Deep hope: A song without words

Hope helps alleviate suffering. In the case of terminal illness, recent experience in palliative medicine has taught physicians that hope is durable and often thrives even in the face of imminent death. In this article, I examine the perspectives of philosophers, theologians, psychologists, clinicians, neuroscientists, and poets, and provide a series of observations, connections, and gestures about hope, particularly about what I call "deep hope." I end with some proposals about how such hope can be sustained and enhanced at the end of life. Studies of terminally ill patients have revealed clusters of personal and situational factors associated with enhancement or suppression of hope at the end of life. Interpersonal connectedness, attainable goals, spiritual beliefs and practices, personal attributes of determination, courage, and serenity, lightheartedness, uplifting memories, and affirmation of personal worth enhance hope, while uncontrollable pain and discomfort, abandonment and isolation, and devaluation of personhood suppress hope. I suggest that most of these factors can be modulated by good medical care, utilizing basic interpersonal techniques that demonstrate kindness, humanity, and respect.     

The spatial contours of wellbeing: A content analysis of metaphor in academic discourse

Abstract

In thinking and talking about wellbeing, people often deploy spatial metaphors, such as identifying positive and negative affect with ‘up’ and ‘down’ respectively. However, there has not yet been a systematic investigation of how wellbeing is represented through metaphor. To shed light on this topic, a content analysis was conducted of spatial metaphors in academic discourse on wellbeing, focusing on recent editions of two leading journals, the Journal of Positive Psychology, and the British Journal of Clinical Psychology. Across 28 papers, 54 spatial metaphors were identified, grouped into four main categories: verticality; horizontality; configuration; and dynamism. Above all, wellbeing is associated with interior expansiveness, with positive valence usually attaching to vertical metaphors of height and depth, horizontal metaphors of width and breadth, and configuration metaphors of size and growth. The analysis thus offers valuable insights into the subjective dynamics of wellbeing.     

On the Gendered Nature of Mobile Phone Culture in Israel

Data from surveys and personal interviews were used to analyze gendered patterns and contexts of the mobile phone use of Israelis. The findings suggest that the mobile phone has become an everyday, highly regarded, multipurpose interpersonal communication device rather than a working tool. Both men and women discussed their perceptions of the role of the mobile phone in their lives in quite a traditional gendered manner—activity and technological appropriation for men and dependency and domesticity for women. At the same time, the actual phoning habits and attitudes of users point to a pattern of domestication of the mobile phone and even feminization of its consumption.     

Testing beyond words: Using tests to enhance visuospatial map learning

Psychological research shows that learning can be powerfully enhanced through testing, but this finding has so far been confined to memory tasks requiring verbal responses. We explored whether testing can enhance learning of visuospatial information in maps. Fifty subjects each studied two maps, one through conventional study, and the other through computer-prompted tests. For the tests, the subjects were repeatedly presented with the same map with one feature deleted (e.g., a road or a river), and they tried to covertly recall the missing feature and its location. Subjects’ map drawings after 30 min were significantly better for maps learned through tests in comparison with maps learned through the same amount of time devoted to conventional study. These results suggest that the testing effect is not limited to the types of memory that require discrete, verbal responses, and that utilizing covert retrievals may allow the effect to be extended to a variety of complex, nonverbal learning tasks.     

The embodiment of emotional words in a second language: An eye-movement study

The hypothesis that word representations are emotionally impoverished in a second language (L2) has variable support. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using tasks that present words in isolation or that require laboratory-specific decisions. Here, we recorded eye movements for 34 bilinguals who read sentences in their L2 with no goal other than comprehension, and compared them to 43 first language readers taken from our prior study. Positive words were read more quickly than neutral words in the L2 across first-pass reading time measures. However, this emotional advantage was absent for negative words for the earliest measures. Moreover, negative words but not positive words were influenced by concreteness, frequency and L2 proficiency in a manner similar to neutral words. Taken together, the findings suggest that only negative words are at risk of emotional disembodiment during L2 reading, perhaps because a positivity bias in L2 experiences ensures that positive words are emotionally grounded.     

Thee,uhh disfluency effect in preschoolers: A cue to discourse status

Speech disfluencies, such as filled pauses (ummm, uhhh), are increasingly recognized as an informative element of the speech stream. Here, we examined whether 2‐ and 3‐year‐olds expected that the presence of filled pause would signal reference to objects that are new to a discourse. Children viewed pairs of familiar objects on a screen and heard a speaker refer to one of the objects twice in succession. Next, children heard a critical utterance and were asked to look and point at either the discourse‐given (i.e., previously mentioned) or discourse‐new (i.e., previously unmentioned) object using a fluent (‘Look at the ball!’) or disfluent (‘Look at thee uh ball!’) expression. The results indicated that 3‐year‐old children, but not 2‐year‐old children, initially expected the speaker to continue to refer to given information in the critical utterance. Upon hearing a filled pause, however, both 2‐ and 3‐year‐old children's looking patterns reflected increased looks to discourse‐new objects, although the timing of the effect differed between the age groups. Together, these findings demonstrate that young children have an emerging understanding of the role of filled pauses in speech.     

Teaching by Convincing: Strategies of Argumentation in Lectures

The aim of this article is to show the argumentative component in the discourse of teachers. This is done on the basis of an analysis of the argumentative strategies used by teachers during the first class of a university course in order to increase their discourse efficiency. The analysis of the corpus studied shows that in such a session teachers use argumentative strategies in order to control the social distance which separates them from students. In doing so, they make a double movement, one of distancing and one of approximation, with the aim of achieving a balance which permits them to consolidate their authority in the eyes of the students and, at the same time, present an accessible and well-disposed image to them.     

The format of representation of recognized words in infants' early receptive lexicon

Eleven-month-olds can recognize a few auditorily presented familiar words in experimental situations where no hints are given by the intonation, the situation, or the presence of possible visual referents. That is, infants of this age (and possibly somewhat younger) can recognize words based on sound patterns alone. The issue addressed in this article is what is the type of mental representations infants use to code words they recognize. The results of a series of experiments with French-learning infants indicate that word representations in 11-month-olds are segmentally underspecified and suggest that they are all the more underspecified when infants engage in recognizing words rather than merely attending to meaningless speech sounds. But underspecification has limits, which were explored here with respect to word-initial consonants. The last two experiments show the way to investigating further these limits for word-initial consonants as well as for segments in other word positions. In French, infants' word representations are flexible enough to allow for structural changes in the voicing or even in the manner of articulation of word-initial consonants. Word-initial consonants must be present, however, for words to be recognized. In conclusion, a parallel is proposed between the emerging capacities to ignore variations that are irrelevant for word recognition in a “lexical mode” and to ignore variations that are phonemically irrelevant in a “neutral mode” of listening to native speech.     

Cultural safety: towards postcolonial counselling practice?

ABSTRACT

This article examines the discursive production of counsellor identity and practice through the operations of colonising and postcolonial discourse in Aotearoa New Zealand. It argues that constructs of cultural safety, tino rangatiratanga and Māori sovereignty, which arose as part of the postcolonial politics of life in Aotearoa, have achieved discursive status and both enable and restrain counsellor practice. This argument is informed by research that explored the discursive production of Pākehā counsellors' practice with non-Pākehā clients.     

中国和欧洲家庭的家务分工：文化的视角(英文)

本文通过对以往研究的总结, 讨论了哪些因素可以帮助理解中国和欧洲家庭之间的家务分工文化差异。首先, 我们将中国家庭的家务分工状况与欧洲家务的情况进行了对比, 总结了文化差异所在。其次, 我们分析了目前家务分工研究领域内的主要理论模型在中国社会里的应用情况。我们发现, 这些模型只能部分的解释, 为什么中国和欧洲家庭在家务分工上存在文化差异。接下来, 我们讨论了儒家思想和第三方的家务承担对于夫妻家务分工可能产生的影响, 以扩展家务分工跨文化研究的理论框架。最后, 我们总结了文化价值观和家务支持对于理解不同文化中的夫妻家务分工的意义, 呼吁更多的研究关注。     

文化与社会赞许反应:社会个人互动的观点

在处理社会赞许反应的文化差异时,常用的两种方法为实验控制和统计控制。我们在本文中提出另一个观点。通过回顾近期的相关文献,我们指出:社会赞许反应的文化差异,反映在不同社会环境中,人们在相应的文化要求下,以不同的自我呈现方式来加强他们追求个人目标的动力。这种社会、文化与个人的对话历程乃研究文化—心理关系的核心课题。用实验或统计方法将因这个历程产生的变量从跨文化数据中剔除后,所得的结果便只有微薄的文化意义了。因此,我们反对将社会赞许反应的文化差异视为跨文化研究的噪音。相反地,我们认为跨文化研究者应认真地分析社会赞许反应的社会文化意义,以社会赞许反应作为一个窗口,管窥社会、文化与行为相生相成的关系。     

第二语言学习者形态复杂词的加工机制

大多数语言中, 形态复杂词所占的比例很高。形态复杂词形-义映射的规律性使得读者不仅能直接从心理词典中提取整词语义, 还可以利用形态规则来建构词语的语义。研究发现, 母语者可以利用形态规则来加工复杂词, 但第二语言(二语)学习者的研究结果存在较大的分歧, 且表现出和母语者不一样的结果模式。基于补充学习系统理论和情景性二语者假设, 我们尝试提出了二语形态复杂词加工机制的观点, 并据此解释研究分歧出现的原因。未来的研究需要探究词汇形态家族大小等因素对二语形态复杂词加工的影响, 以及揭示二语形态复杂词加工的神经机制。     

Doing philosophy with words

This paper discusses the coverage of ordinary language philosophy in Scott Soames' Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. After praising the book's virtues, I raise three points where I dissent from Soames' take on the history. First, I suggest that there is more to ordinary language philosophy than the rather implausible version of it that Soames sees to have been destroyed by Grice. Second, I argue that confusions between analyticity, necessity and priority are less important to the ordinary language period than Soames takes them to be. Finally, I claim that Soames' criticisms of Ryle turn in part on attributing reductionist positions to Ryle that Ryle did not hold. Contribution to Symposium on Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, volume 2     

Children,words and symptomatic acts

Referring to communicative material from an autistic and a psychotic child, the author argues for the primary importance of understanding children's words and actions in terms of their conscious or intended meaning before seeking a latent, symbolic meaning for them and attempting to convey this to the child in therapy. In furtherance of the argument the author introduces and develops a distinction between the signification and the significance of expressive utterances, and explains its relevance to the development of children's concepts by means of clinical material.     

Vocabulary and automatic attention: The relation between novel words and gaze dynamics in noun generalization

Words direct visual attention in infants, children, and adults, presumably by activating representations of referents that then direct attention to matching stimuli in the visual scene. Novel, unknown, words have also been shown to direct attention, likely via the activation of more general representations of naming events. To examine the critical issue of how novel words and visual attention interact to support word learning we coded frame-by-frame the gaze of 17- to 31-month-old children (n = 66, 38 females) while generalizing novel nouns. We replicate prior findings of more attention to shape when generalizing novel nouns, and a relation to vocabulary development. However, we also find that following a naming event, children who produce fewer nouns take longer to look at the objects they eventually select and make more transitions between objects before making a generalization decision. Children who produce more nouns look to the objects they eventually select more quickly following the naming event and make fewer looking transitions. We discuss these findings in the context of prior proposals regarding children's few-shot category learning, and a developmental cascade of multiple perceptual, cognitive, and word-learning processes that may operate in cases of both typical development and language delay.

Research Highlights

• Examined how novel words guide visual attention by coding frame-by-frame where children look when asked to generalize novel names.
• Gaze patterns differed with vocabulary size: children with smaller vocabularies attended to generalization targets more slowly and did more comparison than those with larger vocabularies.
• Demonstrates a relationship between vocabulary size and attention to object properties during naming.
• This work has implications for looking-based tests of early cognition, and our understanding of children's few-shot category learning.

     

Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5‐min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., ‘ko’) replaced either personal pronouns or articles, children were able to infer semantic properties for novel words co‐occurring with the newly learned function word (i.e., objects vs. actions). These findings implicate a mechanism by which a distributional analysis, associated with a small vocabulary of known words, could be sufficient to identify some properties associated with specific syntactic contexts.