Reactions to male-favouring versus female-favouring sex differences: A pre-registered experiment and Southeast Asian replication

Two studies investigated (1) how people react to research describing a sex difference, depending on whether that difference favours males or females, and (2) how accurately people can predict how the average man and woman will react. In Study 1, Western participants (N = 492) viewed a fictional popular-science article describing either a male-favouring or a female-favouring sex difference (i.e., men/women draw better; women/men lie more). Both sexes reacted less positively to the male-favouring differences, judging the findings to be less important, less credible, and more offensive, harmful, and upsetting. Participants predicted that the average man and woman would react more positively to sex differences favouring their own sex. This was true of the average woman, although the level of own-sex favouritism was lower than participants predicted. It was not true, however, of the average man, who – like the average woman – reacted more positively to the female-favouring differences. Study 2 replicated these findings in a Southeast Asian sample (N = 336). Our results are consistent with the idea that both sexes are more protective of women than men, but that both exaggerate the level of same-sex favouritism within each sex – a misconception that could potentially harm relations between the sexes.     

Symbolically speaking: a connectionist model of sentence production

The ability to combine words into novel sentences has been used to argue that humans have symbolic language production abilities. Critiques of connectionist models of language often center on the inability of these models to generalize symbolically (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Marcus, 1998). To address these issues, a connectionist model of sentence production was developed. The model had variables (role‐concept bindings) that were inspired by spatial representations (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993). In order to take advantage of these variables, a novel dual‐pathway architecture with event semantics is proposed and shown to be better at symbolic generalization than several variants. This architecture has one pathway for mapping message content to words and a separate pathway that enforces sequencing constraints. Analysis of the model's hidden units demonstrated that the model learned different types of information in each pathway, and that the model's compositional behavior arose from the combination of these two pathways. The model's ability to balance symbolic and statistical behavior in syntax acquisition and to model aphasic double dissociations provided independent support for the dual‐pathway architecture.     

PHONOLOGICAL RECODING OF MIXED-CASE WORDS IN THE PRIMING TASK

The successes of the phonological recoding hypothesis induced us naturally to question the role of orthographic information. Mixed-case words (e.g., tOwEd -> toad vs. tOlD -> toad) were used as a prime in the priming task in order to investigate the locus of an orthographic spelling check, based on the assumption of the phonological recoding hypothesis. Experiment 1 showed that both normal-case prime and mixed-case prime produced significant phonological priming in a short Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) of the prime and the target. In contrast, Experiment 2, using a long SOA, showed that the mixed-case prime maintained the phonological priming, but the normal-case prime did not. These results indicated that the orthographic spelling check distinguished the normal-case and the mixed-case in a later stage of word recognition, not in an early stage.     

血管外科治疗进展与科技发展的关系

血管外科在近几十年日益发展成熟,并逐渐从普外科分离出来成为单独发展的学科.在科技发展日新月异的新世纪,新技术新材料的应用也推动着血管外科诊疗手段的突飞猛进.这就要求从事血管外科的医务工作者在临床工作中要树立科技发展观的意识,及时了解科技前沿的发展动态,用新技术新方法改善治疗效果,最大程度地减少患者的痛苦和提高患者的生活质量,促进人类健康生存和发展.     

II—Reflections on the Reasonable and the Rational in Conflict Resolution

Most familiar approaches to social conflict moot reasonable ways of dealing with conflict, ways that aim to serve values such as legitimacy, justice, morality, fairness, fidelity to individual preferences, and so on. In this paper, I explore an alternative approach to social conflict that contrasts with the leading approaches of Rawlsians, perfectionists, and social choice theorists. The proposed approach takes intrinsic features of the conflict—what I call a conflict's evaluative 'structure'—as grounds for a rational way of responding to that conflict. Like conflict within a single person, social conflict can have a distinctive evaluative structure that supports certain rational responses over others. I suggest that one common structure in both intra- and interpersonal cases of conflict supports the rational response of 'self-governance'. Self-governance in the case of social conflict involves a society's deliberating over the question, 'What kind of society should we be?' In liberal democracies, this rational response is also a reasonable one.     

Adjacent and Non-Adjacent Word Contexts Both Predict Age of Acquisition of English Words: A Distributional Corpus Analysis of Child-Directed Speech

Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child-directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We evaluate two sets of features: One set is generated from the distribution of words into frames defined by the two adjacent words. These features primarily encode syntactic aspects of word usage. The other set is generated from non-adjacent co-occurrences between words. These features encode complementary thematic aspects of word usage. Regression models using these distributional features to predict age of acquisition of 656 early-acquired English words indicate that both types of features improve predictions over simpler models based on frequency and appearance in salient or simple utterance contexts. Syntactic features were stronger predictors of children's production than comprehension, whereas thematic features were stronger predictors of comprehension. Overall, earlier acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for nouns and verbs, and by thematic content related to food and face-to-face play topics; later acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for pronouns and question words, and by content related to narratives and object play.     

The effectiveness of short-format refutational fact-checks

Fact-checking has become an important feature of the modern media landscape. However, it is unclear what the most effective format of fact-checks is. Some have argued that simple retractions that repeat a false claim and tag it as false may backfire because they boost the claim's familiarity. More detailed refutations may provide a more promising approach, but may not be feasible under the severe space constraints associated with social-media communication. In two experiments, we tested whether (1) simple ‘false-tag’ retractions can indeed be ineffective or harmful; and (2) short-format (140-character) refutations are more effective than simple retractions. Regarding (1), simple retractions reduced belief in false claims, and we found no evidence for a familiarity-driven backfire effect. Regarding (2), short-format refutations were found to be more effective than simple retractions after a 1-week delay but not a one-day delay. At both delays, however, they were associated with reduced misinformation-congruent reasoning.     

重建人类禁忌观念

禁忌是指被禁止或忌讳的言行,在古代被认为是不可触犯的戒律。禁忌作为人类最古老的观念,从原始社会到传统社会一直是人类生命安全的守护神。然而,近代以来市场经济、工业革命和现代科技汇聚成的巨大力量使过去建立在畏惧敬畏对象和恇畏对象基础上的禁忌消失殆尽,导致了许多前所未有的重大社会问题和灾难性事件。因此,重建近代以来被否弃的禁忌观念必须提上议事日程。今天的禁忌对象也无非就是敬畏对象和恇畏对象这两大类,前者包括自然、神灵和祖先,后者包括战争、恐怖主义、干预人类自然生长和生活的各种科学研究,以及毒品、性乱、谣言、不讲卫生等。重建禁忌观念,就是要努力促使人们将禁忌内化为自己的底线生存观念,从而在内心深处对触犯禁忌感到羞耻和有罪。当前尤其要注重从小培养人们的畏惧和禁忌意识,强化触犯禁忌的耻感和罪感,营造切忌触犯禁忌的舆论氛围,用法律和道德促进禁忌观念形成。