A hyper-emotion theory of psychological illnesses is presented. It postulates that these illnesses have an onset in which a cognitive evaluation initiates a sequence of unconscious transitions yielding a basic emotion. This emotion is appropriate for the situation but inappropriate in its intensity. Whenever it recurs, it leads individuals to a focus on the precipitating situation and to charac...

The aim of this study was to propose and validate the new scaling method, fuzzy partial credit scaling (FPCS), which combines fuzzy set theory with the partial credit model (PCM) to score rating scales. To achieve this goal, the Chinese version of BDI (Beck Depression Inventory-II) was administrated to a depressed sample of patients and a non-depressed sample. The depressed sample consisted of ...

A theory of discrimination which assumes that subjects compare psychological values evoked by a stimulus to a subjective referent is proposed. Momentary differences between psychological values for the stimuh~s and the referent are accumulated over time until one or the other of two r~sponse thresholds is first exceeded. The theory is analyzed as a random walk bounded between two absorbing barr...

The author discusses the ways in which psychoanalytic theories, like other theories, attempt to systematise the understanding of observations. Freud remarked that systems also have unconscious meanings. The author discusses these unconscious vicissitudes of psychoanalytic theories of both clinical and more abstract kinds, at various levels of psychological function. Learning psychoanalysis repe...

Acknowledgements. Thanks to Ann Bradlow and especially the editors for helpful discussions. Many thanks to Lisa Davidson and Susannah Levi for helpful discussions and comments on the manuscript.