Non-linearity,Complexity and Limited Measurement in the Relationship Between Satisfaction with Specific Life Domains and Satisfaction with Life as a Whole

In this article we defend that the adoption of a non-linear approach, theoretically framed on complexity theories can make some contribution to the bottom-up approach, which explains the levels of satisfaction with life as a whole through the combination of the levels of satisfaction in different life domains. Two approaches have been tested: (Rojas in J Happiness Stud 7:467–497, 2006) constant elasticity of substitution model and the model with quadratic terms and interaction effects (González et al. in Soc Indic Res 80:267–295, 2006; González et al. in Qual Quant 42:1–21, 2008). In order to prevent obtaining false non-linear relationships they have been analysed twice taking into account or not limited measurement of satisfaction with life as a whole. Results show that: (a) any of the two non-linear models fits better than the linear one; (b) any of the models failing to take into account limited measurement fits worse; (c) the non-linear model with quadratic terms and interaction effects fits better than Rojas’. The implications for the study of psychological well-being are discussed.     

Interactive effects of APOE and CHRNA4 on attention and white matter volume in healthy middle-aged and older adults

In the present study, we investigated age-related changes in interactions between efficiency of neuronal repair mechanisms and efficiency of cholinergic neurotransmission in the context of attentional orienting. In addition, we explored white matter volume changes as possible neuronal underpinnings. A sample of 230 healthy middle-aged (53–64 years) and older (65–75 years) adults was genotyped for polymorphisms of APOE and CHRNA4, a nicotinic receptor subunit gene. Participants were administered a visuospatial attention task involving letter discrimination with location cues of varying validity. Genotype effects on white matter volume were also investigated in a subset of participants who received MRI scans. APOE interacted with CHRNA4, such that APOE-ε4 carriers who were also CHRNA4 TT homozygotes showed disproportionately slowed reaction time (RT) following invalid location cues. The interaction was stronger in the middle-aged participants than in the older participants. There was also a trend for individuals with combined APOE-ε4/CHRNA4 TT genotypes to show both lower white matter volume and slower overall RT on the attention task. The interaction of a neurotransmission gene (CHRNA4) and a susceptibility gene (APOE) suggests that the efficiency of neuronal repair mechanisms may modulate the cholinergic system to influence attentional function.     

Interference effects of stimulus–response modality pairings in dual tasks and their robustness

Recent evidence suggests that the degree of interference in dual-task situations depends crucially on the pairings of input- and output modalities of the two component tasks with increased dual-task costs for modality incompatible (i.e., visual–vocal and auditory–manual) compared to modality compatible (i.e., visual–manual and auditory–vocal) dual tasks. These effects of modality pairings in dual tasks have been related to the overlap of non-preferred processing pathways in modality incompatible tasks. Until now, modality compatibility has not yet been related to other sources of interference in a dual-task context, such as stimulus–response (S–R) compatibility or crosstalk. In the present study, we conducted two experiments using the paradigm of the psychological refractory period (PRP) to test the effects of S–R compatibility and crosstalk on the effects of modality compatibility in temporally overlapping task situations. Experiment 1 revealed an overadditive interaction between stimulus onset asynchrony and modality compatibility for tasks with S–R compatible mappings, indicating that modality compatibility effects are present in different task situations, even when S–R mappings are otherwise compatible. In Experiment 2, we aimed at pinpointing the boundaries of the effects of modality compatibility in dual-task situations. We showed that additional sources of dual-task interference in a modality compatible dual task could overwrite the pronounced PRP effect previously shown for modality incompatible tasks. Taken together, these data provide new evidence that the specific types of stimulus–response modality pairings are an additional factor that might interact with other sources of interference in dual-task situations.     

Projectibility and Explainability or How to Draw a New Picture of Inductive Practices

Summary  Goodman published his “riddle” in the middle of the 20th century and many philosophers have attempted to solve it. These attempts almost all shared an assumption that, I shall argue, might be wrong, namely, the assumption that when we project from cases we have examined to cases we have not, what we project are predicates (and that this projectibility is an absolute property of some predicates). I shall argue that this assumption, shared by almost all attempts at a solution, looks wrong, because, in the first place, what we project are generalizations and not predicates, and a generalization is projectible (or unprojectible) relative to a given context. In this paper I develop the idea of explainable–projectible generalizations versus unexplainable–unprojectible generalizations, relative to a specific context. My main claim is that we rationally project a generalization if and only if we rationally believe that there is something that explains the general phenomenon that the generalized statement in question asserts to obtain, and that a generalization is projectible, if and only if its putative truth can be explained, whether we know that it can be or not.     

Maternal Symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Maternal Language: Implications for Infant Language Development

The relationship between maternal ADHD symptoms and maternal language was examined in a community sample of 50 mothers of infants age 3–12 months. It was hypothesized that higher maternal symptoms of ADHD would be related to lower quality of maternal language use. Recordings of mothers’ speech were coded for complexity and elaboration of speech and vocabulary diversity during an interview with an adult and during mother–infant play interactions in the home. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that maternal ADHD symptoms were significantly related to mothers’ lower mean length of utterances during the interview and during mother–infant play interactions. Maternal ADHD symptoms were not related to maternal vocabulary use in either of these situations. Our findings suggest that mothers with higher ADHD symptoms may display exiguous language behaviors when interacting with their infants and with adults. In addition, findings suggest one reason why current parent-management programs for children with ADHD, which are verbally based and rely heavily on the parent’s communication skills, are relatively ineffective when ADHD may be present in the parent.     

Episodic memory updating: The role of context familiarity

We previously demonstrated that spatial context is a powerful reminder that can trigger memory updating (Hupbach, Hardt, Gomez, & Nadel in Learning & Memory, 15, 574–579 2008). In the present study, we asked whether the familiarity of the spatial context modulates the role of spatial context as a reminder. Since context familiarity can be easily manipulated in children, we chose 5-year-olds as study participants. In two experiments, we demonstrated robust memory-updating effects in children. Spatial context triggered incorporation of new information into old memories only when the context was unfamiliar. In highly familiar spatial environments (children’s homes), spatial context did not initiate memory updating. Other reminders (the experimenter and a reminder question) became highly effective in familiar contexts. These findings shed further light on the specific conditions that trigger memory updating and support the view that the mechanisms underlying it are similar in children and adults.     

先秦儒家美学之"美"的边界

“Beauty” is a very important concept in Pre-Qin Confucian aesthetics. Pre-Qin Confucian aesthetics generally had two viewpoints when defining beauty: Negatively, by stressing that “beauty” in the aesthetic sense was not “good”; and positively, by stressing two factors: one, that beauty was related to “feeling” which was not an animal instinct, the other was that “beauty” was a special texture with a particular meaning. “Beauty” in Pre-Qin Confucian aesthetics may be defined as “texture (or form)” capable of communicating feeling or triggering a reaction of feeling. __________ Translated from Shanghai shifan daxue xuebao 上海师范大学学报 (Journal of Shanghai Normal University), 2007, (7): 80–85     

Hermann Cohen and Bakhtin’s early aesthetics

In this article, Bakhtin’s early aesthetics is reread in the context of Hermann Cohen’s system of philosophy, especially his aesthetics. Bakhtin’s thinking from the early ethical writing Toward a Philosophy of Act to Author and Hero in Artistic Activity and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is followed. In Author and Hero, an individual is in his life conceived as involved in cognitive and ethical action but as remaining without a consummative form; the form, or the ‘soul’, is bestowed upon a person by the creative activity of the artist alone. In his understanding of artistic creativity and the relationship between the ‘hero’ and the author, Bakhtin closely follows Cohen, with the exception that for Cohen the object of artistic form-giving is the universal, idealized man, whereas for Bakhtin it is an individual. In the concept of a ‘polyphonic novel’ as developed in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin, however, considers this view of the activity of the artist (or the novelist) to apply to the “traditional” novel only, while in a Dostoevskyean novel the characters are not subordinated to any defining power of the author. Bakhtin’s theory of the Dostoevskyean novel is thus a return to the emphasis of the cognitive and ethical autonomy of the individual. His understanding of the encounter between persons as a ‘subject’—‘subject’ or an ‘I’—‘thou’ relation has a predecessor, among others, in Cohen.     

Computerized assessment of syntactic complexity in Alzheimer’s disease: a case study of Iris Murdoch’s writing

Currently, the majority of investigations of linguistic manifestations of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease are conducted based on manual linguistic analysis. Grammatical complexity is one of the language use characteristics sensitive to the effects of Alzheimer’s disease and is difficult to operationalize and measure using manual approaches. In the current study, we demonstrate the application of computational linguistic methods to automate the analysis of grammatical complexity. We implemented the Computerized Linguistic Analysis System (CLAS) based on the Stanford syntactic parser (Klein and Manning, Pattern Recognition, 38(9), 1407–1419, 2005) for longitudinal analysis of changes in syntactic complexity in language affected by neurodegenerative disorders. We manually validated CLAS scoring and used it to analyze writings of Iris Murdoch, a renowned Irish author diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. We found clear patterns of decline in grammatical complexity consistent with previous analyses of Murdoch’s writing conducted by Garrard, Maloney, Hodges, and Patterson (Brain, 128(250–260, 2005). CLAS is a fully automated system that may be used to derive objective and reproducible measures of syntactic complexity in language production and can be particularly useful in longitudinal studies with large volumes of language samples.     

Talking about interest: exploring the role of social interaction for regulating motivation and the interest experience

The Self-Regulation of Motivation Model suggests that the experience of interest is an important source of human motivation and that people often strategically regulate the experience of interest. Previous work based on this model suggests that the social context may influence this process at multiple points. The present research focuses on whether talking to others about an activity experience is one means by which individuals evaluate how interesting that activity is. In Study 1 college students completed questionnaires that asked about real life experiences where working on an activity was more interesting because they worked with others. They described experiences that occurred first in any domain, and then that occurred specifically in the school domain. Results suggested that the more students talked with others about the activity after it happened the more they reported greater interest in the activity after the conversations. In the school domain, this was especially true for Latinos and for individuals who scored higher on the Relational Self-Construal scale. Study 2 employed a lab paradigm to control for the task that individuals talked to others about and to examine whether the nature of listeners’ reactions influenced the speaker’s interest even after the study was ostensibly over. First, replicating Pasupathi and Rich (2005, ‘Inattentive listening undermines self-verification in personal storytelling’, Journal of Personality 73, pp. 1051–1086) college students who talked to a distracted friend about a computer game during the lab session reported a significant drop in interest relative to those who talked to attentive friends, regardless of whether the attentive listeners agreed or disagreed with participants. Importantly, interest ratings at a 4–6 week follow-up were affected by the perceived responsiveness of listeners during spontaneous conversational retellings outside the lab, controlling for interest levels at the end of the lab session. Taken together, results suggest that social interaction plays an important role in regulating activity interest even beyond the immediate activity experience.     

Against Stepping Back: A Critique of Contextualist Approaches to the Semantic Paradoxes

A number of philosophers have argued that the key to understanding the semantic paradoxes is to recognize that truth is essentially relative to context. All of these philosophers have been motivated by the idea that once a liar sentence has been uttered we can ‘step back’ and, from the point of view of a different context, judge that the liar sentence is true. This paper argues that this ‘stepping back’ idea is a mistake that results from failing to relativize truth to context in the first place. Moreover, context-relative liar sentences, such as ‘This sentence is not true in any context’ present a paradox even after truth has been relativized to context. Nonetheless, the relativization of truth to context may offer us the means to avoid paradox, if we can justifiably deny that a sentence about a context can be true in the very context it is about.     

Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result

There is presently considerable interest in the phenomenon of “self-organisation” in dynamical systems. The rough idea of self-organisation is that a structure appears “by itself” in a dynamical system, with reasonably high probability, in a reasonably short time, with no help from a special initial state, or interaction with an external system. What is often missed, however, is that the standard evolutionary account of the origin of multi-cellular life fits this definition, so that higher living organisms are also products of self-organisation. Very few kinds of object can self-organise, and the question of what such objects are like is a suitable mathematical problem. Extending the familiar notion of algorithmic complexity into the context of dynamical systems, we obtain a notion of “dynamical complexity”. A simple theorem then shows that only objects of very low dynamical complexity can self organise, so that living organisms must be of low dynamical complexity. On the other hand, symmetry considerations suggest that living organisms are highly complex, relative to the dynamical laws, due to their large size and high degree of irregularity. In particular, it is shown that since dynamical laws operate locally, and do not vary across space and time, they cannot produce any specific large and irregular structure with high probability in a short time. These arguments suggest that standard evolutionary theories of the origin of higher organisms are incomplete.     

Scene context influences without scene gist: Eye movements guided by spatial associations in visual search

Although the use of semantic information about the world seems ubiquitous in every task we perform, it is not clear whether we rely on a scene’s semantic information to guide attention when searching for something in a specific scene context (e.g., keys in one’s living room). To address this question, we compared contribution of a scene’s semantic information (i.e., scene gist) versus learned spatial associations between objects and context. Using the flash-preview–moving-window paradigm Castelhano and Henderson (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 33:753–763, 2007), participants searched for target objects that were placed in either consistent or inconsistent locations and were semantically consistent or inconsistent with the scene gist. The results showed that learned spatial associations were used to guide search even in inconsistent contexts, providing evidence that scene context can affect search performance without consistent scene gist information. We discuss the results in terms of hierarchical organization of top-down influences of scene context.     

Animal Disenhancement for Animal Welfare: The Apparent Philosophical Conundrums and the Real Exploitation of Animals. A Response to Thompson and Palmer

In his paper “The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem” (Nanoethics 2: 305-36, 2008) Thompson argued that technological attempts to reduce or eliminate selected non-human animals’ capabilities (animal disenhancements) in order to solve or mitigate animal welfare problems in animals’ use pose a philosophical conundrum, because there is a contradiction between rational arguments in favor of these technological interventions and intuitions against them. In her response “Animal Disenhancement and the Non-Identity Problem: A Response to Thompson” (Nanoethics 5:43–48, 2011), Palmer maintained that the philosophical conundrum is even deeper if we introduce the non-identity problem into the discussion. In my brief response, I claim that in order to avoid the pitfalls of speculative ethics, empirical facts related to the technologies involved as well as costs for the non-human animals have to be taken into account. Depending on which changes we are referring to, ethical problems can be seen very differently. Widening the consideration to the socio-economic context in which non-human animals are currently used by humans, I challenge the idea of genuine philosophical conundrums from an antispeciesist and abolitionist perspective. Only in a context of exploitation, in which non-human animals are deprived of basic rights and their existence is totally dependent on human exploitation, the contradictions between improvement of welfare and disenhancement of capabilities make sense.     

Mother-Child Conflict Interaction in the Toddler Years: Behavior Patterns and Correlates

We examined mother-child (M-C) conflict behavior during the toddler years. The nature of M-C conflict behaviors, whether conflict behavior differed by context, and factors that were associated with conflict interactions were examined. We used data collected as part of the National Evaluation of the Healthy Steps for Young Children Program. 378 M-C dyads participated in this study. Videotaped observational data at 16–18 months were used to code conflict behaviors using an event recording method. Results showed that M-C conflict were more likely to be initiated by the mothers and that conflict interactions were influenced by context of interaction, family, maternal, and child temperamental factors. In this study, we provide a foundation for understanding parent-child conflict interaction prior to age two.     

Subjective Well-Being in Cities: A Multidimensional Concept of Individual, Social and Cultural Variables

Subjective indicators of well-being have been proposed as guides for development policy since development is not limited to material wealth (Veenhoven, Social Indicators Research, 58:33–45 2002; Diener, Journal of Happiness Studies 7:4–397 2006). Development studies have suffered from a materialistic bias (Easterlin, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 27:35–47 1995). The paper presents a comparative cross-cultural investigation of domains of subjective well-being (SWB) and a global measure of Satisfaction with Life as a Whole (SWLS) in three cities: Bogotá-Colombia; Belo-Horizonte-Brazil and Toronto-Canada. The Personal and National Wellbeing Indexes (PWI and NWI) developed by the International Wellbeing Group (IWG, Cummins, Social Indicators Research 38:303–328 1996; Cummins et al., Social Indicators Network News 69:8 2002) as well as the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS, Diener et al., Journal of Personality Assessment 49:71–75 1985) were applied and successfully validated at the city level. The cities chosen have similar democratic institutions but different cultures and different “objective” indicators of development. Significant differences across cities as well as significant interaction effects were found for the subjective well-being indexes and demographic variables. Based on these results, we propose that NWI may be seen as a contextual antecedent of PWI, consistent with our view that individual evaluations of SWB may be determined by dispositional factors (top-down), context (bottom-up domains) and cultural values. The validation of the subjective well-being indexes in diverse cultural contexts is an important contribution in a field that has been mainly dominated by European, American and Australian samples.     

Humans do not switch between path knowledge and landmarks when learning a new environment

Using a metric shortcut paradigm, we have found that like honeybees (Dyer in Animal Behaviour 41:239–246, 1991), humans do not seem to build a metric “cognitive map” from path integration. Instead, observers take novel shortcuts based on visual landmarks whenever they are available and reliable (Foo, Warren, Duchon, & Tarr in Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition 31(2):195–215, 2005). In the present experiment we examine whether humans, like ants (Wolf & Wehner in Journal of Experimental Biology 203:857–868, 2000), first use survey-type path knowledge, built up from path integration, and then subsequently shift to reliance on landmarks. In our study participants walked in an immersive virtual environment while head position and orientation were recorded. During training, participants learned two legs of a triangle with feedback: paths from Home to Red and Home to Blue. A configuration of colored posts surrounded the Red location. To test reliance on landmarks, these posts were covertly translated, rotated, or left unchanged during six probe trials. These probe trials were interspersed during the training procedure to measure changes over learning. Dependence on visual landmarks was immediate and sustained during training, and no significant learning effects were observed other than a decrease in hesitation time. Our results suggest that while humans have at least two distinct navigational strategies available to them, unlike ants, a computationally-simpler landmark strategy dominates during novel shortcut navigation.     

Is gratitude an alternative to materialism?

Materialistic strivings have been implicated as a cause of unhappiness. Gratitude, on the other hand – both in its manifestations as a chronic affective trait and as a more temporary emotional experience – may be a cause of happiness. In the present paper we review the empirical research on the relationships among materialism, gratitude, and well-being. We present new correlational data on the gratitude–materialism relationship and propose that gratitude may have the potential to reduce materialistic strivings and consequently diminish the negative effects of materialistic strivings on psychological well-being. We conclude with some recommendations for future research on the relationships among gratitude, materialism, and well-being.     

Picture-naming norms for Canadian French: Name agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, and age of acquisition

The present study provides Canadian French normative data for 388 line drawings from the European Picture Pool for Oral Naming (Protocole européen de dénomination orale d’images; PEDOI; Kremin et al., 2003). One hundred eighty subjects were equally distributed for age group (18–39, 40–59, 60–85), educational level (low, high), and sex. They rated pictures of objects on age of acquisition, name agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. Syllable length and word frequency were also taken into account. The present study suggests that age of acquisition and name agreement show significant age-related differences. These results show that unequivocal interpretation of age-related differences can be made when age-appropriate norms are used.     

A transition of Chinese humanism and aesthetics from rationalism to irrationalism

Chinese people attach importance to intuition and imagery in ways of thinking that are quite sensible, but the result, i.e. the thoughts that are popularized in virtue of political power, are rather rational. These rational thoughts, which were influenced by Buddhism and continually became introspective, had been growing more irrational factors. Up to the middle and late Ming Dynasty, when the economy was developed, they merged with the growing emphasis on daily needs of food and clothes and the envisagement to the utilitarian circumstances, and finally broke through the threshold of rationalism. Under the attack of Geng Dingxiang, Li Zhi who emphasized these thoughts was forced beyond his previous boundaries and led a whole variation in how he viewed a series of issues including values, humanity, ethics and aesthetics. This indicated a historical change from rationalism to irrationalism in Chinese humanism and aesthetics thoughts. Translated by Huang Deyuan from Xueshu Yuekan 学术月刊 (Academic Monthly), 2006, (11): 103–112