Applicability and attachment findings of the Strange Situation Paradigm in infants with visual impairment

Attachment studies with diverse populations enrich the understanding of infants’ socioemotional development by documenting both universal and idiosyncratic aspects of attachment. Given the effects of attachment in children's socioemotional outcomes, such studies are necessary to investigate the impact of children's sensory impairments on attachment development. Yet, very little attachment research has focused on infants with visual impairment (VI infants), a population in which infant–caregiver emotional exchanges through visual means are reduced/absent. We investigated the applicability of the Strange Situation Paradigm (SSP), with added instructions to compensate for degraded visual input, in 20 VI infants (with no additional disabilities and who were receiving developmental counseling). In all but 1 of the SSPs coded, VI infants displayed observable attachment behavior that was classifiable. Nineteen VI infants showed attachment by 12 months of age. Across the ages tested (fractional age range = 0.9–2.33 months), most VI infants’ attachment patterns were classified as secure and organized.     

智慧测量三十年:两种测量范式及新发展

准确且高效地测量智慧是智慧研究的基石。自柏林智慧模式于1990年首创智慧测量法后,围绕如何测量智慧形成两种测量范式:最佳行为测量取向和典型行为测量取向。文中综述了两种测量范式的新发展、优势和不足。未来宜重点测量“德才一体”的综合心理素质和借助这一素质创造出的产品; 兼顾自我报告、行为观察和认知神经科学的方法测量智慧。     

Schizophrenia: Disease,Syndrome, or Dimensions?

Schizophrenia has the status of a clinical syndrome and may comprise a number of specific disease entities. This construct is similar to dementia, in which several diseases have been defined within the syndrome. Alternatively, schizophrenia may be a single disease entity with quite variable manifestations across cases. Kraepelin proposed dementia praecox as a disease entity, and Bleuler proposed dissociative pathology as fundamental to each case, thus substantiating the single disease entity concept. More recently, the nuclear schizophrenia construct defined the disease entity using specific criteria proposed by Schneider and Langfeldt. This view has been challenged by a series of studies during the past three decades. These investigations are summarized in this report. Implications for clinical work with families are considered.     

Previews of a Paradigm Shift in Psychotherapy: An Interview with Alvin Mahrer

The main purpose of the interview was to explore Alvin Mahrer’s views on an uncommon issue, namely the possibility of a paradigm shift in the field of psychotherapy. The interview covers (a) a way to help bring about a revolutionary paradigm shift, and (b) preview possibilities for an across-the-board, comprehensive paradigm shift in the field of psychotherapy. Grateful appreciation is extended to the reviewers whose comments were helpful and constructive in enabling a substantial improvement in the earlier draft of the interview.     

阈上与阈下知觉启动之间的差异:来自Stroop效应的证据

本研究采用Oddball与Stroop相结合的范式,对导致Merikle与Daza等研究结果之间的矛盾进行了考察。研究发现,在启动刺激与目标刺激之问的SOA为300毫秒的即时掩蔽条件下,启动刺激“红”和“绿”对随后的目标刺激的判断产生了不同的影响。前者表现出典型的Stroop效应,后者表现出反转的Stroop效应;主观觉知阈限测验显示,启动刺激“红”是在阈下状态被知觉的,而启动刺激“绿”是在阈上状态被知觉的。结果表明．阈下知觉启动具有一定的时问延续性。并不局限在某一特定时问点上,启动刺激的知觉状态受多种因素影响。     

Eye contact does not facilitate detection in children with autism

Eye contact is crucial in achieving social communication. Deviant patterns of eye contact behavior are found in individuals with autism, who suffer from severe social and communicative deficits. This study used a visual oddball paradigm to investigate whether children with high functioning autism have difficulty in detecting mutual gaze under experimental conditions. The results revealed that children with autism were no better at detecting direct gaze than at detecting averted gaze, which is unlike normal children. This suggests that whereas typically developing children have the ability to detect direct gaze, children with autism do not. This might result in altered eye-contact behavior, which hampers subsequent development of social and communicative skills.     

The place of psychotherapy and counselling in a healthy European social order: A commentary on Tantam and Van Deurzen

This commentary on Tantam and van Deurzen's vision for psychotherapy in Europe (this issue, pp. 228-235) interrogates their seeming modernity-driven, rights-obsessed convictions. Specifically, their uncritical advocacy of control-fixated political intrusions into the cultural-spiritual sphere is challenged; and critical reflections are offered on institutional professionalization; the authors' profession-centred, grandiose discourse; and therapy's alleged scientificity. Some dangers associated with individualised therapy's becoming a fetishized, institutionally sanctioned ‘regime of truth’ are voiced — one practicable antidote to which is the deliberate cultivation of an ongoingly deconstructive, ‘New Paradigm’ approach to therapy which, not least, mistrusts therapy's tendency towards delusory, self-interested exaggeration of its own cultural indispensability.     

P3 event-related potentials and childhood maltreatment in successful and unsuccessful psychopaths

Although P3 event-related potential abnormalities have been found in psychopathic individuals, it is unknown whether successful (uncaught) psychopaths and unsuccessful (caught) psychopaths show similar deficits. In this study, P3 amplitude and latency were assessed from a community sample of 121 male adults using an auditory three-stimulus oddball task. Psychopathy was assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Hare, 2003) while childhood physical maltreatment was assessed using the Conflict Tactic Scale (Straus, 1979). Results revealed that compared to normal controls, unsuccessful psychopaths showed reduced parietal P3 amplitudes to target stimuli and reported experienced more physical abuse in childhood. In contrast, successful psychopaths exhibited larger parietal P3 amplitude and shorter frontal P3 latency to irrelevant nontarget stimuli than unsuccessful psychopaths. This is the first report of electrophysiological processing differences between successful and unsuccessful psychopaths, possibly indicating neurocognitive and psychosocial distinctions between these two subtypes of psychopathy.     

Why are auditory novels distracting? Contrasting the roles of novelty, violation of expectation and stimulus change

Past studies show that novel auditory stimuli, presented in the context of an otherwise repeated sound, capture participants’ attention away from a focal task, resulting in measurable behavioral distraction. Novel sounds are traditionally defined as rare and unexpected but past studies have not sought to disentangle these concepts directly. Using a cross-modal oddball task, we contrasted these aspects orthogonally by manipulating the base rate and conditional probabilities of sound events. We report for the first time that behavioral distraction does not result from a sound’s novelty per se but from the violation of the cognitive system’s expectation based on the learning of conditional probabilities and, to some extent, the occurrence of a perceptual change from one sound to another.     

西方马克思主义宗教论说的六个问题领域

宗教在当代社会的"私人化",使基督教不仅作为一种信仰传统、也作为一种文化叙事引起诸多学科的关注,进而在基督教与马克思主义的关系方面形成了新的论说模式。马克思主义与基督教神学是否存在着可能交合的问题领域?这应该对中国目前的宗教学研究具有重要的借鉴价值。本文作者就此归纳为六个方面,并提出相关讨论。