The Structure of Evolutionary Theory : on Stephen Jay Gould's Monumental Masterpiece

Stephen Jay Gould's monumental The Structure of Evolutionary Theory “attempts to expand and alter the premises of Darwinism, in order to build an enlarged and distinctive evolutionary theory … while remaining within the tradition, and under the logic, of Darwinian argument.” The three branches or “fundamental principles of Darwinian logic” are, according to Gould: agency (natural selection acting on individual organisms), efficacy (producing new species adapted to their environments), and scope (accumulation of changes that through geological time yield the living world's panoply of diversity and morphological complexity). Gould's efforts to contribute something important to each of these three fundamental components of Darwinian Theory are far from successful.     

Do Mindsets Shape Students’ Well-Being and Performance?

“Mindsets (or implicit theories) are people’s lay beliefs about the nature of human attributes, such as intelligence or personality”. Individuals with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence is an unchangeable trait, whereas those with a growth mindset think of it as a malleable quality that can be increased and developed. This study explored the relationships among growth mindset, wellbeing, and performance in a sample of 1,240 students from a multi-campus private university located in 18 states across Mexico. Our results indicated that individuals who scored high in growth (vs. fixed) mindset showed increased levels of wellbeing and also performed better in school. Furthermore, we found that wellbeing mediated the relationship between growth mindset and performance and that the effect of growth mindset on grades was higher among younger students. These findings have interesting implications for psychology and education.     

Infants' early ability to segment the conversational speech signal predicts later language development: a retrospective analysis

Two studies examined relationships between infants' early speech processing performance and later language and cognitive outcomes. Study 1 found that performance on speech segmentation tasks before 12 months of age related to expressive vocabulary at 24 months. However, performance on other tasks was not related to 2-year vocabulary. Study 2 assessed linguistic and cognitive skills at 4-6 years of age for children who had participated in segmentation studies as infants. Children who had been able to segment words from fluent speech scored higher on language measures, but not general IQ, as preschoolers. Results suggest that speech segmentation ability is an important prerequisite for successful language development, and they offer potential for developing measures to detect language impairment at an earlier age.     

Treatment with medications affecting dopaminergic and serotonergic mechanisms: effects on fluency and anxiety in persons who stutter

Medications with dopamine antagonist properties, such as haloperidol, and those with serotonin reuptake inhibitor properties, such as clomipramine, have been shown to improve fluency. To examine the degree to which each of these two pharmacological mechanisms might independently affect fluency, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, paroxetine, and a selective dopamine (D-2) antagonist, pimozide, were evaluated. Both types of medications also affect mood and anxiety, factors that could influence fluency levels. Therefore, we also evaluated the medications’ effects on generalized and speech-related anxiety and the relationships between changes in anxiety and changes in fluency in 11 subjects with a history of developmental stuttering. The randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled crossover study that was designed had to be terminated prior to completion due to severe side effects following withdrawal from paroxetine. Even with a reduced sample size (n = 6), significant improvement in percent fluent speaking time (p = 0.02) was found using a telephone task between baseline and pimozide (n = 6), with average duration of dysfluencies significantly shorter (p = 0.04) but no significant difference in the estimated number of dysfluencies per minute. This significant improvement was associated with non-significant increases in generalized anxiety, but non-significant decreases in speech-related anxiety. No significant differences were found in fluency between baseline and paroxetine (n = 5). These preliminary results suggest that fluency improvement is more likely to be mediated by dopaminergic rather than serotonergic mechanisms. Due to its side effects, however, pimozide may be considered a risk for treatment of stuttering.

Educational objectives: As a result of reading this paper the reader will describe and explain: (1) how medications may affect fluency and the rationale for selecting medications for treatment trials; (2) the interrelationship between fluency and anxiety; and (3) factors important in developing clinical trials using medications.     

Multitask investigation of individual differences in hemispheric asymmetry

Right-handed subjects (N = 120) participated in four different laterality tasks designed to measure aspects of cerebral hemisphere asymmetry: identification of dichotically presented consonant-vowel syllables (CVs), examination of the effects of concurrent repetition of CVs and concurrent anagram solution on finger-tapping by the right and left hands, lateralized identification of CVs presented tachistoscopically to the left and right visual fields, and left/right biases on a free-vision face task involving judgments of emotion. Ear differences in the dichotic listening task were related to the pattern of lateralized interference in the dual-task finger-tapping paradigm. There were no other significant relations between pairs of tasks, but when the present results are considered in the light of other recent experiments, there appears to be a relation between lateral bias on the free-vision face task and visual field differences in tachistoscopic identification. The pattern of results has implications for hypothesized individual differences among right-handers in cerebral dominance for verbal processes, input pathway dominance, and asymmetric arousal of the two cerebral hemispheres.     

Guarding confidentiality in clinical groups: the therapist's dilemma.

This study examines the confidentiality practices of highly experienced, well-trained group psychotherapists. A provocative finding was that practitioners rarely inform prospective clients of confidentiality limitations. Their reluctance to do so appears to be based upon the belief that it might discourage persons from entering treatment, as well as having negative ramifications for the therapeutic process (e.g., members may be less likely to talk about unprotected topics). The prevalence and content of breaches in confidentiality are explored. Ethical, legal, clinical, and educational implications of these and other findings are addressed. Research recommendations are offered.     

The Effect of Food on Test Anxiety

Proceeding from the literature on eating behavior and anxiety reduction, this study introduces food offering as a mode of intervention aimed at reducing anxiety. Two hypotheses were tested: (1) in an anxiety evoking test situation students will tend to consume more food than in a nonanxiety inducing situation such as a regular lecture; (2) eating food (i.e., peanut butter sandwiches) will result in a reduction of subjects' initial levels of test anxiety. Both hypotheses were confirmed. It also became apparent that the mere offering of food is conducive to some anxiety reduction, presumably due to the effect on the classroom atmosphere.     

A MATLAB toolbox for correcting within-individual effects of respiration rate and tidal volume on respiratory sinus arrhythmia during variable breathing

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is a common estimator of vagal outflow to the heart, dependent on parasympathetic activity. During variable breathing, both respiration rate and tidal volume contribute substantially to within-individual RSA variance. A respiratory control method allows for within-individual correction of the time-domain index of RSA. rsaToolbox is a set of MATLAB programs for scoring respiration-corrected RSA using measurements of cardiac interbeat intervals, respiratory-cycle times, and tidal volumes, recorded at different paced-breathing frequencies. The within-individual regression of RSA divided by tidal volume upon total respiratory cycle time is then used to estimate the baseline vagal tone for each breath of a given total respiratory-cycle time. During a subsequent analysis, the difference between the observed RSA (divided by the tidal volume at each breath) and the RSA divided by the tidal volume that was predicted by the baseline equation serves as an estimate of changes in vagal tone. rsaToolbox includes a graphical user interface for intuitive handling. Modular implementation of the algorithm also allows for flexible integration within other analytic strategies or for batch processing.     

乌托邦是我们时代的哲学范畴

布洛赫被誉为20世纪“乌托邦哲学家”。在他看来,乌托邦是20世纪一个重要的哲学一马克思主义范畴,乌托邦远没有限定在社会领域里,它也存在于艺术中,特别是存在于受表现主义影响的诗人和画家中。具体的乌托邦是一种斗争原理、一支社会力量,它预示政治上的未来远见、新事物的未发现状态。更美好生活的乌托邦不仅照亮未来,也照亮当下。一个马克思主义者不应传播悲观主义。