the focal agent's improvement. We show that this bias is most pronounced for implicit incremental theorists, who believe that performance is malleable (and hence assign more weight to intentions and effort). We discuss implications of this asymmetry for decision making and for an understanding of the underdog bias. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of endogenous attention and stimulus onsets on encoding target location

The effects of endogenously attended and non-attended stimulus onsets on spatial stimulus encoding of a target were explored in a Simon task. In each experiment participants made speeded left or right key-press responses to the colour of a target that followed a cueing display consisting of several shapes. The target appeared within some shapes and not others. The target's spatial code as measured by a Simon task was its location relative to possible target positions and relative to the centre of the display. Target location was not coded relative to the positions of onset shapes that could not contain a target. These spatial coding effects were found at cue-target intervals of 50, 300, and 1000 ms. The data indicate that target location is defined relative to the distribution of endogenous attention and reference frames aligned with the centre of the display and that the spatial code assigned to a target is not affected when attention is shifted in the target's direction.