Make‐or‐Break: Chasing Risky Goals or Settling for Safe Rewards?

Humans regularly pursue activities characterized by dramatic success or failure outcomes where, critically, the chances of success depend on the time invested working toward it. How should people allocate time between such make‐or‐break challenges and safe alternatives, where rewards are more predictable (e.g., linear) functions of performance? We present a formal framework for studying time allocation between these two types of activities, and we explore optimal behavior in both one‐shot and dynamic versions of the problem. In the one‐shot version, we illustrate striking discontinuities in the optimal time allocation policy as we gradually change the parameters of the decision‐making problem. In the dynamic version, we formulate the optimal strategy—defined by a giving‐up threshold—which adaptively dictates when people should stop pursuing the make‐or‐break goal. We then show that this strategy is computationally inaccessible for humans, and we explore boundedly rational alternatives. We compare the performance of the optimal model against (a) a myopic giving‐up threshold that is easier to compute, and even simpler heuristic strategies that either (b) only decide whether or not to start pursuing the goal and never give up or (c) consider giving up at a fixed number of control points. Comparing strategies across environments, we investigate the cost and behavioral implications of sidestepping the computational burden of full rationality.     

“为癌症患者心理赋能”的临床干预路径

“为患者心理赋能”是近年来医疗健康领域出现的一种新的积极医疗照护理念,其关注点是个体的能力而非缺陷,它强调医疗实践应该为改善健康和生活质量建立患者激励结构。首先梳理了赋能的概念发展与心理结构,随后引证多个实证研究总结出为癌症患者心理赋能的四条临床干预路径,指出医患共同决策、同伴支持、赋能教育以及认知行为压力管理的赋能价值。最后结合已有成果和研究中发现的问题,提出癌症心理赋能干预发展建议,有利于进一步开展临床研究和实践探索。

     

情绪智力与工作绩效的关系

大量研究证实, 情绪智力能够正向预测工作绩效, 二者关系会受到中介与调节变量的影响。现有研究存在一些问题和不足, 原因在于不同理论模型的分歧与对立、测验工具存在问题和研究没有深入到维度水平等。未来研究应该致力于理论模型的整合、新的测验工具的编制、中介与调节变量的考察、深入到维度水平考察情绪智力与工作绩效的关系。     

大中小学生内隐序列学习的发展性研究

采用序列学习的研究范式,对大中小学生的序列反应时和序列生成成绩进行测量,结果表明:(1)大中小学生均能在序列学习中获得序列规则。(2)采用比例测量方法,大中小学生的序列反应时无显著差异。(3)大中小学生的序列生成成绩是不同的,包含成绩随着年级升高而上升,排除成绩则不随年级变化;小学生包含和排除成绩无显著差异,而中学生和大学生的差异逐渐加大。说明序列学习的意识成分随年级的升高而增加。     

纵向数据分析方法

纵向研究方法是心理学研究领域的一种重要方法。近年来,国外在纵向研究数据分析方法上取得了一系列理论和应用上的进展。章对此方法进行了简要的回顾,并重点阐述了最近发展起来的纵向研究的方法：多层线性模型和潜变量增长曲线模型,并在此基础上对几种常用的方法进行了比较。     

老年人短时记忆特点的研究

本工作以50名青年作对照,对240名65—90岁正常老人的短时记忆特点进行了研究。结果看到:1.在逻辑故事记忆、图象自由回忆、数字广度和指向记忆四项记忆成绩上,均有随年老而衰退的明显趋势。其中除数字广度外,其他三项记忆在入老年后(65岁至90岁)有继续减退的趋势。在逻辑故事、指向记忆和总分上还见到有65岁和70岁组、75岁和80岁组成绩接近的现象;2.老年人顺背数字成绩较好,对刺激序列中末端刺激的正确回忆率较高,均说明老年人的初级记忆受损较少;3.四项记忆成绩比较,青年组故事分节分最高,然后依次为图象自由回忆、顺背数字和指向记忆,而老年组则无此明显顺序;4.文化因素对记忆成绩有明显影响。     

心理理论和语言发展的关系

大量的研究表明心理理论和语言之间存在着密切的关系,但具体关系如何,一直存在争议。文章介绍了心理理论和语言关系的新近研究,着重阐述了目前关于二者关系的两种观点： （1）心理理论和语言发展之间不仅是早期揭示的一般相关关系,而是可能存在着因果关系——或以语言为因,或以心理理论为因;（2）心理理论和语言都受第三种因素影响,如执行功能和生长环境,但这些因素是究竟如何影响心理理论和语言发展的,还需深入探讨。文章最后对该领域今后的研究提出了新的见解和思路,包括对不同语言能力间的比较研究,对二者关系的跨文化研究和毕生取向研究等     

互联网使用与青少年自我认同的生态关系

互联网已经渗透到人们日常生活的方方面面,给社会及个人带来了广泛而深远的影响,正处于人生的关键时期的青少年更是首当其冲。依据Bronfenbrenner的生态学模型,该文从微系统、中系统、宏系统以及处于生态系统中心的青少年自身4个方面,分别论述了互联网使用与青少年自我认同的形成与发展的密切关系,从而提供了有关互联网使用对青少年身心发展的影响方面的一些初步知识     

Sexual Harassment,Racial Harassment,and Well-Being among Asian American Women: An Intersectional Approach

ABSTRACT

Harassment of Asian American (AA) women has received little attention in popular culture and academic research despite their long legacy of sexualized racial stereotyping (e.g., Geisha, sexually submissive; Shimizu, 2007) and additional risk of mistreatment due to their membership in both marginalized gender and racial groups (Beale, 1970 Beale, F. (1970). Double jeopardy: To be Black and female. In T. C. Bambara (Ed.), The Black woman: An anthology (pp. 90–100). New York: New American Library. [Google Scholar]; Settles & Buchanan, 2014 Settles, I. H., & Buchanan, N. T. (2014). Intersectionality: Multiple categories of identity and difference. In V. Benet-Martinez and Y. Hong (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Multicultural Identity (pp. 160–180). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc. [Google Scholar]). This study addresses this dearth of research using an intersectional theoretical framework to comprehensively examine sexual and racial harassment with a sample of AA women. Results validated the underlying factor structure of the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (Fitzgerald, Gelfand, & Drasgow, 1995 Fitzgerald, L. F., Gelfand, M. J., & Drasgow, F. (1995). Measuring sexual harassment: Theoretical and psychometric advances. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17, 425–445. doi:10.1207/s15324834basp1704_2[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and the Racial Acts, Crimes, and Experiences Scale (RACES; Bergman & Buchanan, 2008 Bergman, M., & Buchanan, N. T. (2008). Development of the Racial Acts, Crimes, and Experiences Survey (RACES). Unpublished instrument. [Google Scholar]) for AA women. Additionally, our results replicated previous research indicating that participants often reported experiencing behaviors that constitute harassment, but did not label them as such. This supports the use of behavioral measures over items that require individuals to label their experiences as harassment. Finally, we examined the associations between these forms of harassment and two indicators of psychological well-being, depression, and posttraumatic stress (PTS). Our results found that gender harassment was associated with more depression, whereas unwanted sexual attention, sexual coercion, and racial harassment were associated with increased PTS. This supports the utility of including both sexual and racial harassment in providing a more nuanced understanding of AA women’s harassment experiences overall and the relationship of harassment to psychological well-being. We discuss theoretical and clinical implications of these findings.     

Alteration of cingulate long-term plasticity and behavioral sensitization to inflammation by environmental enrichment

Exposure to an enriched environment (EE) has been shown to induce cortical plasticity. Considerable amount of research is focused on the effects of EE in the hippocampus; however, effects of EE on other brain regions and the mechanisms involved are not well known. To investigate this, we induced cortical plasticity by placing mice in an EE for one month and measured the effects of EE in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Here, we show that EE enhanced the expression of the plasticity gene, egr-1, in the ACC of EE animals accompanied by enhanced cingulate long-term potentiation (LTP) and decreased cingulate long-term depression (LTD). The increased NMDA receptor NR2B/NR2A subunits current ratio is associated with the plasticity seen in the ACC while total protein levels remain unchanged. Furthermore, behavioral experiments show that these mice exposed to EE demonstrate enhanced responses to acute and long-term inflammation. Our findings suggest that exposure to EE alters physiological properties within the ACC which results in enhanced responses to inflammation.