Time course of selective attention in clinically depressed young adults: an eye tracking study

Depressed individuals display biased attention for emotional information when stimuli are presented for relatively “long” (e.g., 1 s) durations. The current study examined whether attentional biases are sustained over a much longer period. Specifically, clinically depressed and never depressed young adults simultaneously viewed images from four emotion categories (sad, threat, positive, neutral) for 30 s while line of visual gaze was assessed. Depressed individuals spent significantly more time viewing dysphoric images and less time viewing positive images than their never depressed counterparts. Time course analyses indicated that these biases were maintained over the course of the trial. Results suggest that depressed participants' attentional biases for dysphoric information are sustained for relatively long periods even when other emotional stimuli are present. Mood congruent information-processing biases appear to be a robust feature of depression and may have an important role in the maintenance of the disorder.     

Expectation-based syntactic comprehension

This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension, and demonstrates its equivalence to the theory of Hale [Hale, J. (2001). A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of NAACL (Vol. 2, pp. 159-166)], in which the difficulty of a word is proportional to its surprisal (its negative log-probability) in the context within which it appears. This proposal subsumes and clarifies findings that high-constraint contexts can facilitate lexical processing, and connects these findings to well-known models of parallel constraint-based comprehension. In addition, the theory leads to a number of specific predictions about the role of expectation in syntactic comprehension, including the reversal of locality-based difficulty patterns in syntactically constrained contexts, and conditions under which increased ambiguity facilitates processing. The paper examines a range of established results bearing on these predictions, and shows that they are largely consistent with the surprisal theory.     

五个层面的挑战与三大理论难题——试论基因伦理

基因伦理的挑战在基因-检测、基因-治疗、基因-生殖、基因-克隆、基因-生态等五个层面展开,大致包括保护基因隐私、防止基因歧视,生殖细胞能否基因治疗,辅助生殖是否“扮演上帝”,克隆人,转基因的安全性等内容。同时,提出了基因决定论、实体论和主观论以及基因伦理走向何处等理论难题,需要认真研究和讨论。     

The Effect of Anxiety on the Cognitive Functioning in Non-clinical Schizotypal Individuals

Schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) is characterized by eccentric behavior and perceptual distortions that closely resemble the patterns observed in those with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia and related personality disorders (i.e., SPD) are associated with deficits in sustained attention, slower than normal reaction times, and manifestations of working memory deficits and erratic cognitive tasks. The present study used the schizotypal personality scale (STA) to compare cognitive abilities of self-reported low schizotypic tendency subjects with high schizotypic tendency subjects. The group scores on the STA differed significantly. Those with high STA scores also tended to have higher state and trait anxiety scores based on the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). The groups did not significantly differ on any of the demographic variables tested, including age, education, self-rated health status, and medication. Along with an executive function test, two computerized tasks tested subjects on reaction time and memory. Even when covariates (i.e., state, trait anxiety scores) were analyzed, there were no significant differences between the groups and tasks, although the gathered data showed trends in the expected direction.     

When and how do differences matter? An exploration of perceived similarity in teams

In this paper, we directly assess perceived similarity—the degree to which members view themselves as having few differences—because we want to understand when teams notice diversity on various member characteristics and how they interpret it. Our results indicate social category diversity was related to initial estimates of both perceived social category similarity (SCS) and perceived work style similarity (WSS). And, whereas perceived SCS did not change over time, perceived WSS decreased significantly over the period of our study. We suggest this change in perceived WSS can be explained by an information-processing/decision-making framework. We found informational diversity was positively related to conflict in teams, and in turn conflict was negatively related to subsequent estimates of perceived WSS. However, informational diversity was positively related to information sharing in teams, which in turn was positively related to subsequent estimates of perceived WSS. Finally, these updated estimates of perceived WSS affected subgroup formation and team process effectiveness. We discuss how our research explores the subjective experience of diversity by team members, provides a dynamic view of the relationship between diversity and team outcomes, and informs emerging theory about the activation of faultlines in teams.     

The Effect of Anxiety on the Cognitive Functioning in Non-clinical Schizotypal Individuals

Schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) is characterized by eccentric behavior and perceptual distortions that closely resemble the patterns observed in those with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia and related personality disorders (i.e., SPD) are associated with deficits in sustained attention, slower than normal reaction times, and manifestations of working memory deficits and erratic cognitive tasks. The present study used the schizotypal personality scale (STA) to compare cognitive abilities of self-reported low schizotypic tendency subjects with high schizotypic tendency subjects. The group scores on the STA differed significantly. Those with high STA scores also tended to have higher state and trait anxiety scores based on the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). The groups did not significantly differ on any of the demographic variables tested, including age, education, self-rated health status, and medication. Along with an executive function test, two computerized tasks tested subjects on reaction time and memory. Even when covariates (i.e., state, trait anxiety scores) were analyzed, there were no significant differences between the groups and tasks, although the gathered data showed trends in the expected direction.     

Cyborg intentionality: Rethinking the phenomenology of human–technology relations

This article investigates the types of intentionality involved in human–technology relations. It aims to augment Don Ihde’s analysis of the relations between human beings and technological artifacts, by analyzing a number of concrete examples at the limits of Ihde’s analysis. The article distinguishes and analyzes three types of “cyborg intentionality,” which all involve specific blends of the human and the technological. Technologically mediated intentionality occurs when human intentionality takes place “through” technological artifacts; hybrid intentionality occurs when the technological actually merges with the human; and composite intentionality is the addition of human intentionality and the intentionality of technological artifacts.

MUTATIONS OF NATURE,TECHNOLOGY, AND THE WESTERN SACRED

Bronislaw Szerszynski's book Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005) challenges us to think of nature, technology, and the sacred in a genuinely novel way. The sacred is the context and the protagonist, not a passive, unchanging, vague phenomenon. Both nature and technology will be better interpreted in the context of the transformations of the sacred.     

网络医疗的发展和思考

随着科学技术、网络技术迅猛的发展,许多互联网业务如网上求医、网上购药、网上保健也日渐火热,成为人们防治疾病的又一手段。网络医疗是网络科技与医疗技术结合的产物,在信息高速发展的今天,它已成为医学交流中一道亮丽的风景线,各国都在不遗余力发展自己的远程医疗系统,这无疑将推动医学模式的进步。然而作为一种新的医疗手段,网络医疗目前仍存在着诸多的弊端和问题,这些问题反过来又可制约网络医疗的发展,因此必须在技术、政策、法律各方面予以完善,使之更好地服务于人类。     

高新技术临床应用中不合理诊疗行为的思考

高新医疗技术临床应用中的不合理诊疗行为,主要包括医方趋利性医疗行为和防御性医疗行为。通过典型案例对高新医疗技术临床应用中的不合理诊疗行为的成因进行分析,剖析不合理的诊疗行为,提出了规范应用高新医疗技术的对策。