你们要什么

耶稣问门徒：“你们要什么?”要清楚我们要什么,不妨先问问自己：我可以不要什么?我可以不要什么呢?细观你现在所拥有的,你会发现,从前你拼命想要得到的很多东西,今天是你所不需要的。当我们决定告诉上帝,我要什么时,不妨先清楚我可以不要什么;当我们决定向上帝要什么时,不妨先下定决心我要为此舍弃什么!     

You are not what you feel you are

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences -     

You never know where you are going until you know where you have been: Disorganized search after stroke

Disorders in spatial exploration can be expressed in a disorganized fashion of target cancellation. There is debate regarding whether disorganized search is related to stroke in general, to right brain damage or to unilateral spatial neglect (USN) in particular. In this study, 280 stroke patients and 37 healthy control subjects performed a computerized shape cancellation test. We investigated the number of perseverations and several outcome measures regarding disorganized search: Consistency of search direction (best r), distance between consecutive cancelled targets and intersections with paths between previous cancelled targets. We compared performance between patients with left and right brain damage (L, R) and with and without USN (USN+, USN?), resulting in four subgroups: LUSN?, RUSN?, LUSN+, and RUSN+. Higher numbers of intersections were found for the left brain‐ and right brain‐damaged patients with USN and for the right brain‐damaged patients without USN, compared to healthy control subjects. Furthermore, right brain‐damaged patients with USN showed a higher number of intersections compared to right brain‐damaged patients without USN and compared to left brain‐damaged patients with USN. To conclude, disorganized search was most strongly related to the neglect syndrome, and patients with more severe USN were even more impaired.     

How to measure diversity when you must

Racial/ethnic diversity has become an increasingly important variable in the social sciences. Research from multiple disciplines consistently demonstrates the tremendous impact of ethnic diversity on individuals and organizations. Investigators use a variety of measures, and their choices can affect the conclusions that can be drawn and limit the ability to compare and generalize results across studies effectively. The current article reviews 3 popular approaches to the measurement of diversity: the simplistic majority-minority approach and 2 multiple categories variants, the generalized variance and the lesser used entropy statistic. We discuss the properties of each approach and reject the majority-minority approach. We provide 5 examples using the generalized variance and entropy statistics and illustrate their versatility and flexibility. We urge investigators to adopt these multicategory measures and to use our discussion to determine which measure of diversity is most appropriate given the nature of one's data set and research question.     

Importance of having agreeable friends in adolescence (especially when you are not)

Using the actor–partner interdependence model, we examined whether adolescent's agreeableness, best friend's agreeableness, and the interaction between adolescent‐friend agreeableness are important for interpersonal functioning. Adolescents (N = 158) in fifth to eighth grades who were part of best friend pairs completed personality and friendship measures. Adolescents' adjustment and victimization experiences were assessed by peer nominations. For boys, best friend's agreeableness moderated the relationship between the target boy's agreeableness and overt victimization, relational victimization, and externalizing problems. For girls, best friend's agreeableness moderated the relationship between the target girl's agreeableness and internalizing problems and prosocial skills. This study provides an initial glimpse into how traits of friends can influence outcomes beyond what would be expected from adolescents' personality alone.     

Look where you have to go! A field study comparing looking behaviour at urban intersections using a navigation system or a printed route instruction

In this study, experienced navigation system users (N = 20) drove a given unfamiliar route twice: once with the navigation system activated and once with a printed instruction including a route instruction. Quantitative analysis indicated that drivers passed intersections slower when they used the printed instruction than when they used the navigation system. Drivers looked more often and in proportion longer to the side scene when they used the printed instruction and made less and proportionally shorter glances away from the road scene and to the instruction than when they were supported by the navigation system. No difference was found between these two conditions in the total number of glances and the amount and duration of glances to the forward scene. A qualitative analysis provided understanding of the quantitative results: the type of route guidance was identified to influence drivers’ motive for scanning the side road scene. When the navigation system was used the motive was primarily to look for potential hazards and when the printed instruction was used the motive was more focused to look for salient orientation points. The outcomes of the study are discussed in terms of looking motive and the ‘look but failed to see’ phenomenon.     

Turn left where you felt unhappy: how affect influences landmark-based wayfinding

The present work investigated the impact of affect in landmark-based wayfinding. We assumed that affect-laden landmarks improve wayfinding performance and have an impact on later landmark recognition. To investigate our hypotheses, we ran two experiments in a virtual maze. In Experiment 1, we investigated how affect-laden landmarks influence wayfinding and recognition in comparison with neutral landmarks. The aim of Experiment 2 was to focus on the affective valence of a landmark. The memory tasks of both experiments were repeated after 1 week in order to assess memory consolidation. Results showed that the best wayfinding and recognition performance occurs when negatively laden landmarks were used. In comparison with neutral and positively laden landmarks, recognition performance hardly decreased over time for the negatively laden landmarks. Our results not only support findings in the field of emotion research but also expand the concept of semantic landmark salience with respect to emotional responses.     

On not having what you are given

The statement, that these or those philosophers do not accept the distinction between what is, and what is not, ‘given’ in perception, has very little content; and should receive only a corresponding degree of emphasis.     

How to tell essence (when you sense one)

How could perceptual experiences reveal matters of essentiality? Answering this question is crucial for vindicating a thesis about the epistemic import of experience, commonly known as Revelation. The thesis comes in a weak and a strong version. Only on the strong one could it make up an authoritative piece of common sense. But this version also seems to demand too much of our experiences, namely that they can reveal essentiality. However, the impression that our experiences are not suited for this turns out to be due to a non-mandatory assumption about how the revelation of essentiality would work.     

I know you are beautiful even without looking at you: discrimination of facial beauty in peripheral vision

Earlier research suggests that facial attractiveness may capture attention at parafovea. However, little is known about how well facial beauty can be detected at parafoveal and peripheral vision. Participants in this study judged relative attractiveness of a face pair presented simultaneously at several eccentricities from the central fixation. The results show that beauty is not only detectable at parafovea but also at periphery. The discrimination performance at parafovea was indistinguishable from the performance around the fovea. Moreover, performance was well above chance even at the periphery. The results show that the visual system is able to use the low-spatial-frequency information to appraise attractiveness. These findings not only provide an explanation why a beautiful face could capture attention when central vision is already engaged elsewhere, but also reveal the potential means by which a crowd of faces is quickly scanned for attractiveness.     

What young children think you see when their eyes are closed

The common assumption that young children egocentrically believe you cannot see them when their own eyes are closed was investigated in two studies. It was found that 2.5-4-year-olds, but not 5-year-olds and adults, would indeed often give negative reply to the experimenter's question “Do I see you?” when their eyes were closed and covered with their hands. However, they would also correctly reply that the experimenter did see their arm and an object placed in front of them and did not see their eyes and back, indicating that they were making veridical, nonegocentric inferences about the experimenter's visual experience. In addition, their eyes being visible to the experimenter did not prove to be either a necessary or a sufficient condition for their judgment that the experimenter could see “them” (“you”). It was concluded that, in this context, adults take “you” to mean their whole body while young children take it to mean primarily their face region. Speculations were made as to how young children could have acquired this meaning, and about possible similarities and differences between the self conceptions of young children and adults.     

Recollection and familiarity through the looking glass: when old does not mirror new

The authors use the qualitative differences logic to demonstrate that 2 separate memory influences underlie performance in recognition memory tasks, familiarity and recollection. The experiments focus on the mirror effect, the finding that more memorable stimulus classes produce higher hit rates but lower false-alarm rates than less memorable stimulus classes. The authors demonstrate across a number of experiments that manipulations assumed to decrease recollection eliminate or even reverse the hit-rate portion of the mirror effect while leaving the false-alarm portion intact. This occurs whether the critical distinction between conditions is created during the test phase or manipulated during the study phase. Thus, when recollection is present, it dominates familiarity so that the hit-rate portion of the mirror effect primarily reflects recollection; when recollection is largely absent, the opposite pattern associated with the familiarity process emerges.     

How much woe when we go: A quantitative method for predicting culture shock

Culture shock is defined as the confusion and discomfort caused by the conflict in perceived motives and expected behaviors between the home culture and the foreign culture. Several quantitative and graphical methods employing techniques of cluster analysis and similarity mapping are offered for predicting the magnitude of culture shock between pairs of countries using data extracted from Hofstede's 1980–83 studies of national cultural values. Implications for business, politics, and personal stress management are discussed.     

It’s not just what you say but when you say it: Self-presentation and temporal construal

Three experiments demonstrated that the use and effectiveness of self-presentation strategies are affected by time. In Experiment 1, participants used more indirect self-presentation statements for the distant than near future, but used more direct self-presentation statements for the near than distant future. In Experiment 2, participants for whom indirect self-presentation strategies were made accessible rated a future interview as more temporally distant than those for whom direct self-presentation strategies were made accessible. In Experiment 3, participants rated their self-presentation attempts as more effective if they used direct strategies for the near future and indirect strategies for the distant future. Implications for studying the timing of self-presentation and its relation to temporal construal levels are discussed.     

When you and I are "we," you are not threatening: the role of self-expansion in social comparison

Many theories of self-evaluation emphasize the power of social comparison. Simply put, an individual is thought to gain esteem whenever she or he outperforms others and to lose esteem when he or she is outperformed. The current research explored interdependent self-construal as a moderator of these effects. Two studies used a priming task to manipulate the level of self-construal and investigate effects of social comparison in dyadic (Study 1) and group situations (Study 2). Both studies demonstrated that when the target for comparison is construed as part of the self, his or her successes become cause for celebration rather than costs to esteem. Additionally, gender differences in chronic relational and collective self-construals moderated the patterns of social comparison in a form similar to that of priming relational and collective self-construals.