In the 1950s Jacques Lacan developed a set-up with a concave mirror and a plane mirror, based on which he described the nature of human identification. He also formulated ideas on how psychoanalysis, qua clinical practice, responds to identification. In this paper Lacan's schema of the two mirrors is described in detail and the theoretical line of reasoning he aimed to articulate with aid of th...

We investigate how the mental lexicon changes over the life span using free association data from over 8,000 individuals, ranging from 10 to 84 years of age, with more than 400 cue words per age group. Using network analysis, with words as nodes and edges defined by the strength of shared associations, we find that associative networks evolve in a nonlinear (U-shaped) fashion over the life span...

Virginia Woolf, one of the prominent representatives of modernist novelist in England, has contributed significantly to the development of modern novel in both theory and practice. She abandoned traditional fictional devices and formulated her own distinctive techniques. The novels of Woolf tend to be less concerned with outward reality than with the inner life. Her masterpiece, To the Lighthou...

In two experiments, dysphoric and nondysphoric students first concentrated on either self-focused or other-focused phrases and then performed an ostensibly unrelated task involving the interpretation of homographs with both personal and impersonal meanings. In Experiment 1, they constructed sentences for the homographs; dysphoric students' sentences were more emotionally negative (although not ...

The richness of semantic representations associated with individual words has emerged as an important variable in reading. In the present study we contrasted different measures of semantic richness and explored the time course of their influences during visual word processing as reflected in event-related brain potentials (ERPs). ERPs were recorded while participants performed a lexical decisio...

Three language production studies indicate that amnesic H.M. produces speech errors unlike everyday slips-of-the-tongue. Study 1 was a naturalistic task: H.M. and six controls closely matched for age, education, background and IQ described what makes captioned cartoons funny. Nine judges rated the descriptions blind to speaker identity and gave reliably more negative ratings for coherence, vagu...

Associative frequency, the ease with which a word comes to mind in free association, is taken as a measure of general response availability. As expected from this view, in both controlled experiments and in reanalyses of previously published correlational data, high associative frequency words were judged to be more familiar and were easier to recall but harder to recognize than low associative...

ment " make fascinating reading. The author expressly disclaims that his method is meant to supersede orthodox psychoanalysis: it is rather a complementary approach which touches upon the patient's adjustment to social realities in a way which the privacy of the individual analytic procedure inevitably misses. The method employs, in a group setting, the same " tools "? free association, underst...

Characterize the social representations of nurses regarding the planning of nursing care for people with cancer, by determining the central nucleus and of the peripheral system. Qualitative study conducted in a specialized hospital in Salvador, Bahia, between July 2008 and March 2009. Data collection was made by free association of words, with forty-one nurses. The data were processed by the so...

This study sheds light on the relationship between the prosodic features and semantic functions of the Korean focus particles (FPs) hangsang ‘always’ and ocik ‘only’. Based on a production experiment, Nambu and Lee (forthcoming) argue that different phonetic realizations of hangsang and ocik reflect their semantic distinction, supporting Beaver and Clark’s (2008) Quasi/Free/Conventional Theory....