“精英症候群”:社会病理分析及对策——医学社会学的解释视角

转型期中国社会的精英群体普遍面临着身体与精神的双重危机。从医学社会学的独特解释视角来看,这一非正常的“精英症候群”实质上是反复循环状态下生产与再生产的一种“社会病”。在社会病理分析的基础上,从社会结构、社会评价体系、预防与保障机制诸方面为“精英症候群”会诊。     

An intervention study of the effects of the coping strategy of "finding positive meaning" on positive affect and health

Previous research has shown that positive affect (PA) is associated with the coping strategies of "searching for and finding positive meaning." The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the coping strategy of "finding positive meaning" and PA using an intervention method. Additionally, inasmuch as previous research has revealed that PA is associated with physical and mental health status, the current study measured health status in order to carry out a preliminary test as to whether PA increased by the intervention can also improve health. Participants in the intervention group (Japanese graduate students; 13 men and 16 women) reported the most stressful event during the past 3 days and its positive meaning, while those in the control group (13 men and 15 women) reported the most stressful event alone. Both groups reported twice a week for 5 successive weeks using e-mails. Three questionnaires, the Japanese version of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule scales for measuring positive and negative affects (NA), the situational version of the General Coping Questionnaire for coping strategies, and the Japanese version of the General Health Questionnaire for health status, were administered to all participants just before the start of the intervention, after the conclusion of the intervention, and at the 5-week follow-up session. Results revealed that the "finding positive meaning" coping strategy and PA were enhanced by the intervention in the follow-up for men and women with no changes in NA. For the health scales of the General Health Questionnaire, no significant group-related effects were observed. Thus, the intervention had no significant influence on NA or health status. Implications of these findings for future research are discussed along with a few limitations in this study.     

A method for measuring "primitive" and "advanced" elements in pleasures and aversions

Subjects were asked to list pleasures and aversions actually experienced, and pleasures and aversions based on their "innermost fantasies." A 7-point rating scale was developed to rate "primitive" and "advanced" elements in these pleasure-aversion responses. The "primitive" pole of the scale was keyed with the phrase "gut-level experiencing" and the "advanced" pole with "detached objective thinking." Reality Pleasure, Fantasy Pleasure, Reality Aversive, Fantasy Aversive, and Total scores were derived by having trained raters rate each subject's response with the 7-point rating scale. In Study 1, 25 females and 25 males provided pleasure-aversion responses and the data analyzed in a mixed 2 (male-female) x 2 (reality-fantasy) x 2 (pleasure-aversive) ANOVA. The most important finding was a highly significant reality-fantasy x pleasure-aversive interaction: subjects tended to "progress" (give more advanced responses) going from reality to fantasy in their pleasure responses, while exactly the opposite occurred with the aversive responses. Also, as predicted, reality aversive responses tended to be more "advanced" than reality pleasure responses. Study 2 was similar in design, but several additional personality measures were administered to assess the construct validity of the pleasure-aversion scores. As in Study l, the reality-fantasy x pleasure-aversive interaction was highly significant and again reflected a pattern of "progression" going from reality to fantasy for pleasure responses and "regression" for aversive responses. The correlation analysis also produced several interesting findings with sex serving as a major moderator variable.     

Detrimental therapist-client relationships--beyond thinking of "dual" or "multiple" roles: reflections on the 2001 AAMFT Code of Ethics

This article presents reflections on and a critique of the recent revision of the AAMFT Code of Ethics on the multiple relationship ethical standard. A brief historical overview of terminology and the debate surrounding "dual" and "multiple" relationship ethical rules in marriage and family therapy is provided. The term "exploitation" is also delimited. Ethical principles and a set of standards addressing "detrimental" versus "potentially beneficial" interactions are introduced, deriving from works in other mental health professions. The article recommends: (a) the terms "dual" and "multiple" relationships should be abandoned; (b) the ethical principles underlying the AAMFT Code of Ethics need to be examined; and (c) the debate on the topic of detrimental therapist-client interactions in marriage and family therapy needs to be revisited, especially in light of a "positive ethics."     

情绪易感性辨析

从个性视角看情绪-认知关系从而提出情绪易感性概念,专指人们在执行认知活动时受其情绪影响的程度特征,而区分于情绪敏感性、情绪性、情绪风格、情绪调节等概念。对涉及情绪易感性的情绪启动研究、情绪STROOP研究和神经心理学研究等进行了简要回顾。指出需要整合行为和生理水平,研究情绪易感性的发生发展机制及与其他心理现象的关系。     

The Sylvia Plath Effect: Mental Illness in Eminent Creative Writers

Although many studies (e.g., Andreasen, 1987; Jamison, 1989; Ludwig, 1995) have demonstrated that creative writers are prone to suffer from mental illness, this relationship has not been truly examined in depth. Is this finding true of all writers? In Study One, 1,629 writers were analyzed for signs of mental illness. Female poets were found to be significantly more likely to suffer from mental illness than female fiction writers or male writers of any type. Study Two extended the analysis to 520 eminent women (poets, fiction writers, non-fiction writers, visual artists, politicians, and actresses), and again found the poets to be significantly more likely to experience mental illness. This early finding has been dubbed “the Sylvia Plath effect,” and implications and possibilities for future research are discussed.     

从"载营魄抱一"看逍遥境界与成仙信仰

中国古代道家(教)常常或隐或显地体现出对内体的肯定甚至眷恋。本文从中国古代的魂魄二元灵魂观入手考察其身体观及对灵肉关系的看法,并选取《庄子》逍遥境界与道教的成仙信仰这两种迥异于西方的超越样式进行具体的分析,以期展露其“肉体关怀”的真正根源所在。     

传统中国文化处理心理健康问题的三种思路

近年来 ,从中国文化的角度进行心理健康问题的研究越来越多 ,但是从文化整体的角度对这一问题的研究尚嫌不够。本文认为 ,虽然传统中国文化没有现代心理学意义上的心理健康的说法 ,但是由于人的存在的共同性 ,传统中国文化客观上具有处理心理健康问题的功能。这表现为三种思路 :信仰—养性的思路 ,养生—治身的思路 ,迷信—功利的思路。它们各自对心理健康有自己的见解和做法。文章分析了这三种思路的基本情况和特征 ,并进一步讨论了它们对当代心理健康研究的启发     

Occupational level and mental health: A note

Investigation of mental health and job satisfaction by means of Kornhauser's (1965) questionnaire appears to demonstrate the existence of at least six factors concerned with personal life adjustment. There was a failure to find any substantial relationship between mental health and job satisfaction over a fairly wide occupational distribution which confirms a finding by the previously cited Survey Research Center study 1970. It is hypothesized that the mental health-job satisfaction relationship exists only on the lower skill, routine work level. It is further suggested that these research results offer certain directions that might be pursued in the further understanding of the exact bases for both job and general life adjustment.     

Toward a physiology of dual-process reasoning and judgment: lemonade, willpower, and expensive rule-based analysis

This experiment used the attraction effect to test the hypothesis that ingestion of sugar can reduce reliance on intuitive, heuristic-based decision making. In the attraction effect, a difficult choice between two options is swayed by the presence of a seemingly irrelevant "decoy" option. We replicated this effect and the finding that the effect increases when people have depleted their mental resources performing a previous self-control task. Our hypothesis was based on the assumption that effortful processes require and consume relatively large amounts of glucose (brain fuel), and that this use of glucose is why people use heuristic strategies after exerting self-control. Before performing any tasks, some participants drank lemonade sweetened with sugar, which restores blood glucose, whereas others drank lemonade containing a sugar substitute. Only lemonade with sugar reduced the attraction effect. These results show one way in which the body (blood glucose) interacts with the mind (self-control and reliance on heuristics).     

Role of motor processes in extrinsically encoding mental transformations

Previous research has shown that imagined perspective rotations elicit spatial and low-level cortical motor areas of the brain when participants rely on knowledge of their physical body, or body percept (Wraga, Flynn, Boyle, & Evans, 2010). The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether recruitment of the body percept would activate low-level cortical motor areas of the brain within other classes of mental transformations. Participants performed imagined object and perspective rotations of three-dimensional Shephard-Metzler (1971) stimuli. For each task, participants used button presses serving as virtual pointers to locate a prescribed portion of the stimuli with respect to their "right" and "left." We found low-level cortical motor activation (M1) for both mental transformations; however, the degree to which such activation related to participants' performance differed, as well as the recruitment of additional nonmotoric strategies. The results are discussed in terms of recent hypotheses regarding the role of the body percept in extrinsically encoded mental transformations.     

On the different roles of the cerebral hemispheres in mental imagery: the "o'Clock Test" in two clinical cases

This paper develops the hypothesis of different roles of the two hemispheres in imaginal processes. A test designated the "o'Clock Test" is proposed, which contains closely confrontable perceptual and imaginal tasks. It enables examination of the abilities both to generate mental images and to explore them in their right and left halves (R + L Condition). This test was used to examine two patients, one severely affected by hemi-inattention resulting from a right posterior lesion, and the other with a selective deficit of imagery due to a left occipital lesion. The former demonstrated left neglect in both perceptive and imaginal capacities, while the latter was able to perform correctly only the perceptive tasks. These results suggest that the right hemisphere has functions of organization and spatial exploration at both perceptive and imaginal levels, and that the left hemisphere's role is to generate mental images.     

Irrelevant differences in the "same"--"different" task

This article examines the effects of irrelevant information on the multidimensional "same"--"different" task. Subjects were instructed to compare two geometric figures with respect to certain attributes but to ignore other attributes in making the "same"--"different" decision. The irrelevant attributes were chosen in such a way that they could not easily be ignored to see how the existence of irrelevant differences would affect the comparison process. As expected, the overall latencies were longer than is usually found in tasks with no irrelevant differences. However, the nature of the comparison process appeared unchanged. The usual finding of a "fast-same" phenomenon persisted even when irrelevant information was present. The similarity of the results in this task to results in the "same"--"different" task with no irrelevant features supports the idea that the same comparison mechanism is used whether or not irrelevant differences are present in the stimulus pairs. The results suggest a more general-purpose comparison mechanism than is usually included in models of this task. Two-process models of visual comparisons are thus ruled out entirely. A modified version of Krueger's noisy-operator theory does appear consistent with the results.     

Images of numbers, or "When 98 is upper left and 6 sky blue".

Some people declare that they possess a personal visual representation of numbers: some automatically "see" the numbers they are confronted with in a precise location in a structured mental space, others "associate" specific colours with given numbers. Such visuo-spatial representations of numbers were first described by Galton in 1880 but have since received little attention from psychologists. It is the aim of this article to describe these mental representations and discuss their role in number processing. The authors first review Galton's observations, and then present their own. Finally, they discuss the relevance of these visuo-spatial representations in relation to contemporary debates on number representation and calculation.     

Secular humanism and "scientific psychiatry"

The Council for Secular Humanism identifies Secular Humanism as a "way of thinking and living" committed to rejecting authoritarian beliefs and embracing "individual freedom and responsibility ... and cooperation." The paradigmatic practices of psychiatry are civil commitment and insanity defense, that is, depriving innocent persons of liberty and excusing guilty persons of their crimes: the consequences of both are confinement in institutions ostensibly devoted to the treatment of mental diseases. Black's Law Dictionary states: "Every confinement of the person is an 'imprisonment,' whether it be in a common prison, or in private house, or in the stocks, or even by forcibly detaining one in the public streets." Accordingly, I maintain that Secular Humanism is incompatible with the principles and practices of psychiatry.     

The Effect of a Derogatory Professional Label: Evaluations of a "Shrink"

A study was designed to examine the consequences of hearing a mental health professional referred to as a "shrink." Participants ( N  = 129) viewed a videotape of a simulated therapy session after hearing a psychologist referred to as a shrink , a psychologist , or Mr. Smith . As hypothesized, exposure to shrink lowered evaluations of the therapist. However, this was focused on specific characteristics (e.g., expertise). After hearing the label shrink , participants expressed less interest in seeking therapy from the psychologist portrayed. The commenter of the shrink label was also viewed more negatively. The findings imply that the use of the term shrink may undermine people's attitudes toward mental health professionals, a consequence with implications for the utilization of their services.     

Looking a Hundred Years Back: Remarks on the Concept of "Wishing" in Psychoanalysis

While the concepts of "wish" and "wish fulfillment" have indeed remained central since the start of classical psychoanalysis, they are only weakly anchored both in theory and practice. It has become common today for psychoanalysts to use the term "to wish" in the sense of "to want" or "to intend." As a first step, it will be emphasized that "wish" should not be constructed along the lines of "intention." An examination of the relationship of "wish" to "wish fulfillment" is then followed by an evaluation of its practical significance for psychoanalysis and for our understanding of mental life in a general sense. Turning to an example dream sequence, we will arrive at the psychoanalytic core of the issue: the assumption of hidden, non-obvious, non-recognizable wish fulfillment scenarios. At this point in the discussion, a method of access will be sketched out - the dramaturgical approach - that, although it makes use of the idea of free association, does so in a manner that diverges from Freud's original recommendation.     

Extracting parity and magnitude from Arabic numerals: developmental changes in number processing and mental representation.

Children from Grades 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8 (7.8, 9.2, 9.8, 11.7, and 13. 6 years old, respectively) made speeded, bimanual parity (odd/even) judgments of the Arabic numerals 0-9. Analysis of response times indicated that from fourth grade on, parity information is retrieved directly from memory rather than being extracted by means of a mental calculation strategy. As early as Grade 3, children exhibited the SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect, where small numbers were responded to faster with the left hand than with the right hand, while the converse held true for large numbers. This finding, previously demonstrated only in adults, confirms that (a) children represent magnitude information in the form of a left-to-right oriented mental number line, and (b) this information is accessed obligatorily even when irrelevant. Finally, although the SNARC effect remained strong at Grade 4, it was attenuated at Grades 6 and 8 by a linguistic effect based on associations between the unmarked adjectives "even" and "right" and between the marked adjectives "odd" and "left." Copyright 1999 Academic Press.