Psychosocial correlates of immune status and disease progression in HIV-1 infected homosexual men: Review of preliminary findings,and commentary

Abstract

Behavioral factors may have an effect on the course of infection in HIV-1 infected individuals. These effects can be mediated by the immune system of the host, which, based on psychoneuroimmunologic findings, can be affected by some psychosocial factors. We present a short review of some putative psychoneuroimmunologic pathways and their possible implications for HIV-1 infected individuals. We next summarize the findings of recent psychoimmunological work with HIV-1 seropositives and discuss the methodological problems in studying the psychoneuroimmunologic aspects of HIV-1 infection. Psychoneuroimmunologic research in HIV-1 seropositives is a rapidly developing field, yielding contradictory findings so far, but which in the long run could provide important knowledge for psychoimmunologic interventions, targeted at improving or preserving immune status and retarding disease progression, as well as optimizing psychosocial functioning.     

家庭功能：理论、影响因素及其与青少年社会适应的关系

该文综述了中西方近20年有关家庭功能的定义、理论、影响因素及家庭功能与青少年社会适应关系的研究进展。有关家庭功能的理论可以分为两大类：以家庭发展结果为取向和以家庭发展过程为取向的家庭功能理论。现有研究主要探讨了家庭结构、社会经济地位、家庭关系、发展阶段、生活事件等对家庭功能的影响,并发现家庭功能与青少年的社会适应有着非常密切的关系。文章最后分析了已有家庭功能理论及相关研究的不足,并指出了未来家庭功能领域的研究方向。     

Neat,Swine, Sheep,and Deer: Mill and Peirce on Natural Kinds

In the earliest phase of his logical investigations (1865–1870), Peirce adopts Mill's doctrine of real Kinds as discussed in the System of Logic and adapts it to the logical conceptions he was then developing. In Peirce's definition of natural class, a crucial role is played by the notion of information: a natural class is a class of which some non-analytical proposition is true. In Peirce's hands, Mill's distinction between connotative and non-connotative terms becomes a distinction between symbolic and informative and pseudo-symbolic and non-informative forms of representation. A symbol is for Peirce a representation which has information. Just as for Mill all names of Kind connote their being such, so for Peirce all symbols profess to correspond to a natural class.     

Astrophysical Fine Tuning,Naturalism, and the Contemporary Design Argument

Evidence for instances of astrophysical ‘fine tuning’ (or ‘coincidences’) is thought by some to lend support to the design argument (i.e. the argument that our universe has been designed by some deity). We assess some of the relevant empirical and conceptual issues. We argue that astrophysical fine tuning calls for some explanation, but this explanation need not appeal to the design argument. A clear and strict separation of the issue of anthropic fine tuning on one hand and any form of Eddingtonian numerology and teleology on the other, may help clarify arguably the most significant issue in the philosophy of cosmology.     

言语工作记忆、句子理解与句法依存关系加工

言语工作记忆在句子理解中作用的机制和性质,是当前认知神经科学研究的一个中心课题。文章首先回顾了与支撑语言理解的工作记忆资源的性质有关的理论争论和实验证据,然后回顾了填充语-空位依存关系加工这一能够揭示言语工作记忆与句子理解之间关系的重要领域,最后简要展望了今后应该进一步研究的几个问题     

A case of acquired aphasia and convulsive disorder: some linguistic aspects of recovery and breakdown

Among the cases of acquired aphasia and convulsive disorder several children are reported to have experienced more than one aphasic period. We present such a case in more detail, with emphasis on some characteristics of spontaneous speech. The occurrence of paraphasias, and in particular of neologisms, appeared to be associated with language recovery and breakdown. At the beginning of the period of recovery, a rapid and total disappearance of neologisms was observed, while only literal paraphasias remained. A period of language breakdown was preceded by the return of neologisms. The process was not influenced by drug therapy.     

Children,childhood, and development in evolutionary perspective

We examine children, childhood, and development from an evolutionary perspective. We begin by reviewing major assumptions of evolutionary–developmental psychology, including the integration of “soft” developmental systems theory with ideas from mainstream evolutionary psychology. We then discuss the concept of adaptive developmental plasticity and describe the core evolutionary concept of developmental programming and some of its applications to human development, as instantiated in life history theory and the theory of differential susceptibility to environmental influence. We then discuss the concept of adaptation from an evolutionary–developmental perspective, including ontogenetic and deferred adaptations, and examine the development of some adaptations of infancy and childhood from the domains of folk psychology and folk physics. We conclude that evolutionary theory can serve as a metatheory for developmental science.     

Sport,Ethics, and Neurophilosophy

Abstract

The influence of neuroscience looms large today. In this introductory essay, we provide some context for the volume by acknowledging the expansion of applied neuroscience to everyday life and the proliferation of neuroscientific disciplines. We also observe that some individuals have sounded cautionary notes in light of perceived overreach of some claims for neuroscience. Then we briefly summarize the articles that comprise this volume. This diverse collection of papers represents the beginning of a conversation focused on the intersection of sport, ethics and neurophilosophy. As such, the essays also represent a new mode of interaction between philosophy and science with sport in the center of the discussion.     

Lateralization for reading musical chords: Disentangling symbolic, analytic, and phonological aspects of reading

It has been repeatedly shown that the left hemisphere (right visual field) is superior to the right hemisphere (LVF) in reading English, a bias possibly due to any or all of three confounded factors: (1) the symbolic nature of the coding system; (2) the analytic requirements of the decoding process; and (3) the phonological associations of the elements. Recent work on reading Japanese ideograms (Kanji) disentangles (1) from (2) and (3), but leaves the latter two confounded. We further disentangle (2) and (3) by examining visual field preference for reading musical chords, representatives of an analytic, nonphonological symbol system. The strong RVF advantage is interpreted as indicating that the left hemisphere is dominant for reading an analytic symbol system that is not phonologically based. We conclude that the left-hemisphere advantage traditionally found for reading phonological symbols is due to their analytic nature in addition to any effect due to their linguistic association.     

Sex-Linked Carrying Styles and the Attribution of Homosexuality

Abstract

We used pairs of slides showing 3 women and 3 men displaying 2 sex-linked carrying styles to examine differences in the attribution of homosexuality as a consequence of behavioral displays that are either sex typical or sex atypical. We hypothesized that the participants would be less likely to view targets displaying sex-typical behaviors as gay men or as lesbians. Each of 2 groups of U.S. university students rated targets in 6 slides on homosexuality and 3 other traits. The mean difference in rated homosexuality for typical versus atypical carrying styles was small but statistically significant. Thus, the results provide some empirical support for the common belief that effeminate men and masculine women are more likely to be seen as homosexual, at least by U.S. university students.     

Anxiety, learning, and memory: A reconceptualization

A new theoretical framework for work on anxiety and memory is proposed. Anxious subjects engage in task-irrelevant processing which preempts processing resources and some of the available capacity of working memory. They typically attempt to compensate for the adverse effects of this task-irrelevent processing on task performance by increased effort. It follows from these theoretical assumptions that anxiety will have differential effects on performance efficiency (i.e., the quality of performance) and on processing effectiveness (i.e., performance efficiency/effort). Anxiety will always reduce processing effectiveness, but will not impair performance efficiency if there is sufficient effort expenditure. Consequently, reliance on measures of performance efficiency will often obscure the detrimental effects of anxiety on processing effectiveness.     

Choice,Conditioned Reinforcement,and the Prius Effect

Psychologists have long been intrigued with the rationales that underlie our decisions. Similarly, the concept of conditioned reinforcement has a venerable history, particularly in accounting for behavior not obviously maintained by primary reinforcers. The studies of choice and of conditioned reinforcement have often developed in lockstep. Many contemporary approaches to these fundamental topics share an emphasis on context and on relative value. We trace the evolution of thinking about the potency of conditioned reinforcers from stimuli that were thought to acquire their value from pairings with more fundamental reinforcers to stimuli that acquire their value by being differentially correlated with these more fundamental reinforcers. We discuss some seminal experiments (including several that have been underappreciated) and some ongoing data, all of which have propelled us to the conclusion that the strength of conditioned reinforcers is determined by their signaling a relative improvement in the organism''s relation to reinforcement.     

The semantic pointer theory of emotion: Integrating physiology,appraisal, and construction

Emotion theory needs to explain the relationship of language and emotions, and the embodiment of emotions, by specifying the computational mechanisms underlying emotion generation in the brain. We used Chris Eliasmith’s Semantic Pointer Architecture to develop POEM, a computational model that explains numerous important phenomena concerning emotions, including how some stimuli generate immediate emotional reactions, how some emotional reactions depend on cognitive evaluations, how bodily states influence the generation of emotions, how some emotions depend on interactions between physiological inputs and cognitive appraisals, and how some emotional reactions concern syntactically complex representations. We contrast our theory with current alternatives, and discuss some possible applications to individual and social emotions.     

Symmetry,scale types,and generalizations of classical physical measurement

A review is presented of a number of recent results concerning fundamental measurement structures with a particular emphasis on generalizations of physical measurement. Relational structures are classified in terms of richness and redundancy of their automorphism groups (i.e., in terms of their symmetries). By means of this classification, the possible types of measurement scales are described, and the possibilities for structures with concatenation operations (either associative or nonassociative and either positive or intensive) and for conjoint structures whose automorphisms factor into component automorphisms are explicitly spelled out. Certain conjoint structures with concatenation operations on components are viewed as generalizations of classical physical measurement and some of their most important algebraic and representational properties are explored.     

Love, Power, and Being Born Married

This article responds both sympathetically and critically to some feminist writing about the psychology of women and of gender differences. Though love and the will to power often oppose one another, as Jung maintained, to understand their bearing upon gender it is sometimes important to regard other kinds of relations between them. There is something to be said for imagining the self as being born married. Still, the otherness of the sexes to one another cannot be overcome, and appreciating the implications of this given leads to a more complex understanding of the relational self symbolized by marriage.     

Fluency,disfluency, dysfluency,and stuttering

The appropriate use of words, particularly certain words, is a persisting problem in the field of stuttering. This paper discusses some of the misuse involving four words basic to the field.     

Calibration of probability assessments by professional blackjack dealers, statistical experts, and lay people

The question addressed in this study is whether experts are better calibrated than lay people. We investigated how well people are calibrated when they assess the probabilities of card combinations in the game of blackjack. Three groups of subjects were used: professional dealers, statistical experts, and control subjects. The results showed that experience and statistical expertise do not make people better calibrated in this task. It is argued that the concept of calibration is not wholly appropriate to describe the obtained deviations from the normatively correct responses. This is illustrated by a discriminant analysis performed on the signed deviation scores, which resulted in an almost perfect separation of the three groups, although they were overlapping with respect to calibration.     

Retrieval-induced forgetting,delay, and sleep

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) refers to the finding that retrieval of a subset of previously studied material can cause forgetting of related unpractised material. Prior work on the role of delay between practice and test for RIF reported mixed results. Whereas some studies found RIF to be a relatively transient phenomenon, others found RIF to persist over time. We examined whether the persistence of RIF can depend on whether wakefulness or sleep follows retrieval practice. We employed a variant of the retrieval-practice paradigm with short (20 minutes) and long (12 hours) delay conditions. In all conditions participants studied a perceptually categorised list followed by retrieval practice on some of the items from some of the categories. Participants studied and practised the material in the morning or the evening. RIF was present in the short-delay conditions, and it was present in the long-delay condition if the delay included nocturnal sleep; if the long delay was filled with diurnal wakefulness, RIF was absent. Results show that whether delay eliminates RIF or not can depend on whether sleep or wake follows retrieval practice. Connections of the results to recent findings about the role of delay and sleep for RIF are discussed.     

Objective self-awareness,standards of evaluation,and moral behavior

In a performance setting, subjects were given an opportunity to cheat without fear of detection on puzzle problems. Subjects were led to believe that successful performance was due to ability in some conditions, but to luck in other conditions. In fact, most of the problems were insolvable, so that success was impossible without cheating. Self-awareness was induced in half the subjects by having them sit in front of a mirror and listen to a tape recording of their own voice as they worked on the puzzle problems; the remaining subjects were not exposed to a mirror and listened to a tape of someone else's voice as they worked on the problems. It was predicted that cheating frequency would be higher under ability attribution conditions than under luck attribution conditions, and that this effect of performance attribution would be greater among self-aware subjects than among non-self-aware subjects. Results confirmed these hypotheses. Discussion centered on the differential use of morality and competence standards for behavior when in a state of self-awareness.