Binocular disparity as a discriminable stimulus parameter for young infants

The ability of 8-week-old infants to discriminate between projected stereograms with and without retinal disparity was tested with an habituation-dishabituation paradigm. Infants in two experimental groups received six trials with either the disparity or the nondisparity stimulus and then were given two trials with the other display. Infants in two control groups viewed the same stimulus, either disparity or nondisparity, on all eight trials. There was a suggestion of some response decrement over time in both cardiac deceleration and sucking suppression, although this effect was not significant. However, significant increment was obtained on the dishabituation trials for heart rate in the group that was shifted from the nondisparity to the disparity stimulus. These results were interpreted as indicating that the infants could discriminate between stimuli when the only difference between them was binocular disparity.     

Some effects of discriminable goal-box conditions on the learning of a successive discrimination

In an attempt to confirm and extend a previous reslt, rats were trained on two tasks where a signal delivered at the start of each trial indicated which of two paths through a maze would be rewarded. In Experiment I both paths led to the same goal-box, and it was found that performance was better when the state of the goal-box was different on trials with each of the two signals. In Experiment II the two paths led to spatially separated goal-boxes. It was found that when the states of the two goal-boxes were discriminably different but the state of each of them remained the same from trial to trial, performance was better than when their states varied irregularly. It is suggested that these results have interesting implications for theories of behaviour.     

为临床决策的科学化而努力

当今,我国的临床医学实践正面临着深刻的挑战.摆在我们面前的现实是:一方面,医学科学的快速发展,为许多疾病的诊断和治疗提供了多种选择,为诊疗最优化提供了广阔的空间;另一方面,我们在应用医学发展提供的科学成果为病人诊治时,由于医生的学术基础、临床经验、诊疗决策、治疗动机的差异,其效果差别极大.辽宁省抗癌协会最近的一项抽样调查表明,该省癌症的规范化治疗率仅为32.46%,其中A级医院不规范治疗为53.21%,B级医院不规范治疗为66.49%,C级医院不规范治疗高达96.69%.     

Making Exceptions

abstract   Because we are more comfortable with judgements of conceptual conceivability than with judgements of practical possibility, we content ourselves with imaginary cases, which are useless for making many decisions that practical people most need to make, notably all-things-considered decisions about when to follow an admitted general principle and when to make an exception. The diverse cases of climate change, preventive attack, and torture all illustrate how the avoidance of the difficult task of integrating empirical judgements with conceptual judgements through the flight into the sanitized abstraction of imaginary cases undermines attempts at practical ethics. All three cases involve allegedly exceptional, or emergency, situations, although climate change seems to require more than the usual compliance with general principle while preventive attack and torture supposedly require less than the usual compliance. By my lights the proposed exceptions are, respectively, fully, sometimes, and never justified. But the fundamental point is that one unfortunately cannot decide any of the cases without assessing what is in fact likely as well as what is conceptually possible .     

Making Connections

Abstract

LEARNING FROM OUR MISTAKES: BEYOND DOGMA IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSYCHOTHERAPY, by Patrick Casement. The Guilford Press: New York and London, 2002, 150 pp. Reviewed by Brian Rasmussen.     

Making Honey

Journal of Religion and Health - A third-year medical student reflects on the role of creative meditation in the life of the clinician. Through three patient encounters, he suggests that the...     

Making Meaning

SUMMARY

In this article, the author outlines the responsibilities of the therapist as a host in Existential Couples Therapy. In this approach, the functions of the therapist-host include helping the client couple discover, actualize and make use of the meaning potentials in intimate life. The activities of the host include joining, assessment, creative fidelity, primary and secondary reflection, evaluation and termination. Clinical material is offered to illustrate the process of being a host in Existential Couples Therapy.     

制造回忆

我们每天要去上班,但我们仍能使许多晚上和周末过得充实而快乐,与家人在一起做一些有趣又简单的事情,不要忘记每天都和你的孩子相处,使你成为孩子需要的爸爸或妈妈。     

Men Making and Keeping Commitments

This article addresses the clinical encounter of men struggling to make and keep marital commitments. The “Male Code” limits mens' feeling and body awareness, thus leaving them information-deprived when it comes to making important decisions. The culture is viewed as less than supportive of this process. Commitment is described as a multi-faceted concept and men's struggles are explored from developmental, cultural, emotional, familial, and spiritual perspectives. Individual and group, clinical, and educational implications are discussed.     

Religion and Political Decision Making

Influential political theorists suggest that religious differences in political life may be overcome through shared commitment to political processes. In this article, I subject the underlying assumptions of this proposition to empirical inquiry. When faced with substantive conflict over policy outcomes, do religious persons defer to a political process for resolution? And if so, to which political process do they defer? Through a novel interview exercise with 61 respondents from a variety of religious backgrounds, I find a general willingness to defer to a legitimate political process, even if it results in an undesirable outcome that violates religious (or other) political preferences. However, I also find that a political process need not be democratic to be seen as legitimate, and that process preferences do not map onto religious differences.     

On Making and Keeping Promises

Do the conditions under which promises are made determine whether they ought to be kept? Philosophers have placed a number of conditions on promising which, they hold, must be met in order to make promise-keeping obligatory. In so doing, they have distinguished valid promises from invalid promises and justified promises from promises that are not justified. Considering such conditions, one by one, we argue that they are mistaken. In the first place, the conditions they lay down are not necessary for either valid or justified promise-making. In the second place, promises need not meet such conditions in order to create moral obligations. In general, such analyses of promising fail because they suffer from a confusion between promise-making and promise-keeping. Philosophers have wrongly supposed that obligations to keep promises are dependent upon, or derivable from, the quality of the promises themselves, at the time they are made, instead of focusing on conditions that must be satisfied at the time when promises are supposed to be kept. It is not the quality of a promise that determines an obligation to keep it but the rightness or wrongness of performing the promised act.     

Women's Sexuality and Meaning Making

The purpose of the current study was to challenge depictions of traditionally oppressive female sexuality by explicitly exploring diverse women's positive experiences of sexuality and to capture the unique meanings women ascribe to their sexuality through the use of participant-generated metaphor. We interviewed 17 diverse women regarding the meaning of sexuality in their lives. Coding revealed that metaphors for sexuality provided a creative and integrative way for women to express the complexity of their sexuality. In addition, a sexual developmental trajectory emerged from the analysis, as did themes of fluidity and ideal sexuality. Implications for theory and therapy, as well as future directions for research, are offered.