句子语境中汉语词汇歧义消解的眼动研究

采用眼动方法.通过两个实验考察了汉语同音同形歧义词的歧义消解过程.结果显示:(1)在中性句子语境中,均衡歧义词的首视时间显著高于偏向歧义词.歧义词的意义通达仅受歧义词意义的相对频率影响,不受语境的影响;(2)在偏向句子语境中,当语境支持歧义词的次要意义时,被试对偏向歧义词的解歧信息的注视时间显著高于其他两类目标词,体现了语境对歧义词意义的整合作用.实验结果支持词汇歧义消解的模块化模型的观点.     

Cultural Differences in the Self: From Philosophy to Psychology and Neuroscience

Different thinking styles in Westerners and Chinese (analytic vs. holistic) lead to disparities between the two cultures not only in perception and attention but also in high‐level social cognition such as self‐representation. Most Western philosophers discussed the self by focusing on personal self‐identity, whereas Chinese philosophers emphasized the relation between the self and others. Dissimilar philosophical thinking of the self is associated with distinct cognitive styles of self‐representation (i.e., the independent self in Westerners and the interdependent self in Chinese). Recent brain imaging studies found that Westerners employed the medial prefrontal cortex to represent only the individual self, whereas Chinese utilized the same brain area to represent both the self and close others, providing neural basis of cultural differences in self‐representation. We suggest that the cultural differences in thinking styles between Westerners and Chinese influence both psychological and neural structure of self‐representation.     

民主的概念

The core elements of modern democracy are citizens who share equally in mutually-compatible basic rights, serve as the final decision-makers on the community’s constitution, and choose whom to be entrusted with legislative and executive powers, while at the same time wielding final veto power over the present government. The rule of the majority in modern democracy is no longer a fundamental principle, but rather a derivative principle the validity of which is based on the above-mentioned core elements. Translated by Hu Jinglei from Tianjin Shehui Kexue 天津社会科学 (Tianjin Social Sciences), 2007, (5): 7–12     

Grammaticality,Acceptability, and Probability: A Probabilistic View of Linguistic Knowledge

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well‐formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply reduce acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large‐scale experiments using crowd‐sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state‐of‐the‐art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic.     

Putting Raters in Ratees’ Shoes: Perspective Taking and Assessment of Creative Products

This study reported 2 experiments that studied the effect of perspective taking on assessment of creative products by using human raters. Forty responses of 2 alternative uses tasks (AUTs) and 15 alien stories generated by 6th-grade students were used as assessment materials. Undergraduate students as the novice raters assessed the products under 3 experimental conditions: assessing without any information of the ratees, assessing only with age information of the ratees, and assessing with age information and taking the perspective of the ratees. Results of Experiment 1 showed significant differences in creativity ratings between group 1 and 2. But no significant difference was found between group 2 and 3. In Experiment 2, raters in group 1 used objective perception and raters in group 3 were asked to take the perspective for more time. Raters in group 3 assigned higher ratings than the other 2 groups but no difference was found between group 1 and 2. Overall, the results showed the effect of perspective taking on assessment of creative products. Possible mechanisms of the effect and implications for creativity assessment and creativity teaching practice were discussed.     

Detectable Neuropsychological Differences in Early Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease: A Meta-Analysis

The development of methods for in vivo detection of cerebral beta amyloid retention and tau accumulation have been increasingly useful in characterizing preclinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD). While the association between these biomarkers and eventual AD has been demonstrated among cognitively intact older adults, the link between biomarkers and neurocognitive ability remains unclear. We conducted a meta-analysis to test the hypothesis that cognitively intact older adults would show statistically discernable differences in neuropsychological performance by amyloid status (amyloid negative = A-, amyloid positive = A+). We secondarily hypothesized a third group characterized by either CSF tau pathology or neurodegeneration, in addition to amyloidosis (A+/N+ or Stage 2), would show lower neuropsychology scores than the amyloid positive group (A+/N- or Stage 1) when compared to the amyloid negative group. Pubmed, PsychINFO, and other sources were searched for relevant articles, yielding 775 total sources. After review for inclusion/exclusion criteria, duplicates, and risk of bias, 61 studies were utilized in the final meta-analysis. Results showed A+ was associated with poorer performance in the domains of global cognitive function, memory, language, visuospatial ability, processing speed, and attention/working memory/executive functions when compared to A-. A+/N+ showed lower performances on memory measures when compared to A+/N- in secondary analyses based on a smaller subset of studies. Results support the notion that neuropsychological measures are sensitive to different stages of preclinical AD among cognitively intact older adults. Further research is needed to determine what constitutes meaningful differences in neuropsychological performance among cognitively intact older adults.     

Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills for Families of Individuals With Behavioral Disorders: Initial Feasibility and Outcomes

Family members of individuals with behavioral disorders are a valuable source of logistical and emotional support for patients. Family members may take on tremendous financial and/or psychological responsibility to care for their loved ones, which can result in poor psychological outcomes for the family and, in turn, impede the recovery of the patient. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills training is an effective treatment that has been utilized with numerous populations, including family members of individuals with behavioral problems, and has shown efficacy in improving various interpersonal outcomes; however, no study has examined feasibility and outcomes of delivering all four unabridged DBT skills modules to this population. Twenty participants attended weekly DBT skills classes for 6 months, where they acquired skills in mindfulness, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and distress tolerance. There were significant pre-post improvements for emotion dysregulation, stress reactivity, and various interpersonal outcomes; there were no significant changes in depression or anxiety. These results suggest that DBT skills may be effective at improving broad clinical domains in a sample of family members of individuals with behavioral problems. This research is the first step in demonstrating that DBT skills might benefit family members of patients with heterogeneous mental health problems and, therefore, fits in to the field’s growing interest in cost-effective transdiagnostic interventions.     

Stress-Related Growth Experience: Listening to Korean Adolescents who have Visual Impairments

Research suggests that negative life events facilitate stress-related growth, such as the development of coping strategies and restoration skills. In this study, we aimed to capture the characteristics of stress-related growth among Korean adolescents who have visual impairments. Using a constructive grounded theory methodology, three themes were identified as characteristics of stress-related growth experiences: (a) developing meaningful relationships, (b) creating coping strategies, and (c) discovering personal strength. This study indicates that Korean adolescents who had visual impairments developed their own coping strategies to deal with various stressors and increased their awareness of their inner strengths and talents. It also suggests that challenging life circumstances may provide opportunities for Korean adolescents who have visual impairments to experience emotional wellbeing.     

Clinician competencies: Strengths and limitations for work with transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) clients

Individuals who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming (TGNC) face a number of health disparities compared to individuals who identify as cisgender (those who self-identify with the sex they were assigned at birth). For example, TGNC individuals experience heightened rates of clinical depression, anxiety, general psychological distress, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. Despite these troubling disparities, many TGNC individuals report hesitance to seek mental health services due to concerns regarding culturally insensitive or even overtly discriminatory services from providers. In addition to decreasing service utilization among TGNC populations, discriminatory services impair intervention effectiveness even when TGNC individuals persist in seeking mental health services. The American Psychological Association (APA) and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) provide guidelines for culturally competent work with TGNC clients; however, research indicates a profound lack of TGNC-specific training and resources among mental health care providers. To address this gap, the present investigation utilized a mixed-method design to assess training experiences, understanding of terminology, and TGNC competence among mental health care providers at various training levels. Participants were current mental health clinicians across the United States. Implications for improving reported and demonstrated weaknesses are discussed.     

Rethinking culture and self-construal: China as a middle land

Amid criticisms of current paper-and-pencil type questionnaires measuring self-construal across cultural groups, the authors used a graphic representation scale to examine whether Anglo Canadians (N = 220) were more independent than Mainland Chinese (N = 196) and Indians (N = 212) in construing their relationships with closest family member, family members, closest friend, friends, (other) relatives, colleagues, and neighbors. Data generated 5 intriguing findings: (a) Chinese were more interdependent than Canadians but less so than Indians, indicating that Chinese culture has become more individualistic. (b) Canadians were more independent than Chinese in 6 relationship dimensions but were as interdependent as Chinese in self-closest-friend connectedness, somewhat contradicting 1 assumption of theories of independent-interdependent self-construal and individualism-collectivism (I-C). (c) Canadians were more independent than Indians in all relationship dimensions, supporting theories of independent-interdependent self-construal and I-C. (d) Chinese were as interdependent as Indians in self-closest-family-member, self-close-family-members, and self-relatives connectedness but more independent than Indians in the other categories of self-other relationships. (e) Participants' age did not have strong correlations with variables measuring self-construal in any sample, indicating that a person's attachment style may not change greatly over a lifespan. The authors discussed theoretical and methodological implications.