Investigating Reflexive Responses to Explicit and Implicit Forms of Social Exclusion Using Immersive Virtual Environment Technology.

Humans are strongly affected by social exclusion, a multifaceted and complex phenomenon of social life. However, individuals tend to respond differently depending on a multitude of individual and contextual factors. Firstly, with a view to increasing the ecological validity and experimental control of an exclusion manipulation in the laboratory setting, we made use of immersive virtual environment technology (IVET; an Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset) to create a new exclusion paradigm.

Infant Understanding of Different Forms of Social Exclusion.

In a series of eye-tracking studies, we investigated preverbal infants' understanding of social exclusion by analyzing their gaze behaviors as they were familiarized with animations depicting social acceptance and explicit or implicit social exclusion. In addition, we implemented preferential reaching and anticipatory looking paradigms to further assess understanding of outcomes. Across all experiments ( = 81), it was found that 7-9 month-old infants exhibited non-random visual scanning and gaze behaviors and responded systematically and above random chance in their choice of character and, to some extent, in their anticipation of the movement of a neutral character during a test trial.

The Norwegian version of the five factor narcissism inventory for vulnerable narcissism and the grandiose narcissism subscale of indifference: Psychometric properties of the long- and short-form versions.

In recent years, narcissism has been reconceptualized as a multi-dimensional feature of human psychology. The Five Factor Narcissism Inventory (FFNI) has been proposed as a measure for two distinguishable dimensions of narcissism: Vulnerable and Grandiose (Glover, Miller, Lynam, Crego & Widiger, 2012). To investigate the role that some of these factors may have in moderating responses to cues of social exclusion, implemented in a connected laboratory experiment, we translated the subscales for Vulnerable Narcissism and the Grandiose Narcissism subscale of Indifference from English into Norwegian and included them in an online survey that was used to recruit and pre-screen participants for the laboratory experiment.

In the Intimacy of My "Enactlon": Modeling Kohut's "Bipolar Self" as an Autopoietic System: A Dialectic Approach to Phenomenological Research in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.

This paper demonstrates that Kohut's definitional system of the "bipolar self" within psychoanalytic self psychology can be modeled as a biological autopoietic system, both in terms of its structure and dynamics, in a way that accounts for the phenomenological aspects of experiential living. Based on this finding, the author argues that a nonreductionist definitional system of this type is an integral component of any pragmatic methodology, such as Kohut's "empathic-introspective" method of treatment, which aims to enable the analyst, as observer, to gain access to the phenomenological world of the analysand within the analytic setting. The dialectic approach undertaken in this preliminary exploration of the "bipolar self" as an autopoietic system has proven fruitful in excavating some of the theoretical features of psychoanalytic self psychology, the weighted importance of which can now be reevaluated in contemporary practice.