Turn left where you felt unhappy: how affect influences landmark-based wayfinding

The present work investigated the impact of affect in landmark-based wayfinding. We assumed that affect-laden landmarks improve wayfinding performance and have an impact on later landmark recognition. To investigate our hypotheses, we ran two experiments in a virtual maze. In Experiment 1, we investigated how affect-laden landmarks influence wayfinding and recognition in comparison with neutral landmarks. The aim of Experiment 2 was to focus on the affective valence of a landmark. The memory tasks of both experiments were repeated after 1 week in order to assess memory consolidation. Results showed that the best wayfinding and recognition performance occurs when negatively laden landmarks were used. In comparison with neutral and positively laden landmarks, recognition performance hardly decreased over time for the negatively laden landmarks. Our results not only support findings in the field of emotion research but also expand the concept of semantic landmark salience with respect to emotional responses.     

Why Do Women Endorse Honor Beliefs? Ambivalent Sexism and Religiosity as Predictors

Cultures of honor, such as Turkey, prioritize defending individual and family reputations, but in gender-specific ways (Nisbett and Cohen 1996). Men maintain honor via reputations for toughness, aggression, control over women, and avenging insults. Women maintain honor through obedience to men, sexual modesty, and religious piety. Honor beliefs support women’s subordination, justifying violence against them (Sev’er and Yurdakul, Violence against Women, 7, 964–998, 2001) and therefore should be challenged. Understanding honor beliefs’ ideological correlates may inform such efforts. We hypothesized that benevolent sexism, a subjectively favorable system-justifying ideology, would more strongly, positively predict Turkish women’s (versus men’s) honor beliefs; whereas hostile sexism, which is openly antagonistic toward women, would more strongly, positively predict Turkish men’s (versus women’s) honor beliefs. Additionally, due to justifications for gender inequality embedded in Islamic religious teachings, we expected Islamic religiosity to positively predict honor beliefs for both genders. A convenience sample of Turkish undergraduates (313 women and 122 men) in Ankara completed the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, Religious Orientation Scale, and Honor Endorsement Index. Regression analyses revealed that benevolent (but not hostile) sexism positively predicted women’s honor beliefs, whereas hostile (but not benevolent) sexism positively predicted men’s honor beliefs. Islamic religiosity positively predicted honor beliefs for both genders, but (unexpectedly) did so more strongly for men than women. We suggest that combating benevolent sexism and promoting feminist interpretations of Islamic religiosity may help to empower Turkish women to challenge honor beliefs.     

Neurobıology of Repressıon: A Hypothetıcal Interpretatıon

Freud lived in a time when technology was incapable of explaining the biological correlates of the mental processes he described in psychoanalytic theory. During the last two decades, advances in neuroimaging methods and neuroscience have provided new insights for understanding mind-brain collaboration. Neurobiological underpinnings of psychoanalytical concepts have been an area of interest in recent years. This paper will suggest a new hypothesis for neurobiology of repression. This hypothesis will be discussed with the help of our knowledge about neurobiological mechanisms underlying perception of the emotional significance of an event, memory formation of an emotionally arousing stimulus, role of prefrontal cortex in modulation of subcortical information, neural mechanisms of suppression and molecular mechanisms of memory erasure. We suggest that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and especially its caudal part plays a major role for repression of childhood traumatic events. Possible molecular mechanism of memory erasure in repression is long term depression of glutamatergic neurotransmission between prefrontal cortex- thalamus- limbic system.     

The Soul,as an Uninhibited Mental Activity,is Reduced into Consciousness by Rules of Quantum Physics

This paper is an effort to describe, in neuroscientific terms, one of the most ambiguous concepts of the universe—the soul. Previous efforts to understand what the soul is and where it may exist have accepted the soul as a subjective and individual entity. We will make two additions to this view: (1) The soul is a result of uninhibited mental activity and lacks spatial and temporal information; (2) The soul is an undivided whole and, to become divided, the soul has to be reduced into unconscious and conscious mental events. This reduction process parallels the maturation of the frontal cortex and GABA becoming the main inhibitory neurotransmitter. As examples of uninhibited mental activity, we will discuss the perceptual differences of a newborn, individuals undergoing dissociation, and individuals induced by psychedelic drugs. Then, we will explain the similarities between the structure of the universe and the structure of the brain, and we propose that consideration of the rules of quantum physics is necessary to understand how the soul is reduced into consciousness.     

Attachment to Society and Cognitive Deviance: The Case of Turkey

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the relationship between the level of attachment to society and cognitive deviance in modern Turkey. Applying Social Bonding Theory, we argue that stronger attachment to society leads to higher conformity to society’s socially accepted norms and less cognitive deviance. We conceptualize cognitive deviance as nontraditional attitudes toward sexuality and marriage. Using the 2011 World Values Survey, we find that the level of attachment to society reduces cognitive deviance. Moreover, the effect is stronger toward more extreme cognitive deviance, such as tolerance toward homosexuality, than less extreme cognitive deviance, such as tolerance toward divorce and abortion.     

A primer on the Dark Triad traits

In this review, we detail three personality traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) that have gained popularity in the last decade as the ‘Dark Triad’. These traits are useful to augment research on personality, like the Big Five traits, as they capture individual differences in ‘darker’ aspects of personality more fully. We briefly review the body of work surrounding these traits, how they are measured, how they can be understood through the exploration of their nomological network, and the role each trait plays in various domains like organisational psychology and interpersonal relationships. We then detail how an evolutionary paradigm can provide a novel and powerful way of understanding these traits. Finally, we explore broad-spectrum concerns about the research and thoughts on how one might think about these issues.     

Association of depression in mothers of disabled children with the child's participation in integrated education

To measure depression in mothers of 5 to 7-yr.-old children with disabilities and to find out whether mothers' depression varied by sex of the child, 126 mothers from Ankara participated; 59 were mothers of children with disabilities who participated in integrated education and attended preschool classes in public schools and, as a comparison group, 67 were mothers of children with disabilities of similar age and characteristics who did not participate in integrated education while attending public and private schools. In the study, the Beck Depression Scale and General Information Forms were used. Depression in mothers of children with disabilities who did not participate in integrated education was higher than in mothers of children with disabilities who participated in integrated education.