Cognitive processing of moral and social judgements: A comparison of offenders,students, and control participants

Examining cognitive processes related to offenders’ moral and social judgements is important in order to better understand their criminal behaviour. In the present study, 30 offenders, 30 students, and 24 control participants were administered the moral-conventional judgements computer task, which requires responding under strict time constraints. Participants read scenarios and were asked to judge whether the act was acceptable or unacceptable when rules were either assumed or removed. Additionally, participants completed an executive function (EF) task in order to examine the relation between EF and moral and social judgements. The findings revealed that, as expected, controls and students had faster reaction times (RTs) and a higher percentage of normative judgements than offenders. Additionally, offenders had a low percentage of normative judgements, particularly in the conventional rule removed condition. Finally, RTs of moral and conventional judgements in most conditions were related to EF among students but not controls or offenders. We conclude that offenders, as compared to controls and students, may rely more on rule-oriented responding and may rely less on EF when making moral and social judgements.     

When a Picasso is a “Picasso”: The entry point in the identification of visual art

We investigated whether art is distinguished from other real world objects in human cognition, in that art allows for a special memorial representation and identification based on artists’ specific stylistic appearances. Testing art-experienced viewers, converging empirical evidence from three experiments, which have proved sensitive to addressing the question of initial object recognition, suggest that identification of visual art is at the subordinate level of the producing artist. Specifically, in a free naming task it was found that art-objects as opposed to non-art-objects were most frequently named with subordinate level categories, with the artist’s name as the most frequent category (Experiment 1). In a category-verification task (Experiment 2), art-objects were recognized faster than non-art-objects on the subordinate level with the artist’s name. In a conceptual priming task, subordinate primes of artists’ names facilitated matching responses to art-objects but subordinate primes did not facilitate responses to non-art-objects (Experiment 3). Collectively, these results suggest that the artist’s name has a special status in the memorial representation of visual art and serves as a predominant entry point in recognition in art perception.     

美术专业与普通专业学生对中西方绘画作品的审美认知差异

审美认知是人类最高级最复杂的心理活动之一,在美育中具有重要的作用。本研究采用不同艺术类别及情绪效价的作品图片,考察美术专业与普通专业大学生对中西方绘画作品的审美认知差异。结果发现：美术专业学生与普通学生对西方画的审美认知差异极其显著,且美术专业学生对西方画产生的美感显著强于普通学生;而两类学生对中国画的审美认知差异并不显著;对于不同风格的绘画作品,两类学生都存在着审美偏好,且审美偏好一致,都对中国画产生的美感更为强烈;两类学生的审美认知反应时间差异极其显著,专业学生总体上要比普通学生进行更多更复杂的审美认知加工活动。研究表明,审美认知具有较强的可塑性,对于美育心理学的发展具有重要的价值。     

Dissimilarity cumulation theory in smoothly connected spaces

This is the third paper in the series introducing the Dissimilarity Cumulation theory and its main psychological application, Universal Fechnerian Scaling. The previously developed dissimilarity-based theory of path length is used to construct the notion of a smooth path, defined by the property that the ratio of the dissimilarity between its points to the length of the subtended fragment of the path tends to unity as the points get closer to each other. We consider a class of stimulus spaces in which for every path there is a series of piecewise smooth paths converging to it pointwise and in length; and a subclass of such spaces where any two sufficiently close points can be connected by a smooth “geodesic in the small”. These notions are used to construct a broadly understood Finslerian geometry of stimulus spaces representable by regions of Euclidean n-spaces. With an additional assumption of comeasurability in the small between the canonical psychometric increments of the first and second kind, this establishes a link between Universal Fechnerian Scaling and Multidimensional Fechnerian Scaling in Euclidean n-spaces. The latter was a starting point for our theoretical program generalizing Fechner’s idea that sensation magnitudes can be computed by integration of a local discriminability measure.     

‘Well‐being’ through reading: drawing upon literature and literacy in spiritual education

In this paper reading is conceived as a spiritual gift that can help readers towards an understanding of being. The image of the well and the act of drawing water is employed to illustrate the relation of the spiritual and the aesthetic. The term ‘well‐being’ in relation to reading is used here to draw attention to the importance of ontology in both reading and spiritual education. How readers can practice reading as a spiritual gift is explored with reference to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), reader‐response theory and selected biblical passages.     

蔡元培:说美育到死方休的教育家

该文讨论了现代著名教育家蔡元培在美育方面的思想特点及其在今天的意义。蔡氏美育思想的核心是认为审美教育的本质乃是一种情感教育,它与德育、智育、体育在教育中占有同样重要的地位,因为在人性发展与社会进步的过程中,只有科学、知识与理性的教育与进步是不完备的,对人类感性的忽略与压抑会带来各种社会弊端。蔡元培还提出了具有可操性的美育实施措施,在今天也值得重视。