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William Stern is mostly renowned for inventing the IQ formula. However, he is also the originator of the term 'differential psychology' itself. His program of differential psychology synthesized population-based correlational studies as well as idiosyncratic approaches focusing on unique profiles of individuals. We argue that his approach still offers valuable ideas to this day; in particular, the individualistic sub-programme of Stern's differential psychology corresponds to a large extent to ipsative testing that emphasizes a profile-based analysis of individual strengths and weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper surveys the last 30 years of Hungarian academic psychology. Around 1989–1990, the time of the great social changes Hungarian psychology was rather Westernized, but still a relatively small scientific field and applied profession. The opening and liberalization of politics made psychology in Hungary a booming profession and a rich research field. Education of psychologists was spreading, and becoming more Westernized in textbook usage and reading materials. Entrance numbers at two universities with 80 students were replaced by 2010 by 6 university programs and about 8000 incoming students. The training system is a Bologna type BA + MA + PhD system, The educational booming has its own problems. As all university subjects, psychology training is also underfinanced, with high teaching loads and a move by university management towards applied areas, neglecting basic research. The research activity is characterized by a fivefold increase of English language publications coming from Hungary over a 20 years period. University research was strengthened, and competitive grant systems were introduced, whth good success aretes by psychologists. Here again, managerial thinking questions many aspects of basic research and liberalized science management. These factors are peculiar to psychology, but they do have an impact on it. The paper gives some details about one chapter of academic psychology, cognitive psychology. Institutionally, support by the Soros foundation in the 90s for the university cognitive programs had as one consequence that three departments of cognition are active in Budapest today. Another aspect of insitutional development was the series of multidisciplinary conferences in Hungary (MAKOG), and Hungarian involvement in international graduate training programs in cognitive science. The most successful cognitive group, at Central European University (5 ERC grants, publications in leading journals) is recently chased out of Hungary by anti‐Western and antiliberal legal moves. This would certainly have a detrimental effect on Hungarian cognitive psychology for quite a time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Powerful figures, such as politicians, who show a behavioural pattern of exuberant self-confidence, recklessness, and contempt for others may be the subject of the acquired personality disorder, the hubris syndrome, which has been demonstrated to leave its mark on speech patterns. Our study explores characteristic language patterns of Hungarian prime ministers (PMs) with a special emphasis on one of the key indicators of hubris, the shift from the first person "I" to "we" in spontaneous speech. We analyzed the ratio of the first-person singular ("I") and plural ("we") pronouns and verbal inflections in the spontaneous parliamentary speeches of four Hungarian PMs between 1998–2018. We found that Viktor Orbán during his second premiership (2010–2014) used first person plural relative to singular inflections more often than the other three PMs during their terms. Orbán and another Hungarian PM, Ferenc Gyurcsány, who were re-elected at some point showed an increased ratio of first-person plural vs. singular inflections and personal pronouns by their second term, likely reflecting increasing hubristic tendencies. The results show that the ratio of "I" and "we" usually studied in English texts also show changes in a structurally different language, Hungarian. This finding suggests that it is extended periods of premiership that may increase hubristic behaviour in political leaders, not only experiencing excessive power. The results are particularly elucidating regarding the role of re-elections in political leaders' hubristic speech–and behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will compare the life and work of two Marxist psychologists of the midtwentieth century, George Politzer (1903-1942) and Ferenc Mérei (1909-1986). Both were Hungarian Jews who were educated at the French Sorbonne. They were both involved in covert activities related to the French Communist movement in the 1920 and 1930s. As young communist intellectuals, they combined Marxist ideology with the need to elaborate a new psychology. I present their work as an alternative to better known versions of Marxist psychology, namely, Freudo-Marxism and Soviet action theories. Unlike these theories, Politzer and Mérei created a partly empirical, partly theoretical psychological oeuvre that operationalized the ideas of a concrete dramatic psychology anchored in the actual social life of humans. Politzer and Mérei shared desire for a psychology that is rooted in dynamics, changes, and interactions--a psychology that is rooted in the human drama, rather than in abstractions of academic laboratory psychology, and in the static topography of Freud. For Politzer, the critique of traditional psychology was mainly conceptual. Mérei looked for concrete psychology in data from field work in social psychology and from applied clinical research. The work of Mérei provided an empirical, concrete psychology, which eventually led to an influx of many new psychologists within the field in Hungary. Politzer's contributions, in contrast, remained largely conceptual and philosophical. The main message of their work is that it is an almost impossible task to combine a Marxist-Communist engagement with a commitment toward traditional civic values of enlightenment and rationality. The combination of social-political commitment and an analysis of concrete human interactions remained a formal combination, rather than a real synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is written on the occasion of a new French monograph by Noemi Pizarosso on Ignace Meyerson. This French mid 20th century intellectual has been one of the representatives of the early French non-individualistic social psychologies. Meyerson claimed that the mind undergoes radical changes during historical times. Relative to the other early historical psychologies, Meyerson was more radical and more relativistic in the historical sense. One great merit of the book of Pizarosso is to show that Meyerson and his followers attempted to prove this historical relativity thesis in analyzing changes in the concept of person, and changes in styles of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is partly a review of a new book by Brady Wagoner on Frederick Bartlett as a theoretician of constructive memory, and partly a survey of what has become of memory constructionism. The basic message of Wagoner analyzing Bartlett is that constructive memory processes are not the exception but the rule. The details of the reemergence of this memory model in modern cognitive psychology are clearly presented by Wagoner. One crucial point is missing, however, that is analyzed in detail by the paper. Bartlett was using stories to support his contructionist theory. This attitude was coming up in the rediscovery of Bartlett as a narrative interpretation of memory schematization. New structural approaches to stories have been emerging in the work of Colby, Rumelhart, and others. Like Bartlett, they were looking for underlying social schematization and constraints, but this time round, there was a stronger linguistic and even structural emphasis. Narrative patterns promised to provide a substantial anchoring point for the otherwise elusive concept of schemata proposed by Bartlett. This turn affiliates memory schematization with theories that treat elementary sociality as a basic, not constructed feature of the human mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews the role of Noam Chomsky in the conceptual changes in modern psychology that are described by many as the cognitive revolution. Several aspects of the work of Chomsky are identified as key elements in the changes regarding the human mind, and the determinants of human nature. The mentalism of Chomsky resulted in the general spread of theory theories about human development, where the human mind is interpreted as a theory-using open, creative system. The peculiarities of sequential behavioral organization and later the sequential interface issues as well as the concentration on (syntactic) pure form were important inspirations for several general theories of human cognition. Chomsky, with his differentiation between competence and performance, opened the road along with David Marr to multilayered computational theories of the mind. While the innatist commitments of Chomsky regarding human development created many fruitful controversies during half a century, they also tied the underdetermined nature of human language with the philosophical issues of freedom. Language with its innate recursive system is a basic factor of human freedom. Freedom is connected to a rational image of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We investigated the role of speech pauses in emotion ascribing. [•] Length of silent speech pauses was systematically manipulated. [•] Experiments were made in a native and in a foreign language context. [•] Speech samples are perceived to be sadder and more scared, when pauses are longer. [•] Speech samples are perceived to be happier and more positive when pauses are shorter. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Williams syndrome (WMS), a rare neurogenetic disorder, has been in the forefront of research in cognitive psychology for the last 10 years. Studies of grammatical development in 14 Hungarian WMS children are presented: they were examined on tasks testing regular and irregular morphology; measures of digit span were also obtained. Results on the production of accusative and plural forms confirmed for Hungarian that regardless of the frequency of the item, inflected forms of irregulars are harder to produce, and often regularized in WMS, revealing a dissociation between the rules of grammar vs. the mental lexicon. Overall performance on the morphology task is associated with the capacity of phonological short-term memory: subjects with higher span perform better on both tasks. The specification of the surprisingly close relation of phonological short-term memory with the linguistic measures awaits further study. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper reports on a Hungarian study of social class differences in the speech of 65 six year old children from 5 primary schools in Budapest. Speech samples were collected from stories which were elicited by a series of pictures. Five quantitative indices of context-dependence were constructed; and, on the basis of these indices, contexts dependence was related to the child's own social background and to the social composition of the school. It was found that the speech of `advantaged' children was structurally more complex and less context-dependent than the speech of `disadvantaged' children. Overall, the study demonstrates the applicability of the concept of context-dependence in a non- English speaking country, and provides yet another demonstration of the influence of social class differences on speech codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore lexical processing in an agglutinative language and the organization of the lexicon. From the point of view of lexical processing the major empirical question that arises in relation to agglutinative languages is whether the morphologically complex words are represented in a holistic or a morphologically decomposed form in the mental lexicon and whether lexical access requires some form of morphological parsing of the word. In this article several possible models are being differentiated. These include holistic word entries, separate morphemic entries, and serially specified morphemic entries. It also briefly reports some preliminary results from two pilot studies which bear on the validity of these models. Both experiments examined the lexical processing of morphologically simple and complex Hungarian words using different on-line techniques.

The paper presents the results of two experiments performed on Hungarian preverbal modifiers. This hypothetical grammatical concept includes such categorically different morphemes as verbal prefixes, objects with no article, nominal parts of complex predicates etc. They are all supposed to attach more directly to the verb than other moveable elements and to have a prototypical preverbal position. Both experiments tried to find psycholinguistic evidence for this privileged relationship between the verb and the preverbal modifiers and for their preferred ordering. In the first study adults had to provide pairwise word-relatedness judgements in a scaling task. The main results suggested that most of the proposed modifiers indeed have a privileged connection to their verb even if they are separated from the verb in the surface string. However, semantic relatedness also had an effect on the judgements. In the second experiment preschoolers participated in an elicited imitation task repeating sentences with the preverbal modifiers in preverbal or postverbal positions. In general, there was a strong tendency to redress the structures to the canonic form with preverbal modifiers in the immediately preverbal slot. In sum, the experiments give some psycholinguistic support for the intimate relationships between the preverbal modifiers and the verb and for their privileged position. The actual list of modifiers needs further clarification in consonance with the development of grammatical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the author's opinion on the book "Brain Language," which takes a critical look at the metatheoretical assumptions of several contemporary research fields in order to provide a provocative framework. Information on the Cartesian approach used in the book; Suggestions on how to overcome recent conceptual difficulties in dealing with the intricacies of the human mind; Debate on cognitive and linguistic models of the language.

This article discusses the book "The Modularity of Mind. An Essay on Faculty Psychology," by Jerry A. Fodor. The general thesis of the book can be summarized using the author's dichotomies. There are two versions of faculty psychology, both historically and on the contemporary scene. The horizontal one, practiced by many modern psychometricians, suggests that there are qualitatively different faculties or propensities in the human mind, each of which, however, operates over several different contents. The second version, vertical faculties, operates with faculties of a much more restricted scope. The faculties suggested by this view are domain-specific and content-dependent. Thus, instead of a general faculty of memory, one would have to deal with musical and mathematical memory separately.

This paper examines the role of word order in the sentence interpretation of Hungarian children. The concept of perceptual strategies and its equivalents have been used more and more in the psycholinguistic literature. Among the many proposed strategies, one of the widest possible scope is the Noun-Verb-Noun strategy suggested by Thomas Bever. Bever has found that in the acquisition of English, the strategy is being formed and overgeneralized around four years, causing a systematic misinterpretation of passive sentences and some cleft constructions. A clearer "first noun is the agent" strategy was obtained from children showing no signs of the assymetry. Studies with Hungarian children are especially well suited to probe some of the issues involved. The case system clearly marks grammatical relations, while word order does not carry information about the roles of noun phrases as arguments of the verb. In studying sentence interpretation of Hungarian preschool children, the author aims to gain some hints on whether children tend to take order as a marker of basic relations like agency as well as on the course of differentiation between topic, agent and surface subject.

It is worthy to supplement Charney with two historical issues: (1) There were two rival trends in the rebirth of genetic thought in the 1960s: the universal and the variation related. This traditional duality suggested that heredity cannot be equated with genetic determinism. (2) The classical debates and reinterpretation oi adoption/twin studies in the 1980s regarding intelligence suggested that the environment had a more active role in unfolding the genetic program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile phones have become an integral part of life, drawing researchers' attention to their behavioral consequences. Yet, we know little about the psychological associations of mobile phones. It has been proposed that due to their role in maintaining social relationships, the mobile phone, as an object, has become the representation of a person's social network. This paper empirically investigates this idea. A sample of 154 university students participated in an experiment that tested the cognitive consequences of activating the concept of a mobile phone. We primed the concept of a mobile phone and measured the accessibility of thoughts related to social relationships with a word fragment completion task. People reminded of their mobile phones (vs. neutral personal objects) found significantly more words related to social networks, demonstrating the association between social relationships and the idea of mobile phones. Additionally, priming people with their mobile phones was associated with lower need to belong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the foreword for the January 1, 1989 issue of the journal "Folia Linguistica."

Abstract: One of the intriguing and sometimes controversial findings in figurative language research is a right-hemisphere processing advantage for novel metaphors. The current divided visual field study introduced novel literal expressions as a control condition to assess processing novelty independent of figurativeness. Participants evaluated word pairs belonging to one of the five categories: (1) conventional metaphorical, (2) conventional literal, (3) novel metaphorical, (4) novel literal, and (5) unrelated expressions in a semantic decision task. We presented expressions without sentence context and controlled for additional factors including emotional valence, arousal, and imageability that could potentially influence hemispheric processing. We also utilized an eye-tracker to ensure lateralized presentation. We did not find the previously reported right-hemispherical processing advantage for novel metaphors. Processing was faster in the left hemisphere for all types of word pairs, and accuracy was also higher in the right visual field - left hemisphere. Novel metaphors were processed just as fast as novel literal expressions, suggesting that the primary challenge during the comprehension of novel expressions is not a serial processing of salience, but perhaps a more left hemisphere weighted semantic integration. Our results cast doubt on the right-hemisphere theory of metaphors, and raise the possibility that other uncontrolled variables were responsible for previous results. The lateralization of processing of two word expressions seems to be more contingent on the specific task at hand than their figurativeness or saliency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We investigated the impact of readers' visuo-spatial (VS) capacity on their incidental learning of page links during the exploration of simple hierarchical hypertextual documents. Forty-three university students were asked to explore a series of hypertexts for a limited period of time. Then the participants were asked to recall the layout and the contents of the pages. We found that low VS capacity readers had more difficulty recalling the links located at a deeper level in the page hierarchy. A content map included in half the trials had a limited effect on recall accuracy. We conclude that reading networked digital documents taps VS working memory, possibly due to readers’ attempts to construct a topological representation of the network that coexists with the semantic representation of the contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study investigates the cognitive abilities involved in hypertext learning and design approaches that can help users. We examined the effects of two types of high-level content organizers – a graphic spatial map and an alphabetical list – on readers’ memory for hypertext structure. In the control condition, a simple “home” page with no navigational aid was offered. Subjects were asked to read the hypertext with the purpose of learning the content, but in the post test phase they also had to recall the layout of nodes and links. Memory for links and page places varied as a function of condition. When a spatial map was available participants reconstructed more accurate formal structure then in the two other conditions. Participants’ memory about page places was the least accurate in the list condition. Results also indicate that participants use the content organizer when it is available in order to orientate during learning from hypertext documents. Our results prove that a content organizer showing the formal structure can facilitate the spatial mapping process. However, an organizer exposing a different structure than the real one would generate a conflict. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Emotional reactions are rather flexible, due to the schema-like organization of complex socio-emotional situations. Some data on emotion development, and on certain pathological conditions such as alexithymia, give further support for the psychological constructivist view put forward by Lindquist et al. Narrative organization is a key component of this schematic organization. The self-related nature of narrative organization provides scaffolding to the contextual dependency of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The right hemisphere''s role in language comprehension is supported by results from several neuropsychology and neuroimaging studies. Special interest surrounds right temporoparietal structures, which are thought to be involved in processing novel metaphorical expressions, primarily due to the coarse semantic coding of concepts. In this event related fMRI experiment we aimed at assessing the extent of semantic distance processing in the comprehension of figurative meaning to clarify the role of the right hemisphere. Four categories of German noun noun compound words were presented in a semantic decision task: a) conventional metaphors; b) novel metaphors; c) conventional literal, and; d) novel literal expressions, controlled for length, frequency, imageability, arousal, and emotional valence. Conventional literal and metaphorical compounds increased BOLD signal change in right temporoparietal regions, suggesting combinatorial semantic processing, in line with the coarse semantic coding theory, but at odds with the graded salience hypothesis. Both novel literal and novel metaphorical expressions increased activity in left inferior frontal areas, presumably as a result of phonetic, morphosyntactic, and semantic unification processes, challenging predictions regarding right hemispheric involvement in processing unusual meanings. Meanwhile, both conventional and novel metaphorical expressions induced BOLD signal change in left hemispherical regions, suggesting that even novel metaphor processing involves more than linking semantically distant concepts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The description of the heterogeneous phenomenological, pathophysiological, and etiological nature of schizophrenia is under way; however, the relationships between heterogeneity levels are still unclear. We performed a robust cross-sectional study, including a systematic neuropsychological battery, assessment of clinical symptoms, neurological soft signs, morphogenetic anomalies and smell identification, and measurement of event-related potentials on 50 outpatients with schizophrenia in their compensated states. An explorative fuzzy cluster analysis revealed two subgroups in this sample that could be distinguished from each other on symptomatological, cognitive and neurological levels. The patterns of cognitive dysfunctions and neurological developmental anomalies equally indicate that there may be hemispherical differences between the patients belonging to the different clusters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two numerical systems—the analogue magnitude system and verbal retrieval—were investigated in Williams syndrome (WS) with three numerical tasks: simple addition, simple multiplication, and number comparison. A new matching technique was introduced in selecting the proper control groups. The WS group was relatively fast in the addition and multiplication tasks, but was slow in number comparison. No reverse numerical effect was observed in the comparison task, and the distance effect was stronger than that in the control groups. The findings indicate a profile with an impaired analogue magnitude system and less impaired verbal retrieval in Williams syndrome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Hungarian is a null-subject language with both agglutinating and fusional elements in its verb inflection system, and agreement between the verb and object as well as between the verb and subject. These characteristics make this language a good test case for alternative accounts of the grammatical deficits of children with language impairment ( LI). Method: Twenty-five children with LI and 25 younger children serving as vocabulary controls (VC) repeated sentences whose verb inflections were masked by a cough. The verb inflections marked distinctions according to tense, person, number, and definiteness of the object. Results: The children with LI were significantly less accurate than the VC children but generally showed the same performance profile across the inflection types. For both groups of children, the frequency of occurrence of the inflection in the language was a significant predictor of accuracy level. The two groups of children were also similar in their pattern of errors. Inflections produced in place of the correct inflection usually differed from the correct form on a single dimension (e.g., tense or definiteness), though no single dimension was consistently problematic. Conclusions: Accounts that assume problems specific to agreement do not provide an explanation for the observed pattern of findings. The findings are generally compatible with accounts that assume processing limitations in children with LI, such as the morphological richness account. One nonmorphosyntactic factor (the retention of sequences of sounds) appeared to be functionally related to inflection accuracy and may prove to be important in a language with numerous inflections such as Hungarian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A feature of schizophrenia is disrupted executive function leading to learning difficulties and memory problems. In two experiments we measured the ability of patients with schizophrenia to suppress irrelevant parts of acquired information by intentional (executive) and autonomic (non-executive) strategies. In the first experiment using directed forgetting by lists patients were found to be unable to intentionally suppress recently acquired episodic memories. In a second experiment using a procedure that induces inhibition automatically schizophrenic patients showed levels of inhibition comparable to those of normal controls. These findings indicate that in schizophrenia memory is most impaired in tasks that load heavily on control or executive processes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Thirteen male patients with schizophrenia and thirteen male normal control subjects were compared by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on volumes of the straight gyrus (SG), anterior cingulate gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, hippocampus, third ventricle, cavum septi pellucidi, total brain volume and intracranial volume. In addition, neuropsychological tasks were used to measure working memory and executive functions. Healthy volunteers and schizophrenic patients showed no significant differences in mean values for volumes of regions of interests. In the case of the SG, we found a significant difference in laterality: the tendency toward left dominance in healthy volunteers changed to significant right dominance in patients. The schizophrenic patients showed lower performance in working memory tasks, and strongly significant group differences were observed in measures of neurological signs assessed by the Neurological Evaluation Scale (NES). Negative symptoms correlated with the level of spatial working memory and executive functions. Negative symptoms also correlated with the volume of the right hippocampus, while the rate of anhedonia negatively correlated with the relative volume of the left SG. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Williams syndrome (WMS), a rare neurogenetic disorder, has been in the forefront of research in cognitive psychology for the last 10 years. Studies of grammatical development in 14 Hungarian WMS children are presented: they were examined on tasks testing regular and irregular morphology; measures of digit span were also obtained. Results on the production of accusative and plural forms confirmed for Hungarian that regardless of the frequency of the item, inflected forms of irregulars are harder to produce, and often regularized in WMS, revealing a dissociation between the rules of grammar vs. the mental lexicon. Overall performance on the morphology task is associated with the capacity of phonological short-term memory: subjects with higher span perform better on both tasks. The specification of the surprisingly close relation of phonological short-term memory with the linguistic measures awaits further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]