医学教育环境测量评价的实践与探索

重点讨论了医学教育环境测量和评价在医学教育改革中的地位和作用,在借鉴国外先进经验的基础上,在教育环境评价和教师评价方面提出了重视学生感受,重视教育环境的动态评价,科学公正地评价教师,建立全面系统的分析方法,建立评价的分析反馈机制等看法.     

自传记忆事件聚集现象中的组织和提取特点

事件聚集是在事件水平上组织自传记忆的结构,是一种反映自传记忆组织的提取现象.在利用矫正后的事件追随任务对62名成人进行测试后发现:①事件之间各种组织信息并不是分离的,而是以整合的方式来组织事件聚集结构,这些信息不仅包含客体的信息,更包含主观的感受.②自我在自传记忆组织中的作用是强化事件聚集本身所具有的联系.③自传记忆的提取中首先要满足当前自我的要求;进行直接提取失败后,被试根据自传记忆的层级关系进行生成搜索;生成提取策略也失败后,个体则会根据事件线索中任何可以利用的细节来完成回忆任务.     

流动儿童家庭环境的特点及其对生活满意度的影响

以北京市1018名流动儿童和447名城市儿童为调查对象,采用家庭生活环境调查问卷、家庭功能问卷、学生多维生活领域满意度量表和学生总体生活满意度量表,考察流动儿童家庭环境的特点及其对生活满意度的影响。结果表明:(1)流动儿童的家庭经济状况和家庭功能均显著差于城市儿童。(2)父亲从事体力类工作显著负向预测流动儿童的环境满意度;家庭生活指数显著正向预测流动儿童的家庭、环境满意度及总体生活满意度;家庭居住的社区环境显著正向预测流动儿童的家庭和环境满意度。(3)家庭亲密度显著正向预测流动儿童的家庭、环境满意度和总体生活满意度,家庭的适应性显著正向预测其家庭满意度。     

Childhood maltreatment and adult personality disorder symptoms in a non‐clinical sample

It can be argued that the well‐substantiated relationship between childhood maltreatment and adult personality disorder (PD) symptoms may be confounded by comorbid symptoms of depression, anxiety or dysfunctional childhood family environments. Therefore, the current study was designed to test the hypothesis that retrospective reports of childhood maltreatment would still be significantly related to reports of more PD symptoms when statistically controlling for these factors. One hundred and seventy‐eight non‐clinical participants were divided into groups reporting childhood maltreatment (n = 54) or not (n = 124) according to scores on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Participants also completed questionnaires measuring current depression, anxiety, and PD symptoms as well as retrospective reports of their childhood environment. Results showed that individuals reporting childhood maltreatment reported more symptoms of PD than those not reporting childhood maltreatment, even when statistically controlling for depression, anxiety and retrospective reports of dysfunctional family environment. These findings underscore the relevance and independent contribution of childhood maltreatment to the development of PDs, with important implications for further research and clinical practice.     

Children's perception and understanding of (dis)similarities among dynamic bodily/facial expressions of happiness, pleasure, anger, and irritation

The current study examined the abilities of children (6 and 8 years of age) and adults to freely categorize and label dynamic bodily/facial expressions designed to portray happiness, pleasure, anger, irritation, and neutrality and controlled for their level of valence, arousal, intensity, and authenticity. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses showed that children (n = 52) and adults (n = 33) structured expressions in systematic and broadly similar ways. Between 6 and 8 years of age, there was a quantitative, but not a qualitative, improvement in labeling. When exposed to rich and dynamic emotional cues, children as young as 6 years can successfully perceive differences between close expressions (e.g., happiness, pleasure), and can categorize them with clear boundaries between them, with the exception of irritation, which had fuzzier borders. Children’s classifications were not reliant on lexical semantic abilities and were consistent with a model of emotion categories based on their degree of valence and arousal.     

Environmental enrichment improves behavioral performance and auditory spatial representation of primary auditory cortical neurons in rat

Environmental enrichment (EE) has an important role in brain plasticity. Early research has shown that EE increases the response strength of neurons in the auditory cortex, but it remains unknown whether EE can influence the process of spatial localization in the auditory system. In this study, we raised rats in enriched and standard conditions from postnatal day 10 to day 56. By testing behavioral tasks via auditory cues, we have shown that EE improved the number of correct scores, but decreased the reaction time and azimuth deviation in behavioral performance of sound-azimuth discrimination. By in vivo extracellular recording, we have shown that EE enhanced the directional sensitivity of neurons in the primary auditory cortex. For example, EE rats had a smaller spatial receptive field, sharper frequency tuning curve and directional selective curve of auditory neurons compared with normal rats. Our findings indicate that early exposure to EE increases directional sensitivity. These results provide an insight into developmental plasticity in the auditory system.     

European Bioethics II--Disparate Hopes and Fears: An Introduction

This introduction supplies further bearing points for the conceptualmap, which the introduction to the previous issue on Europeanbioethics (2008/1) had provided for sorting out the variousdimension in which the essays collected in these issues resembleand differ from each other. Special attention is devoted tocommunication, as diverse Christianities attend to differentpurposes, problems, and opportunities for normatively engaging(persuading, influencing, ruling, opposing, and converting)their surrounding secularized cultures. These differences reflectincompatible ways of conceiving Christ's acts of healing, asthese provide a model for His disciples' bioethics. These differencesalso reflect diversely rationalist and noetic epistemologies.The subtext concerns the haunting question about the enduringsustainability of a specifically Christian bioethics in Europe.As Schotsmans opts for a Roman Catholicism that is not recognizedas such by his Magisterium, as Muller transforms Protestantisminto a religiously nonhostile laicity, as Messer and Silva daBarbosa hope for the prophetic impact of communal "cities onthe hill," and as the Orthodox pursue the conversion of WesternEurope in Greek, Russian, and Rumanian, ongoing Divine miraclespresent the most realistic hope.     

Comparing black-capped (Poecile atricapillus) and mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli): use of geometric and featural information in a spatial orientation task

Since Cheng (Cognition 23:149–178, 1986) first proposed the “geometric module” in rats, a great deal of research has focused on how other species use geometric information and how geometric encoding may differ across species. Here, hand-reared and wild-caught black-capped chickadees and wild-caught mountain chickadees searched for food hidden in one corner in a rectangular environment. Previous research has shown that mountain chickadees do not spontaneously encode geometric information when a salient feature is present near the goal location. Using a slightly different training and testing procedure, we found that both hand-reared and wild-caught black-capped chickadees encoded geometric information, even in the presence of a salient landmark. Some, but not all, mountain chickadees also encoded geometric information. Overall, our results suggest that use of geometric information may be a less preferred strategy for mountain chickadees than for either wild-caught or hand-reared black-capped chickadees. To our knowledge, this is the first direct interspecies comparison of use of geometric information in a spatial orientation task.     

Environmental influences on reading‐related outcomes: an adoption study

Evidence from intervention studies, quantitative genetic and molecular genetic studies suggests that genetic, and to a lesser extent, shared environmental influences are important to the development of reading and related cognitive skills. The Northeast‐Northwest Collaborative Adoption Projects (N2CAP) is a sample of 241 adoptive families, containing 354 children and their adoptive parents. Negative parent outcome × child age interactions significantly predicted child outcomes, suggesting that shared environmental influences related to parent–offspring resemblance, although modest, are most salient in younger children. Additional analyses suggested that identified measures of the family environment largely accounted for these parent–offspring correlations. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Environmental Correlates of Gambling Behavior in Urban Adolescents

The present study considered the relation between adolescent gambling behavior and the perceived environment, the component of Jessor and Jessor’s (1977) Problem Behavior Theory that assesses the ways that adolescents perceive the attitudes and behaviors of parents and peers. The predominantly African-American sample included 188 sophomores from two urban public high schools. Using the South Oaks Gambling Screen-Revised for Adolescents to assess gambling risk, rates of both at-risk (20.7%) and problem (12.8%) gambling were found to be high. Boys displayed more gambling problems than did girls. The perceived environment accounted for significant variance in gambling problems and frequency, with proximal components displaying stronger relationships than distal components. Perceiving parent gambling and friend models for problem behavior were positively correlated with gambling problems, and friend models were positively related to gambling frequency. Among girls, family support was positively related to gambling problems. Among boys, this relation was negative. The authors Emerson M. Wickwire, Jr. James P. Whelan, and Andrew W. Meyers are members of The Institute for Gambling Education and Research, Department of Psychology, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN. The primary research interest of this group is the prevention and treatment of gambling related problems. David M. Murray, Ph.D., is the Chair of the Division of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.