Infants' On-line Segmentation of Dynamic Human Action

Identifying the developmental origins of scientific thinking, as well as its endpoint, provides an essential framework for understanding its development. The origins of scientific thinking are claimed here to lie in attainments in epistemological understanding, beginning with the understanding achieved at about 4 years of age that assertions generated by human minds are distinguishable from an external reality against which they can be compared. Despite this achievement, children between 4 and 6 years of age exhibit an epistemological category mistake regarding the source of knowledge. They confuse a theory making it plausible that an event occurred and evidence indicating that the event did occur, as the source of their knowing that the event occurred. Appreciation of this distinction develops rapidly during this age range and reflects increasing mastery of an epistemological understanding we argue to be of foundational status for the development of scientific thinking, defined here as the consciously controlled coordination of theory and evidence.     

Psychoanalysis,man, and value

Psychology does not seek to correlate independent happenings, but to discern in the manifold of a unique life, or of a unique culture, the pervasive sense or meaning which the life or culture expresses. The method is appropriate to the subject: a human being is not a string of lawfully connected events but an embodied meaning, an incarnated value. Psychology is therefore less like physics than it is like the critical interpretation of a work of art. It is psychoanalytical. Some of the traditional objections to psychoanalytic theory disappear in the light of this conception. Others vanish when it is realized that the analytic situation, being personal encounter as well as interpretative analysis, to some extent creates the being it analyzes.     

Evidence for task-dependent categorization in infancy

Two experiments compared infants' attention to the categorical distinction between people and animals in object-examining and sequential-touching tasks. In Experiment 1, 10- and 13-month-old infants distinguished between animals and people in an object-examining task. In this task, infants are familiarized with individual exemplars from one category, and then their response to exemplars from another category is measured. In Experiment 2, 13- and 16-month-old infants, but not 10-month-old infants, attended to the same distinction in a sequential-touching task. In this task, infants are presented with several exemplars from two categories simultaneously, and the order in which they touch those objects is assessed. Evaluation of infants' touching behavior in Experiment 2 also revealed developmental changes in how they approached this task. The combined results of these two experiments confirm the general trend reported in the literature and begin to provide insight into developmental changes that contribute to infants' ability to apply their categorization skills in different task contexts.     

A Cognitive Model of Dynamic Cooperation With Varied Interdependency Information

We analyze the dynamics of repeated interaction of two players in the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) under various levels of interdependency information and propose an instance‐based learning cognitive model (IBL‐PD) to explain how cooperation emerges over time. Six hypotheses are tested regarding how a player accounts for an opponent's outcomes: the selfish hypothesis suggests ignoring information about the opponent and utilizing only the player's own outcomes; the extreme fairness hypothesis weighs the player's own and the opponent's outcomes equally; the moderate fairness hypothesis weighs the opponent's outcomes less than the player's own outcomes to various extents; the linear increasing hypothesis increasingly weighs the opponent's outcomes at a constant rate with repeated interactions; the hyperbolic discounting hypothesis increasingly and nonlinearly weighs the opponent's outcomes over time; and the dynamic expectations hypothesis dynamically adjusts the weight a player gives to the opponent's outcomes, according to the gap between the expected and the actual outcomes in each interaction. When players lack explicit feedback about their opponent's choices and outcomes, results are consistent with the selfish hypothesis; however, when this information is made explicit, the best predictions result from the dynamic expectations hypothesis.     

Shame and Depressive Symptoms: Self-compassion and Contingent Self-worth as Mediators?

Research has identified the experience of shame as a relevant predictor of depressive symptoms. Building upon resilience theory, this is the first study to investigate if self-compassion and/or contingent self-worth (i.e., family support and God’s love) mediate the link between shame and depressive symptoms. Participants were 109 African Americans, within the age range of 18 and 64, who sought service following a suicide attempt from a public hospital that serves mostly low-income patients. Findings suggest that shame was related to depressive symptoms through self-compassion but not through contingent self-worth, underscoring the significant role that self-compassion plays in ameliorating the aggravating effect of shame on depressive symptoms. Results highlight the value of incorporating self-compassion training into interventions for suicidal African Americans in an effort to reduce the impact of shame on their depressive symptoms and ultimately their suicidal behavior and as a result enhance their capacity for resilience.