The placebo effect in popular culture

This paper gives an overview of the placebo effect in popular culture, especially as it pertains to the work of authors Patrick O’Brian and Sinclair Lewis. The beloved physician as placebo, and the clinician scientist as villain are themes that respectively inform the novels, The Hundred Days and Arrowsmith. Excerpts from the novels, and from film show how the placebo effect, and the randomized clinical trial, have emerged into popular culture, and evolved over time. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003.     

情境理论的迁移观及其教育意义

支撑—活动观、社会共享认知观以及实践共同体观是当前情境理论中具有代表性的迁移观点。这些观点分别从不同的角度强调情境特性对迁移的影响,并主张在常规的学校教育中突出情境、尤其是社会文化与社会实践情境的作用。     

Living with Contradictions: The Taken-for-Granted in Israeli Political Discourse

Two apparently contradictory ideas are closely linked in Israeli political discourse: Israel is powerful and independent and Israel is vulnerable and dependent. This study used content analysis and focus groups, as well as existing survey data analyzed by others, to explore how this paradox has been reflected in newspapers and conversations during six different time periods from 1948 to 1996. The goal was not to explain the paradox but to examine its consequences for Israeli perceptions of U.S. policy in the Middle East—and, in the process, to explore Israeli self-images. The nature of U.S. strategic interests was originally treated as problematic and in need of political discussion, but in the past 25 years these interests have become taken for granted. Surprisingly, even after the end of the Cold War, a critical discourse moment in which a reexamination of U.S. interests in the Middle East would seem inevitable, the U.S. role remains taken for granted and largely unexamined. The strong/vulnerable paradox explains this absence of discussion: Examining U.S. interests too closely upsets the delicate balance that keeps the sense of vulnerability in check.     

Unity and Disunity in Landmarks: The Rivalry Between Petr Struve and Mikhail Gershenzon

In this article the most important text of twentieth-century Russian intellectual history, Landmarks (Vekhi) (1909) comes under reexamination. Looking at the rivalry of the volume's two organizers, Mikhail Gershenzon and Petr Struve, Professor Brian Horowitz explains why Landmarks succeeded in offering such a biting critique of radical ideology, while lacking its own internal intellectual unity.     

The history of Russian psychoanalysis and the problem of its periodisation

The formation and spread of the psychoanalytic teaching of Sigmund Freud and his followers is one of the most significant events in the life of the spirit in the twentieth century. The recognition of this as an historical fact--irrespective of its relation to Freud and his ideas--assumes of course and need to gain a proper understanding and appropriate interpretation of psychoanalysis in all its dimensions. Generally speaking, the history of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic movement has been researched quite fully, although for a variety of reasons and circumstances there are a number of gaps in it. Perhaps the most important of these is the history of Russian psychoanalysis, which has developed within a country where, at the beginning of the century, Freud's works were translated and published in a most effective and representative way, and where psychoanalytic ideas drew a response both from specialists and among the public at large, although in content and inclination the Russian mentality did not at heart suit a psychoanalytical treatment of man and his culture.     

Cultural Effects Rather Than a Bilingual Advantage in Cognition: A Review and an Empirical Study

The bilingual advantage hypothesis contends that the management of two languages in the brain is carried out through domain‐general mechanisms, and that bilinguals possess a performance advantage over monolinguals on (nonlinguistic) tasks that tap these processes. Presently, there is evidence both for and against such an advantage. Interestingly, the evidence in favor has been thought strongest in children and older adults, leading some researchers to argue that young adults might be at peak performance levels, and therefore bilingualism is unable to confer an improvement. We conducted a large‐scale review of the extant literature and found that the weight of research pointed to an absence of positive evidence for a bilingual advantage at any age. We next gave a large number of young adult participants a task designed to test the bilingual advantage hypothesis. Reasoning from the literature that young adults from an East Asian (Korean) culture would likely outperform those from a Western (British) culture, we also compared participants on this factor. We found no evidence for a bilingual advantage but did find evidence for enhanced performance in the Korean group. We interpret these results as further evidence against the bilingual advantage hypotheses.     

中国考试文化的古今嬗变与镜鉴

中国考试文化生态因社会环境、经济土壤、社会结构和国际环境影响而形成从保守封闭性向包容开放性转变的特征。本文从三个层面考察中国考试文化的当代嬗变： 考试观念文化从单一的政治情结向综合人文素质嬗变, 考试制度文化从僵化到创新嬗变, 考试行为文化则从场所、教学行为、主体、应试行为和实践行为考察。通过合理挖掘中国传统考试文化中的道德诉求与和谐理念, 力求凝练出一种具有深厚文化内涵和现代竞争意识的考试文化。     

基于文化的心理复原力研究

随着对个体心理复原力研究不断深入,文化作为影响个体心理复原力的重要因素日益受到关注,研究者在厘清文化与复原力之间的关系后,尝试以积极心理学的视角,将中国传统文化中"天人合一"、"以人为本"、"自强不息"、"厚德载物"等文化精神引入到个体心理复原力发展的过程中,为个体心理复原力的研究贡献价值。     

中国穆斯林商业文化特点探析

近年来,在经济快速发展的过程中,由于过于注重眼前利益,导致一系列缺乏商业道德事件的发生。受伊斯兰教和我国传统文化的影响,我国穆斯林在商业活动中形成了独特的商业文化,其核心价值是"自立"、"公正"、"重承诺"、"慎独"和"重未来"。我国穆斯林商业文化,对中国企业的经营管理具有借鉴意义。     

From ��Water Boiling in a Peruvian Town�� to ��Letting them Die��: Culture, Community Intervention, and the Metabolic Balance Between Patience and Zeal

While the concept of culture has long been central to community psychology research and intervention, it has most frequently referred to the communities in which such work occurs. The purpose of this paper is to reframe this discussion by viewing community interventions as instances of intercultural contact between the culture of science, reflected in community intervention research, and the culture of the communities in which those interventions occur. Following a brief discussion of the complexities of culture as a concept, two illustrative stories of failed community interventions are provided to highlight the centrality of cultural and contextual understanding as prelude to community intervention. These stories, set 50 years apart, reflect the depth and pervasive influence of both the culture of science and the culture of communities. Next, a series of propositions about the culture of social science as a partial reflection of the broader culture of the United States are offered, and their implications for the conduct of community interventions drawn. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations which, together, provide an ecological mind-set for taking culture seriously in community interventions. Central to this mind set are the importance of focusing on communities rather than programs and emphasizing the intervention goal of choice over change.