与彼得·辛格的对话

对话的主题涉及辛格对马克思、全球伦理、道德责任、动物解放、伦理思维中的直觉层次与批判层次以及伦理的客观性问题。辛格哲学的特点不仅在于他始终不懈地将伦理的思维与减少痛苦与苦难的价值付诸行动,而且也在于他拓宽伦理思维的能力。辛格博采生物学、历史学、人类学、经济学以及博弈论研究成果,丰富并阐明了伦理理论与实践何以可以被现实赋予活力。当我们转向辛格的哲学时,我们会发现一种伦理的生活方式:不仅仅为此刻活着,也不仅仅根据个人喜好活着,而是去过一种具有更广意义的生活,它要求献身于所有有感受能力的生命的福祉和环境保护之中。     

Correction to: Religious and Spiritual Practices Used by Children and Adolescents to Cope with Cancer

Journal of Religion and Health -     

A Review of Preclinical Studies to Understand Fear During Adolescence

The most rapid physical and psychological growth occurs during adolescence, a period of transition from childhood to adulthood when the incidence of anxiety disorder peaks in humans. Human and animal studies suggest that dramatic changes in prefrontal cortical areas during adolescence are responsible for such prevalence of anxiety. Only recently, however, has the relationship between prefrontal immaturity and differential fear processing across adolescence been directly and systematically examined. Such progress is largely due to the culmination of rodent studies that delineated the fear learning, expression, and inhibition neural circuitry, and preclinical studies that provided avenues for translation. This article summarises those initial findings on the circuitry of fear inhibition, and describes in detail the new findings on adolescent fear inhibition that highlight the prefrontal cortex as a key, unrefined brain region that may govern adolescent vulnerability to anxiety disorders. Specifically, adolescent rodents have been demonstrated to be impaired in inhibiting learned fear responses following fear extinction due to prefrontal immaturity, a discovery that was shortly after replicated in adolescent humans (at least the behavioural component). Our desire for this article is to acquaint both research and clinical psychologists with the neural circuitry of fear learning and extinction, turn the attention to developmental work, and facilitate translation of preclinical rodent findings in humans.     

A Multi-Disciplinary Inquiry of Secular and Christian Approaches to Sex Education

Secular scholars have criticized Christian education and counseling on sex as restrictive, ineffective, and outdated. The authors of the current study explored both common non-Christian and Christian approaches to human sexuality with reference to overarching domains of religion, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Secular approaches were classified as the inward approach, the spatial approach, and the temporal approach, whereas Christian approaches were categorized as the traditional and the modern perspectives. Although Christian faith can be signified as a protective factor against casual and risky sexual behaviors, traditional Christian values should be reevaluated in favor of comprehensive Christian approaches to sexuality, which embrace sexual desires as divine gifts for completeness of humanity.     

Low‐income parents' warmth and parent–child activities for children with disabilities,suspected delays and biological risks

Warm and responsive parenting is optimal for child development, but this style of parenting may be difficult for some parents to achieve. This study examines how parents' observed warmth and their reported frequency of parent–child activities were related to children's classifications as having biological risks or a range of disability indicators. Children were low‐income prekindergarteners who participated in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project Longitudinal Follow‐up. Data from parent, early care and education staff reports, and direct child assessments were used to classify children into the following groups: disabilities, suspected delays, biological risks, disabilities and biological risk, suspected delays and biological risk, and no disability indicator. Socioeconomic status (ethnicity, maternal education and poverty level) and maternal depression were controlled in the analyses. The parents of children with disabilities and suspected delays evidenced significantly lower levels of warmth and less frequent parent–child activities compared with other parents. The parents of children with biological risk factors who did not also have disabilities or suspected delays did not exhibit decreased warmth and less frequent parent–child activities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bilingual Reading of Compound Words

The present study investigated whether bilingual readers activate constituents of compound words in one language while processing compound words in the other language via decomposition. Two experiments using a lexical decision task were conducted with adult Korean-English bilingual readers. In Experiment 1, the lexical decision of real English compound words was more accurate when the translated compounds (the combination of the translation equivalents of the constituents) in Korean (the nontarget language) were real words than when they were nonwords. In Experiment 2, when the frequency of the second constituents of compound words in English (the target language) was manipulated, the effect of lexical status of the translated compounds was greater on the compounds with high-frequency second constituents than on those with low-frequency second constituents in the target language. Together, these results provided evidence for morphological decomposition and cross-language activation in bilingual reading of compound words.     

Phosphorylation of mitogen-activated protein kinase in the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala following memory retrieval or forgetting in developing rats

We examined neuronal correlates of forgetting in rats by detection of phosphorylated mitogen-activated protein kinase (pMAPK) in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and amygdala. In Experiment 1, postnatal day (P)23 and P16 rats received paired noise CS-shock US presentations. When tested immediately after conditioning, P23 and P16 rats exhibited similar levels of conditioned fear; when tested after 2 days, however, P16 rats showed poor CS-elicited freezing relative to P23 rats. In Experiment 2, P16 and P23 rats received either paired or unpaired CS-US presentations, and then were tested 48 h later. Consistent with Experiment 1, P16 rats showed forgetting whereas P23 rats exhibited good retention at test. Additionally, unpaired groups showed poor CS-elicited freezing at test. Immunohistochemistry showed that P23 and P16 rats given paired presentations exhibited significant elevation of pMAPK-immunoreactive (ir) neurons in the amygdala compared to rats given unpaired presentations. That is, MAPK phosphorylation in the amygdala tracked learning history rather than behavioral performance at test. In contrast, only the P23-paired group showed an elevated number of pMAPK-ir neurons in mPFC, indicating that MAPK phosphorylation in the mPFC tracks memory expression. Different test-perfusion intervals were employed in Experiment 3, which showed that the developmental dissociation in the pMAPK-ir neurons observed in the mPFC in Experiment 2 was not due to age differences in the rate of phosphorylation of MAPK. These findings provide initial evidence suggesting that while the mPFC is involved in memory retrieval, MAPK phosphorylation in the amygdala may be a persisting neural signature of fear memory.     

Development of phonological awareness in English-Mandarin bilinguals: a comparison of English-L1 and Mandarin-L1 kindergarten children

Phoneme awareness is critical for literacy acquisition in English, but relatively little is known about the early development of phonological awareness in ESL (English as a second language) bilinguals when their two languages have different phonological structures. Using parallel tasks in English and Mandarin, we tracked the development of L1 (first language) and L2 (second language) syllable and phoneme awareness longitudinally in English-L1 and Mandarin-L1 prereaders (n=70, 4- and 5-year-olds) across three 6-month intervals. In English, the English-L1 children's performance was better in phoneme awareness at all three time points, but the Mandarin-L1 children's syllable awareness was equivalent to the English-L1 children's syllable awareness by Time 3. In Mandarin, the English-L1 children's phoneme awareness, but not their syllable awareness, was also significantly better than that of the Mandarin-L1 children at all three time points. Cross-lagged correlations revealed that only the English-L1 children applied their L1 syllable and phoneme awareness to their L2 (Mandarin) processing by Time 2 and that the Mandarin-L1 children seemed to require exposure to English (L2) before they developed phoneme awareness in either language. The data provide further evidence that phonological awareness is a language-general ability but that cross-language application depends on the similarity between the phonological structures of a child's L1 and L2. Implications for classroom teaching are briefly discussed.     

Perception and Help-Seeking Intention of Intimate Partner Violence in Later Life: An International Perspective

This study examines whether elderly Koreans recognize a scenario of intimate partner violence as such and whether they would seek help in the given situation of elder mistreatment (EM). Two cohorts of Korean elders (one immigrant and one Korea-based), each numbering 124 participants, were recruited using a quota sampling strategy. The study used a mixed method approach, employing a hypothetical scenario, and patriarchy theory informed the study. Findings revealed low perception of the vignette as EM and low help-seeking intention in both cohorts. Among the immigrant cohort, intention to seek help was greater among respondents who were female, demonstrated lower adherence to traditional values, and perceived the vignette as EM. Among the Korea-based cohort, the only significant factor was recognition of the scenario as EM. Development of culturally competent and geographically specific practice and intervention is urgently needed, particularly among elders who have greater adherence to traditional cultural values.