Attribution of beliefs by 13-month-old infants

In two experiments, we investigated whether 13-month-old infants expect agents to behave in a way that is consistent with information to which they have been exposed. Infants watched animations in which an animal was either provided information or prevented from gathering information about the actual location of an object. The animal then searched successfully or failed to retrieve the object. Infants' looking times suggest that they expected searches to be effective when--and only when--the agent had had access to the relevant information. This result supports the view that infants possess an incipient metarepresentational ability that permits them to attribute beliefs to agents. We discuss the viability of more conservative explanations and the relation between this early ability and later forms of theory of mind that appear only after children have become experienced verbal communicators.     

论艾滋病患者的隐私权保护

中国艾滋病立法始于1987年,其标志性法规性文件就是《艾滋病监测管理的若干规定》,这也是中国第一部关于艾滋病的法规性文件.中国艾滋病立法虽然已有了19年的历史,但至今中国仍没有专门的、系统的、权威的艾滋病法规,大多数法律或法规性内容都是分散在其他的法律、法规或规章中,现有的法律法规体系残缺不全.2006年1月29日,国务院总理温家宝签署第457号国务院令,公布了《艾滋病防治条例》,该条例于2006年3月1日起施行.该条例明确了政府和个人艾滋病防治的权利与义务,应该是中国目前最专门、最系统、最权威的艾滋病法规.但如何保护艾滋病患者的隐私权,该条例并未充分说明,因此有必要予以探讨和研究.     

国外教师职业倦怠研究新进展

教师职业倦怠是教师因工作时间过长、工作量过大、工作强度过高所经历的一种疲惫不堪的状态,包括情绪衰竭、去人性化、低个人成就感三个方面.教师职业倦怠的起因很多,除个人因素外,更重要的是环境因素,主要包括超量工作、缺乏调节、缺乏奖赏、人际关系障碍、公平缺失和价值冲突等,研究者认为教会教师应对倦怠的策略是缓解倦怠的有效方法.     

Opioids: from physical pain to the pain of social isolation

The opioid systems play an important role in mediating both physical pain and negative affects (eg, the pain of social isolation). From an evolutionary perspective, it is not surprising that the neurocircuitry and neurochemistry of physical pain would overlap with that involved in complex social emotions. Exposure to trauma as well as a range of gene variants in the opioid system may be associated with alterations in opioid systems function, with changes in reward processing, and with vulnerability to substance abuse. A role for interventions with opioid agents in depression and anxiety disorders has been suggested.     

Cogex: A semantically and contextually enriched logic prover for question answering

This paper presents the architecture and functionality of a logic prover designed for question answering. The approach transforms questions and answer passages into logic representations based on syntactic, semantic and contextual information. World knowledge supplements the linguistic, ontological, and temporal axioms supplied to the prover which renders a deep understanding of the relationship between the question and answer text. The trace of the proofs provides a basis for generating human comprehensible answer justifications. The results show that the prover boosts the performance of the Question Answering system on TREC 2004 questions by 12%.     

攀缘激活的计时机制

攀缘激活指神经元在两个先后出现事件的间隔阶段呈现出的一种缓慢爬升式“期待”激活。这种激活的强度在后一事件出现时达最高峰,以致被视为一种可能时距编码机制而成为目前时间生物学研究的一个热点问题。目前攀援激活的计时作用神经机制有三种主要观点：膜电流假说、双稳态单元假说、线性整合假说。未来研究将主要集中于探索攀缘激活的神经元突触机制,非固定间隔时距条件下攀缘激活的计时机制及攀缘激活、运动准备和脉冲累加之间的关系。     

Attention reduces perceived brightness contrast

The effects of attention on brightness perception was investigated in four experiments. In the first three, subjects estimated the brightness of a briefly presented small grey square by selecting a number that corresponded to one of four possible squares varying on a lightness-darkness dimension. In the last experiment, subjects matched the brightness of two peripheral squares, one attended and one unattended. When the stimulus appeared on a white background (Experiments 1, 2, and 4a) it was judged as brighter when attention was directed to its location than when attention was diverted to another location. When the stimulus appeared on a dark background (Experiments 3 and 4b), the opposite pattern of results was obtained: the attended stimulus was judged as darker than the unattended one. These results show that attention reduces the perceived contrast between the stimulus and its background, suggesting that attention enables subjects to provide a more veridical judgement of stimulus brightness by limiting processing resources to the square itself, at the expense of the surrounding background. As attention produced a directional brightness effect rather than just an improvement in report accuracy, the results can be attributed to early perceptual processing effects, hence providing support for early selection views of attention.     

Why do Managers Engage in Trustworthy Behavior? A Multilevel Cross‐Cultural Study in 18 Countries

Drawing on theories of generalized exchange and the norm of indirect reciprocity, we conceptualize subordinates’ organizational citizenship behavior directed toward the organization (OCBO) and directed toward peers (OCBI) as antecedents of managerial trustworthy behavior and examine how managers’ affective trust in subordinates mediates this relationship. We also investigate the extent to which this mediation is moderated by the level of collectivism in a society. Data were collected from 741 managers and 2,111 subordinates in 18 countries representing all major cultural regions of the world. We find support for our hypothesized moderated mediation in that managers’ affective trust in subordinates mediates the relationships between both subordinates’ OCBO and managerial trustworthy behavior, and subordinates’ OCBI and managerial trustworthy behavior across the different countries studied. Further, managers’ affective trust in subordinates only mediates the relationships between both types of citizenship behavior and managerial trustworthy behavior when collectivism is low to medium but not when it is high. Implications for research on cross‐cultural psychology, trust, and organizational citizenship behavior are discussed.