Demarcating Role Transitions as Indicators of Adulthood in the 21st Century: Who Are They?

The present study examines the transition into adulthood from a Symbolic Interactionism perspective, where people come to define themselves based on cultural influences and established cultural norms. College students (N = 234; mean age 23 years, SD = 6.26; 69.4% White, 14.5% Hispanic, 4.7% African-American) who had placed more importance on role transition markers (e.g., parenthood and marriage) as indicators of the transition into adulthood belonged to a fraternity/sorority were a traditionally aged college student (aged 18–25), were an ethnic minority were of a traditional marital status (i.e., not cohabitating) or belonged to a religious organization (particularly for men). These findings are consistent with the view that people who apparently hold collectivist or more traditional values place more importance on role transition markers as markers of adulthood. It is suggested that research take into account the cultural context when studying developmental periods that are culturally construed (i.e., the transition to adulthood), rather than biologically based.     

Chaos breeds autonomy: connectionist design between bias and baby-sitting

In connectionism and its offshoots, models acquire functionality through externally controlled learning schedules. This undermines the claim of these models to autonomy. Providing these models with intrinsic biases is not a solution, as it makes their function dependent on design assumptions. Between these two alternatives, there is room for approaches based on spontaneous self-organization. Structural reorganization in adaptation to spontaneous activity is a well-known phenomenon in neural development. It is proposed here as a way to prepare connectionist models for learning and enhance the autonomy of these models.     

Studying the variability of handwriting patterns using the Kinematic Theory

The variability observed in handwriting patterns is analyzed from the perspective of integrating the resulting motor control knowledge in the design of more powerful handwriting recognizers in personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smartphones. Using the highest representational level of the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movement, the Sigma-Lognormal model, this article reports basic theoretical and practical results that could be taken into account in the design of such systems. The main movement variability introduced by the neuromuscular system (NMS) and induced through the scheduling of motor tasks by the central nervous system (CNS) is divided into global and local fluctuations. From a fiducial action plan decoded by this model, a wide range of handwriting distortions are artificially generated by acting on the Sigma-Lognormal parameters. The resulting patterns are studied to understand scale changes and rotational deformations, the two basic features that a recognizer has to take into account. An experiment based on the writing of the same word by six writers is also reported. The results, obtained by an ANOVA analysis, corroborate the predictions and support the relevance of the Kinematic Theory for the analysis and synthesis of handwriting disruptions. These findings consolidate the results of previous studies on single strokes using the Sigma-Lognormal model. Overall, this report provides new insights into our understanding of motor control, as well as into practical cues for the development of huge databases of letters and words to train and test on-line handwriting classifiers and recognizers.     

The Living Body as the Origin of Culture: What the Shift in Husserl’s Notion of “Expression” Tells us About Cultural Objects

Husserl’s philosophy of culture relies upon a person’s body being expressive of the person’s spirit, but Husserl’s analysis of expression in Logical Investigations is inadequate to explain this bodily expressiveness. This paper explains how Husserl’s use of “expression” shifts from LI to Ideas II and argues that this shift is explained by Husserl’s increased understanding of the pervasiveness of sense in subjective life and his increased appreciation for the unity of the person. I show how these two developments allow Husserl to better describe the bodily expressiveness that is the source of culture. Husserl’s account of culture is thoroughly intentionalistic, but it does not emphasize thought at the expense of embodiment. Culture originates not in an abstract subjectivity, but by persons’ expressing themselves physically in the world. By seeing how Husserl develops his mature position on bodily expressiveness, we can better appreciate the meaningfulness and the bodily concreteness of cultural objects.

The repetition-break plot structure: a cognitive influence on selection in the marketplace of ideas

Using research into learning from sequences of examples, we generate predictions about what cultural products become widely distributed in the social marketplace of ideas. We investigate what we term the Repetition-Break plot structure: the use of repetition among obviously similar items to establish a pattern, and then a final contrasting item that breaks with the pattern to generate surprise. Two corpus studies show that this structure arises in about a third of folktales and story jokes. An experiment shows that jokes with this structure are more interesting than those without the initial repetition. Thus, we document evidence for how a cognitive factor influences the cultural products that are selected in the marketplace of ideas.     

Some reflections on potential abuses of psychology’s knowledge and practices

This article identifies ten implicit and explicit assumptions of Western psychology that are rooted within its cultural history, traditions, and values. Unfortunately, these assumptions have informed and dominated the knowledge and practice of psychology across the world because of historic, cultural, political, and economic reasons. It is now clear, however, that the indiscriminate acceptance and application of Western psychological knowledge and practices constitutes a serious abuse for non-Western people and for ethnic/racial minorities in Western nations. This abuse is often transmitted and exacerbated via the training of international and ethnic minority students who learn to accept Western psychology as universal. In a global community in which all our lives have become interdependent, it is essential Western psychology be re-considered as a “cultural construction” with all the ethnocentric limitations this implies. As a counter, efforts must be made to acknowledge, develop, and transmit the diverse indigenous/national psychologies from across the world.     

Socio-Ecological Predictor Model of Parental Intention to Participate in Triple P-Positive Parenting Program

We examined variables associated with parental intention to participate in a parenting program viewed within a socio-ecological framework. In two metropolitan areas in Japan, 222 families voluntarily completed a series of questionnaires. A series of multiple regression analyses was used to evaluate the Socio-Ecological Predictor Model that was able to account for 50% of the variance associated with parental intention to participate in a parenting program. The most significant predictor in the model was program features, which accounted for 30% of the variance. It is important to consider program features that make it more likely that parents will engage positively in a parenting program. We discuss parental intention to participate in a parenting program as well as the limitations of the study and areas for future research.     

Language evolution by iterated learning with bayesian agents

Languages are transmitted from person to person and generation to generation via a process of iterated learning: people learn a language from other people who once learned that language themselves. We analyze the consequences of iterated learning for learning algorithms based on the principles of Bayesian inference, assuming that learners compute a posterior distribution over languages by combining a prior (representing their inductive biases) with the evidence provided by linguistic data. We show that when learners sample languages from this posterior distribution, iterated learning converges to a distribution over languages that is determined entirely by the prior. Under these conditions, iterated learning is a form of Gibbs sampling, a widely-used Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. The consequences of iterated learning are more complicated when learners choose the language with maximum posterior probability, being affected by both the prior of the learners and the amount of information transmitted between generations. We show that in this case, iterated learning corresponds to another statistical inference algorithm, a variant of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. These results clarify the role of iterated learning in explanations of linguistic universals and provide a formal connection between constraints on language acquisition and the languages that come to be spoken, suggesting that information transmitted via iterated learning will ultimately come to mirror the minds of the learners.     

The state of methods and tools for social systems change

The last decade or so has seen an increase in the rate of attention to systems change and the application of multiple theories to study and influence change in systems. This article considers how these theories, described in other articles in this issues, plus theories about complex adaptive systems open opportunities for us to continue to expand our repertoire of tools and methods to address systems change. These conceptual frameworks, tools, and methods are expected to help us increase our capacity to study and influence both planned and self-organizing systems change. New tools and methods have emerged and others are needed to help us continue to explore and influence the complex social systems within which we operate.