发展性阅读困难的行为遗传学研究

发展性阅读困难是学龄儿童常见的学习障碍,其病源学问题极其复杂,很多行为遗传学家针对遗传和环境对阅读困难的影响进行了大量的研究。该文对阅读困难的行为遗传学研究进行了回顾,特别是综合介绍了分子遗传学研究所取得的重要成果及不足。最后指出了研究所面临的困难和将来的方向,并对与教育的关系进行了总结与评价。     

理解能力不同的个体抑制干扰信息的效率

根据多媒语言理解测试 ,筛选出汉语综合理解能力高、低不同的两组被试 ,采用固定速移动窗口阅读与选择性再认相结合的实验范式 ,在两个实验中考察了两组被试在理解加工汉语双字词和两从句复合句的过程中对外在干扰信息的抑制效率。词汇加工与句子加工两个实验的结果一致表明 :不同语言理解能力的个体在抑制干扰信息的效率上存在差异 ,低理解能力者的抑制效率也较低 ;抑制效率受到干扰材料意义性的影响 ,越有意义的干扰越难以被抑制     

内隐学习与外显学习的相互关系

对内隐与外显学习过程的相互作用进行了探讨。被试为上海高二学生 10 0人 ,实验通过限定状态语法和双条件语法两种材料的会聚操作对 5种实验条件进行了比较。研究结果表明 :(1)内隐学习具有很强的抽象性 ,本研究首次对此给予了高度评价 ;(2 )内隐与外显学习存在相互作用 ,在学习过程中 ,时而互相促进 ,时而互相冲突 ,时而内隐学习贡献大 ,时而外显学习贡献大 ,本研究探明了内隐学习与外显学习的贡献谁大谁小 ,视学习材料的难度而定。实验启示 ,在人类的学习和生活中 ,内隐学习及其与外显学习的相互作用起着不可估量的作用 !     

Relationship between job burnout and personal wellness in mental health professionals

This study aimed to determine the nature of the relationship between job burnout and personal wellness among mental health professionals. The authors performed intercorrelations and multivariate multiple regression analyses to identify the relationship between subscales of job burnout and personal wellness. Results showed that all subscales of job burnout, except for the Negative Work Environment subscale, significantly predicted a large amount of the variance in the collective personal wellness subscales. Implications for mental health professionals’ clinical practice, training, and supervision and limitations and prospects for future studies are discussed.     

An archer's perceived form scales the "hitableness" of archery targets

For skills that involve hitting a target, subsequent judgments of target size correlate with prior success in hitting that target. We used an archery context to examine the judgment-success relationship with varied target sizes in the absence of explicit knowledge of results. Competitive archers shot at targets 50 m away that varied in size among five diameters. Immediately after the arrow's release, its flight and landing were occluded and archers chose which of 18 miniature targets looked most like the distal target. Greater apparent size correlated with higher accuracy. In a second experiment, nonarchers merely aimed the bow (without an arrow) at varied targets. Apparent size was larger when the bow arm was stabilized than when it was not. Archery is seemingly an instance of affordance-based control: For an archer, the affordance of the target is the "hitableness" of its central regions, a property inclusive of his or her momentary, and perceptible, archery form. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Reevaluating the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in delay eyeblink conditioning

It has been proposed that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is not necessary for delay eyeblink conditioning (DEC). Here, we investigated the involvement of the mPFC in DEC with a soft or loud tone as the conditioned stimulus (CS) by using electrolytic lesions or muscimol inactivation of guinea pig mPFC. Interestingly, when a soft tone was used as a CS, electrolytic lesions of the mPFC significantly retarded acquisition of the conditioned response (CR), and muscimol infusions into mPFC distinctly inhibited the acquisition and expression of CR, but had no significant effect on consolidation of well-learned CR. In contrast, both electrolytic lesions and muscimol inactivation of mPFC produced no significant deficits in the CR when a loud tone was used as the CS, or in the unconditioned response (UR) when a soft or loud tone was used as the CS. These results demonstrate that the mPFC is essential for the DEC with the soft tone CS but not for the DEC with the loud tone CS.     

G(o) activation is required for both appetitive and aversive memory acquisition in Drosophila

Heterotrimeric G(o) is an abundant brain protein required for negatively reinforced short-term associative olfactory memory in Drosophila. G(o) is the only known substrate of the S1 subunit of pertussis toxin (PTX) in fly, and acute expression of PTX within the mushroom body neurons (MB) induces a reversible deficit in associative olfactory memory. We demonstrate here that the induction of PTX within the α/β and γ lobe MB neurons leads to impaired memory acquisition without affecting memory stability. The induction of PTX within these MB neurons also leads to a significant defect in an optimized positively reinforced short-term memory paradigm; however, this PTX-induced learning deficit is noticeably less severe than found with the negatively reinforced paradigm. Both negatively and positively reinforced memory phenotypes are rescued by the constitutive expression of G(o)α transgenes bearing the Cys(351)Ile mutation. Since this mutation renders the G(o) molecule insensitive to PTX, the results isolate the effect of PTX on both forms of olfactory associative learning to the inhibition of the G(o) activation.     

Violence risk: Re-defining variables from the first-person perspective

Over the past 25 years, there have been notable advances in violence risk assessment of mentally ill individuals using actuarial methods to define high versus low risk groups. A focus on readily observable risk factors, however, has led to a relative neglect of how the offender's subjective states may be valuable to consider in research on the ongoing assessment and prevention of violence. We argue for the relevance of considering idiographic features of subjective experience in the development of structured assessment methods. We then identify three heuristic groups of existing constructs related to aggressive and illegal behavior that may capture modifiable, time-varying aspects of mental functioning leading up to involvement in an act of violence. These hypothesized domains are: (i) construal of intent and cause; (ii) normative reference points; and (iii) emotion recognition and regulation. We suggest that risk state for violence can be studied in a parsimonious and direct manner through systematic research on coded speech samples. The coding method for such an assessment procedure would be almost identical to existing structured clinical judgment instruments with the difference that variables be defined from a first-person point of view. Some implications of this approach for the tertiary prevention of violence in high-risk individuals are described.     

Neural mechanisms underlying the higher levels of subjective well-being in extraverts: Pleasant bias and unpleasant resistance

The present study investigated the neural mechanisms that underlie the higher levels of subjective well-being in extraverts. The impact of extraversion on the human sensitivity to pleasant and unpleasant pictures of diverse emotional intensities was examined. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) for highly positive (HP), moderately positive (MP), and neutral stimuli in the pleasant session, and for highly negative (HN), moderately negative (MN), and neutral stimuli in the unpleasant session, while subjects (16 extraverts and 16 ambiverts) performed a standard/deviant categorization task, irrespective of the emotionality of the deviant stimuli. The results showed significant emotion effects for HP and MP stimuli at the P2 and P3 components in extraverts, but not in ambiverts. Despite a pronounced emotion effect for HN stimuli across the P2, N2, and P3 components in both samples, ambiverts displayed a significant emotion effect for MN stimuli at the N2 and P3 components that was absent in extraverts. The posterior cingulate cortices, which connect multiple neural regions that are important in interactions of emotion and extraversion, may mediate the extravert-specific emotion effect for pleasant stimuli. Thus, extraverts are less susceptible to unpleasant stimuli of mild intensity than are ambiverts, while extraverts have an additional enhanced sensitivity to pleasant stimuli, regardless of emotion intensity. Consequently, the decreased threshold for pleasant emotion and the increased threshold for unpleasant emotion might be essential neural mechanisms that underlie the higher levels of subjective well-being in extraverts.     

Formally grounding spatio-temporal thinking

To navigate through daily life, humans use their ability to conceptualize spatio-temporal information, which ultimately leads to a system of categories. Likewise, the spatial sciences rely heavily on conceptualization and categorization as means to create knowledge when they process spatio-temporal data. In the spatial sciences and in related branches of artificial intelligence, an approach has been developed for processing spatio-temporal data on the level of coarse categories: qualitative spatio-temporal representation and reasoning (QSTR). Calculi developed in QSTR allow for the meaningful processing of and reasoning with spatio-temporal information. While qualitative calculi are widely acknowledged in the cognitive sciences, there is little behavioral assessment whether these calculi are indeed cognitively adequate. This is an astonishing conundrum given that these calculi are ubiquitous, are often intended to improve processes at the human-machine interface, and are on several occasions claimed to be cognitively adequate. We have systematically evaluated several approaches to formally characterize spatial relations from a cognitive-behavioral perspective for both static and dynamically changing spatial relations. This contribution will detail our framework, which is addressing the question how formal characterization of space can help us understand how people think with, in, and about space.