An experimental reunion of psychoanalytic theory with perceptual vigilance and defense.

Blum, Gerald S.

doi:10.1037/h0054455

Cited by 58 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…The automatic search process, however, has the unintended effect of keeping the to-be-suppressed thought activated unconsciously. Blum (1954) demonstrated a similar phenomenon in which both the vigilance and suppression processes occur outside of awareness. He exposed participants to threatening and nonthreatening visual stimuli at speeds that rendered them in one condition far below and in another condition near the threshold of conscious perception.…”

Section: Other Studies Documenting Unconscious Emotional Processesmentioning

confidence: 78%

The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science.

Westen

1998

Psychological Bulletin

342

233

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Although commentators periodically declare that Freud is dead, his repeated burials lie on shaky grounds. Critics typically attack an archaic version of psychodynamic theory that most clinicians similarly consider obsolete. Central to contemporary psychodynamic theory is a series of propositions about (a) unconscious cognitive, affective, and motivational processes; (b) ambivalence and the tendency for affective and motivational dynamics to operate in parallel and produce compromise solutions; (c) the origins of many personality and social dispositions in childhood; (d) mental representations of the self, others, and relationships; and (e) developmental dynamics. An enormous body of research in cognitive, social, developmental, and personality psychology now supports many of these propositions. Freud's scientific legacy has implications for a wide range of domains in psychology, such as integration of affective and motivational constraints into connectionist models in cognitive science.Freud, like Elvis, has been dead for a number of years but continues to be cited with some regularity. Although the majority of clinicians report that they rely to some degree upon psychodynamic 1 principles in their work ( Pope, Tabachnick, & Keith-Spiegel, 1987 ), most researchers consider psychodynamic ideas to be at worst absurd and obsolete and at best irrelevant or of little scientific interest. In the lead article of a recent edition of Psychological Science, Crews (1996) arrived at a conclusion shared by many: " [T]here is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas" (p. 63).Despite the explosion of empirical studies of unconscious cognitive processes (see, e.g., Greenwald, 1992 ;Kihlstrom, 1987 ;Schacter, 1992 ), few reference Freud; none cite any contemporary psychodynamic work; and in general, psychodynamic concepts are decreasingly represented in the major psychology journals ( Robins & Craik, 1994 ). The situation is similar in the popular media and in broader intellectual discourse. Publications ranging from Time to the New York Review of Books periodically publish Freud's intellectual obituary, with critics charging that Freud's ideas-such as his dual-instinct theory or his hypotheses about female personality development-are seriously out of date and without scientific merit (e.g., Crews, 1993 ).Many aspects of Freudian theory are indeed out of date, and they should be: Freud died in 1939, and he has been slow to undertake further revisions. His critics, however, are equally behind the times, attacking countenance was last sighted in earnest. Contemporary psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists no longer write much about ids and egos, nor do they conceive of treatment for psychological disorders as an archaeological expedition in search of lost memories ( Aron, 1996 ;Gabbard, 1994 ;Horowitz, 1988 ;Kolb, Cooper, & Fishman, 1995 ;Mitchell, 1988 ;Wachtel, 1993 ). People do sometimes describe feelings or behav...

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Section: Other Studies Documenting Unconscious Emotional Processesmentioning

confidence: 78%

The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science.

Westen

1998

Psychological Bulletin

342

233

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“…But if the phenomenon is empirically demonstrable its proof must be established by experimental methods other than those commonly used. Perhaps Blum's (1954) forced-choice technique of threshold assessment holds best promise since it eliminates possible effects due to the response process.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Response suppression in perceptual defense.

Zajonc¹

1962

Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Recent theorizing maintains that the phenomenon of perceptual defense can be accounted for in terms of response processes. Elevated thresholds to taboo words are now generally regarded as reflecting a response bias deriving from either previous experience (Goldiamond & Hawkins, 1958), set (Postman, Bronson, & Cropper, 1953), or conflict (Brown, 1961), rather than a defensive perceptual blocking. Although the core of the issue deals with the relative contributions of the stimulus and response to the perceptual defense effect, studies attempting to evaluate such relative contributions have been rather few (Matthews & Wertheimer, 1958;Neisser, 1954). It is the purpose of this experiment to determine the extent to which both recognition threshold and the galvonic skin response (GSR) are influenced by the stimulus and to what extent by the response, using a procedure first suggested by Garner, Hake, and Eriksen (1956). First, threshold and GSR data for a set of taboo and neutral words were obtained by means of standard methods. Secondly, a paired-associate list was constructed using the previously exposed words as stimulus terms and a new set of taboo and neutral words as response terms. Some taboo stimuli were paired with taboo, others with neutral response terms. Neutral stimuli too,

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“…Experiments often show that participants are particularly slow to verbalize negative, taboo words. This effect can be explained by vigilance (Blum, 1954; Kitayama, 1990): The attention that taboo words demand interferes with verbalization.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

On Wildebeests and Humans

2003

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On the basis of a functional perspective, we hypothesized that negative stimuli are detected faster than positive stimuli. In Experiment 1, participants were subliminally presented with positive and negative words or with no words at all. After each presentation, participants were asked whether they had seen a word. They detected negative words more accurately than positive words. In Experiment 2, participants were subliminally presented with negative or positive words. After each presentation, they were asked whether the presented word was positive or negative. Negative words were correctly categorized more often than positive words. Experiment 3 showed that although participants correctly categorized negative words more often than positive words. they could not guess the meaning of the words better than would be expected by chance. The results are discussed against the background of recent findings on basic affective processes.

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An experimental reunion of psychoanalytic theory with perceptual vigilance and defense.

Cited by 58 publications

References 8 publications

The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science.

The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science.

Response suppression in perceptual defense.

On Wildebeests and Humans

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