"Good enough stories": helping couples invest in one another's growth

This article utilizes key constructs of the narrative metaphor: that stories organize, structure, and give meaning to events in our lives. When stories are used as a way to understand the lives of couples, they have the potential for enhancing individual and relational growth. It is proposed that knowing both our own and our partner's story and development goals increases the likelihood of making an investment in self/other and relational growth. It is further suggested that helping couples develop narratives with a sense of "We" promotes a more generative perspective. These ideas were developed in a small qualitative pilot study with long-married, middle-class, heterosexual couples, which suggested that the synthesis of each partner's life story into a couple story promoted individual and relational development. Implications for therapeutic work with couples are presented as well as specific recommendations for ways to utilize the life story approach as an aspect of treatment. It is intended to assist clinicians and teachers in translating narrative ideas into therapeutic work with couples.     

Infants’ recognition of objects using canonical color

We explored infants’ ability to recognize the canonical colors of daily objects, including two color-specific objects (human face and fruit) and a non-color-specific object (flower), by using a preferential looking technique. A total of 58 infants between 5 and 8 months of age were tested with a stimulus composed of two color pictures of an object placed side by side: a correctly colored picture (e.g., red strawberry) and an inappropriately colored picture (e.g., green-blue strawberry). The results showed that, overall, the 6- to 8-month-olds showed preference for the correctly colored pictures for color-specific objects, whereas they did not show preference for the correctly colored pictures for the non-color-specific object. The 5-month-olds showed no significant preference for the correctly colored pictures for all object conditions. These findings imply that the recognition of canonical color for objects emerges at 6 months of age.     

Am I doing better than you? That depends on whether you ask me in English or Chinese: Self-enhancement effects of language as a cultural mindset prime

Westerners tend to judge themselves positively unless their failure relative to others is obvious, in which case they tend to distance themselves from outperforming others. Whether this tendency to self-enhance in social-comparison situations is universal or culture-bound is hotly debated. Rather than construe self-enhancement as either universal or culture-bound, we propose that its effects depend on the cultural mindset that is salient at the moment of self-reflection. A cultural mindset is a mental representation containing culture-congruent content, procedures, and goals. We focused on individual and collective mindsets, using language as an unobtrusive mindset prime and predicting that people would be more self-enhancing when an individual mindset was made salient by using English than when a collective mindset was made salient by using Chinese. Three studies supported this hypothesis. Chinese students self-enhanced (rating themselves as better than others and distancing themselves from outperforming others) more when primed with an individual mindset.     

Transference occurs across group boundaries

Transference occurs when a perceiver's representation of a significant other is activated and applied to a new target person (Andersen & Chen, 2002). Extending past research, it was hypothesized that transference occurs even when a target person possesses a core feature—namely, group membership status—that is inapplicable to the relevant significant-other representation. Supporting this, transference led perceivers to make representation-consistent memory and evaluation judgments about a target—regardless of whether the target's political (experiment 1) or ethnic (experiment 2) group membership was the same or different from that of the relevant significant other. Moreover, in experiment 2, perceivers undergoing transference involving a positively evaluated significant other behaved more positively toward the target even when the target was from an ethnic out-group. The results represent initial evidence of transference processes occurring across group boundaries. Implications for transference and the reduction of out-group bias are discussed.     

Similarity predicts liking in 3-year-old children

Two studies examined the influence of similarity on 3-year-old children’s initial liking of their peers. Children were presented with pairs of childlike puppets who were either similar or dissimilar to them on a specified dimension and then were asked to choose one of the puppets to play with as a measure of liking. Children selected the puppet whose food preferences or physical appearance matched their own. Unpacking the physical appearance finding revealed that the stable similarity of hair color may influence liking more strongly than the transient similarity of shirt color. A second study showed that children also prefer to play with a peer who shares their toy preferences, yet importantly, show no bias toward a peer who is similar on an arbitrary dimension. The findings provide insight into the earliest development of peer relations in young children.     

Perception through a perspective-taking lens: Differential effects on judgment and behavior

In contrast to the view that social perception has symmetric effects on judgments and behavior, the current research explored whether perspective-taking leads stereotypes to differentially affect judgments and behavior. Across three studies, perspective-takers consistently used stereotypes more in their own behavior while simultaneously using them less in their judgments of others. After writing about an African-American, perspective-taking tendencies were positively correlated with aggressive behavior but negatively correlated with judging others as aggressive. Similarly, after writing about an elderly man, perspective-takers walked more slowly and became more conservative, but judged others as less dependent. These divergent effects of perspective-taking on judgment and behavior occurred regardless of whether perspective-taking was manipulated or measured, whether judgments were measured before or after behavior, the stereotype that was activated, and participants’ culture (American, Singaporean). These findings support theorizing that judgments and behavior can diverge when individuals’ social strategies are geared towards establishing and maintaining social bonds, as well as provide insight into how perspective-taking helps individuals manage diversity.     

Implicit learning of social predictions

Humans exchange a range of nonverbal social signals in every interaction. It is an open question whether people use these signals, consciously or unconsciously, to guide social behavior. This experiment directly tested whether participants could learn to predict another person’s behavior using nonverbal cues in a single interaction, and whether explicit knowledge of the cue-outcome relationship was necessary for successful prediction. Participants played a computerized game of rock-paper-scissors against an avatar they believed was another participant. Sometimes the avatar generated a predictive facial cue before the play. On these trials, participants’ win-frequency increased over time, even if they did not acquire explicit knowledge of the predictive cue. The degree to which participants could predict the avatar (wins on cued trials) related to their self-reported liking of the avatar. These findings demonstrate the importance of implicit associative learning mechanisms in guiding social behavior on a moment-to-moment basis during interaction.     

大学生对心理健康必备能力的认知

本研究以200名大学生为被试,以访谈及问卷的方式对大学生心理健康必备能力的认知进行了调查研究,并建立了大学生心理健康必备能力认知结构模型,结果表明:大学生所认知的自己心理健康必备能力由自我调控、社会应对、学习和人际交往这四个方面的能力组成,它们彼此独立,但又相互关联。     

Kant on the Inapplicability of the Categories to Things in Themselves

This paper addresses the question of what we can legitimately say about things in themselves in Kant's critical doctrine. Many Kant scholars believe that Kant allows that things in themselves can be characterized through the unschematized or ‘pure’ concepts of our understanding such as ‘substance’ or ‘causality’. However, I show that on Kant's view things in themselves do not conform to the unschematized categories (given their standard discursive meaning): the pure categories, like space and time, are merely subjective forms of finite, discursive cognition. I then examine what this interpretation might entail for central aspects of Kant's system such as his doctrine of noumenal freedom.     

轻度认知功能障碍与颈动脉狭窄的相关性研究

为了探讨颈动脉狭窄与轻度认知功能障碍(MCI)的关系,选取轻度认知功能障碍病例89例,健康对照组100例,全部行颈动脉彩超检查及简易智能状态量表(MMSE),蒙特利尔认知量表(MoCA),临床痴呆量表(CDR),日常生活能力量表(ADL),汉密尔顿抑郁量表(HAMD)测评.结果发现轻度认知功能障碍组颈动脉狭窄发生率明显高于对照组,左侧发生率明显高于右侧.其中随着狭窄的严重程度增加,患者在延迟回忆、视空间与执行功能、计算力与注意力、语言能力方面评分显著下降.从这一结果可以看出轻度认知功能障碍与颈动脉狭窄密切相关.