心理学视角下社交网络用户个体行为分析

以社交网络的典型代表Facebook为例, 以社交网络用户个体行为为着眼点, 从个体使用社交网络的动机、社交网络用户个体行为的主要表现及其影响因素和结果变量四个方面, 梳理国外心理学领域有关社交网络的最新研究成果。今后研究可以在社交网络用户个体行为的测量、样本代表性、线上和线下社交网络的交互作用、具体人格特质变量的预测作用以及对社交网络功能的动态考察等方面推进已有研究。     

Judging a book by its cover and its contents: the representation of polysemous and homophonous meanings in four-year-old children

Unlike homophonous meanings, which are semantically unrelated (e.g., the use of bat to refer to a baseball bat and a flying rodent), polysemous meanings are systematically related to one another (e.g., the use of book, CD, and video to refer to physical objects, as in ‘the leather book’, or to the intellectual content they contain, as in ‘the profound book’). But do perceived relations among polysemous meanings reflect the presence of generative lexical or conceptual structures that permit the meanings of these words to shift? If so, these structures may also support children’s early representations of polysemous meanings. In four studies, we demonstrate (1) that four-year-old children can understand both the concrete and abstract meanings of words like book, (2) that when taught a novel label for one of these meanings, children can readily understand an extension of that label to the other meaning, and (3) that extension does not occur between two homophonous meanings, which share a common phonological form but are otherwise unrelated. We conclude that the polysemous meanings of words like book rely on a common representational base early in development, and suggest that this may be the result of foundational, generative properties of the lexicon or conceptual system.     

Food Systems Change and the Environment: Local and Global Connections

Making changes to the way food is produced, distributed, and processed is one strategy for addressing global climate change. In this case study, we examine the "forming" stage of an emergent and locally-based coalition that is both participatory and focused on promoting food security by creating food systems change. Social network analysis is used to compare network density, centrality, and centralization among coalition partners before the formation of the coalition and at its one-year anniversary. Findings reveal that the coalition facilitated information seeking, assistance seeking, and collaborative efforts related to food security among a group of organizational stakeholders that were relatively disconnected pre-coalition. Results also illuminate tensions related to increased centralization of the network, coalition efficiency, and the goals of democratic decision-making. This study highlights the utility of social network analysis as a tool for evaluating the aims and trajectory of locally-based coalitions focused on global concerns.     

Motor knowledge is one dimension for concept organization: Further evidence from a Chinese semantic dementia case

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have indicated that motor knowledge is one potential dimension along which concepts are organized. Here we present further direct evidence for the effects of motor knowledge in accounting for categorical patterns across object domains (living vs. nonliving) and grammatical domains (nouns vs. verbs), as well as the integrity of other modality-specific knowledge (e.g., visual). We present a Chinese case, XRK, who suffered from semantic dementia with left temporal lobe atrophy. In naming and comprehension tasks, he performed better at nonliving items than at living items, and better at verbs than at nouns. Critically, multiple regression method revealed that these two categorical effects could be both accounted for by the charade rating, a continuous measurement of the significance of motor knowledge for a concept or a semantic feature. Furthermore, charade rating also predicted his performances on the generation frequency of semantic features of various modalities. These findings consolidate the significance of motor knowledge in conceptual organization and further highlights the interactions between different types of semantic knowledge.     

Regional differences in the listener's phonemic inventory affect semantic processing: A mismatch negativity (MMN) study

Using the mismatch negativity (MMN) response, we examined how Standard French and Southern French speakers access the meaning of words ending in /e/ or /ε/ vowels which are contrastive in Standard French but not in Southern French. In Standard French speakers, there was a significant difference in the amplitude of the brain response after the deviant-minus-standard subtraction between the frontocentral (FC) and right lateral (RL) recording sites for the final-/ε/ word but not the final-/e/ word. In contrast, the difference in the amplitude of the brain response between the FC and RL recording sites did not significantly vary as a function of the word’s final vowel in Southern French speakers. Our findings provide evidence that access to lexical meaning in spoken word recognition depends on the speaker’s native regional accent.     

Support for anterior temporal involvement in semantic error production in aphasia: new evidence from VLSM

Semantic errors in aphasia (e.g., naming a horse as “dog”) frequently arise from faulty mapping of concepts onto lexical items. A recent study by our group used voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) methods with 64 patients with chronic aphasia to identify voxels that carry an association with semantic errors. The strongest associations were found in the left anterior temporal lobe (L-ATL), in the mid- to anterior MTG region. The absence of findings in Wernicke’s area was surprising, as were indications that ATL voxels made an essential contribution to the post-semantic stage of lexical access. In this follow-up study, we sought to validate these results by re-defining semantic errors in a manner that was less theory dependent and more consistent with prior lesion studies. As this change also increased the robustness of the dependent variable, it made it possible to perform additional statistical analyses that further refined the interpretation. The results strengthen the evidence for a causal relationship between ATL damage and lexically-based semantic errors in naming and lend confidence to the conclusion that chronic lesions in Wernicke’s area are not causally implicated in semantic error production.     

Over-specified referring expressions impair comprehension: an ERP study

Speakers often include extra information when producing referring expressions, which is inconsistent with the Maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975). In this study, we investigated how comprehension is affected by unnecessary information. The literature is mixed: some studies have found that extra information facilitates comprehension and others reported impairments. We used an attentional-cueing paradigm to assess how quickly participants could orient attention to an object upon hearing a referring expression, such as the red square. If there are two squares differing in color, then the modifier is required. However, if there is only one (red) square, then the modifier is unnecessary. We also recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in order to investigate online processing. Reaction times were significantly longer for referring expressions that contained extra information, and ERPs revealed a centroparietal negativity (N400) that emerged approximately 200–300 ms after modifier onset. We conclude that referring expressions with an unnecessary pre-nominal modifier impair comprehension performance.     

Comprehension of argument structure and semantic roles: evidence from English-learning children and the forced-choice pointing paradigm

Research using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP) has consistently shown that English-learning children aged 2 can associate transitive argument structure with causal events. However, studies using the same methodology investigating 2-year-old children's knowledge of the conjoined agent intransitive and semantic role assignment have reported inconsistent findings. The aim of the present study was to establish at what age English-learning children have verb-general knowledge of both transitive and intransitive argument structure using a new method: the forced-choice pointing paradigm. The results suggest that young 2-year-olds can associate transitive structures with causal (or externally caused) events and can use transitive structure to assign agent and patient roles correctly. However, the children were unable to associate the conjoined agent intransitive with noncausal events until aged 3;4. The results confirm the pattern from previous IPLP studies and indicate that children may develop the ability to comprehend different aspects of argument structure at different ages. The implications for theories of language acquisition and the nature of the language acquisition mechanism are discussed.     

Effectiveness of follow‐up reminiscence therapy on autobiographical memory in pathological ageing

The objective is to examine the effects of reminiscence therapy (RT) on total, episodic and semantic autobiographical memory in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) groups, testing the effects of RT on different stages of autobiographical memory, and its effectiveness at follow‐up. A sample composed of 43 aMCI (27 treatments, 16 controls) and 30 AD (15 treatments, 15 controls) subjects were evaluated with the Autobiographical Memory Interview (AMI) test. The RT consisted of 10 sessions lasting 60 minutes each. Both groups, aMCI and AD, showed significant effects on overall autobiographical memory; aMCI showed significant main effects on episodic and semantic autobiographical memory in the treatment group, increasing scores in both cases. For AD, significant effects were observed on autobiographical episodic memory, showing an increase in the treatment group from Time 1 to follow‐up; semantic memory showed a decrease in the control group from Time 1 to follow‐up. Results show that RT implementation and follow‐up are effective in increasing autobiographical memory in subjects with aMCI and AD.     

Trouble articulating the right words: Evidence for a response‐exclusion account of distraction during semantic fluency

It is widely held that single‐word lexical access is a competitive process, a view based largely on the observation that naming a picture is slowed in the presence of a distractor‐word. However, problematic for this view is that a low‐frequency distractor‐word slows the naming of a picture more than does a high‐frequency word. This supports an alternative, response‐exclusion, account in which a distractor‐word interferes because it must be excluded from an articulatory output buffer before the right word can be articulated (the picture name): A high, compared to low, frequency word accesses the buffer more quickly and, as such, can also be excluded more quickly. Here we studied the respective roles of competition and response‐exclusion for the first time in the context of semantic verbal fluency, a setting requiring the accessing of, and production of, multiple words from long‐term memory in response to a single semantic cue. We show that disruption to semantic fluency by a sequence of to‐be‐ignored spoken distractors is also greater when those distractors are low in frequency, thereby extending the explanatory compass of the response‐exclusion account to a multiple‐word production setting and casting further doubt on the lexical‐selection‐by‐competition view. The results can be understood as reflecting the contribution of speech output processes to semantic fluency.