Online monitoring of the social presence effects in a two‐person‐like driving video game using near‐infrared spectroscopy

We examined how a friend's presence affects a performer's prefrontal activation in daily‐life activities using two wireless portable near‐infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) devices. Participants played a driving video game either solely in the single group or with a friend in the paired group. The two groups (single and paired) were subdivided according to their game proficiency (low and high). The NIRS data demonstrated a significant interaction of group by proficiency. Low‐proficiency players in the paired group showed lower activation than those in the single group, but high‐proficiency players did not. In the paired group, high‐proficiency players showed higher activation than low‐proficiency players, but not in the single group. These results suggest that NIRS detects social presence effects in everyday situations: decreasing prefrontal activation in low‐proficiency performers due to tension reduction and increasing prefrontal activation in high‐proficiency performers due to increased arousal.     

Experiential Marketing and Marketing Experience: An Empirical Study of the Influence of Summer Boot Camp on Military Propensity

The purpose of this study was to examine how experiential marketing may influence military propensity via the Summer Boot Camp (SBC), a 5-day quasi–training camp for high school and college students run by the Taiwan military. A survey of 1,102 participants was conducted using questionnaires. The findings indicate that a satisfactory SBC experience leads to a higher degree of perceived experiential value, which in turn triggers favorable behavioral intentions regarding the military in terms of supporting national defense, recommending the SBC to relatives and friends, and visiting regional recruiting centers. Further, perceived experiential value plays an important mediator role for experiencing a military propensity by exerting a significant indirect influence. However, the influence resulting from a good experience and value is not sufficient to motivate participants to actually go to enlist. Implications for recruiting efforts are discussed in terms of designing effective experience marketing.     

Chasing vs. stalking: interrupting the perception of animacy

Visual experience involves not only physical features such as color and shape, but also higher-level properties such as animacy and goal-directedness. Perceiving animacy is an inherently dynamic experience, in part because agents' goal-directed behavior may be frequently in flux-unlike many of their physical properties. How does the visual system maintain and update representations of agents' animate and goal-directed behavior over time and motion? The present study explored this question in the context of a particularly salient form of perceived animacy: chasing, in which one shape (the "wolf") pursues another shape (the "sheep"). Here the participants themselves controlled the movement of the sheep, and the perception of chasing was assessed in terms of their ability to avoid being caught by the wolf-which looked identical to many moving distractors, and so could be identified only by its motion. The wolf's pursuit was frequently interrupted by periods in which it was static, jiggling in place, or moving randomly (amidst distractors that behaved similarly). Only the latter condition greatly impaired the detection of chasing-and only when the random motion was grouped into temporally extended chunks. These results reveal (1) how the detection of chasing is determined by the character and temporal grouping (rather than just the brute amount) of "pursuit" over time; and (2) how these temporal dynamics can lead the visual system to either construct or actively reject interpretations of chasing.     

垂直等值的应用及最新发展述评

由于实际的需求,垂直等值方法在近些年来迅速发展。但从垂直等值方法的整个过程来看,包括垂直等值的选用、双向细目编制、发展性量尺的构建、程序的选择和结果的报告,仍存在大量有待解决的问题。同时,随着其他测量方法的发展与进步,垂直等值与之相结合从而获得了进一步的完善。综观之,垂直等值方法的发展与完善,一方面依赖于各种模型和参数估计方法的改进与创新,另一方面还依赖于研究者对学业发展本质的不断深入认识。     

阿奎那灵魂学说的立场与方法

阿奎那的灵魂学说虽然从理性辩护主义的立场,调和了亚里士多德关于"灵魂是肉体的形式和现实性"的定义和古代教父关于"灵魂是不朽的精神实体"的论断,但它并非一个将哲学和神学无原则地掺和在一起的理论体系,而是通过意义辨析的方法对前人思想做出了创造性发展。在此过程中,基督教信仰赋予了他的学说以许多独特的内容和积极的影响。     

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.     

心理咨询中的突然获益：工作同盟及初始症状的影响

对82位当事人在咨询中的症状改变过程进行纵向研究,检验突然获益模式（Sudden Gain, SG）的发生及其与咨询效果的联系,并探索初始症状水平、工作同盟对SG的影响。结果表明,24.93%的当事人经历了SG,咨询效果显著好于其他当事人;SG组与对照组在初始症状水平和总体工作同盟水平上差异显著。结论：SG出现于本土心理咨询中,经历SG的当事人取得了更好的咨询效果,工作同盟与初始症状水平与SG的发生相关。     

Losing control in front of a fearful face: the effect of emotional information on cognitive control

How is our cognitive control system modulated by emotional information, especially fearful stimuli? An intuitive hypothesis is that fearful stimuli would enhance cognitive control so that people could switch from the ongoing task to emergent events more quickly to secure themselves. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the influence of emotional information on the shift function of cognitive control by using the task-cueing procedure, in which face images were presented as cues. With the gender of faces indicating which task to do, we manipulated the emotional valence of faces (neutral vs. fearful), finding that the switch costs were larger in the trials containing fearful cues than in the trials containing neutral cues (Experiment 1). This effect was not caused by enlarging task-set interference (Experiment 2), nor by slowing down cue encoding (Experiment 3). Contrary to the intuitive hypothesis, our results suggested that the endogenous task-set reconfiguration process was impaired when fearful faces were presented. We speculated that the benefit of decreasing cognitive flexibility in face of fearful stimuli is to speed up response in a dangerous environment, and this accelerating response is achieved by suppressing the goal-directed system to permit the fast, automatic stimulus-driven system to govern behaviours.     

The wolfpack effect. Perception of animacy irresistibly influences interactive behavior

Imagine a pack of predators stalking their prey. The predators may not always move directly toward their target (e.g., when circling around it), but they may be consistently facing toward it. The human visual system appears to be extremely sensitive to such situations, even in displays involving simple shapes. We demonstrate this by introducing the wolfpack effect, which is found when several randomly moving, oriented shapes (darts, or discs with "eyes") consistently point toward a moving disc. Despite the randomness of the shapes' movement, they seem to interact with the disc--as if they are collectively pursuing it. This impairs performance in interactive tasks (including detection of actual pursuit), and observers selectively avoid such shapes when moving a disc through the display themselves. These and other results reveal that the wolfpack effect is a novel "social" cue to perceived animacy. And, whereas previous work has focused on the causes of perceived animacy, these results demonstrate its effects, showing how it irresistibly and implicitly shapes visual performance and interactive behavior.     

试论和谐思想的佛教哲学依据

佛教作为一个思想文化体系,蕴涵有许多和谐思想。这些和谐思想对于解决现代社会的诸多问题,具有一定的借鉴作用。构建社会主义和谐社会可以从佛教吸收理论营养,但也不能照单全收,应该研究其深层次的哲学依据,通过其哲学依据来对佛教和谐思想进行辨析。