自强意识的初步调查研究

采用录音访谈和开放式问卷要求200名不同性别、年龄、职业、教育程度的成人对“自强”的含义以及在什么时候、什么心理背景下想到“自强”进行了调查,结果表明：(1)公众的自强观主要是指持久的意志力;(2)自强可分为顺境自强、逆境自强、竞争性自强、成长性自强和他向性自强．逆境自强更为公众所赞同;(3)人们回忆起自强意识产生的时间主要在参加工作以后。     

评发生认识论的"反省抽象"范畴

论文分析了皮亚杰发生认识论中“反省抽象”范畴的发展脉络、主要内涵及其与某些相关概念(如概括化、平衡化、矛盾与否定的构造、意识化与觉知等)的联系。作者认为：反省抽象不仅体现皮亚杰的独创性．而且也是发生认识沦中最为核心和最为重要的概念。它合理地解释了知识创新的源泉,使发生认识论的逻辑一数学范畴研究及认知发展一般规律的研究奠基于科学认识论之上。作者主张应准确继承皮亚杰的学术遗产,深化对认知发展机制的探索。     

Internal versus external attention in social anxiety: an investigation using a novel paradigm

Several cognitive models propose that social anxiety is associated with increased self-focused attention. Indirect evidence for this hypothesis has been provided by questionnaire studies, and by cognitive psychology paradigms that have demonstrated reduced processing of external information during feared social-evaluative situations. However, no studies have simultaneously measured on-line attention to internal and external events. A probe detection task that aimed to measure the balance of attention between internal and external stimuli was developed. High and low socially anxious individuals were instructed to detect two probes. The external probe was superimposed on pictures of faces (happy, neutral, angry) or household objects that were presented on a VDU. The 'internal' probe was a pulse to the finger which participants were led to believe represented significant changes in their physiology. Compared to low speech anxious individuals, high speech anxious individuals showed an internal attentional bias, that was specific to conditions of social-evaluative threat.     

Pain coping and social support as predictors of long-term functional disability and pain in early rheumatoid arthritis

Pain-related avoidance factors and social resources, as assessed by pain coping and social support, are supposed to have lasting effects on functional disability and pain in chronic pain disorders. As a follow-up to a prospective study demonstrating short-term effects after one year (Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36, 179-193, 1998), the role of pain coping and social support at the time of diagnosis was investigated in relationship to the long-term course of functional disability and pain after three and five years in 78 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), taking into account personality characteristics of neuroticism and extraversion, clinical status and use of medication. In line with findings at the one-year follow-up, results showed that more passive pain coping predicted functional disability at the three-year, but not the five-year follow-up. In addition, low levels of social support at the time of diagnosis consistently predicted both functional disability and pain at the three and five-year follow-ups. Results indicate that pain coping and social support, assessed very early in the disease process, can affect long-term functional disability and pain in RA, and suggest that early interventions focusing on pain-related avoidance factors and social resources for patients at risk may beneficially influence long-term outcomes in RA.     

Representing others' actions: just like one's own?

Previous research has shown that observing others' actions can affect individual performance of the same actions. In the present study, we developed a new paradigm to investigate whether and how complementary actions at the disposal of another agent are represented and influence one's own actions. A spatial compatibility task was distributed among two people so that each participant took care of one of two responses. The identical task was performed alone and alongside another participant. There was a spatial compatibility effect in the group setting only. It was similar to the effect obtained when one person took care of both responses. This result suggests that one's own actions and others' actions are represented in a functionally equivalent way.     

Strategies of control,aggression, and morality in preschoolers: an evolutionary perspective

Moral reasoning, moral affect, social problem solving skills, and social preferences were assessed in 163 ethnically mixed preschoolers (2.86-5.95 years). Participants were rated by their teachers on prosocial and coercive strategies of control, success at resource control, and aggression (overt and relational). Based on their employment of coercive and prosocial strategies of resource control, the children were categorized as bistrategic controllers, coercive controllers, prosocial controllers, noncontrollers, or typicals. Teacher-rated relational aggression was positively associated with moral maturity in girls. Bistrategic controllers, although aggressive, were morally mature and preferred play partners by their peers. The results are discussed in terms of hypotheses that arise from evolutionary theory which suggests that highly effective resource controllers would be simultaneously aggressive and yet well aware of moral norms. The findings are contrasted with alternative hypotheses that might arise variously from traditional and prevailing approaches.     

Argumentation and Evidence

This essay explores the role of informal logicand its application in the context of currentdebates regarding evidence-based medicine. This aim is achieved through a discussion ofthe goals and objectives of evidence-basedmedicine and a review of the criticisms raisedagainst evidence-based medicine. Thecontributions to informal logic by StephenToulmin and Douglas Walton are explicated andtheir relevance for evidence-based medicine isdiscussed in relation to a common clinicalscenario: hypertension management. This essayconcludes with a discussion on the relationshipbetween clinical reasoning, rationality, andevidence. It is argued that informal logic hasthe virtue of bringing explicitness to the roleof evidence in clinical reasoning, and bringssensitivity to understanding the role ofdialogical context in the need for evidence inclinical decision making.     

A Capuchin monkey (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Cebus apella</Emphasis>) recognizes when people do and do not know the location of food

In a previous study, Kuroshima and colleagues demonstrated that capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) learned to discriminate between a "knower" who inspected a box for food, and a "guesser" who did not. The aim of the present study was to specify whether the subjects learned a simple conditional discrimination or a causal relationship that seeing leads to knowing. In experiment 1, we introduced five types of novel containers to two subjects. Each container was of different shape and color. The subjects gradually learned to reach toward the container the knower suggested. In experiment 2, we diversified the behavior of the knower and the guesser. In experiment 3, in order to eliminate the possibility of discrimination based on differences in the magnitude and the complexity of two trainers, we equated their behaviors. One subject adapted to the novel behaviors of the knower and the guesser, successfully discriminating the two trainers. Thus this monkey clearly learned to use the inspecting action of the knower and the non-inspecting action of the guesser as a discriminative cue to recognize the baited container. This result suggests that one capuchin monkey learned to recognize the relationship between seeing and knowing.     

The ‘Medical Body’ As Philosophy's Arena

Medicine, as Byron Good argues, reconstitutes thehuman body of our daily experience as a medical body,unfamiliar outside medicine. This reconstitution can be seen intwo ways: (i) as a salutary reminder of the extent to which thereality even of the human body is constructed; and (ii) as anarena for what Stephen Toulmin distinguishes as theintersection of natural science and history, in which many ofphilosophy's traditional (and traditionally abstract) questionsare given concrete and urgent form.This paper begins by examining a number of dualities between themedical body and the body familiar in daily experience. Toulmin's epistemological analysis of clinical medicine ascombining both universal and existential knowledge is thenconsidered. Their expression, in terms of attention,respectively, to natural science and to personal history, isexplored through the epistemological contrasts between themedical body and the familiar body, noting the traditionalphilosophical questions which they in turn illustrate.