Putting the “We” Into Well‐being: Using Collectivism‐Themed Measures of Well‐Being Attenuates Well‐being's Association With Individualism

Studies repeatedly have documented that societal well‐being is associated with individualism. Most of these studies, however, have conceptualized/measured well‐being as individual life satisfaction—a type of well‐being that originates in Western research traditions. Drawing from the latest research on interdependent happiness and on family well‐being, we posit that people across cultures pursue different types of well‐being, and test whether more collectivism‐themed types of well‐being that originate in Confucian traditions also are associated with individualism. Based on data collected from 2,036 participants across 12 countries, we find support for the association between individual life satisfaction and individualism at the societal level, but show that well‐being's association with individualism is attenuated when some collectivism‐themed measures of well‐being are considered. Our article advances knowledge on the flourishing of societies by suggesting that individualism may not always be strongly linked with societal well‐being. Implications for public policies are signaled.     

The effects of psychological therapies under clinically representative conditions: a meta-analysis

Recently, concern has arisen that meta-analyses overestimate the effects of psychological therapies and that those therapies may not work under clinically representative conditions. This meta-analysis of 90 studies found that therapies are effective over a range of clinical representativeness. The projected effects of an ideal study of clinically representative therapy are similar to effect sizes in past meta-analyses. Effects increase with larger dose and when outcome measures are specific to treatment. Some clinically representative studies used self-selected treatment clients who were more distressed than available controls, and these quasi-experiments underestimated therapy effects. This study illustrates the joint use of fixed and random effects models, use of pretest effect sizes to study selection bias in quasi-experiments, and use of regression analysis to project results to an ideal study in the spirit of response surface modeling.     

Visual and Affective Multimodal Models of Word Meaning in Language and Mind

One of the main limitations of natural language-based approaches to meaning is that they do not incorporate multimodal representations the way humans do. In this study, we evaluate how well different kinds of models account for people's representations of both concrete and abstract concepts. The models we compare include unimodal distributional linguistic models as well as multimodal models which combine linguistic with perceptual or affective information. There are two types of linguistic models: those based on text corpora and those derived from word association data. We present two new studies and a reanalysis of a series of previous studies. The studies demonstrate that both visual and affective multimodal models better capture behavior that reflects human representations than unimodal linguistic models. The size of the multimodal advantage depends on the nature of semantic representations involved, and it is especially pronounced for basic-level concepts that belong to the same superordinate category. Additional visual and affective features improve the accuracy of linguistic models based on text corpora more than those based on word associations; this suggests systematic qualitative differences between what information is encoded in natural language versus what information is reflected in word associations. Altogether, our work presents new evidence that multimodal information is important for capturing both abstract and concrete words and that fully representing word meaning requires more than purely linguistic information. Implications for both embodied and distributional views of semantic representation are discussed.     

From Pathological Merger to a Reflective,Triangular Space: Parent-Infant Psychotherapy with a Mother with Borderline Personality Disorder

This article looks at Parent-Infant Psychotherapy work with a mother with Borderline Personality Disorder and her infant son. Mother had suffered a traumatic childhood and, when her son was born, withdrew into a delusion of merger with him, avoiding what she experienced as a violent, threatening and confusing world. Drawing on psychoanalytic and attachment-mentalization theories and neuroscientific and developmental research, this article explores mother’s difficulties in acknowledging her baby as a separate being, and the impact this had on baby, who was slowly turning toward an autistic way of functioning. The article discusses the therapeutic challenges in creating a reflective, triangular space where both mother’s and baby’s experiences could be thought about and understood. Finally, the author considers an interpretative stance that includes both mother’s and baby’s shared and their separate experiences.     

Hypermnesia in older people and its relationship with successful ageing / La hipermnesia en personas mayores y su relación con el envejecimiento exitoso

Abstract

This study analyses the phenomenon of hypermnesia and its relationship with variables associated with successful ageing such as age, sex, cognitive status and cognitive plasticity in older people. The sample consists of 124 institutionalized and non-institutionalized participants, whose ages ranged from 65 to 91. A specific task was used to evaluate hypermnesia; a cognitive screening test and a verbal fluency test were used to assess cognitive status, and the AVLT-LP test was used to measure cognitive plasticity. The results show significant improvements between the hypermnesia recall tests for the total sample and for all the groups, according to the variables studied. Participants with successful ageing characterized by a younger age, a high level of cognitive functioning and a greater cognitive plasticity showed better results than the other participants in the hypermnesia task with the exception of sex, which did not present differences between groups. This study confirms that hypermnesia occurs more significantly in older people with successful ageing regardless of whether they are male or female.     

When Extremists Win: Cultural Transmission Via Iterated Learning When Populations Are Heterogeneous

How does the process of information transmission affect the cultural or linguistic products that emerge? This question is often studied experimentally and computationally via iterated learning, a procedure in which participants learn from previous participants in a chain. Iterated learning is a powerful tool because, when all participants share the same priors, the stationary distributions of the iterated learning chains reveal those priors. In many situations, however, it is unreasonable to assume that all participants share the same prior beliefs. We present four simulation studies and one experiment demonstrating that when the population of learners is heterogeneous, the behavior of an iterated learning chain can be unpredictable and is often systematically distorted by the learners with the most extreme biases. This results in group‐level outcomes that reflect neither the behavior of any individuals within the population nor the overall population average. We discuss implications for the use of iterated learning as a methodological tool as well as for the processes that might have shaped cultural and linguistic evolution in the real world.     

Shared Sovereignty over Migratory Natural Resources

With growing vigor, political philosophers have started questioning the Westphalian system of states as the main actors in the international arena and, within it, the doctrine of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources. In this article I add to these questionings by showing that, when it comes to migratory natural resources, i.e., migratory species, a plausible theory of territorial rights should advocate a regime of shared sovereignty among states. This means that one single entity should represent their interests and maybe also those of third parties, managing and making decisions over the resource as a whole. Although such a regime might be the tacit goal of existing international conventions regarding wildlife, it remains untheorized in political philosophy and largely under-theorized in international law. By presenting the critical situation of the monarch butterfly in North America, I point to the inadequacy of the compartmentalized current regime, which generates injustice in migration; namely, the phenomenon whereby range states of a given species may neglect or over-exploit it while in their territory, to the detriment of others. I suggest that more flexible and imaginative governance arrangements are needed to deal in a better way with these and similar natural resources.     

Syntactic development in Chilean students’ narrative and expository discourse throughout schooling: different measures of syntactic complexity / Desarrollo sintáctico en narraciones y exposiciones orales de estudiantes chilenos a través de la escolaridad: diferentes mediciones de complejidad sintáctica

While there are studies that describe early syntactic development, less research has focused on oral syntactic development in Spanish throughout schooling according to text structure. This article describes syntactic patterns in Chilean school age students and compares the differences between narrative and expository discourse. The oral production of 462 students aged 5–18 years old from eight schools in a central Chilean region was analysed. Their oral productions were transcribed and segmented at clause and clause package levels; clause package length, clause package density and the clause density were calculated. Results show that students are more productive and construct more complex syntactical discourse as they advance through their education. The results also suggest that syntactic development patterns function differently in narrative and expository discourses. This indicates that students firstly master their syntactic resources before producing narratives. In addition, the implications of using different syntactic measures to describe syntactic development by text structure are explored.