Health Downturns and Predictors of Suicidal Ideation: An Application of the Baumeister Model

Suicidal thoughts and attempts have been studied from a number of perspectives, but only recently has an attempt been made to incorporate many different psychological perspectives into one framework. Baumeister (1990) has integrated personality and social psychological perspectives into one sequential model, moving from instigating events to a final stage of suicidal thoughts. Employing a sample of older adult subjects undergoing the stresses of a recent health downturn, this study tested a four-stage model of suicidal ideation based on many of the components proposed by Baumeister. Structural equation modeling achieved a good fit to the data. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of including life events, particularly poor health, and cognitive variables such as confusions in thinking, in understanding suicidal ideation.     

Work site group meetings and the effectiveness of a televised smoking cessation intervention

At the work site, smoking accounts for increased health care expenses and worker absenteeism due to smoking-related illness and reduced productivity and lost wages. Developing comprehensive and accessible smoking cessation programs at the work site is an important objective for health care professionals. In this study, employees of 43 corporations participated in a televised smoking cessation program accompanied by self-help manuals. The media component involved presenting a smoking cessation program on a network television affiliate station during the 4:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. news for 20 days. Employees at half the corporations also had access to semiweekly self-help group meetings. Adding self-help support groups to a program involving self-help manuals and the media reports was found to significantly increase abstinence and its maintenance over time. The implications of using the media, self-help groups, and work site locations in large-scale community-based interventions are discussed.     

团体心理咨询对提高大学生自信心的效果研究

本研究探讨了团体心理咨询在提高大学生自信心方面的作用。我们精心设计了团体心理咨询活动的过程,并在活动前后用五种量表对团体成员进行了测量。通过分析量表测量结果及其他定性研究方法,我们发现：（１）团体心理咨询可以有效地提高大学生的自信心。（２）团体心理咨询在发展性目标上也是有效的。本研究结果对今后的团体心理咨询研究及其应用具有一定的参考价值。     

Unexpected improvement, decline, and stasis: a prediction confidence perspective on achievement success and failure

The authors hypothesized that reactions to performance feedback depend on whether one's lay theory of intelligence is supported or violated. In Study 1, following improvement feedback, all participants generally exhibited positive affect, but entity theorists (who believe that intelligence is fixed) displayed more anxiety and more effort to restore prediction confidence than did incremental theorists (who believe that intelligence is malleable). Similarly, when performance declined, entity theorists displayed more anxiety and compensatory effort than incremental theorists. However, when performance remained rigidly static despite a learning opportunity, incremental theorists evinced more anxiety and compensatory effort than entity theorists. In Study 2, this pattern was replicated when the entity and incremental theories were experimentally manipulated. Study 3 demonstrated that for both groups, theory violation impairs subsequent task performance. Taken together, these studies provide evidence that lay theory violation and damaged prediction confidence have significant and measurable effects on emotion and motivation. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the literature on achievement success and failure.     

Temporal Contiguity and Contingency Judgments: A Pavlovian Analogue

The two experiments reported examine the role of temporal contiguity on judgments of contingency in a human analogue of the Pavlovian task. The data show that the effect of the actual delay on contingency judgment depends on the observer's expectation regarding the delay. For a fixed contingency between the cue and the outcome, ratings of the contingency are higher when the actual delay is congruent with the observer's expectation than when it is incongruent. We argue that our data can be understood within the context of the temporal coding hypothesis.     

On spatial response code activation in a Simon task

The Simon effect refers to the performance advantage for trials where the task-irrelevant location of a target spatially corresponds with the location of the response. It is thought that the irrelevant spatial code of the target facilitates responding by automatically pre-activating the spatially corresponding response code. This spatial code is thought to passively decay shortly after its activation. In this investigation, the response was selected according to the identity of a central cue. The selected response was executed or withheld depending the identity (Experiment 1) or the presence (Experiment 2) of the target. Varying the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA), between the central response cue and the peripheral target, allowed for a time-course analysis of the Simon effect. The results of two experiments provided no indication that the activation level of the irrelevant spatial code decayed while the relevant response was prepared. Although reaction times increased as the SOA decreased, the Simon effect was additive with SOA, suggesting that the automatic activation of the task-irrelevant spatial code was delayed until the task-relevant response code was mostly prepared, perhaps due to the capacity limitations of response selection.     

从“有()”式表达看何物存在——兼论西方哲学的汉语研究

"有()"式表达意谓的存在概念,回到中国思想的历史语境来看,不是性质概念,而是关系概念,即存在某物或有某物在中国心灵中是被表象为某物被……所具有,包括(1)某物被某一事物整体所具有,进而是(2)某物作为对象,被某种事物语言的对象域(论域)所具有,以及(3)某种事物语言被特定的说话人所具有。这种关系性理解反映在语言层面,就是中文谈论何物存在的习惯表达是"有()"或"存在()",而非某些西方哲学译文中看到的表达式"()存在"或"()在",后者意谓的正是作为性质概念的x存在,前者则是关系概念y具有x的缩略表达。因此从"有()"式表达入手探讨何物存在的中国理解,不仅是面向中国思想的知识性探索,更能使相关知识成果服务于为西方哲学的汉语研究奠定语义基础的目标。