Moral growth in medical students

Although students bring to medical school a fairly well established value system, the potential for moral growth through the medical school environment and experience is substantial. The educational environment poses a succession of developmental and adaptive tasks to be accomplished. Several of these tasks are discussed here, tasks that are value-laden and involve, directly or indirectly, the interplay of ethical theory and practice. During the past quarter century, the two influences that have had the greatest impact on the moral growth and moral reasoning capacity of medical students have been the incorporation into the medical school curriculum of courses in medical humanities and the admission to medical school of an increasing number of female students. The female students have brought to medical school a level or dimension of moral reasoning (morality as care or responsibility for others) to augment the male students' focus on rights and justice considerations.     

Designing road safety interventions for young drivers – The power of peer influence

Peer passengers are associated with risky driving behaviour and increased collision rate in young drivers, but the mechanism by which young drivers are influenced by their peers is not well understood. Here we report two studies that explore the effect of peer influence on young drivers. The first explored the relationship between susceptibility to peer influence and young drivers’ engagement in risky driving behaviour. 163 young drivers completed self-report measures of risky driving behaviour and susceptibility to different forms of peer influence. Results showed that young drivers who were influenced by their peers to attain social prestige and through peers intervening in their decisions committed more driving violations. The second study sought to utilise the susceptibility of young drivers to peer influence by using peers to design and deliver a safety intervention, following the ‘U in the Driver Seat’ model from the US. When compared to a traditional fear appeal and a control, the peer intervention group reported safer attitudes and intentions to drive safely at follow-up. Together these studies provide insight into how peers influence young drivers’ risky behaviour, and support the notion of using peer education tools in young driver safety interventions.     

从《周易参同契》看易学在道教中的传播与影响

<周易参同契>作为道教易学的重要代表作,其最重要的特色是会归"大易"、"黄老"和"炉火"三家之理,借<周易>言黄老说炼丹.本文将<周易参同契>置于汉代易学的背景下,从黄老道家哲学与道教仙学的发展中,来探讨<周易参同契>如何托<周易>卦爻象为象征符号来隐喻金丹道之内涵,以展示易学在道教中的传播与影响.     

On the influence of causal beliefs on the feeling of agency

The sense of agency is the experience of being the origin of a sensory consequence. This study investigates whether contextual beliefs modulate low-level sensorimotor processes which contribute to the emergence of the sense of agency. We looked at the influence of causal beliefs on ‘intentional binding’, a phenomenon which accompanies self-agency. Participants judged the onset-time of either an action or a sound which followed the action. They were induced to believe that the tone was either triggered by themselves or by somebody else, although, in reality, the sound was always triggered by the participants. We found that intentional binding was stronger when participants believed that they triggered the tone, compared to when they believed that another person triggered the tone. These results suggest that high-level contextual information influences sensorimotor processes responsible for generating intentional binding.     

Attentional sets influence perceptual load effects,but not dilution effects

Perceptual load theory [Lavie, N. (1995). Perceptual load as a necessary condition for selective attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 451–468.; Lavie, N., & Tsal, Y. (1994) Perceptual load as a major determinant of the locus of selection in visual attention. Perception & Psychophysics, 56, 183–197.] proposes that interference from distractors can only be avoided in situations of high perceptual load. This theory has been supported by blocked design manipulations separating low load (when the target appears alone) and high load (when the target is embedded among neutral letters). Tsal and Benoni [(2010a). Diluting the burden of load: Perceptual load effects are simply dilution effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36, 1645–1656.; Benoni, H., & Tsal, Y. (2010). Where have we gone wrong? Perceptual load does not affect selective attention. Vision Research, 50, 1292–1298.] have recently shown that these manipulations confound perceptual load with “dilution” (the mere presence of additional heterogeneous items in high-load situations). Theeuwes, Kramer, and Belopolsky [(2004). Attentional set interacts with perceptual load in visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 697–702.] independently questioned load theory by suggesting that attentional sets might also affect distractor interference. When high load and low load were intermixed, and participants could not prepare for the presentation that followed, both the low-load and high-load trials showed distractor interference. This result may also challenge the dilution account, which proposes a stimulus-driven mechanism. In the current study, we presented subjects with both fixed and mixed blocks, including a mix of dilution trials with low-load trials and with high-load trials. We thus separated the effect of dilution from load and tested the influence of attentional sets on each component. The results revealed that whereas perceptual load effects are influenced by attentional sets, the dilution component is not. This strengthens the notion that dilution is a stimulus-driven mechanism, which enables effective selectivity.     

The tripartite influence model of body image and eating disturbance: A replication with adolescent girls

The tripartite influence model of body image and eating disturbance is a recent theoretical approach that includes a test of direct (peer, parental, and media factors) and mediational links (internalization of societal appearance standards, appearance comparison processes) as factors potentially leading to body dissatisfaction and eating disturbance. The theory was evaluated in the current study in a sample of 391 adolescent females. A structural equation model that evaluated the tripartite model replicated previous findings reported by Keery, van den Berg and Thompson (2004) [Keery, H., van den Berg, & Thompson, J. K. (2004). A test of the tripartite influence model of body image and eating disturbance in adolescent girls. Body Image: An International Journal of Research, 1, 237–251.]. Additionally, a second model extended these findings, suggesting that peer and media influences are more important than parental influences. The results are discussed in light of the need for prevention programs to incorporate formative influences and mediational processes in the construction of intervention strategies.     

The emergence of words: attentional learning in form and meaning

Children improve at word learning during the 2nd year of life—sometimes dramatically. This fact has suggested a change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more referential form of learning. This article presents an associative exemplar-based model that accounts for the improvement without a change in mechanism. It provides a unified account of children's growing abilities to (a) learn a new word given only 1 or a few training trials ("fast mapping"); (b) acquire words that differ only slightly in phonological form; (c) generalize word meanings preferentially along particular dimensions, such as object shape (the "shape bias"); and (d) learn 2nd labels for already-named objects, despite a persisting resistance to doing so ("mutual exclusivity"). The model explains these improvements in terms of increased attention to relevant aspects of form and meaning, which reduces memory interference. The interaction of associations and reference in word learning is discussed.     

青少年亲子冲突的研究现状

青少年时期是人生中最关键而富有特色的时期,是个体由不成熟的童年向成熟人生过渡的时期。过渡性往往和不稳定性联系在一起,因此,青少年时期容易产生亲子冲突,被有的学者称之为“亲子关系危机期”、“疾风暴雨”期。且目前我国青少年亲子冲突愈演愈烈,针对此现象,本文从亲手冲突的特点、影响因素方面进行综述,以期对我国目前正开展的此领域研究提供一些思考和借鉴。     

Time-course of attention for threatening pictures in high and low trait anxiety

Cognitive studies about anxiety suggest that the interplay between automatic and strategic biases in attention to threat is related to the persistence of fear. In the present study, the time-course of attention to pictures with varying threat levels was investigated in high trait anxious (HTA, n=21) and low trait anxious (LTA, n=22) students. In a visual probe detection task, high and mild threat pictures were presented at three durations: 100, 500, and 1250 ms. Results indicated that all individuals attended to the high threat pictures for the 100 ms condition. Differential responding between HTA and LTA individuals was found for the 500 ms condition: only HTA individuals showed an attentional bias for mild threatening stimuli. For the 1250 ms condition, the HTA individuals attended away from high and mild threat pictures. The observed pattern of differential attention to threatening pictures may explain the persistence of fear in HTA individuals.     

Selective attention in social phobia and the moderating effect of a concurrent depressive disorder

Studies using the modified Stroop colour naming task have provided results consistent with the hypothesis that social phobia is associated with an attentional bias towards negative social-evaluative words. However, these results could also have arisen as a consequence of non-attentional processes. For this reason, the present study uses a modified version of MacLeod et al.'s (J. Abnorm. Psychol. 95 (1986) 15) dot-probe task, which provides a more direct measure of attention. Patients with social phobia (n=28), patients with social phobia and a concurrent depressive disorder (n=33), and non-patients (n=40) were presented with word pairs each consisting of a neutral word and a threat word. The results indicated that patients with social phobia show an attentional bias towards social-threat words while non-patients tend to avoid social-threat words. Patients with social phobia and a concurrent depressive disorder behaved like non-patients, indicating that concurrent depression abolishes the attentional bias. Physical threat words were also included in the study. The main analysis indicated that social phobia is also associated with an attentional bias to physical threat. However, a post hoc analysis (which requires replication) suggested that the physical threat bias might have arisen because some social phobia patients also had another anxiety disorder in which physical concerns are likely to have been prominent. Overall, the results emphasise the importance of assessing comorbidity when investigating attentional biases.