中文语境下的“心理”和“心理学”

“心”或“心理”等词语在汉语中有相当长的历史,对这些词语的理解反映了中国人关于“心理”的认识。中文的“心”往往不是指一种身体器官而是指人的思想、意念、情感、性情等,故“心理学”这三个汉字有极大的包容性。任何学科都摆脱不了社会文化的作用,中国心理学亦曾受到意识形态、科学主义和大众常识等方面的影响。近年中国学者对心理学自身的问题进行了反思。从某种意义上说,中国人对“心理”和“心理学”的理解或许有助于心理学的整合,并与其他国家的心理学一道发展出真正的人类心理学     

"鬼月"话"鬼"

每年阴历的七月,人们俗称“鬼月”,民间至今还流传“七月半,鬼乱窜”的迷信谚语。而七月十五的“中元节”,传言更为离奇,据说这天鬼魂全出,人们不可乱走,更忌出远门。倘若碰到鬼魂一年都将不吉利。鬼从何来?其实心理学家早就指出:一般来源于客观事物的突然出现,但却没有直接作用于人的感觉器官,而是头脑中所     

"Near" and "far" in language and perception.

A major interest in cognitive science is the relationship between linguistic and perceptual representations of space. One approach to exploring this relationship has been to investigate aspects of the linguistic encoding of space that correspond closely to aspects of the visual system. Another approach, which does not contradict the first but rather complements it, is to investigate ways in which linguistic and visual representations of space are different. This paper pursues the second approach by arguing that the distinction between proximal and distal demonstratives (e.g. this vs. that, here vs. there) does not correspond to an independently established distinction between near and far space in the visual system but is instead based on language-internal factors. Recent neuropsychological and neurophysiological studies suggest that the brain contains separate mechanisms for representing, on the one hand, near or peripersonal space which extends roughly to the perimeter of arm's reach and, on the other hand, far or extrapersonal space which expands outward from that boundary. In addition, crosslinguistic research suggests that it is very common for languages to have two basic types of demonstrative terms - proximal and distal. This parallelism raises the possibility that the linguistic distinction may derive from the perceptual distinction. However, several arguments support the contrary view that the two distinctions are independent of one another. A substantial proportion of languages in the world have demonstrative systems that divide space into three or more egocentrically-grounded regions, thereby violating the two-way perceptual contrast. Even more importantly, empirical studies of how demonstratives are used in ongoing discourse in different languages suggest that they do not encode quantitative spatial information such as within vs. beyond arm's reach; instead, they specify abstract semantic notions that, when combined with the unique pragmatic features of communicative contexts, allow speakers to make a virtually unlimited range of spatial distance contrasts. Thus, demonstratives constitute an interesting case of divergence between linguistic and perceptual representations of space.     

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.     

"Brainwashing" Theories in European Parliamentary and Administrative Reports on "Cults" and "Sects"

This study examines the recent rash of official reports done by governmental agencies in Western Europe to guide policy development in those societies. Particular attention is given to reports in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, and Italy, and to the changes in such reports that have occurred, perhaps because of the influence of scholarly critiques offered for some of the earlier reports. The reports are divided into "Type I" and "Type II" reports, with the former being thorough-going in their anti-cult orientation, and the latter reports being more moderate in tone, with some attention paid to scholarship on new religions. However, the major thesis of the study is supported, as an examination of both types of reports reveals that they incorporate "brainwashing" and "mind control" imagery imported from the United States, even though such theories have been largely discounted within the United States. Use of such theories leads directly to some questionable policy recommendations, as demonstrated in the reports. Reasons for the spread of "brainwashing" ideas to Europe are discussed.     

Remembering "what" brings along "where" in visual working memory

Does a behavioral and anatomical division exist between spatial and object working memory? In this article, we explore this question by testing human participants in simple visual working memory tasks. We compared a condition in which there was no location change with conditions in which absolute location change and absolute plus relative location change were manipulated. The results showed that object memory was influenced by memory for relative but not for absolute location information. Furthermore, we demonstrated that relative space can be specified by a salient surrounding box or by distractor objects with no touching surfaces. Verbal memory was not influenced by any type of spatial information. Taken together, these results indicate that memory for "where" influences memory for "what." We propose that there is an asymmetry in memory according to which object memory always contains location information.     

Formal lexical paragraphias in a single case study: how "masterpiece" can become "misterpieman" and "curiosity" "suretoy"

Formal lexical errors are relatively rare in the production of aphasic patients. In this study, we report the case of DW, who makes a high proportion of these errors. A few other cases have previously been reported, but DW shows a number of distinguishing characteristics. First, formal lexical errors are made in spelling and not in spoken speech. Second, they are associated with morphological errors and not with semantic errors. Third, they often combine lexical units in ways which are semantically and morphologically illegal. Finally, the majority of morphological errors involve the insertion, rather than the deletion, of suffixes. This pattern can be explained by hypothesizing that DW's errors arise because of confusions among a cohort of lexical neighbors activated top-down from a phonological input and bottom-up from shared letters. One possible cause of the confusions is lack of proper inhibition among lexical competitors.     

附体的"大仙"

在社会上,自称为大仙的人一般分为二大类:一类是为了捞取钱财等不可告人的目的而装“仙”弄“鬼”来骗人;另一类,则是患有疾病,是一种病态反应。 这种疾病,医学上称之为:癔症性附体征。学者们的研究表明,此病的患者可能有心理遵从或者精神病。 下面,就介绍一例此病患者的发病情况,读后,也许您会对一些所谓的“大仙”有所了解,明白要相信科学、相信真理,反对虚假、反对迷信。 有这么一位范姓老年妇女,是农民。她经常腰酸腿痛。这     

The "what" and "where" of object representations in infancy

Four-month-olds' memory for surface feature and location information was tested following brief occlusions. When the target objects were images of female faces or monochromatic asterisks infants showed increased looking times following a change in identity or color but not following a change in location or combinations of feature and location information. When the target objects were images of manipulable toys, the infants showed increased looking times following a change in location but not identity or the binding of location and identity information. This evidence is consistent with the idea that young infants are unable to maintain the information processed separately in both the dorsal and ventral visual streams during occlusions. Our results suggest that it is the target's affordance for action that determines whether the dorsal or ventral information is selectively maintained during occlusion.     

Comprehension in "hyperlexic" readers

Mentally retarded children who can read aloud written words better than one would expect from their Mental Age are often called hyperlexic. The reading comprehension thought to be impaired in such children was investigated in four experiments. Mentally retarded advanced decoders, including autistic and nonautistic children, were compared with younger nonretarded children matched for Mental Age and Reading Age. Experiment 1 established that mildly mentally retarded readers could match sentences to pictures as well as could be expected from their verbal ability. This was the same whether they read the sentences or heard them. Experiment 2 demonstrated that only the more able retarded subjects, but not the less able ones, used sentence context in a normal way in order to pronounce homographs. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that these same more able children could extract meaning at both sentence and story level, and their performance was indistinguishable from that of normal controls. Hence, it is doubtful whether these advanced decoders should be called hyperlexic. In contrast, the readers of relatively low verbal ability performed much worse than their normal controls. Although they could be induced under certain conditions to read sentence-by-sentence rather than word-by-word, they did not do so spontaneously. Furthermore, they did not make use of already existing general knowledge in order to answer questions about the stories they had read. The ability to comprehend in terms of large units of meaning seems to be specifically impaired in these low verbal ability fluent readers. We suggest that it is this impairment that marks true hyperlexia. Since there were no differences between autistic and nonautistic readers on any of our tasks, we conclude that hyperlexia is not an autism-specific phenomenon.     

西方美学中的"形式":一个观念史的理解

倘若把西方美学范畴体系比作一张由形色大小各异的范畴编织而成的错综复杂的巨大的思维之网,那么毫无疑问,在一批最古老、最持久的强力范畴中,形式当属耀眼的纽结之一。我们引两段话印证形式的显赫身份:日内瓦学派批评家让·鲁塞断言,关于文艺现象的一切重大问题都存在大量无把握的和针锋相对的意见,“但如果说有一个概念挑起了矛盾或分歧,那正是形式这个中心概念。”①李斯托威尔写道:“只要略微瞥一下美学的历史,就可以知道形式论的重要地位了。从希腊时代一直到今天,它一再居于显著的地位。”②据塔达基维奇(又译塔塔凯维奇)的考证,形式…