Subject collection: Psychology (246 titles, 1978–2015)

A face strikes us immediately as sad, and so, too, do a mourner, a willow tree, a house on a prairie, and a group of onlookers. The spontaneous emergence of affective and other qualities of people, things, places, and events falls under the heading of physiognomy, a phenomenon discussed since at least Aristotle, and a key feature of evolutionary theory, psychology, and perception as well as professional practice (“profiling”) and popular talk. However, physiognomy is a controversial topic because of a suspect history, and is often renamed as non-verbal communication.

The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience: Physiognomy Reconsidered examines this venerable, attractive, and contentious topic within the unique perspective of research-oriented psychology. Included are the processes involved, primarily perceptual; origins, mainly evolutionary; and social-cultural factors as supplements. Discussed within a holistic-experiential (phenomenological)-aesthetic framework are physiognomy’s ties to the arts as well as emotions, synesthesia, learning, development, and personality. Empirical investigations are summarized, including the author’s.

This volume examines the neuroscience of visual consciousness, drawing on the phenomenon of binocular rivalry. It provides overviews of brain structure and function, the visual system, and neuroscientific methodologies, and then focuses on binocular rivalry from multiple perspectives: historical, psychophysical, electrophysiological, brain-imaging, brain stimulation, clinical and computational, with a glimpse also into the future of research in this exciting field. This is the first collected volume on binocular rivalry in nearly a decade and will be of special interest to researchers, scholars and students in the vision sciences, and more broadly in the psychological and clinical sciences. In addition, it lays foundations for a forthcoming interdisciplinary volume in this series on the constitution of phenomenal consciousness, making it essential reading for anyone interested in the science and philosophy of consciousness.

Language researchers and practitioners often adopt tools and techniques without testing whether they really work as they should. This is understandable because most scholars do not have the time or expertise to properly evaluate the usefulness of all instruments, measures, and methods they need. It is therefore critical to have problem solvers in the field who gain the necessary expertise and take the time to scrutinize existing methods, identify problems, and offer new solutions. This volume represents the work of scholars who have done this; it is a collection of the latest advances, developments, and innovations regarding the modeling and measurement of learners’ vocabulary growth curves, current levels of vocabulary knowledge and lexical proficiency, and the patterns of lexical diversity found in their language production. Several of the contributors also address the complex but important relationship between automated indices and human judgments of learners’ lexical patterns and abilities.

This book represents the state of the art on rightward movement in one thematically coherent volume. It documents the growing importance of the combination of empirical and theoretical work in linguistic analysis. Several contributions argue that rightward movement is a means of reducing phonological or structural complexity. The inclusion of corpus data and psycholinguistic results confirms the Right Roof Constraint as a characteristic property of extraposition and argues for a reduced role of subsentential bounding nodes. The contributions also show that the phenomenon cannot be looked at from one module of grammar alone, but calls for an interaction of syntax, semantics, phonology, and discourse. The discussion of different languages such as English, German, Dutch, Italian, Italian Sign Language, Modern Greek, Uyghur, and Khalkha enhances our understanding of the complexity of the phenomenon. Finally, the analytic options of different frameworks are explored. The volume is of interest to students and researchers of syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, and corpus linguistics.

The papers brought together in this volume illustrate how spoken corpora (be they native or learner corpora) can provide insights into various aspects of errors and disfluencies such as pauses and discourse markers. They show, among others, that such phenomena can be influenced by factors like gender, age or genre, and that they can correlate with, e.g., informativeness and syntactic complexity. Crucially, they also demonstrate that items which are often dismissed as mere disfluencies can fulfil important functions and thus play an essential role in the management of spoken discourse. The book should appeal to linguists who are interested in spoken language in general and in errors and disfluencies in speech in particular, as well as to specialists in second language acquisition and language testing who want to know more about the nature of fluency and accuracy. Originally published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16:2 (2011)

This volume consists of a collection of papers that focus on structural/grammatical aspects of the process of first language attrition. It presents an overview of current research, methodological issues and important questions regarding first language attrition. In particular, it addresses the two most prominent issues in current L1 attrition research: Can attrition effects impact on features of core syntax, or are they limited to interface phenomena?, and; What is the role of age at onset (pre-/post-puberty) in this regard?

By investigating attrition in a variety of settings, from a case study of a Spanish-speaking adoptee in the US to an empirical investigation of more than 50 long-term attriters of Turkish in the Netherlands, the investigations presented take a new perspective on these issues.

Originally published in Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Langage, Interaction et Acquisition 2:2 (2011).

There is a perceived tension between empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of language. Many recent works in the discipline emphasise that linguistics is an ‘empirical science’. This volume argues for a nuanced view, highlighting that theory and practice necessarily and as a matter of fact complement each other in linguistic research. Its contributions – ranging from experimental studies in psychology via linguistic fieldwork and cross-linguistic comparisons to the application of formal and logical approaches to language – exemplify the mutual relationship between empirical and theoretical work. The volume illustrates how selected topics are addressed by different contributions and methodological stances. Topics include the cognitive grounding of language, social cognition and the construction of meaning in interaction, and, closely related, pragmatics from a typological perspective and beyond. Anyone interested in these topics and more generally in meta-theoretical considerations will find great value in this volume.

The study of how words are represented and processed in the mind has served as a meeting ground for research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Right now, this domain of study is in the midst of astonishing developments. At the core of these developments are the methodological and analytic advancements that have enabled researchers to address new phenomena and to ask new questions. These new methodologies have also raised fundamental questions concerning the nature of words in the mind, the nature of language processing, and the ways in which data can be understood.

This book provides a timely resource written by international leaders in methodological innovation. It offers fundamental insights into how innovative methodological approaches advance lexical research. It also offers the technical knowledge that is essential to that advancement, but which is rarely found in journal reports. This is a methodologically oriented volume designed to be informative, thought provoking, innovative, and perhaps also revolutionary. The contributions in this volume that originally appeared in The Mental Lexicon 5:3 (2010) and 6:1 (2011) are supplemented with several new chapters, as well as with a new and timely introductory chapter titled "Embracing Complexity".

The theoretical proposals brought forward in this book as well as the results from the reported experimental studies present genuine contributions to the biolinguistic program. The papers contribute to our understanding of the properties of the computations and the representations derived by the language faculty, viewed as an organism of human biological. Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar: Essays on Interfaces adds to the usual notion of interfaces, which is generally understood as the connection between syntax and the semantic system, between phonology and the sensorimotor system. It raises novel interface questions about how these connections are at all possible within the biolinguistic program. It anchors the formal properties of grammar at the interfaces between language and biology, language and experience, bringing about language acquisition and language variation, and it also explores the interaction of grammar with the factors reducing complexity. This book aims to bring about further understanding of the interfaces of the grammar in a broader biolinguistic sense. Written in a language accessible to a wide audience, this book will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.

One of the most important theoretical and empirical issues in the scholarly study of emotion is whether there is a correct list of “basic” types of affect or whether all affective states are better modeled as a combination of locations on shared underlying dimensions. Many thinkers have written on this topic, yet the views of two scientists in particular are dominant. The first is Jaak Panksepp, the father of Affective Neuroscience. Panksepp conceptualizes affect as a set of distinct categories. The leading proponent of the dimensional approach in scientific psychology is James Russell. According to Russell all affect can be decomposed into two underlying dimensions, pleasure versus displeasure and low arousal versus high arousal.

In this volume Panksepp and Russell each articulate their positions on eleven fundamental questions about the nature of affect followed by a discussion of these target papers by noted emotion theorists and researchers. Russell and Panksepp respond both to each other and to the commentators. The discussion leads to some stark contrasts, with formidable arguments on both sides, and some interesting convergences between the two streams of work.