Evidentiality in language and cognition

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3- and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable problems for learners; however, these problems are not (necessarily) conceptual in nature. Our data also suggest that, contrary to relativistic expectations, children's ability to reason about sources of information proceeds along similar lines in diverse language-learning populations and is not tied to the acquisition of the linguistic markers of evidentiality in the exposure language. We discuss implications of our findings for the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations during development.     

Touching the Spirit: Re-enchanting the Person in the Body

In this essay, we argue that touch constitutes a sacred connection between the patient and practitioner. When touch is avoided or overlooked, the enigmatic inner workings of the body are ignored as those aspects of the body that can be quantified and ultimately controlled are emphasized. In utilizing touch as a fundamental way of opening up space for the sacred, the practitioner affirms the humanity for both the patient and herself. Only by returning to the senses can practitioners resist the dehumanizing effects of machinery and re-enchant the health-care profession in caring for persons they have sworn to serve.     

Examining the help-seeking intentions of Chinese individuals in the United States

The underutilization of mental health services by Chinese individuals in the United States is concerning. In this study, we examined Chinese individuals’ help-seeking intentions utilizing the theory of planned behavior. Two hundred fifty-one participants were recruited for this study. The results revealed that help-seeking attitudes (β = 0.28, p < 0.001), perceived behavioral control (β = 0.21, p < 0.001), and subjective norms (β = 0.13, p < 0.001) were found to be significant predictors of help-seeking intentions. The implications of the results are discussed.     

The Perceived Stress Reactivity Scale: measurement invariance, stability, and validity in three countries

There is accumulating evidence that individual differences in stress reactivity contribute to the risk for stress-related disease. However, the assessment of stress reactivity remains challenging, and there is a relative lack of questionnaires reliably assessing this construct. We here present the Perceived Stress Reactivity Scale (PSRS), a 23-item questionnaire with 5 subscales and 1 overall scale, based on an existing German-language instrument. Perceived stress reactivity and related constructs were assessed in N = 2,040 participants from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. The 5-factor structure of the PSRS was found to be similar in the 3 countries. In the U.S. sample the questionnaire was applied using 2 modes of administration (paper-pencil and computerized), and measures were repeated after 4 weeks. Measurement invariance analyses demonstrated full invariance across mode of administration and partial invariance across gender and countries. Scale scores differed between countries and genders, with women scoring higher on most scales. Overall, reliability analysis suggested good stability of PSRS scores over a 4-week period, and validation analysis showed expected associations with related constructs such as self-efficacy, neuroticism, chronic stress, and perceived stress. Perceived stress reactivity was also associated with depressive symptoms and sleep. These associations were particularly strong when individuals scoring high on perceived stress reactivity were exposed to chronic stress. In sum, our findings suggest that the PSRS is a useful and easy-to-administer instrument to assess perceived stress reactivity.     

Applying bubbles to localize features that control pigeons' visual discrimination behavior

The authors trained pigeons to discriminate images of human faces that displayed: (a) a happy or a neutral expression or (b) a man or a woman. After training the pigeons, the authors used a new procedure called Bubbles to pinpoint the features of the faces that were used to make these discriminations. Bubbles revealed that the features used to discriminate happy from neutral faces were different from those used to discriminate male from female faces. Furthermore, the features that pigeons used to make each of these discriminations overlapped those used by human observers in a companion study (F. Gosselin & P.G. Schyns, 2001). These results show that the Bubbles technique can be effectively applied to nonhuman animals to isolate the functional features of complex visual stimuli.     

Transmitting and decoding facial expressions

This article examines the human face as a transmitter of expression signals and the brain as a decoder of these expression signals. If the face has evolved to optimize transmission of such signals, the basic facial expressions should have minimal overlap in their information. If the brain has evolved to optimize categorization of expressions, it should be efficient with the information available from the transmitter for the task. In this article, we characterize the information underlying the recognition of the six basic facial expression signals and evaluate how efficiently each expression is decoded by the underlying brain structures.     

Effects of parent education on knowledge and attitudes

This study evaluated 42 pregnant and parenting adolescents (aged 13 to 20 years) and adults (who began parenting as adolescents) enrolled in parenting classes. The Parent as a Teacher Inventory and the Adult-Adolescent Parenting Inventory were used to measure change in knowledge and attitudes following participation in the classes. The findings indicated significant improvement as a result of parent education.     

Using "Bubbles" with babies: a new technique for investigating the informational basis of infant perception

The 'Bubbles' technique (Gosselin, F. & Schyns, P.G. (2001). Bubbles: A technique to reveal the use of information in recognition tasks. Vision Research, 41, 2261-2271) has been widely used to reveal the information adults use to make perceptual categorizations. We present, for the first time, an adapted form of Bubbles, suitable for use with young infants.     

Show me the features! Understanding recognition from the use of visual information

We propose an approach that allows a rigorous understanding of the visual categorization and recognition process without asking direct questions about unobservable memory representations. Our approach builds on the selective use of visual information in recognition and a new method (Bubbles) to depict and measure what this information is. We examine three face–recognition tasks (identity, gender, expressive or not) and establish the componential and holistic information responsible for recognition performance. On the basis of this information, we derive task–specific gradients of probability for the allocation of attention to the different regions of the face.