Self and Others: Empirical and Neuropsychoanalytic Considerations of Superego and Conscience.

Freud's mature theorizing about human morality entrenched the functioning of the superego in anxiety stemming from the fear of punishment, a view with which many later psychoanalysts took issue, producing a debate as to the distinction between superego and conscience. This debate would later be mirrored more broadly in academic psychology concerning distinctions between shame and guilt. This is an area where the clinical observations and theoretical discussions of psychoanalysis have subtly guided research in cognitive psychology and the cognitive and affective neurosciences. These areas, in turn, have both clarified and supported psychoanalytic theory and practice without negating the rich phenomenological and theoretical basis on which psychoanalysis rests.

The contribution of the rat prelimbic-infralimbic areas to different forms of task switching.

The experiments examined the effects of prelimbic-infralimbic inactivation in rats on the acquisition and reversal learning of different discrimination tasks: 2- or 4-choice odor discrimination in Experiments 1 and 2, the shift from 2-choice odor discrimination to 2-choice place discrimination in Experiment 3, and the shift from 2-choice place to 2-choice odor discrimination in Experiment 4. Infusions of 2% bupivacaine did not impair performance in the odor discrimination tests. Prelimbic-infralimbic inactivation did not impair acquisition but did impair the shift from an odor to a place discrimination and vice versa. Analysis of the errors revealed that the deficit was due to perseveration of the previously learned strategy. The selective deficits observed in the odor-place tests suggest that the prelimbic-infralimbic areas enable behavioral flexibility when conditions demand inhibiting the use of one type of attribute information and learning a new type of attribute information.