Psychology's limits as a scientific discipline: A personal view

I provided a more personal view of Wachtel's (1980) article. I began by discussing the extent to which my own research program complied with his distinctive recommendations. After offering a different take on the impact of high productivity, I focused on (a) the negative effects of the quest for extramural funding and (b) the positive effects of a better balance between theoretical and empirical contributions. I then turn to some of my own theoretical and empirical studies of the place that theory has in successful science. This research suggests that theory only has a beneficial effect when it is integrative in function and when it is closely constrained by available data. I end with a speculation regarding the value of having theories that are maximally formal, even mathematical.     

Responsibility and obsessive-compulsive disorder: an experimental test

To test the causal status of responsibility in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), an experiment was executed in which responsibility was experimentally manipulated. OCD patients, non-OCD anxiety controls, and non-patients executed a classification task in either a high or a low responsibility (LoRes) condition. Subjective ratings related to danger and responsibility indicated that the manipulation was successful. Subjective OCD-like experiences and checking behaviors were higher in OCD patients in the high responsibility (HiRes) condition than in all other groups. Although the checking subscale of the Padua Inventory correlated with subjective ratings in the OCD patients in the HiRes condition, it was not associated with checking behaviors. The results confirm the hypothesis that responsibility plays a causal role in OCD.     

Rapid learning of syllable classes from a perceptually continuous speech stream

To learn a language, speakers must learn its words and rules from fluent speech; in particular, they must learn dependencies among linguistic classes. We show that when familiarized with a short artificial, subliminally bracketed stream, participants can learn relations about the structure of its words, which specify the classes of syllables occurring in first and last word positions. By studying the effect of familiarization length, we compared the general predictions of associative theories of learning and those of models postulating separate mechanisms for quickly extracting the word structure and for tracking the syllable distribution in the stream. As predicted by the dual-mechanism model, the preference for structurally correct items was negatively correlated with the familiarization length. This result is difficult to explain by purely associative schemes; an extensive set of neural network simulations confirmed this difficulty. Still, we show that powerful statistical computations operating on the stream are available to our participants, as they are sensitive to co-occurrence statistics among non-adjacent syllables. We suggest that different learning mechanisms analyze speech on-line: A rapid mechanism extracting structural information about the stream, and a slower mechanism detecting statistical regularities among the items occurring in it.     

共享心智模型研究现状

共享心智模型是指团队成员共同拥有的知识结构,它使得团队成员能就团队作业形成正确的解释和预期,从而协调自己的行为以适应于团队作业和其他团队成员的需求。其研究为理解和提高团队绩效提供了新的视角,从而成为了团队研究的新热点。该文首先明确其定义以及相关概念,再介绍它的几种类型,进而介绍研究中采用的测量方法,最后总结其影响因素及对团队绩效的影响。文章最后指出研究中存在的问题以及今后的研究方向。     

文本阅读中情境模型空间维度的非线索更新

采用实时窗口阅读技术,探讨文本阅读中不同研究范式下空间信息更新的特点。结果表明,阅读中情境模型空间信息的非线索实时更新是存在的,但要实现这种更新则需要一定的条件。相对于自动呈现材料,在更为自由的手动阅读条件下,先前阅读的空间信息,尤其是外显的位置信息（如“广场”）能够进行非线索的实时更新（实验一、实验二）;此外,实验三的结果表明,不同的探测位置对空间信息的通达也产生了影响。在更为敏感的探测位置上,内隐的空间实体信息（如,“雕像”）也表现出了非线索的更新。     

Do Health Care Workplaces Affect Treatment Environments?

Previous research has demonstrated that characteristics of the health care workplace influence staff outcomes such as morale and burnout, but the potential effect of health care workplaces on the treatment environment has been little studied. Building on a model proposed by Schaefer and Moos (1993), we propose that the workplace factors of supervisory work environment (e.g. support from supervisors, managerial control) and programme philosophical orientation (e.g. disease model of addiction, psychosocial learning model of addiction) predict four treatment environment elements: patient autonomy, staff control, staff sensitivity, and patient alienation. Multiple regression analysis of data drawn from a survey (response rate = 86%) of 327 staff members at 15 Veterans Affairs (VA) inpatient substance abuse treatment programmes revealed that greater managerial control over staff predicted greater patient alienation, lower staff sensitivity towards patients, and greater staff control over patients. Stronger disease model programme orientations predicted less patient alienation and greater staff sensitivity, whereas stronger psychosocial model programme orientations predicted less staff control. These results suggest that health care workplaces may influence treatment environments. Implications for further research and practice are discussed. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The operation of Lake Kariba: A multiobjective decision analysis

The paper describes a successful application of Bayesian decision analysis to the operation of the Lake Kariba hydropower system. This management problem is complicated by the high uncertainty of the inflow process, multiple and conflicting objectives and the influence of time on some of the parameters in the management task. Inflows to the reservoir are forecast through dynamic linear models. Managerial preferences are modelled through a multiattribute utility function. Since the solution of the exact model is computationally too demanding, a heuristic method is applied to find a feasible control strategy. A comparison with results obtained by methods used previously demonstrates the superiority of the methodology presented here.     

COMMENTS ON SANBORN BROWN'S “CAN PHYSICS CONTRIBUTE TO THEOLOGY?”

Abstract. Sanborn Brown raised in a preliminary form issues relating to science and religion that have been subjects for increasingly more sophisticated discussion over the intervening forty years.     

习得无助理论模型的演变与争议

习得无助理论是由美国心理学家马丁．塞里格曼于上世纪60年代提出、而后在美国以至全世界引起广泛研究热潮的一种心理学理论,围绕着习得无助产生的机制及实验操作中的关键变量,形成了许多有价值的理论模型。该研究介绍了这些理论模型的起源、发展与演变．以及无助现象对人们的认知、情绪和动机造成的损害,为我们在临床上诊断和治疗抑郁提供了一个新的视角,同时为预测和矫治学生的习得无肋感提供了方法上的借鉴。     

Models for a paraconsistent set theory

In this paper the existence of natural models for a paraconsistent version of naive set theory is discussed. These stand apart from the previous attempts due to the presence of some non-monotonic ingredients in the comprehension scheme they fulfill. Particularly, it is proved here that allowing the equality relation in formulae defining sets, within an extensional universe, compels the use of non-monotonic operators. By reviewing the preceding attempts, we show how our models can naturally be obtained as fixed points of some functor acting on a suitable category (stressing the use of fixed-point arguments in obtaining such alternative semantics).