Children's understanding of human and super-natural mind

Barrett, Richert, and Driesenga [Barrett, J. L., Richert, R. A., & Driesenga, A. (2001). God's beliefs versus mother's: The development of nonhuman agents concepts. Child Development, 72(1), 50–65] have suggested that children are able to conceptualize the representational properties held by certain super-natural entities, such as God, before they achieve representational understanding of the human mind. The two experimental conditions of the present study aimed at cross-checking the above suggestion. One hundred and twenty children aged from 3 to 7 years were involved in both conditions. In the first, a modified perspective-taking and appearance-reality task, similar to that adopted in Barrett et al.'s study, was used. The task in the second addressed another aspect of representational understanding of the human mind, that is, the early emerging of the rule that knowledge is constrained by perception. The results of the study showed that younger children systematically treat God as a human protagonist regarding the representational properties they possess. Moreover, it was found that children are able to reason, accurately, about God's representational properties, only upon reaching their 5th year of age, when their representational understanding of the human mind becomes stable and robust.     

The executive demands of strategic reasoning are modified by the way in which children are prompted to think about the task: Evidence from 3- to 4-year-olds

We investigated a test of strategic reasoning (the Windows task) that in different studies has yielded contrasting pictures of young children's executive abilities [Russell, J., Mauthner, N., Sharpe, S., & Tidswell, T. (1991). The “windows task” as a measure of strategic deception in preschoolers and autistic subjects. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9, 331–349; Samuels, M. C., Brooks, P. J., & Frye, D. (1996). Strategic game playing through the windows task. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 14, 159–172]. An experiment with 52 three- to four-year-olds showed robust effects of different wordings for the prompts used to ask children to respond, and found that a single exposure to the facilitating wording led to improved performance on subsequent trials where the standard wording was used. This suggests that the effect of the wording was to help children infer an appropriate basis for responding, and not to reduce the trial-by-trial working memory or inhibitory demands of the task.     

Consonances and controversies: Investigation and its discontents revisited

The author responds to the commentaries of 13 experts on his 1980 American Psychologist article, “Investigation and its discontents: On some constraints on progress in psychological research.” Among the themes addressed are the role of theory in psychological research, the meanings and implications of “productivity” by scholars and researchers, the role of grants, and of money in general, in directing research efforts, and the relation between psychological and neuropsychological research.     

心理因素如何影响风险决策中的价值运算？——兼谈Kahneman的贡献

风险决策是一个复杂的心理过程,由于心理因素的加入,其中的价值运算有不同于经济学与数学的运算规则。价值的心理学界定可以总结为三方面：效用、值函数、心理帐户,三种界定遵循着不同的心理学规律。Kahneman提出的值函数概念具有承先启后,集其大成的作用,它破除了理性神话,显示了价值运算对认知加工的依赖。     

反事实思维两大理论：范例说和目标－指向说

反事实思维是个体对不真实的条件或可能性进行替换的一种思维过程。该文通过综合国外许多研究者的研究成果,探讨了反事实思维的定义、分类以及反事实思维的两大理论：范例说和目标－指向说。范例说认为反事实思维的激发是自动化过程,影响反事实思维产生的因素包括：正常性、结果的效价、与替代结果的接近性、前提的突变性和前提的突出性。目标－指向说则认为反事实思维的激发过程同样受目标、情绪控制、态度等认知因素的影响     

Parental influence on youth propensity to join the military

The purpose of this research was to apply the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) in a model of youths’ career choice intentions and parents’ recommendation intentions. Specifically, a TPB model was developed for youth-parent dyads and tested with SEM to examine parental influence on youth intentions as well as behavior. Results indicated that a modified TPB model is useful for describing how youth and parent beliefs translate into enlistment intentions and pre-enlistment behavior. The strongest impact parents appeared to have on their children was through efficacy beliefs, followed by the link between parents’ attitudes and youths’ normative beliefs. Implications for recruitment and outreach efforts are discussed.     

Testing the domain-specificity of a theory of mind deficit in brain-injured patients: evidence for consistent performance on non-verbal, "reality-unknown" false belief and false photograph tasks

To test the domain-specificity of "theory of mind" abilities we compared the performance of a case-series of 11 brain-lesioned patients on a recently developed test of false belief reasoning () and on a matched false photograph task, which did not require belief reasoning and which addressed problems with existing false photograph methods. A strikingly similar pattern of performance was shown across the false belief and false photograph tests. Patients who were selectively impaired on false belief tasks were also impaired on false photograph tasks; patients spared on false belief tasks also showed preserved performance with false photographs. In some cases the impairment on false belief and false photograph tasks coincided with good performance on control tasks matched for executive demands. We discuss whether the patients have a domain-specific deficit in reasoning about representations common to both false belief and false photograph tasks.     

他心问题的社会认知神经科学研究进路

作为当代心智哲学九大问题之一的他心问题,肇始于Descartes主义对心身关系的认识。问的是:我们能否知道以及怎么知道他人有心,亦即有思想、经验和情感等?对于他心问题的解决方案,20世纪90年代以来,随着现当代科学技术(尤其是神经生物学、认知神经科学和大脑测试技术等)的深入发展,哲学家与心理学家的知识联姻和交叉合作研究,提供了关于他心问题的若干重要成果和实证资料。他心问题不再成为"理论的死角"。当代社会认知神经科学的出现(social cognitive neuroscience,SCN,2000),在科学方法论上更加关注对社会性心智现象的神经机制考量,一系列研究成果都为揭示他心问题提供了科学旁证。这不仅说明了认识他心的可能性,而且表明了通向认识他心方式的多样性,物理学的方法并不是与他心相隔绝。本文尝试从社会认知神经科学的最新研究进展:镜像神经元系统,他知与自知、他心知觉和再认的社会标记、他心社会判断和归因入手来论证他心问题的可释性,为他心问题的论证提供一条多学科交叉研究的新进路。     

How Sports Fans Forge Intergroup Competition Through Language: The Case of Verbal Irony

In situations with rival groups, people strategically use language to strengthen group identity and foster intergroup competition. We distinguished 2 communication mechanisms to accomplish this: (a) linguistic aggression toward out‐group members, (b) communicating group expectancies. We contrasted these mechanisms across 2 experiments by studying verbal irony. Experiment 1 targeted speaker behavior and showed that Dutch soccer fans found irony more appropriate to comment on out‐group (vs. in‐group) members, regardless of behavioral valence. Experiment 2 demonstrated differential inferences from irony by neutral observers: Fans using ironic comments about competent (vs. incompetent) behavior were seen more as out‐group and less as in‐group members. Our experiments demonstrated a communication asymmetry between speaker behavior and addressee inferences.     

Self‐Disclosure Characteristics and Motivations in Social Media: Extending the Functional Model to Multiple Social Network Sites

The purpose of this study was to examine differences in self‐disclosure goals, privacy concerns, and self‐disclosure characteristics between Facebook and Twitter. These sites were compared in terms of audience representations, based on structural cues that suggest potential audiences for a user. We conceptualized audience representations in 2 ways: based on privacy boundaries that imply bounded versus unbounded audiences, and on network characteristics such as size and diversity for audiences within the boundary. Results revealed that self‐disclosure goals, privacy concerns, and self‐disclosure intimacy were different depending on the privacy boundary. Network characteristics were also important, but effects were moderated by the privacy boundary type, suggesting a complex interplay between the 2 types of audience representations in shaping self‐disclosure in social media.