Rituals, Compulsions, and Other Syncretic Tools: Insights from Werner's Comparative Psychology

In line with theme of this special issue, this article speaks to a topic in developmental psychology from a Wernerian perspective. We take a Wernerian, comparative, and orthogenetic approach in addressing rituals and other compulsive behaviors in a variety of contexts: Ritual as cultural practice, as a part of pathologic behavior, and as a normative aspect of child development. We discuss the similarities and differences in these various forms of ritual, and conclude by incorporating recent advances in the study of obsessive-compulsive disorder to shed light on the normative variant of compulsive behavior. Our goal is to emphasize the continued relevance Werner's work in light of contemporary trends in developmental psychology, developmental psychopathology, and neuroscience.     

THE ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AS MEANING MAKER IN SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND RELIGION

Two hundred years ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher took critical issue with Immanuel Kant's intellectual notion of intuition as applied to human nature (Wellmon 2006). He found it necessary to modify—"hermeneutically," as he said—Kant's notion of anthropology by enabling it to include as human the new and strange human tribes Captain Cook found in the Pacific South Seas. A similar hermeneutic move is necessary if physics is to include the local contextual empirical syntheses of relativity and quantum physics. In this hermeneutical revision the synthesis is formed around the notion of a Hilbert Vector Space as the universal grammar of physics, adding to it the dynamic of the Schrödinger equation, and representing empirical "observables" by projection operators that map the subspaces of definite measurable values. Among the set of observable projection operators, some pairs share the same subspace, commute with one another, and share a common laboratory setting. Other pairs do not share this property and are described as being mutually complementary. Complementary symmetries introduce into the discursive language of physics the commonsense notion of contextuality. The new synthesis, proposed by Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and (in his own way) Paul Dirac, brought physics into the community of common language and established it as a work of general human achievement. ¹     

Effect of role choice on vocational high school students

This study was an attempt to determine whether the role choice dimension of Holland's theory was applicable to vocational high school students. The results of the study indicate that students with a clear role choice have significantly higher mean achievement scores, are more satisfied with their training program and have a lower attrition rate than students with an unclear role choice. These results seem to suggest that school counselors should listen to what students say they want to do in their work role.     

Determinants of infant visual fixation: evidence for a two-process theory

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the dynamics of the human infant's (4 months old) visual fixation. The general finding that, over a series of trials, infants fixate longer to a complex than to a simple stimulus was replicated. The function relating fixation time to trials was shown to be nonmonotonic when the stimulus was complex (fixation time increased between Trials 1 and 2 and then decreased), but was monotonic when the stimulus was simple (it decreased systematically over trials). Additional experiments indicated that (a) the nonmonotonic function associated with the complex stimulus was eliminated when the interval separating Trials 1 and 2 was increased from 10 to 20 or 30 s (Experiment 2), and (b) the difference in fixation time between the complex and the simple stimulus was eliminated by controlling their effects in a within-subjects design (Experiment 3). These data challenge the prevailing cognitive-schema theories as a complete account of the dynamics of the infant's visual fixation. A two-process theory that accounts for these data was proposed.     

lhr,dir, or mir? On the acquisition of pronouns in German children

The present study tested the hypothesis that the linguistic complexity of pronouns corresponds to the order in which children acquire them. Linguistic complexity was defined by three principles of linguistic contrast, namely the proximal-nonproximal, singular-nonsingular, and speaker-nonspeaker contrasts.In an experimental naming task, 55 German children aged 3;5 to 6;5 were asked to express the possessive relationship between different participants in a communication situation and particular objects by means of personal pronouns in the dative case, used from the speaker's point of view. The results showed a strong correspondence between the predicted and actual order of correct use of pronouns, and provide evidence for the precedence of the proximal-nonproximal over the singular-nonsingular contrast.     

心导管技术的发明与诺贝尔奖之启示

德国医生维尔纳·福斯曼(Werner.Forssmann,1904-1979)因其对心导管技术的创造所做的里程碑式的贡献而荣膺1956年度生理学和医学诺贝尔奖.回顾福斯曼创造心脏导管技术的历程带给我们一些启示:科学研究需要强烈的探索欲为动力,无畏的探索精神为保障,科学的辩证法思想为指导.     

Heinz Werner: His Life,Ideas, and Contributions to Developmental Psychology in the First Half of the 20th Century

ABSTRACT

The author provides an overview of Heinz Werner's life and contributions to the field of developmental psychology during the first half of the 20th century. She focuses on his early work in Vienna and Munich as well as his tenure at the Psychological Institute in Hamburg, up through the time when he became a named Professor in Psychology at Clark University. Recognized as one of the founders of developmental psychology, Heinz Werner worked in the areas of perceptual development, comparative psychology, and symbol formation. Versatile in rigorous experimental methodologies, and in observational and phenomenological methodologies, Werner's approach to development stood in contrast to other approaches of development, both past and current. For Werner, development was a heuristic, a way of looking at processes in a variety of domains, including ontogeny, phylogeny, microgenesis, biology, developmental psychopathology, neuropsychology, and comparative psychology. Werner viewed development as proceeding from a state of relative globality and lack of differentiation to a state of increasing differentiation, articulation, and hierarchical integration, but he also stressed that individuals can function at different developmental levels under different times and conditions. Werner's holistic, organismic, comparative, and contextual approach to development transcended interdisciplinary boundaries, allowing him to study the interrelatedness between thought, language, feeling, perception, and culture.