Unconscious Transference Research Articles

Was he the perpetrator or a bystander? Testing theories of unconscious transference for eyewitness identification.

Was he the perpetrator or a bystander? Testing theories of unconscious transference for eyewitness identification.

Outline of the concept of the educational capital transfer

The article presents an outline of the author’s concept of the transfer of educational capital. In particular, attention was paid to the essence of this type of transfer and to its individual and group dimensions. The concepts of conscious and unconscious transfer were introduced and in this context analyzes were made taking into account formal and informal education. The conditions for effective transfer were indicated, and the necessity to properly prepare teachers, lecturers and employers to share knowledge, skills and social competences was emphasized.

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE PHONETIC AND PHONOLOGICAL INTERLINGUAL INTERFERENCE IN BILINGUAL ALBANIANS DURING THE TRANSITION PERIOD (AFTER THE FALL OF THE COMMUNIST REGIME)

In this article, interference is defined as the incorrect and mostly unconscious transfer of linguistic features from one language to another by bilingual speakers (namely Albanians during the democratic transition period), caused by the mutual impact of both languages (German and Albanian). The aim of the present article is to make an exhaustive list of the interference occurrences at the phonetic and phonological level among bilingual Albanians during the transition period, to describe them and draw appropriate conclusions about such linguistic phenomena. The present study draws on important scientific findings as well as the collected data of an empirical study on Albanian-German bilingualism (including a questionnaire and corresponding interviews). According to the interviews carried out, this fact is put down to the Albanian language level of the test subjects which indicates that even those who pretend to be bilingual speakers cannot completely differentiate between the two language systems (Albanian and German). Phonetic and phonological interferences have often been noticeable among the German-speaking Albanians: Probably this might be caused by the significant difference in nature between the German and the Albanian language.

Introduction to Displacements

In the first months of 2020, the call for papers for the 2022 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers was circulated. It invited papers that engage with multiple forms and meanings of displacements and their geographies: patterns of shifting, dislocation, or putting out of place; substitutions of one idea for another or the unconscious transfer of intense feelings or emotions; activities occurring outside their normal context; and replacements of one thing by another. The COVID-19 pandemic, declared by the World Health Organization shortly after, produced new displacements and intensified existing patterns of displacement and dispossession, including human and more-than-human mobilities and immobilities. At the same time, socionatural displacements—floods, fires, droughts, hurricanes, sea-level rise, species loss, and dislocation—were the backdrop to the displaced and deferred hopes of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. The twenty-seven articles in this special issue contend with how we as geographers conceptualize and theorize displacements; the range of sites, spaces, processes, affects, scales, and actors we study with to understand them; and what is at stake politically in how we research displacements. It is also a pandemic archive of academic labor, in which we find traces of displacements within and beyond our discipline.

Composite communication: how dissemination of facial composites in the media affects police investigations

Abstract When looking for a crime suspect, the police may ask an eyewitness to construct a visual likeness (‘facial composite’) of the perpetrator, to be distributed to the public via newspaper articles, television programmes, or social media. The dissemination of facial composites can have a major impact on police investigations. It often results in a deluge of tips and could potentially influence the memory of other eyewitnesses in the case. In this article, we review research on how to interview eyewitnesses for the optimal construction of facial composites from memory. We discuss types of composite systems and their effectiveness, including the ‘gold standard’ of measuring effectiveness. We compare the question posed to the public when a facial composite is disseminated to face-matching tasks faced by immigration officials and store clerks, but then with the added difficulty of the image being a composite of unknown resemblance to the target. We also discuss the potential danger of composites contaminating other eyewitnesses’ memory, highlighting the lessons learnt from research on unconscious transference. We pose several challenges for future researchers and practitioners. We conclude that evidence-based guidance is lacking to inform the police on whether and how to use facial composites in their investigations.

Crime blindness: The impact of inattentional blindness on eyewitness awareness, memory, and identification

AbstractPeople do not constantly watch for accidents and crimes. With their attention focused elsewhere, potential witnesses may fail to notice a crime and experience inattentional blindness. We investigated the impact of inattentional blindness on eyewitness awareness and memory. Participants watched a video in which a theft occurs. We manipulated the attentional focus of the participants—some watched for the crime, others simply watched the video, and some counted the number of people wearing white shirts. Participants counting white shirts and those simply watching more often experienced inattentional blindness for the crime and failed to identify the culprit than those watching for the theft. Participants, particularly those watching for the theft, often falsely identified an innocent bystander, displaying a potential unconscious transference effect. Attention plays a critical role in eyewitness awareness and memory. Eyewitness researchers should investigate situations in which people are not explicitly watching for a crime or accident.

Handling og erindring, håb og skyld: Arv som generationsbånd hos Arendt, Benjamin, Heine og Freud


 
 
 SIGRID WEIGEL: ACTING AND MEMORY, HOPE AND GUILT: HERITAGE AS THE BOND OF GENERATIONS IN ARENDT, BENJAMIN, HEINE, AND FREUD
 The article discusses different but related figures of trans-generational heritage in the writings of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Heine, and Sigmund Freud. The common ground of these German-Jewish authors is an interpretative pattern within the theory of history/memory based in the idea of a strong bond of subsequent generations and their interrelation, which refers back to the biblical origins of the idea of ‘heritage’. Both Heine and Benjamin hypothesize a secret ag- reement between the generations, which might be read as the origin of the idea of solidarity. In Freud’s psychoanalysis we find a complementary concept in the figure of ‘archaic heritage’ elaborated in Monotheism, namely a trans-generational trans- feral of repressed memories of the ancestors to their offspring. While Freud, not coincidentally after the First World War and during the rise of Nazism, discovers the unconscious transfer of guilt, Arendt seeks – after the Second World War – to regain, in the space between human beings, action as the space of the political. By emphasizing ‘natality’ as a basic human condition she invests policy in the acting of men in history with the condition of the possibility of a new beginning. The future, according to the insight of these authors, will not be created in abstract images or produced by means of a program, but will come into being by the treatment of the past and the heritage of those who lived before us and by the way in which we act in the present.
 
 
 

The Colonial/Imperial History of Insect Food Avoidance in the United States

AbstractInterest in edible insects has increased greatly since the 2013 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization demonstrated that insects offer an appealing option for a more sustainable livestock alternative. However, overcoming the cultural bias against insect consumption is necessary in order to see widespread adoption. In order to overcome the bias, it is important to first understand it. There is not a simple answer as to why westerners do not eat insects, but using the United States as an example, this paper works to untangle the history that western culture has with insects as food; a history that is stained by the colonial exploitation of native peoples. Notions that insects are a ‘primitive’ food source and the strong disgust response they trigger can be traced back to the 15th century and Age of Exploration. These ideas have persisted because of the perpetuation of European imperial attitudes and the unconscious transfer of the disgust emotion from parents to offspring for many generations. Fortunately, continued outreach events that normalize insects as food, especially those open to families, will be helpful in reprogramming mindsets that have been deeply rooted in our culture for centuries.

Transferential Loss: Unconscious Dynamics of Love, Learning, and Grieving

In this essay, I work with transference as a relational dynamic from psychoanalysis, to analyze love and loss experienced through learning relationships. Transference is the unconscious transfer of...

Developmental trends in lineup performance: Adolescents are more prone to innocent bystander misidentifications than children and adults.

We tested developmental trends in eyewitness identification in biased and unbiased lineups. Our main interest was adolescent's lineup performance compared with children and adults. 7-10-year-olds, 11-13-year-olds, 14-16-year-olds, and adults (N = 431) watched a wallet-theft-video and subsequently identified the thief, victim, and witness from simultaneous target-present and target-absent six-person photo lineups. The thief-absent lineup included a bystander previously seen in thief proximity. Research on unconscious transference suggested a selection bias toward the bystander in adults and 11-13-year-olds, but not in younger children. Confirming our hypothesis, adolescents were more prone to bystander bias than all other age groups. This may be due to adolescents making more inferential errors than children, as predicted by fuzzy-trace theory and associative-activation theory, combined with lower inhibition control in adolescents compared with adults. We also replicated a clothing bias for all age groups and age-related performance differences in our unbiased lineups. Consistent with previous findings, participants were generally overconfident in their decisions, even though confidence was a better predictor of accuracy in older compared with younger participants. With this study, we show that adolescents have an increased tendency to misidentify an innocent bystander. Continued efforts are needed to disentangle how adolescents in comparison to other age groups perform in forensically relevant situations.

FAMILIARITY TRANSFER AS AN EXPLANATION OF THE DÉJÀ VU EFFECT.

Déjà vu is often explained in terms of an unconscious transfer of familiarity between a familiar object or objects and accompanying new objects. However, empirical research tests more the priming effectiveness than such a transfer. This paper reviews the main explanations of déjà vu, proposes a cognitive model of the phenomenon, and tests its six major assumptions. The model states that a sense of familiarity can be felt toward an objectively new stimulus (point 1) and that it can be transferred from a known stimulus to a novel one (point 2) in a situation where the person is unaware of such a transfer (point 3). The criteria for déjà vu are that the known and the novel stimuli may have graphical or semantic similarity, but differences exclude priming explanations (point 4); the familiarity measure should be of an non-rational nature (sense of familiarity rather than recognition; point 5); and that the feeling of familiarity toward a novel stimuli produces a conflict, which could be measured by means of increased reaction (point 6). 119 participants were tested in three experiments. The participants were to assess the novel stimuli in terms of their sense of familiarity. The novel stimuli were primed or were not primed by the known stimulus (Exp. 1) or primed by the known vs a novel stimulus (Exp. 2 and 3). The priming was subliminal in all the experiments. Reaction times were measured in Exps. 2 and 3. The participants assessed the novel stimuli as more familiar when they were preceded by a known stimulus than when they were not (Exp. 1) or when they were preceded by a novel stimulus (Exps. 2 and 3). Reaction times were longer for assessments preceded by known stimulus than for assessments preceded by a novel stimulus, which contradicts the priming explanations. The results seem to support all six points of the proposed model of the mechanisms underlying the déjà vu experience.

How and why unconscious phantasy and transference are the defining features of psychoanalytic practice

In my view, phantasy 1 and transference are the defining features of psychoanalytic practice. This view is linked to the belief that every aspect of human experience – one's thoughts and memories; ...

Comments on Lucy LaFarge's paper How and why unconscious phantasy and transference are the defining features of psychoanalytic practice

The author's outline of the model of the psychoanalytic process is admirably clear and convincing. However, I find myself less agreement with the way the model is applied to the fascinating clinica...

Introduction to “How and why unconscious phantasy and transference are the defining features of psychoanalytic practice”

Introduction to “How and why unconscious phantasy and transference are the defining features of psychoanalytic practice”

Sharing Social Touch in the Primary Somatosensory Cortex

Touch has an emotional and communicative meaning, and it plays a crucial role in social perception and empathy. The intuitive link between others' somatosensations and our sense of touch becomes ostensible in mirror-touch synesthesia, a condition in which the view of a touch on another person's body elicits conscious tactile sensations on the observer's own body [1]. This peculiar phenomenon may implicate normal social mirror mechanisms [2]. Here, we show that mirror-touch interference effects, synesthesia-like sensations, and even phantom touches can be induced in nonsynesthetes by priming the primary somatosensory cortex (SI) directly or indirectly via the posterior parietal cortex. These results were obtained by means of facilitatory paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (ppTMS) contingent upon the observation of touch. For these vicarious effects, the SI is engaged at 150 ms from the onset of the visual touch. Intriguingly, individual differences in empathic abilities, assessed with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index [3], drive the activity of the SI when nonsynesthetes witness others' tactile sensations. This evidence implies that, under normal conditions, touch observation activates the SI below the threshold for perceptual awareness [4]; through the visual-dependent tuning of SI activity by ppTMS, what is seen becomes felt, namely, mirror-touch synesthesia. On a broader perspective, the visual responsivity of the SI may allow an automatic and unconscious transference of the sensation that another person is experiencing onto oneself, and, in turn, the empathic sharing of somatosensations [2].

False recollection of the role played by an actor in an event

Two experiments demonstrated that eyewitnesses more frequently associate an actor with the actions of another person when those two people had appeared together in the same event, rather than in different events. This greater likelihood of binding an actor with the actions of another person from the same event was associated with high-confidence recognition judgments and "remember" responses in a remember-know task, suggesting that viewing an actor together with the actions of another person led participants to falsely recollect having seen that actor perform those actions. An analysis of age differences provided evidence that familiarity also contributed to false recognition independently of a false-recollection mechanism. In particular, older adults were more likely than young adults to falsely recognize a novel conjunction of a familiar actor and action, regardless of whether that actor and action were from the same or from different events. Older adults' elevated rate of false recognition was associated with intermediate confidence levels, suggesting that it stemmed from increased reliance on familiarity rather than from false recollection. The implications of these results are discussed for theories of conjunction errors in memory and of unconscious transference in eyewitness testimony.

Iranian EFL Learners’ Attitudes toward Correction of Oral Errors

1. IntroductionAs many language educators and researchers (e.g., Edge, 1989; Hendrickson, 1987 as cited in Katayama 2007) maintain, making errors is a necessary and natural process of language learning. Inevitably, learner errors and feedback to errors have been of great interest to language teachers and researchers. And in this regard EFL learner's attitude toward the error correction is of outmost importance and it can facilitate the language learning process.It is important to understand that learners have different preferences, that is to say styles in the way they like to be corrected. Some students favor a focus on form, while others do not. Teaching methods differ as well. Some teachers tend to correct all the errors while some tend to be tolerant and still some others do not correct at all (Riazi and Riasti, 2007; Noora, 2006). According to the relevant literature on teachers' and students' preferences and attitudes towards error correction, many studies show that while teachers and students share such common views as the importance of error correction and the types of errors that require correcting, there exist considerable differences as to the techniques of error correction (Lee, 2005; Wang, 2010).While there are considerable number of studies that focus on the issue of error correction and error analysis, relatively few studies have been carried out related to EFL learner's attitude toward error correction methods during the class time (i.e. especially in Iran context). But it is believed that in order to have a successful learning and teaching process it is necessary to consider EFL learners' perceptions. The role of correction in language teaching has been an issue for quite some time and opinions vary as to whether correction is effective or not. For the time being, people rarely consider the learners' perception on oral error correction. And that is why it is necessary to do research associated with their opinion about oral error correction.1.1. Related review of literatureOn the related literature of error and error correction, it becomes clear that learning and teaching process is significantly bound with the way teachers and learners react toward the errors and how they try to correct them. Before correcting errors language teachers need to consider the cause of errors. As it has been suggested, errors may occur in three types of cases (Chastain 1988). First, some errors occur because learners are not aware of the rules. Second, some errors creep into student's language because they do not attach any great importance to linguistic accuracy. Third, some errors result from temporary overload on the student's cognitive processes due to fatigue, embarrassment, illness, and so on. Correction in the first case will be beneficial, if the teacher can make the error and way of correcting it, clear to the students. Correction in the second case will be counterproductive, unless the teacher can convince the students to change their attitude toward accuracy. Correction in the third case cannot prevent future errors because they do not result from inadequate knowledge. The overload of the cognitive processes probably indicates that the student needs to have more communication practice than correction.According to Spillner (1991), Errors are information. In contrastive linguistics, they are thought to be caused by unconscious transfer of mother tongue structures to the system of the target language and give information about both systems. In the interlanguage hypothesis of second language acquisition, errors are indicative of the different intermediate learning levels and are useful pedagogical feedback. In both cases error analysis is an essential methodological tool for diagnosis and evaluation of the language acquisition process. Errors, too, give information in psychoanalysis (e.g., the Freudian slip), in language universal research, and in other fields of linguistics, such as linguistic change. …

Supportive psychoanalytic therapy for personality disorders.

Theoretical rationale, research, and clinical process from supportive psychoanalytic therapy for personality disorder patients are presented, with detailed discussion of clinical examples. Elements of the supportive therapy used in the Weill Cornell randomized controlled trial for borderline patients are described, including monitoring the frame of therapy and the emergency priorities of suicidal or treatment-threatening behavior; development and management of the therapeutic relationship; enhancing awareness, tolerance, and management of affect; facilitating growth of identity through support and modeling by the therapist; and avoiding explicit verbal interpretation of unconscious transference fantasy. Awareness of transference is used by the therapist to avoid injury to the patient's self esteem and to maximize tact in addressing the patient's defenses and maladaptive behaviors.

Discussion of “Hysteria and Humiliation”: Commentary on Paper by Sam Gerson

This commentary describes certain differences in how Relational and Contemporary Freudian analysts approach both the conceptual dynamics of hysterical functioning and its clinical management. The discussion shows how, despite considerable agreement between these two groups concerning the critical importance of a receptive other for the successful buildup of virtually every aspect of mental life (not to be confused with the concept of co-creation), they also have quite substantial differences; differences that are rooted in contrasting basic assumptions about the ways in which fantasies, unconscious transference displacements, and self-regulating repetitive processes are set up in the mind. The discussion also illustrates how the clinical management of hysteria differs considerably depending on whether what is taking place in the consulting room is conceived of as an autonomous, repetitive process that the patient brings to the treatment and repeats (one way or another) over and over again, or whether it is conceived of as co-created, belonging to the minds of both persons in the room, even if not in equal measure or equal ways.

Unconscious transfer of meaning to brands

We examine semantic conditioning in a consumer context. We subliminally paired neutral ideographs with attributes. In experiment 1, the ideographs served as primes during a lexical decision task and slowed down response times to target words with the opposite semantic meaning. In experiment 2, the ideographs served as brand names of beverages, and attitudinal responses to them were less favorable when the associated attributes were incongruent with existing schemas. These results showed that semantic conditioning (1) can occur unconsciously, (2) can have significant and meaningful consequences for brand evaluation, and (3) influences subsequent attitudinal responses via conceptual disfluency processes.