行动的认知表征水平

个体行动认知表征水平是与个人的行动而非一般心理功能具有特定关联的思维风格。它是一个80年代后兴起的研究领域。本文围绕行动认知表征水平研究的背景、认知表征水平与行动的交互作用以及行动认知表征水平的个体差异展开介绍。文章最后讨论了该研究的不足。     

Telling young children they have a reputation for being smart promotes cheating

The present research examined the consequences of telling young children they have a reputation for being smart. Of interest was how this would affect their willingness to resist the temptation to cheat for personal gain as assessed by a temptation resistance task, in which children promised not to cheat in the game. Two studies with 3‐ and 5‐year‐old children (total N = 323) assessed this possibility. In Study 1, participants were assigned to one of three conditions: a smart reputation condition in which they were told they have a reputation for being smart, an irrelevant reputation control condition, or a no reputation control condition. Children in the smart reputation condition were significantly more likely to cheat than their counterparts in either control condition. Study 2 confirmed that reputational concerns are indeed a fundamental part of our smart reputation effect. These results suggest that children as young as 3 years of age are able to use reputational cues to guide their behavior, and that telling young children they have a positive reputation for being smart can have negative consequences.     

Older but not younger infants associate own‐race faces with happy music and other‐race faces with sad music

We used a novel intermodal association task to examine whether infants associate own‐ and other‐race faces with music of different emotional valences. Three‐ to 9‐month‐olds saw a series of neutral own‐ or other‐race faces paired with happy or sad musical excerpts. Three‐ to 6‐month‐olds did not show any specific association between face race and music. At 9 months, however, infants looked longer at own‐race faces paired with happy music than at own‐race faces paired with sad music. Nine‐month‐olds also looked longer at other‐race faces paired with sad music than at other‐race faces paired with happy music. These results indicate that infants with nearly exclusive own‐race face experience develop associations between face race and music emotional valence in the first year of life. The potential implications of such associations for developing racial biases in early childhood are discussed.     

Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children?

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropomorphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and thus are more inclined to act according to the moral lessons of the stories. Here we experimentally tested this belief by reading preschoolers a sharing story with either human characters or anthropomorphized animal characters. Reading the human story significantly increased preschoolers' altruistic giving but reading the anthropomorphic story or a control story decreased it. Thus, contrary to the common belief, realistic stories, not anthropomorphic ones, are better for promoting young children's prosocial behavior.     

Speaking a tone language enhances musical pitch perception in 3–5‐year‐olds

Young children learn multiple cognitive skills concurrently (e.g., language and music). Evidence is limited as to whether and how learning in one domain affects that in another during early development. Here we assessed whether exposure to a tone language benefits musical pitch processing among 3–5‐year‐old children. More specifically, we compared the pitch perception of Chinese children who spoke a tone language (i.e., Mandarin) with English‐speaking American children. We found that Mandarin‐speaking children were more advanced at pitch processing than English‐speaking children but both groups performed similarly on a control music task (timbre discrimination). The findings support the Pitch Generalization Hypothesis that tone languages drive attention to pitch in nonlinguistic contexts, and suggest that language learning benefits aspects of music perception in early development. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/UY0kpGpPNA0     

Young children's self‐benefiting lies and their relation to executive functioning and theory of mind

It is well established that children lie in different social contexts for various purposes from the age of 2 years. Surprisingly, little is known about whether very young children will spontaneously lie for personal gain, how self‐benefiting lies emerge, and what cognitive factors affect the emergence of self‐benefiting lies. To bridge this gap in the literature, we situated children between 2 and 4 years of age in a zero‐sum game where children must lie to their opponent if they wanted to win a desirable reward. We found that the majority of young children did not lie even when they experienced personal losses repeatedly. However, some children spontaneously lied during the game; as the game progressed, more children lied. Further, we found that children's theory of mind understanding and executive functioning in terms of a combination of inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility had significant positive and unique correlations with how frequently children lied for personal gain. The present results taken together with the existing findings regarding children's lies for self‐protection and politeness purposes suggest that the act of lying begins early in life. Further, its emergence and development are influenced by children's specific cognitive abilities in the domains of theory of mind understanding and executive functioning.

Highlights

• The study investigated whether very young children will spontaneously lie for personal gain.
• This study used a zero‐sum game to elicit children's self‐benefiting lies. Results showed the majority of young children did not lie, and it is related to children's theory of mind understanding and executive functioning.
• The act of lying begins early in life, and its emergence and development are influenced by children's specific cognitive abilities in the domains of theory of mind understanding and executive functioning.

     

人心是何?现代新儒家的心理观

随着文化心理学的兴起,如何深化中国文化与心理学的联系,促进其对心理学的贡献成为了重要问题。在这方面,以梁漱溟、熊十力和冯友兰为代表的现代新儒家进行了开拓性的研究。他们在批判性接纳科学心理观的基础上,主张心理是多层次的存在,强调了心理的自觉性、能动性、生成性、道德性等内涵。新儒家的心理观既能启发本土学者妥善解决中国文化与心理的关系,又能推动建立一种既关注大脑生理机制与心理机制又蕴含本土内涵的综合心理观。     

魏晋玄学关于宇宙本体思想的逻辑演进

魏晋玄学究竟是一种什么样的思想文化?它出现在魏晋时代到底有何思想价值?也就是说,中国传统的思想文化为什么在继先秦诸子、两汉经学之后要出现和能出现这样一种以究玄为主要方式的思想文化?对这一问题的解读,尽管离不开对魏晋时期社会经济、政治、思想文化状况的分析研究,以及在此基础上对魏晋玄学之历史发展的分梳、阐述,但主要的方面不应是对魏晋玄学作史的考察,而应是对其作哲学的考察,即首先要确定玄学思想的哲学主题。     

大学生在双趋冲突和趋避冲突中的折扣率差异

目的探讨大学生被试在双趋冲突和趋避冲突条件下的折扣率差异。方法让70名大学生完成两种条件下的延迟折扣任务（DDT）。结果趋避冲突条件下大学生被试的折扣率显著低于双趋冲突条件下的折扣率,在延迟奖赏为中幅度（50-60元）时折扣率最大。结论相对于双趋冲突,损益情况和延迟时间同时影响着被试在趋避冲突条件下的选择。