Learning to Decide with and without Reasoning: How Task Experience Affects Attribute Weighting and Preference Stability

Certain experiments have shown that reasoning may weaken the stability of people's preferences, especially with regard to well‐learned perceptual judgment and decision‐making tasks, while learning has an opposite, consistency‐enhancing effect on preferences. We examined the effects of these factors in a visual multi‐attribute decision‐making task where reasoning, in contrast, has been found to benefit judgments by making them more stable. The initial assumption in this study was that this benefit would be typical for novel tasks, like the one employed here, and that it would decrease when the task is thoroughly learned. This assumption was examined in three experiments by contrasting it with an alternative assumption that this previously obtained beneficial effect is caused solely by learning, not by reasoning. It was found that learning indeed makes preferences more stable by consolidating the weights of the attributes. Reasoning, however, does not benefit this task when it is completely novel but facilitates learning and stability of the preferences long run, therefore increasing the consistency of the participants in the macrolevel. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

序列语义的类别一致性关系能否进行无意识整合？

阈下语义之间能否进行整合,最近的研究给出了不同的结果。当多个阈下语义词语同时呈现时显示出无意识语义整合效应,但是当序列呈现时没有观察到无意识整合效应。本研究在保留同时呈现方法优点（不同空间呈现位置）的情况下研究了序列呈现的不同汉字词语之间能否产生无意识语义类别关系整合。在实验1中,两个相同或不同类别的词语作为阈下启动刺激先后在两侧呈现,且第一个词语消失后第二词语马上出现,结果显示出无意识语义类别整合效应。实验2延长了两个阈下启动词语之间的时间间隔,结果未发现无意识语义类别整合效应。另外,实验3进一步排除了实验1中第一个启动词语的视觉残留,结果也未观察到显著的无意识语义类别整合效应,说明实验1中观察到的无意识整合效应是视觉残留所致。综合三个实验结果表明,两个阈下词语之间的语义类别一致性关系只有在同时呈现这种特殊条件下才能进行无意识整合加工,说明了短时间维度对于无意识语义关系整合的重要性。     

Shedding new light on an old problem: The estimation of shadow sizes in children and adults

Two experiments using the 'projection of shadows' paradigm investigated multidimensional reasoning, implicit and explicit knowledge, and the nonlinearity concept in 5-, 9-, and 13-year-olds and adults. Participants estimated the resulting shadow lengths of differently sized objects, placed at varying distances from a light source. Experiment 1 (N=80) revealed that, on the group level, 5-year-olds took both object size and light-object distance into account when estimating shadow size. Moreover, half of the children in this age group even considered the subordinate distance dimension. In addition, we found a large discrepancy between implicit and explicit knowledge about shadows in 5-year-olds that decreased with age. Finally, only a minority of older participants and very few younger children recognized the nonlinear relationship between light-object distance and shadow size, suggesting domain dependence of the nonlinearity concept. Experiment 2 (N=20) predominately replicated the findings for 5-year-olds using slightly different stimuli.     

How Neighborhood Poverty Structures Types and Levels of Social Integration

Social integration is fundamental to health and well‐being. However, few studies have explored how neighborhood contexts pattern types and levels of social integration that individuals experience. We examined how neighborhood poverty structures two dimensions of social integration: integration with neighbors and social integration more generally. Using data from the United States Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we linked study participants to percent poverty in their neighborhood of residence (N = 16,040). Social integration was assessed using a modified Social Network Index and neighborhood integration based on yearly visits with neighbors. We fit multivariate logistic regression models that accounted for the complex survey design. Living in high poverty neighborhoods was associated with lower social integration but higher visits with neighbors. Neighborhood poverty distinctly patterns social integration, demonstrating that contexts shape the extent and quality of social relationships.     

“It's ok if it's hidden”: The discursive construction of everyday racism for refugees and asylum seekers in Wales

Wales has a long history of migration; however, the introduction of dispersed asylum seekers in 2001 has led to Wales becoming a more superdiverse nation. Wales has often been positioned as a more “tolerant nation” than England; however, the increasingly superdiverse nature of Wales in a postdevolution era may now be calling this tolerance thesis into question. Models of refugee and asylum seeker integration suggest that the absence of racism plays a key role in integration. This paper reports the findings of research that centres on refugee and asylum seeker integration in Wales. Nineteen interviews were conducted with refugees and asylum seekers who had been living in Wales for between 1 month and 12 years. Each interview was analysed using a discursive psychology approach. In this paper, I show that the interviewees appeared to negotiate a dilemma when talking about experiencing potentially racist incidents within the interviews, constructing them as trivial so as not to appear critical of the protection they have received in Wales. The findings also highlight the more everyday and banal forms of racism that are regularly experienced by refugees and asylum seekers living in Wales.     

Transcultural histories of psychotherapy

Abstract

Both proponents of and critics tend to assume psychotherapy’s origin and status as a ‘Western’ practice. The history of the emergence of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are far more complex than this picture allows for. Today as we enter a more multipolar era of world history, the easy identification of psychotherapy with ‘the West’ will become increasingly difficult to sustain, as Bangalore and Shanghai are likely to rival Hampstead and Manhattan as centres of influence for the development of therapeutic practice and theory in the coming decades. Adapting to this new world will necessitate a different conception of the role of ‘culture’ than we have been used to in recent discussions in psychotherapy. Rather than simply seeing ‘culture’ as a factor that needs to be added to discussions to counteract the alleged ethnocentrism of ‘Western’ psychotherapy, we will need to begin to pay more careful attention to the work that is done by appeals to the ‘culture concept’ in different contexts. In particular ‘culture’ can be constructed as an object of evaluation that makes it part of the ‘check-list’ of skills that characterise the reconception of psychotherapy in an era of neoliberal instrumental manualised therapy training and practice.     

Does solving distant analogies facilitate relational integration?

Relational processing underpins many forms of human thinking. This research addressed whether relational integration in the n-term task (linear syllogisms with three and four premises) can be facilitated. We hypothesised that solving distant analogies (e.g. furnace : coal :: stomach : ______) but not near analogies (e.g. furnace : coal :: woodstove :______) would facilitate n-term performance of undergraduates (N?=?120). Participants generated solutions to near analogies (near condition), to distant analogies (distant condition) while participants in the control condition completed a word rating task. Participants then completed the n-term task with items at two levels of complexity (ternary, quaternary), and a fluid intelligence test. Solving distant analogies facilitated relational integration on the more complex quaternary-relational items. It eliminated the complexity effect in the n-term task and the association between quaternary-relational reasoning and fluid intelligence.     

Accuracy and performance of the state-based Φ and liveliness measures of information integration

A number of people have suggested that there is a link between information integration and consciousness, and a number of algorithms for calculating information integration have been put forward. The most recent of these is Balduzzi and Tononi’s state-based Φ algorithm, which has factorial dependencies that severely limit the number of neurons that can be analyzed. To address this issue an alternative state-based measure known as liveliness has been developed, which uses the causal relationships between neurons to identify the areas of maximum information integration. This paper outlines the state-based Φ and liveliness algorithms and sets out a number of test networks that were used to compare their accuracy and performance. The results show that liveliness is a reasonable approximation to state-based Φ for some network topologies, and it has a much more scalable performance than state-based Φ.     

积极心理学视野下的工作压力

工作压力是职业健康心理学研究的重要领域。随着经济发展,工作压力问题日益突出,它降低了生产率,使员工的健康受损,增加了成本消耗。但是以往的研究主要关注压力的消极面,干预方法也是以预防和治疗为主。然而积极心理学运动的兴起改变了传统的工作压力研究方法,提出积极压力的概念,倡导以健康、整合的方式建立一个完整的工作压力模型。并提出在预防和治疗消极压力的同时,也要重视激发积极压力。     

The effects of ageing and visual noise on conceptual integration during sentence reading

The effortfulness hypothesis implies that difficulty in decoding the surface form, as in the case of age-related sensory limitations or background noise, consumes the attentional resources that are then unavailable for semantic integration in language comprehension. Because ageing is associated with sensory declines, degrading of the surface form by a noisy background can pose an extra challenge for older adults. In two experiments, this hypothesis was tested in a self-paced moving window paradigm in which younger and older readers’ online allocation of attentional resources to surface decoding and semantic integration was measured as they read sentences embedded in varying levels of visual noise. When visual noise was moderate (Experiment 1), resource allocation among young adults was unaffected but older adults allocated more resources to decode the surface form at the cost of resources that would otherwise be available for semantic processing; when visual noise was relatively intense (Experiment 2), both younger and older participants allocated more attention to the surface form and less attention to semantic processing. The decrease in attentional allocation to semantic integration resulted in reduced recall of core ideas in both experiments, suggesting that a less organized semantic representation was constructed in noise. The greater vulnerability of older adults at relatively low levels of noise is consistent with the effortfulness hypothesis.