Challenging Christianity: Leo Tolstoy and religious education

The religious thought of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy is a well documented but often overlooked example of unorthodox Christianity. This paper uses the example of Tolstoy’s religious thinking to question the integrity of the current representation of Christianity in UK schools. It also uses Tolstoy’s criticism of orthodox Christianity to suggest a possible consequence of the existing depiction of Christianity on students’ understanding and attitudes.     

Skill transfer through goal-driven representation mapping

In this paper, we present an approach to transfer that involves analogical mapping of symbols across different domains. We relate this mechanism to Icarus, a theory of the human cognitive architecture. Our system can transfer skills across domains hypothesizing maps between representations, improving performance in novel domains. Unlike previous approaches to analogical transfer, our method uses an explanatory analysis that compares how well a new domain theory explains previous solutions under different mapping hypotheses. We present experimental evidence that the new mechanism improves transfer over Icarus’ basic learning processes. Moreover, we argue that the same features which distinguish Icarus from other architectures support representation mapping in a natural way and operate synergistically with it. These features enable our analogy system to translate a map among concepts into a map between skills, and to support transfer even if two domains are only partially analogous. We also discuss our system’s relation to other work on analogy and outline directions for future research.     

Hermann Hesse and the Daodejing on the Wu 無 and You 有 of Sage-Leaders

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), the poet, novelist, man of letters, and painter, created characters who, like the Daoist sages, had many paradoxical characteristics. Some of Hesse’s characters manage their paradoxical natures well and, like the balanced sages, are able to be simultaneously changing yet stable, full of life but also empty, in unison with nature and the social world. Centered between interchanging extremes, these balanced individuals are carefree yet self-controlled, efficacious in their work yet seemingly inactive, and successful in sustaining leadership and power yet humble and non-obtrusive. These sage-like individuals, the ideal leaders presented in the Daodejing 道德經, will be the focus of this essay. Specifically, I will focus on the Daoist “hub and wheel” analogy, the concepts of wu 無 and you 有, absence and presence respectively, which are extremely important in order to understand the influence of Daoist philosophy on Hesse’s literary examples of sage-leadership.     

Life satisfaction,ethical reflection,and the science of happiness

Life satisfaction is widely considered to be a central aspect of human welfare. Many have identified happiness with it, and some maintain that well-being consists largely or wholly in being satisfied with one’s life. Empirical research on well-being relies heavily on life satisfaction studies. The paper contends that life satisfaction attitudes are less important, and matter for different reasons, than is widely believed.] For such attitudes are appropriately governed by ethical norms and are perspectival in ways that make the relationship between life satisfaction and welfare far more convoluted than we tend to expect. And the common identification of life satisfaction with happiness, as well as widespread views about the centrality of life satisfaction for well-being, are problematical at best. The argument also reveals an unexpected way in which philosophical ethics can inform scientific psychology: specifically, ethical reflection can help explain empirical results insofar as they depend on people’s values.     

Personality and the coherence of psychotherapy narratives

The stories people construct about themselves and their social worlds are key aspects of their identities [Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5, 100–122]. Whereas certain expected life experiences (e.g., leaving home, getting a job) may be relatively easy to narrate, more unexpected and difficult events, such as undergoing psychotherapy, may pose a challenge to successful narration. Yet it is especially important to successfully narrate one’s experience in psychotherapy in order to maintain the gains from treatment [Frank, J. D. (1961). Persuasion and healing: A comprehensive study of psychotherapy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; Spence, D. P. (1982). Narrative truth and historical truth: Meaning and interpretation in psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton]. The present study collected psychotherapy narratives from 76 adult former clients and coded them for the fundamental story criterion of coherence [Baerger, D. R., & McAdams, D. P. (1999). Life story coherence and its relation to psychological well-being. Narrative Inquiry, 9, 69–96]. Former clients that were high in trait Openness to experience and those at higher stages of ego development told more coherent stories about therapy. The relationship between ego development and narrative coherence remained significant even when controlling for Openness. The findings suggest that high ego development may provide narrators with the kind of sophisticated frameworks for meaning-making that are especially well-suited for the important task of making good sense of psychotherapy.     

小学生对无性别事物的性别编码

采用拟人化配声和对形容词进行性别倾向评定的方法,对小学生对无性别事物的性别编码进行了研究。结果表明：（1）小学生对无性别事物存在着性别编码倾向,而且相当稳定。这种倾向一年级时已经基本形成,传统文化和生活经验会加强这种倾向。（2）小学生对无性别事物的性别编码总体趋势一致,但也存在一定的年级差异。随年级增长,将雌性倾向事物划分为女性的比率在增长,将雄性倾向事物划分为男性的比率也在增长。（3）小学生对无性别事物的性别编码也具有性别差异。男生和女生存在以自身性别为中心的倾向。男生更多地看到中性事物的男性特征,女生更多地注意到中性事物的女性特征。与男生相比,女生性别编码的倾向更强些。     

自我效能感与普通话测试的相关研究

通过研究自我效能感对普通话水平测试的影响,为普通话测试提供心理学依据。结果表明：自我效能感与普通话测试成绩呈显著的正相关,有较好的预测;被测试者年龄与自我效能感总分无显著相关;不同性别被测试者自我效能感存在显著的性别差异,女性自我效能感显著高于男性自我效能感。     

Differential effects of unilateral lesions on language production in children and adults.

We present the first direct comparison of language production in brain-injured children and adults, using age-corrected z scores for multiple lexical and grammatical measures. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited in a structured biographical interview from 38 children (5-8 years of age), 24 with congenital left-hemisphere damage (LHD) and 14 with congenital right-hemisphere damage (RHD), compared with 38 age- and gender-matched controls, 21 adults with unilateral injuries (14 LHD and 7 RHD), and 12 adult controls. Adults with LHD showed severe and contrasting profiles of impairment across all measures (including classic differences between fluent and nonfluent aphasia). Adults with RHD (and three nonaphasic adults with LHD) showed fluent but disinhibited and sometimes empty speech. None of these qualitative or quantitative deviations were observed in children with unilateral brain injury, who were in the normal range for their age on all measures. There were no significant differences between children with LHD and RHD on any measure. When LHD children were compared directly with LHD adults using age-corrected z scores, the children scored far better than their adult counterparts on structural measures. These results provide the first systematic confirmation of differential free-speech outcomes in children and adults and offer strong evidence for neural and behavioral plasticity following early brain damage.