The Prevalence of Well-Being on Teachers in Afri Twin Schools as Well as Non Afri Twin Schools

This study investigated the self-perceived preparedness of students from a historically disadvantaged rural South African setting for psychology studies at a university. The study sample comprised 399 beginning students with a historically Black university (age M = 22.8 years, SD = 5.1; 72.2% women; 65.7% rural background) students. The students responded to a questionnaire investigating, inter alia, prior awareness of the subject, access to psychology literature, awareness of psychologists in their communities, perceived relevance to or clashes with their culture, and parental awareness of the subject. Of the sample, 48.1% first heard about psychology upon entering a university, 75.7% had no access to books on the subject, and only 44.6% received information from their school teachers about psychology as a career. Significantly more urban (65.2%) than rural (34.8%) students had received information about psychology before coming to university.     

Freud

The author explores the evidence-base and selection criteria for a short-term supportive dynamic approach for patients whose psychological mindedness and quality of object relationships is low. Illustrating this approach with a case example he outlines the central features of Supportive Dynamic Therapy. He describes a psychodynamic conceptual and developmental framework that can be used to guide the therapist's interventions and responses, and modulate the patient's anxiety. A dynamic focus presented in the form of a central issue is shown to have a significant function both in containing the patient's anxiety, and in giving shape to the therapist's efforts to support the patient's ego-strengths and adaptive abilities. The therapeutic work can be seen to result in an alteration in the trajectory or reiterating pattern of the patient's life.     

Using Dynamic Field Theory to extend the embodiment stance toward higher cognition

The embodiment stance emphasizes that cognitive processes unfold continuously in time, are constantly linked to the sensory and motor surfaces, and adapt through learning and development. Dynamic Field Theory (DFT) is a neurally based set of concepts that has turned out to be useful for understanding how cognition emerges in an embodied and situated system. We explore how the embodiment stance may be extended beyond those forms of cognition that are closest to sensorimotor processes. The core elements of DFT are dynamic neural fields (DNFs), patterns of activation defined over different kinds of spaces. These may include retinal space and visual feature spaces, spaces spanned by movement parameters such as movement direction and amplitude, or abstract spaces like the ordinal axis along which sequences unfold. Instances of representation that stand for perceptual objects, motor plans, or action intentions are peaks of activation in the DNFs. We show how such peaks may arise from input and are stabilized by intra-field interaction. Given a neural mechanism for instantiation, the neuronal couplings between DNFs implement cognitive operations. We illustrate how these mechanisms can be used to enable architectures of dynamic neural fields to perform cognitive functions such as acquiring and updating scene representations, using grounded spatial language, and generating sequences of actions. Implementing these DFT models in autonomous robots demonstrates how these cognitive functions can be enacted in embodied, situated systems.     

The dynamic lexicon in a truth-conditional framework; or how to have Your cake and eat it

A fundamental principle of all truth-conditional approaches to semantics is that the meanings of sentences of natural language can be compositionally specified in terms of truth conditions, where the meanings of the sentences’ parts (words/lexical items) are specified in terms of the contribution they make to such conditions their host sentences possess. Thus, meanings of words fit the meanings of sentences at least to the extent that the stability of what a sentence might mean as specified in a theory is in accord with the stability of what a word might mean as similarly specified. In this paper, I shall be concerned with Ludlow’s (2014) idea that, in fact, there need be no such sympathy between words and sentences. He proposes that we can square what he calls a dynamic lexicon, where word meaning is not stable at all, with a traditional truth-conditional approach of the kind indicated, where sentence meaning is delivered via ‘absolute truth conditions’. I share Ludlow’s aspiration to accommodate dynamic features of word meaning with a truth conditional approach, but not his belief that the marriage is an easy deal. Thus, I shall present a problem for Ludlow’s position and show how resolving this problem leads to an alternative picture of how the meaning of a sentence may be truth-conditionally specified with all relevant dynamic features of the lexicon retained.     

The influence of depression symptoms on exploratory decision-making

People with symptoms of depression show impairments in decision-making. One explanation is that they have difficulty maintaining rich representations of the task environment. We test this hypothesis in the context of exploratory choice. We analyze depressive and non-depressive participants’ exploration strategies by comparing their choices to two computational models: (1) an “Ideal Actor” model that reflectively updates beliefs and plans ahead, employing a rich representation of the environment and (2) a “Naïve Reinforcement Learning” (RL) model that updates beliefs reflexively utilizing a minimal task representation. Relative to non-depressive participants, we find that depressive participants’ choices are better described by the simple RL model. Further, depressive participants were more exploratory than non-depressives in their decision-making. Depressive symptoms appear to influence basic mechanisms supporting choice behavior by reducing use of rich task representations and hindering performance during exploratory decision-making.     

Gamma- and theta-band synchronization during semantic priming reflect local and long-range lexical–semantic networks

Anterior and posterior brain areas are involved in the storage and retrieval of semantic representations, but it is not known how these areas dynamically interact during semantic processing. We hypothesized that long-range theta-band coherence would reflect coupling of these areas and examined the oscillatory dynamics of lexical–semantic processing using a semantic priming paradigm with a delayed letter-search task while recording subjects’ EEG. Time–frequency analysis revealed facilitation of semantic processing for Related compared to Unrelated conditions, which resulted in a reduced N400 and reduced gamma power from 150 to 450 ms. Moreover, we observed greater anterior–posterior theta coherence for Unrelated compared to Related conditions over the time windows 150–425 ms and 600–900 ms. We suggest that while gamma power reflects activation of local functional networks supporting semantic representations, theta coherence indicates dynamic coupling of anterior and posterior areas for retrieval and post-retrieval processing and possibly an interaction between semantic relatedness and working memory.     

The effects of initial movement dynamics on human responses to postural perturbations

Falls are a major cause of injury, and often occur while turning, reaching, or bending. Yet, we have little understanding of how an ongoing feet-in place activity at the onset of imbalance, and its associated cognitive and biomechanical demands, influence our ability to recover balance. In the current study, we used an ankle-rocking paradigm to determine how the nature of the baseline task influences the balance recovery response to a backward support surface translation. Fourteen participants were instructed to “recover balance without stepping” and were perturbed at vertical while standing quietly (“S”), while ankle rocking and moving forward (“A_f”), or while ankle rocking and moving backward (“A_b”). The results showed that changes in rocking velocity at the time of the perturbation elicited changes in the incidence of stepping, magnitude of trunk angular displacements (p < .01), and the onset latencies of distal muscles (gastrocnemius and soleus, both p < .01) used to recover balance. In addition, plots of onset latencies across all muscles showed that onset latencies appeared to occur earlier in many muscles when participants held a static position compared to when they performed a dynamic task at the onset of the perturbation. The results suggest that muscle activities used to recover balance are tailored to the nature of the perturbation and the ongoing task, and that onset latencies are later when participants are performing a dynamic as opposed to static task at the time of a perturbation. These findings support previous research suggesting that automatic postural responses are highly adaptable to environmental, situational, and task demands.     

Predicting retirement preparation through the design of a new measure

Researchers' capacity to investigate retirement planning behaviour is impeded by the lack of rigorous measurement within the literature. For this study, a comprehensive measure based on the reflexive planning domains of public protection, self‐insurance, and self‐protection was developed and evaluated in a sample of 174 employees aged ≥45 years. Variables of gender, age, income and core self‐evaluations were examined for their influence on planning effort in each of the three domains. Results indicated a clean, three‐factor structure for retirement planning behaviours. All variables emerged as predictors of planning effort in one or more domains. Implications of results for future research into retirement planning and the targeting of planning interventions are discussed.     

The relationship between the perception of axes of symmetry and spatial memory during early childhood

Early in development, there is a transition in spatial working memory (SWM). When remembering a location in a homogeneous space (e.g., in a sandbox), young children are biased toward the midline symmetry axis of the space. Over development, a transition occurs that leads to older children being biased away from midline. The dynamic field theory (DFT) explains this transition in biases as being caused by a change in the precision of neural interaction in SWM and improvements in the perception of midline. According to the DFT, young children perceive midline, but there is a quantitative improvement in the perception of midline over development. In the experiment reported here, children and adults needed to determine on which half of a large monitor a target was located. In support of the DFT, even the youngest children performed above chance at most locations, but performance also improved gradually with age.     

歧视知觉与农村贫困大学生孤独感:核心自我评价、朋友支持的中介作用

采用问卷测量769名贫困大学生和1014名非贫困大学生的歧视知觉、核心自我评价、朋友支持和孤独感,探讨歧视知觉对贫困/非贫困大学生的影响以及核心自我评价和朋友支持的中介作用。结果表明：（1）贫困大学生歧视知觉和孤独感显著高于非贫困大学生、核心自我评价和朋友支持显著低于非贫困大学生。（2）歧视知觉与贫困/非贫困大学生核心自我评价、朋友支持和孤独感相关显著,歧视知觉显著预测贫困/非贫困大学生孤独感。（3）贫困/非贫困大学生结构模型没有显著差异,核心自我评价和朋友支持部分中介歧视知觉对贫困/非贫困大学生孤独感的影响。