All Against All: How Beliefs about Human Nature Shape Foreign Policy Opinions

Although the American public's increasingly cynical views about human nature have drawn considerable attention from scholars, existing research says little about how interpersonal trust shapes mass foreign policy opinions. This study analyzes survey data to test the claim that citizens use their beliefs about human nature to reason about international affairs. The results indicate that cynical citizens are more likely than trusting citizens to endorse the principle of isolationism and to oppose cooperative forms of intervention in other nations' problems. Citizens' use of interpersonal trust as an information shortcut helps them to make inferences regarding a topic about which they typically know little, but such inferences are not necessarily realistic ones.     

Emotion Improves and Impairs Early Vision

ABSTRACT— Recent studies indicate that emotion enhances early vision, but the generality of this finding remains unknown. Do the benefits of emotion extend to all basic aspects of vision, or are they limited in scope? Our results show that the brief presentation of a fearful face, compared with a neutral face, enhances sensitivity for the orientation of subsequently presented low-spatial-frequency stimuli, but diminishes orientation sensitivity for high-spatial-frequency stimuli. This is the first demonstration that emotion not only improves but also impairs low-level vision. The selective low-spatial-frequency benefits are consistent with the idea that emotion enhances magnocellular processing. Additionally, we suggest that the high-spatial-frequency deficits are due to inhibitory interactions between magnocellular and parvocellular pathways. Our results suggest an emotion-induced trade-off in visual processing, rather than a general improvement. This trade-off may benefit perceptual dimensions that are relevant for survival at the expense of those that are less relevant.     

早期基督教三一神学之辩

三位一体神学是基督教最核心和艰深的教义.早期基督教思想家历经四个世纪的探索,始在公元381年达成三一神学的正统表达,是为"尼西亚-康士坦丁堡信经".本文论述了存在于早期基督教三一神学中的东方进路("内在三一")和西方进路("经世三一")的张力,以及东西方在三一神学问题上长达半个多世纪的角力.本文深入分析了三一神学之争中东西方基督教的概念性误读,即所谓的ousia/hypostasisi和homoousia/homoiousia之争.由此,本文指出早期基督教在"三位格"和"一本质"之间所保持的适当张力,以及蕴合在三位一体问题中的辩证运思.     

"万物一体"新诠--基于共生哲学的新透视

儒家的"万物一体"的思想,以天道自然、宇宙一体、一体归仁、生命感通、生生和谐与天下大同为其基本内容,以其内在心性的感通性、类推性、扩充性作为其证成为"一体之仁"的思维方式.它不仅代表了中国传统的天人合一的哲学思想,也为笔者所着力建构的现代共生哲学理论,提供了丰富的思想资源.笔者倡导的的共生哲学的实质,就是藉以阐明大道或存有是如何在宇宙及其现实世界中彼此共同相处与和谐共进的.因此从共生哲学的意义来看,儒家"万物一体"的思想,在道德形上学的层面上,含蕴着现代共生哲学的基本内涵,它的现代价值就在于,它为人类走出当下的天-人、人-自然、人-我和人-人的对立与两橛,提供了无尽的传统智慧与现代明鉴.     

政德——政权兴亡的生命线

中国自古就存在政治伦理 ,即“政德”。汉初的思想家们更加重视“政德” ,将其视为一切政权的生命线。     

Kierkegaard's Mirrors: The Immediacy of Moral Vision

This paper explores Kierkegaard's recurrent use of mirrors as a metaphor for various aspects of moral imagination and vision. While a writer centrally concerned with issues of self‐examination, selfhood and passionate subjectivity might well be expected to be attracted to such metaphors, there are deeper reasons why Kierkegaard is drawn to this analogy. The specifically visual aspects of the mirror metaphor reveal certain crucial features of Kierkegaard's model of moral cognition. In particular, the felicity of the metaphors of the “mirror of possibility” in Sickness Unto Death and the “mirror of the Word” in For Self‐Examination depend upon a normative phenomenology of moral vision, one in which the success of moral agency depends upon an immediate, non‐reflective self‐referentiality built into vision itself. To “see oneself in the mirror” rather than simply seeing the mirror itself is to see the moral content of the world as immediately “about” oneself in a sense that goes beyond the conceptual content of what is perceived. These metaphors gesture towards a model of perfected moral agency where vision becomes co‐extensive with volition. I conclude by suggesting directions in which explication of this model may contribute to discussions in contemporary moral psychology.     

Early adolescents' values about their pets

The essays of adolescent boys and girls (N = 354) explaining their decisions to save a pet in the event of a fire were examined by content analysis for the adolescents' underlying value orientations. Hedonistic utility, a moral value characteristic of the second of Kohlberg's (1976) moral development stages, was the primary value underlying adolescents' choices.     

All words are not created equal: expectations about word length guide infant statistical learning

Infants have been described as ‘statistical learners’ capable of extracting structure (such as words) from patterned input (such as language). Here, we investigated whether prior knowledge influences how infants track transitional probabilities in word segmentation tasks. Are infants biased by prior experience when engaging in sequential statistical learning? In a laboratory simulation of learning across time, we exposed 9- and 10-month-old infants to a list of either disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words, followed by a pause-free speech stream composed of a different set of disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words. Listening times revealed successful segmentation of words from fluent speech only when words were uniformly disyllabic or trisyllabic throughout both phases of the experiment. Hearing trisyllabic words during the pre-exposure phase derailed infants’ abilities to segment speech into disyllabic words, and vice versa. We conclude that prior knowledge about word length equips infants with perceptual expectations that facilitate efficient processing of subsequent language input.     

The Ojibwa Vision Quest

Like other Algonkian-speaking groups, the Ojibwa traditionally sought personal relations with guardian spirits whom they encountered in visions, as a rite of passage into status as adults. Visions were sometimes sought as early as age three or four, and were generally accomplished no later than puberty. The procedures for cultivating visions blended practical and ritual elements. The procedures were both explained informally and portrayed in myths and belief-legends. Roheim interpreted vision quests in keeping with Freud's general theory of religion, as evidence of fixated Oedipus complexes; but a pathologizing interpretation is inappropriate. Detailed analyses of both boys' and girls' self-reports readily support diagnoses of healthy genitality, rather than Oedipal fixation. Vision quests are better regarded as manifestations of ego ideals, leading in most cases to improved ego–superego integration.     

The History of Vision

One of the most influential ideas of twentieth‐century art history and aesthetics is that vision has a history and it is the task of art history to trace how vision has changed. This claim has recently been attacked for both empirical and conceptual reasons. My aim is to argue for a new version of the history of vision claim: if visual attention has a history, then vision also has a history. And we have some reason to think that at least in certain contexts (namely, in the context of looking at pictures), visual attention does have a history.     

Vision Using Routines: A Functional Account of Vision

This paper presents the case for a functional account of vision. A variety of studies have consistently revealed “change blindness” or insensitivity to changes in the visual scene during an eye movement. These studies indicate that only a small part of the information in the scene is represented in the brain from moment to moment. It is still unclear, however, exactly what is included in visual representations. This paper reviews experiments using an extended visuo-motor task, showing that display changes affect performance differently depending on the observer's place in the task. These effects are revealed by increases in fixation duration following a change. Different task-dependent increases suggest that the visual system represents only the information that is necessary for the immediate visual task. This allows a principled exploration of the stimulus properties that are included in the internal visual representation. The task specificity also has a more general implication that vision should be conceptualized as an active process executing special purpose “routines” that compute only the currently necessary information. Evidence for this view and its implications for visual representations are discussed. Comparison of the change blindness phenomenon and fixation durations shows that conscious report does not reveal the extent of the representations computed by the routines.