Chimpanzee responding during matching to sample: control by exclusion

Three chimpanzees performed a computerized matching-to-sample task in which samples were photographs of items and comparison stimuli were geometric symbols called lexigrams. In Experiment 1, samples were either defined (i.e., they represented items that were associated already with a specific lexigram label by the chimpanzees) or undefined (i.e., they did not have an already learned association with a specific lexigram). On each trial, the foil (incorrect) comparison could be either a defined or an undefined lexigram. All 3 chimpanzees selected the correct comparison for undefined samples at a level significantly better than chance only when the foil comparison was defined. In Experiment 2, three comparisons were presented on each trial, and in Experiment 3, four comparisons were presented on each trial. For Experiments 2 and 3, the foil comparisons consisted of either defined or undefined comparisons or a mixture of both. For these two experiments, when the chimpanzees were presented with an undefined sample, they typically made selections of only undefined comparisons. These data indicate that the chimpanzees responded through use of exclusion. A final experiment, however, indicated that, despite the use of exclusion to complete trials with undefined samples correctly, the chimpanzees did not learn new associations between undefined samples and comparisons.     

当代中国的社会转型

本文以我国社会生活发生的广泛而深刻的变化为背景,深入揭示了这种变化深层的社会转型。这种转型就是：由权力社会走向能力社会;由人治社会走向法治社会;由人情社会走向理性社会;由依附社会走向自立社会;由身份社会走向实力社会;由注重先天给定社会走向注重后天努力社会;由一元化社会走向多样化社会;由人的依赖社会走向物的依赖社会;由静态社会走向流动社会;由“国家”社会走向“市民”社会。     

Psychological responses to body shape exposure in patients with bulimia nervosa

One of the unresolved issues regarding research on bulimia nervosa concerns the question as to how patients diagnosed with bulimia nervosa respond to body image exposure. In addition, it remains unclear whether there are differential responses associated with different exposure techniques (e.g. in vivo exposure vs. exposure by visualization). The aim of the present study was to investigate psychological responses to body image exposure. Twenty participants diagnosed with bulimia nervosa (DSM IV) and twenty non-eating disordered individuals were exposed to their body image using a video recording (video confrontation). In addition, they were asked to imagine and describe the appearance of their body (imagery task). Results indicate that self-reported negative emotions increased in response to both, video confrontation and imagery task, in the clinical as well as in the control group. Furthermore, video confrontation led to more pronounced group differences than exposure by visualization (imagery task). Participants diagnosed with bulimia nervosa took less time to describe their waist, hips and bottom compared to non-eating disturbed controls. This last result could be interpreted in terms of avoidance behavior and other mechanisms during body image exposure.     

Disruption of writing processes by the semanticity of background speech

Previous studies have noted that writing processes are impaired by task-irrelevant background sound. However, what makes sound distracting to writing processes has remained unaddressed. The experiment reported here investigated whether the semanticity of irrelevant speech contributes to disruption of writing processes beyond the acoustic properties of the sound. The participants wrote stories against a background of normal speech, spectrally-rotated speech (i.e., a meaningless sound with marked acoustic resemblance to speech) or silence. Normal speech impaired quantitative (e.g., number of characters produced) and qualitative/semantic (e.g., uncorrected typing errors, proposition generation) aspects of the written material, in comparison with the other two sound conditions, and it increased the duration of pauses between words. No difference was found between the silent and the rotated-speech condition. These results suggest that writing is susceptible to disruption from the semanticity of speech but not especially susceptible to disruption from the acoustic properties of speech.     

Latent profile analysis of working memory capacity and thinking styles in adults and adolescents

This study of adults (n = 269) and adolescents (n = 308) applied latent profile analysis to preference for rational and/or experiential cognition, coupled with working memory capacity (WMC). A 4-profile solution comprising rationally dominant, experientially dominant, dual preference, and disengaged groups was retained for both adult and adolescent samples. Our solution indicated that high WMC was associated with both preference and ability to engage in rational processing. Profile membership significantly discriminated both adults and adolescents on several reasoning tasks and measures of cognitive biases. Overall our results indicate that cognitive processing styles and WMC can be combined to create a typology that distinguishes between four types of thinkers who significantly differ in their performance on reasoning tasks.     

Fabricated Illness: Working within the Family System to Find a Pathway to Health

The term medically unexplained symptoms refers to a clinical presentation where the child's symptoms and impairment cannot be explained by any known organic pathology, and may include conversion disorders, somatoform pain disorders, factitious disorder, and factitious disorder by proxy. In this case study, we present our treatment of a 9‐year‐old girl with a 2‐year history of medically unexplained abdominal cramping and vaginal discharge. During the 9 months that we worked with this family, we were never able to clarify in our own minds the source of the child's symptoms—that is, who was responsible for their induction or who was the instigator or maintainer of the exaggerated symptoms. Nor did we come to fully understand the function of the symptoms in the family system. Our case report does not answer either of these questions. Instead, we describe how we worked with the family despite the ongoing ambiguities as to why the symptoms were occurring and who was inducing them. The functional outcome was disappearance of symptoms, return to full school attendance, and improved parenting behavior.     

It's in the sample: the effects of sample size and sample diversity on the breadth of inductive generalization

Developmental studies have provided mixed evidence with regard to the question of whether children consider sample size and sample diversity in their inductive generalizations. Results from four experiments with 105 undergraduates, 105 school-age children (M = 7.2 years), and 105 preschoolers (M = 4.9 years) showed that preschoolers made a higher rate of projections from large samples than from small samples when samples were diverse (Experiments 1 and 3) but not when samples were homogeneous (Experiment 4) and not when the task required a choice between two samples (Experiment 2). Furthermore, when a property occurred in large and diverse samples, preschoolers exhibited a broad pattern of projection, generalizing the property to items from categories not represented in the evidence. In contrast, adults followed a normative pattern of induction and never attributed properties to items from categories not represented in the evidence. School-age children showed a mixed pattern of results.     

Stigmatised Identity and Service Usage in Disadvantaged Communities: Residents', Community Workers' and Service Providers' Perspectives

The impact of community stigmatisation upon service usage has been largely overlooked from a social identity perspective. Specifically, the social identity‐mediated mechanisms by which stigmatisation hinders service use remain unspecified. The present study examines how service providers, community workers and residents recount their experience of the stigmatisation of local community identity and how this shapes residents' uptake of welfare, education and community support services. Twenty individual and group interviews with 10 residents, 16 community workers and six statutory service providers in economically disadvantaged communities in Limerick, Ireland, were thematically analysed. Analysis indicates that statutory service providers endorsed negative stereotypes of disadvantaged areas as separate and anti‐social. The awareness of this perceived division and the experience of ‘stigma consciousness’ was reported by residents and community workers to undermine trust, leading to under‐utilisation of community and government services. We argue that stigmatisation acts as a ‘social curse’ by undermining shared identity between service users and providers and so turning a potentially cooperative intragroup relationship into a fraught intergroup one. We suggest that tackling stigma in order to foster a sense of shared identity is important in creating positive and cooperative service interactions for both service users and providers. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Workplace mobbing and bystanders' helping behaviour towards victims: The role of gender,perceived responsibility and anticipated stigma by association

We examined victims' perceived responsibility and bystanders' anticipated risk of being victimized themselves when others associate them with the victim (stigma by association, SBA) as possible antecedents of bystanders' helping behaviour towards a victim of workplace mobbing, and explored the effects of gender. Guided by the attribution model of social conduct (Weiner, 2006), a 2 × 2 vignette experiment was conducted. Participants were Dutch regional government employees (N = 161). Path analyses generally supported the hypotheses, but showed different results for women and men. In the strong (Vs. weak) responsibility condition, women reported less sympathy and more anger and men only more anger, which resulted in lower helping intention. Additionally, for men the results showed an unexpected direct positive effect of responsibility on helping intention. Furthermore, in the strong SBA condition, women and men reported more fear and men, unexpectedly, more anger. Consequently, helping intention decreased. The findings on gender are discussed in the context of social role theory, gender and emotion. Our findings suggest that to prevent and tackle mobbing, organizations and professionals should be aware of the attributional and emotional processes and gender differences in bystanders' helping behaviour.     

Second order inductive logic and Wilmers' principle

We extend the framework of Inductive Logic to Second Order languages and introduce Wilmers' Principle, a rational principle for probability functions on Second Order languages. We derive a representation theorem for functions satisfying this principle and investigate its relationship with the first order principles of Regularity and Super Regularity.