Brain activations associated with sign production using word and picture inputs in deaf signers

Effective literacy education in deaf students calls for psycholinguistic research revealing the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying their written language processing. When learning a written language, deaf students are often instructed to sign out printed text. The present fMRI study was intended to reveal the neural substrates associated with word signing by comparing it with picture signing. Native deaf signers were asked to overtly sign in Chinese Sign Language (CSL) common objects indicated with written words or presented as pictures. Except in left inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule where word signing elicited greater activation than picture signing, the two tasks engaged a highly overlapping set of brain regions previously implicated in sign production. The results suggest that word signing in the deaf signers relies on meaning activation from printed visual forms, followed by similar production processes from meaning to signs as in picture signing. The present study also documents the basic brain activation pattern for sign production in CSL and supports the notion of a universal core neural network for sign production across different sign languages.     

Acceptability of Behavioral Family Therapy among Caregivers in China

In the U.S., helping the noncompliant child and parent child interaction therapy represent behavioral family therapy programs that are empirically supported for treating the conduct problems of 2- to 7-year old children. This study examined how caregivers in China would view behavioral family therapy. Caregivers in Hangzhou, China reported the perceived age of deviance for behavioral family therapy targets (e.g., noncompliance) and rated the acceptability of behavioral treatment components (e.g., timeout). Chinese caregivers agreed with European-American culture on considering noncompliance, aggression, tantrums, and negative talk deviant during the pre-school period. Overall, Chinese caregivers considered all the following nine behavioral family therapy components acceptable: contingent praise, responsive play, ignoring deviant attention seeking, authoritative instruction-giving, warnings, chair timeouts, ignoring tantrums during timeout, room backups for chair timeouts, and immediate timeouts for aggression. However, specific parental reservations were found regarding backup procedures for chair timeouts, particularly room backups. Possible treatment accommodations of behavioral family therapy for Chinese families are discussed.     

患者的依从性与治疗效果——对两例急性会厌炎使用硬管放大喉镜检查的体会

为了提高无呼吸困难的急性会厌炎患者对治疗的依从性,对两名明确诊断为急性会厌炎,因自觉症状轻而忽视该病、拒绝接受医生治疗意见的患者,本着医患之间相互理解与信任的原则,非常规地应用冷光源硬管放大喉镜成像技术对患者进行检查,让患者观察到自身病变的影像,充分认识治疗的必要性,积极配合医生治疗,取得良好治疗效果。     

Increased testosterone-to-cortisol ratio in psychopathy

Only a few studies have examined hormones in psychopathy, and results have been mixed. It has been suggested that because hormone systems are highly interconnected, it may be important to examine multiple systems simultaneously to gain a clearer picture of how hormones work together to predispose for a certain construct. In the present study, we attempt to clarify the role of the hormones cortisol and testosterone in psychopathy by examining both hormones in a community sample of 178 adults demonstrating a wide range of psychopathy scores. Results showed that psychopathy scores were associated with an increased ratio of testosterone (baseline) to cortisol responsivity to a stressor. Psychopathy was not associated with either of these measures independently or with baseline cortisol levels. These findings suggest that these highly interconnected hormone systems may work in concert to predispose to psychopathy.     

What you learn is what you see: using eye movements to study infant cross-situational word learning

Recent studies show that both adults and young children possess powerful statistical learning capabilities to solve the word-to-world mapping problem. However, the underlying mechanisms that make statistical learning possible and powerful are not yet known. With the goal of providing new insights into this issue, the research reported in this paper used an eye tracker to record the moment-by-moment eye movement data of 14-month-old babies in statistical learning tasks. Various measures are applied to such fine-grained temporal data, such as looking duration and shift rate (the number of shifts in gaze from one visual object to the other) trial by trial, showing different eye movement patterns between strong and weak statistical learners. Moreover, an information-theoretic measure is developed and applied to gaze data to quantify the degree of learning uncertainty trial by trial. Next, a simple associative statistical learning model is applied to eye movement data and these simulation results are compared with empirical results from young children, showing strong correlations between these two. This suggests that an associative learning mechanism with selective attention can provide a cognitively plausible model of cross-situational statistical learning. The work represents the first steps in using eye movement data to infer underlying real-time processes in statistical word learning.     

Unbalanced triangle in the social dilemma of trust: Internet studies of real‐time,real money social exchange between China,Japan, and Taiwan

Using a dyadic game theory paradigm, three experiments on the social dilemma of trust were conducted over the Internet in real time, involving real money. It was predicted and found that in‐group favouritism in trusting behaviour was contingent on historical relationships between societies. In the China–Japan experiment, mainland Chinese but not Japanese trusted and made fair allocations to in‐group members more than out‐group members, and out‐group trust was best predicted by positive stereotypes of the out‐group for Chinese and identity for Japanese. In the China–Taiwan experiment, Taiwanese but not Mainland Chinese trusted in‐group members more than out‐group members, and in‐group trust for Taiwanese was best predicted by perceptions of current realistic threats. In the Taiwan–Japan experiment, there were slight in‐group favouring tendencies in trust, and positive stereotypes of the out‐group were the best predictors of out‐group trust. Japanese were unique in not displaying in‐group favouring behaviour at all, whereas both Chinese and Taiwanese were context specific in their in‐group favouritism. Stereotypes, social identities, perceptions of realistic threat, and historical anger made significant contributions to predicting trusting behaviour, but overall these survey measures only accounted for small and inconsistent amounts of variance across the three experiments.     

Hearing others’ pain: neural activity related to empathy

The human voice is one of the principal conveyers of social and affective communication. Recent neuroimaging studies have suggested that observing pain in others activates neural representations similar to those from the first-hand experience of pain; however, studies on pain expressions in the auditory channel are lacking. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study to examine brain responses to emotional exclamations of others’ pain. The control condition comprised positive (e.g., laughing) or negative (e.g., snoring) stimuli of the human voice that were not associated with pain and suffering. Compared to these control stimuli, pain-related exclamations elicited increased activation in the superior and middle temporal gyri, left insula, secondary somatosensory cortices, thalamus, and right cerebellum, as well as deactivation in the anterior cingulate cortex. The left anterior insular and thalamic activations correlated significantly with the Empathic Concern subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Thus, the brain regions involved in hearing others’ pain are similar to those activated in the empathic processing of visual stimuli. Additionally, the findings emphasise the modulating role of interindividual differences in affective empathy.     

虚拟社会心理学：现实, 探索及意义

虚拟世界成为人类日常生活的一个重要组成部分, 对人的思想、感情和行为产生不同程度的影响, 对这些问题的研究逐渐成为社会心理学领域一个新的研究范式。我们认为, 虚拟社会心理学研究的热点问题和重要结论主要关注人在虚拟世界中的自我表现, 虚拟的人际关系、虚拟团体表现, 及虚拟世界中的创造性合作。研究发现, 虚拟社会心理学既有与现实世界一致的地方, 也有很多独特的现象, 有必要成为中国心理学家关注的一个新研究领域。     

非注意状态下拓扑性质优先加工的电生理学证据

采用ERP技术并运用跨通路延迟反应范式来探讨拓扑性质知觉理论在非注意状态下是否成立,发现存在视觉MMN且视觉系统在非注意状态下对拓扑性质的加工比颜色加工更早,表明与局部属性(颜色)相比,拓扑性质在无意识中优先得到加工,拓扑性质知觉理论在非注意状态下是成立的。     

自我解释的研究现状与展望

自我解释(self-explanation)是指学习者在学习过程中通过自己向自己解释学习内容而获得知识的过程。文章主要阐述了自我解释的含义、分类、三种自我解释效果的认知机制,并且提出自我解释研究中尚待解决的问题及对其进行展望。