Is Wisdom in the Brain?

Book reviewed in this article:
James H. Austin, Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness     

Relationships Among Adolescent Girls' Eating Behaviors and Their Parents' Weight-Related Attitudes and Behaviors

This article examines adolescent girls' weightloss behaviors and possible parent influences related toweight and shape. Questionnaires were completed by 369grade 10 girls and their parents. Findings suggested that parent encouragement to loseweight was a more significant predictor of daughterdietary restraint than parents' own dietary restraintlevels. Mother influence variables added significantly to a regression equation after fatherinfluences had been entered, but the reverse was not thecase. Parents' food abstaining behaviors, such asfasting and skipping meals, predicted food abstaining in daughters. Most findings were replicated whendaughter body size was controlled for. Implications formodels of the transmission of diet and weight-relatedvalues from parent to child are discussed.     

Effects of Word Processing and Short-term Memory Deficits on Verbal Learning: Evidence from Aphasia

We report two experiments that investigate the abilities of aphasic subjects with lexical and short-term memory impairments to learn supraspan lists of 10 words. We examined effects of stimulus factors (characteristics of words and lists to be learned) and subject factors (verbal and nonverbal STM span, nature of language impairment). Learning ability was influenced by the imageability and frequency of the words to be learned (Experiment 1) and by the linguistic relationship among words in a list (Experiment 2). Additionally, learning ability was affected by the nature of a subject's word processing deficit (whether it involved semantic and/or phonological processes). Phonological ability was positively associated with learning in both experiments, and semantic ability was associated with learning when words in a list were high in both frequency and imageability (Experiment 1) or were contextually related to one another (Experiment 2). Finally, verbal STM span was positively related to learning performance, but the effect was more pronounced for word span than digit span. These relationships among word processing ability, verbal STM span, and learning ability are discussed with reference to learning in aphasia and to models of learning more generally.     

Hobbes's Theory of Rights – A Modern Interest Theory

The received view in Thomas Hobbes scholarship is that theindividual rights described by Hobbes in his political writings andspecifically in Leviathan are simple freedoms or libertyrights, that is, rights that are not correlated with duties orobligations on the part of others. In other words, it is usually arguedthat there are no claim rights for individuals in Hobbes's politicaltheory. This paper argues, against that view, that Hobbes does describeclaim rights, that they come into being when individuals conform to thesecond law of nature and that they are genuine moral claim rights, thatis, rights that are the ground of the obligations of others to forebearfrom interfering with their exercise. This argument is defended againstboth Jean Hampton's and Howard Warrender's interpretations of rights inHobbes's theory. The paper concludes that the theory of rightsunderlying Hobbes's writing is not taken from Natural Law but isprobably closer to a modern interest theory of rights.     

The roles of emotion management and perspective taking in individuals’ conflict management styles and disposition to forgive

This study aimed to link two fields of research: conflict management and forgiveness. Adult participants (n = 122) and a validating sample of significant others (n = 122) completed measures of disposition to forgive, conflict style, emotion management, and perspective taking; and multi-dimensional models of their relationships were tested. Disposition to forgive was most consistently associated with problem solving and yielding conflict styles. Greater perspective taking was associated with greater forgiveness, and greater problem solving and yielding conflict styles, as well as with lesser fighting style; and perspective taking fully or partially mediated the relationship between ability to repair emotions and dispositions to forgive and problem solve during conflict. Significant other reports confirmed most of the findings based on self-report.     

Children’s mapping between symbolic and nonsymbolic representations of number

When children learn to count and acquire a symbolic system for representing numbers, they map these symbols onto a preexisting system involving approximate nonsymbolic representations of quantity. Little is known about this mapping process, how it develops, and its role in the performance of formal mathematics. Using a novel task to assess children’s mapping ability, we show that children can map in both directions between symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical representations and that this ability develops between 6 and 8 years of age. Moreover, we reveal that children’s mapping ability is related to their achievement on tests of school mathematics over and above the variance accounted for by standard symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical tasks. These findings support the proposal that underlying nonsymbolic representations play a role in children’s mathematical development.     

Self-compassion and reactions to unpleasant self-relevant events: the implications of treating oneself kindly

Five studies investigated the cognitive and emotional processes by which self-compassionate people deal with unpleasant life events. In the various studies, participants reported on negative events in their daily lives, responded to hypothetical scenarios, reacted to interpersonal feedback, rated their or others' videotaped performances in an awkward situation, and reflected on negative personal experiences. Results from Study 1 showed that self-compassion predicted emotional and cognitive reactions to negative events in everyday life, and Study 2 found that self-compassion buffered people against negative self-feelings when imagining distressing social events. In Study 3, self-compassion moderated negative emotions after receiving ambivalent feedback, particularly for participants who were low in self-esteem. Study 4 found that low-self-compassionate people undervalued their videotaped performances relative to observers. Study 5 experimentally induced a self-compassionate perspective and found that self-compassion leads people to acknowledge their role in negative events without feeling overwhelmed with negative emotions. In general, these studies suggest that self-compassion attenuates people's reactions to negative events in ways that are distinct from and, in some cases, more beneficial than self-esteem.     

Internet-Delivered Targeted Group Intervention for Body Dissatisfaction and Disordered Eating in Adolescent Girls: A randomized controlled trial

This study evaluated a targeted intervention designed to alleviate body image and eating problems in adolescent girls that was delivered over the internet so as to increase access to the program. The program consisted of six, 90-minute weekly small group, synchronous on-line sessions and was facilitated by a therapist and manual. Participants were 73 girls (mean age=14.4 years, SD=1.48) who self-identified as having body image or eating problems and were randomly assigned to an intervention group (n=36) (assessed at baseline, post-intervention and at 2- and 6-months follow-up) or a delayed treatment control group (n=37) (assessed at baseline and 6–7 weeks later). Clinically significant improvements in body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and depression were observed at post-intervention and maintained at follow-up. Internet delivery was enthusiastically endorsed. The program offers a promising approach to improve body image and eating problems that also addresses geographic access problems.     

Bootstrapping the lexicon: a computational model of infant speech segmentation

Prelinguistic infants must find a way to isolate meaningful chunks from the continuous streams of speech that they hear. BootLex, a new model which uses distributional cues to build a lexicon, demonstrates how much can be accomplished using this single source of information. This conceptually simple probabilistic algorithm achieves significant segmentation results on various kinds of language corpora - English, Japanese, and Spanish; child- and adult-directed speech, and written texts; and several variations in coding structure - and reveals which statistical characteristics of the input have an influence on segmentation performance. BootLex is then compared, quantitatively and qualitatively, with three other groups of computational models of the same infant segmentation process, paying particular attention to functional characteristics of the models and their similarity to human cognition. Commonalities and contrasts among the models are discussed, as well as their implications both for theories of the cognitive problem of segmentation itself, and for the general enterprise of computational cognitive modeling.