Negotiating the Reality of Visual Impairment: Hope, Coping, and Functional Ability

A consecutive sample of 63 adventitiously blinded American military veterans in a interdisciplinary inpatient rehabilitation program participated in this study examining the relation of hope to self-reported functional ability level. Scores from a modified oral administration of the Hope Scale and the Millon Behavioral Health Inventory basic coping styles were used as predictor variables to test regression-based models of mediation and moderation relations to functional ability level. Results support a mediating role for hope in the relation between a proactive sociable style and perceived level of functional ability.     

Toward a New Understanding of Nature, Reality, and the Sacred: A Syllabus

Adjustments in the understanding of the relation of religion and science since the Enlightenment require new considerations in epistemology and metaphysics. Constructionist theories of knowledge and process theories of metaphysics better provide the new paradigms needed both to preserve and to limit the significance of each field of human understanding. In a course taught at Moravian College, this perspective is applied to the concepts of nature, reality, and the sacred, with a view to showing how we might develop one such paradigm. Key resources for this task are to be found in the work of artist René Magritte; theologians Langdon Gilkey, Arthur Peacocke, and John Haught; philosophers and historians of science Alfred North Whitehead, Timothy Ferris, Ernan Mc Mullin, and Ian Barbour; philosopher of religion Paul Ricoeur; and historians of religion Rudolph Otto and Mircea Eliade. Such a new paradigm calls for an ecologically sensitive religious awareness which is both sacramental and holistic.     

Contextualizing psychotherapy as a healing practice: Culture,history, and methods

The histories of modern medicine and psychotherapy are examined to situate psychotherapy in the array of healing practices. Although modern medicine relies on specificity as its central organizing concept, psychotherapy has consistently produced results that are not consistent with a medical model. Moreover, the development of research methodologies used to validate treatments, although useful in the medical context, ignores the experience of the patients as well as the provider of services. It is demonstrated that psychotherapy is a culturally imbedded healing practice and shares similarities with healing practices other than modern medicine. Psychotherapy shares one important feature with modern medicine, however: empirical support for efficacy. Various theories of placebo effects are examined to propose explanations for the effects of psychotherapy. Finally, issues and paradoxes are presented for future consideration.     

Contextualizing Nanotechnology Education: Fostering a Hybrid Imagination in Aalborg,Denmark

In the context of worldwide economic and environmental crisis it is increasingly important that nanotechnology, genomics, media engineering and other fields of ‘technoscience’ with immense societal relevance are taught in ways that promote social responsibility and that educational activities are organized so that science and engineering students will be able to integrate the ‘contextual knowledge’ they learn into their professional, technical–scientific identities and forms of competence. Since the 1970s, teaching programmes in science, technology and society for science and engineering have faded away at many universities and have been replaced by courses in economic and commercial aspects, or entrepreneurship and/or ethical and philosophical issues. By recounting our recent efforts in contextualizing nanotechnology education at Aalborg University in Denmark, we consider a socio-cultural approach to contextual learning, one that is meant to contribute to a greater sense of social responsibility on the part of scientists and engineers. It is our contention that the social, political and environmental challenges facing science and engineering in the world today require the fostering of what we have come to call a ‘hybrid imagination’, mixing scientific–technical skills with a sense of social responsibility or global citizenship, if science and engineering are to help solve social problems rather than create new ones. Three exemplary cases of student project work are discussed: one on raspberry solar cells, which connected nanotechnology to the global warming debate, and two in which surveys on the public understanding of nanotechnology were combined with a scientific–technical project.     

Television and Reality: Toddlers' Use of Visual Information from Video to Guide Behavior

Toddlers' ability to use a television display in order to guide their object retrieval and object placement was examined. In the first experiment, 2-, 2.5-, and 3-year-olds watched a toy being hidden in an adjacent room, after which they were asked to find it. In the second experiment, 2-year-olds watched a toy being placed in the adjacent room and were then asked to place the toy in the same place. Half the children in each experiment watched the event through a window and half watched the event on television. In both experiments children's performance was worse if they saw the event on television, although retrieval improved with age. In both experiments the 2-year-olds' performance in the television condition started above chance and then deteriorated over trials. These and other studies indicate that toddlers have considerable difficulty using a video image in order to guide behavior in a real setting. Three hypotheses that could account for these findings are discussed.     

错觉研究:从狭义到广义的演进

心理学家对错觉现象的关注由来已久,以往的错觉研究大部分关注与知觉过程相联系的错觉。近十几年来,当代错觉研究呈现出新的热点,并从狭义向广义演进。这一研究对象扩展的基础,是错觉现象的本质特征,即认知过程的一致性偏差。广义错觉研究的对象涉及知觉、记忆、思维、推理等各种心理过程。     

Robbing a Man of His Illusions: Response to Herbert Fensterheim and Stanley Messer

The suggestions made by Fensterheim and Messer regarding increasing ego strengths and pointing out patterns of interaction were found to be useful ones in treating this angry patient. Some other interventions derived from an integrative perspective are also described. The author is still grappling with the problem of stripping this man of his illusions.     

Illusions in quantified reasoning: How to make the impossible seem possible, and vice versa

The mental model theory postulates that reasoners build models of the situations described in premises, and that these models normally represent only what is true. The theory has an unexpected consequence. It predicts the existence of illusions in inferences. Certain inferences should have compelling but erroneous conclusions. Two experiments corroborated the occurrence of such illusions in inferences about what is possible from disjunctions of quantified assertions, such as, "at least some of the plastic beads are not red." Experiment 1 showed that participants erroneously inferred that impossible situations were possible, and that possible situations were impossible, but that they performed well with control problems based on the same premises. Experiment 2 corroborated these findings in inferences from assertions based on dyadic relations, such as, "all the boys played with the girls."     

Medical Ethicists,Human Curiosities,and the New Media Midway

Abstract

Medical ethicists have assumed a role in justifying public voyeurism of human “curiosities.” This role has precedent in how scientists and natural philosophers once legitimized the marketing of museums of “human curiosities.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, physicians dissociated themselves from entrepreneurial displays of persons with anomalies, and such commercial exhibits went into decline. Today, news media, principally on television, promote news features about persons that closely resemble the nineteenth century exhibits of human curiosities. Reporters solicit medical ethicists for soundbites to affirm the newsworthiness and propriety of public voyeurism of these medical stories. Ethicists' soundbites are usually ambiguous or self-evident and rarely enable viewers to morally engage the issues. The precedent of early twentieth century physicians disengaging from such exploitive public shows is a useful example for medical ethics.     

社会化媒体时代的医患关系沟通探索

社会化媒体是近年来迅速兴起的新型在线媒体,它从社会交往形式、信息获取方式、语言表达习惯等方面对人们的行为习惯产生了深刻影响。微博作为一种基于网络社会化媒体形式,在许多年轻医生中已经成为一种表达自我的重要平台。在这个平台上,医务人员进行科普教育,同时具有表达自我、舒解情绪的功能,社会化媒体也让医患双方具有平等的话语权,这种医患交流的平台有及时有效反馈信息的功能,具有较强的实效性和现场感,但也面临新的医学伦理问题。发挥社交网络中医患沟通的优势,改善医患关系是一个全新的挑战。     

Illusions of brightness, length, and now size: comparable effects derived from the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet distributions

Analogous illusions of brightness, line length, and object size occur when stimulus distributions follow the Mach function. Similarly, analogous illusions of brightness and length are produced by stimulus distributions that follow the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet function. In Exp. 1, object size is studied using Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet stimuli composed of 12 clip-art representations of candles, swords, forks, screwdrivers, or pens. Despite their equal dimensions, the three objects next to the taller gradient were judged larger than the three adjacent to the shorter gradient. In Exp. 2, variations of the sword and screwdriver figures having three separations of their constituent objects were used. The illusion produced in Exp. 1 was replicated and, for the figures composed of screwdrivers, increasing separation reduced the hypothesized mis-estimations. The relationship of these Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet size illusions to their brightness and length counterparts mirrors the relationships previously reported for Mach stimuli; moreover, these findings converge to suggest that the visual system registers size of objects with a frequency code and that illusions of size appear when interactions among neurons disrupt this code.     

Illusions and aftereffects of length in the minimal form of the parallel-lines configuration: a reexamination

A number of recent studies have used the graded-series method to measure the illusion and aftereffect distortions of perceived length in the minimal form of the parallel-lines configuration. However, because of some peculiar characteristics of the graded-series method, the aftereffect distortions measured with this method cannot be interpreted unequivocally as reflecting distortions of the perceived length of the test line. On the basis of the results of an experiment that examined the contribution of a possible confound present in the method, it is argued that the method should not be used to measure length aftereffects, and, furthermore, that the results of studies using this method need to be reconsidered.