从摩梭人的词汇看人类概念的发展

通过调查摩梭人的词汇研究人类概念的发展。摩梭人到本世纪七十年代还盛行母系家 庭,至今没有文字。调查方法是从小学汉语文课本中选出一批常用词汇,把当地摩梭和汉两种 语文水平最高的几个知识分子请到一起,逐词逐字地共同讨论,核实提供调查的词汇在摩梭 语中是否有对应词。不论有无对应词均以全体同意为准。结果表明,摩梭人词汇数量较少,范 围较窄,概括和具体化的程度都不高。作者认为,由摩梭词汇标志的概念发展状况,可作人类 概念发展早期的一个例证。     

关于高龄恶性肿瘤与人类自然死亡

“天寿癌”指的是高寿者经历漫长和满足的生命历程后平和地几乎没有痛苦地死于恶性肿瘤。癌症在高龄人群中十分常见,故高龄者死于癌症亦可被认为是一种形式的生命自然终结过程。因此,“天寿癌”的提出可能有助于老年人较实际地面对致死性肿瘤性疾病。对“天寿癌”的概念、诊断、治疗及其医学伦理学的问题进行简要的讨论。     

中国人的印象整饰特征及其影响因素初探

本研究探讨在中国文化背景下．一个人如何表现他自己,即强凋社会的和谐与人际关系的融洽,即印象整饰过程。旨在揭示中国人的印象整饰特征及其影响因素,从而增进对特定文化背景下的中国人的心理和行为模式的理解。结果揭示了２个独特的中国人的印象整饰特征：社会道德维度与人际关系维度。     

Loss of control by a less valid or by a less salient stimulus compounded with a better predictor of reinforcement

An unsalient stimulus, or one imperfectly correlated with reinforcement, may acquire significant control over responding, provided that it is the only available signal for reinforcement, but may fail to acquire control if it is reinforced only in conjunction with a second, more salient or more valid stimulus. A stimulus imperfectly correlated with reinforcement may also lose control over responding if having initially been reinforced in isolation, it is subsequently reinforced only in conjunction with another, more valid stimulus. If the effects of relative salience are to be explained in exactly the same way as those of relative validity, we should expect a similar loss of control by an unsalient stimulus, A, if, after initial consistently reinforced trials to A alone, subjects subsequently receive reinforcement only in the presence of a compound stimulus, A + B. Two experiments on discrete-trial discrimination learning in pigeons and one on conditioned suppression in rats confirm this expectation. The results have implications for theories of selective association in conditioning and discrimination learning.     

Determinants of fear over the course of avoidance learning

Most theorists have explained attenuation of fear over the course of avoidance learning by assuming that fear extinguishes with repeated nonreinforced avoidance trials. Experiment 1 replicates the finding that rats trained to a criterion of 27 consecutive avoidance responses (CARs) show less fear during the CS than rats trained to a criterion of 3 or 9 CARs. This attenuation of fear cannot, however, be accounted for by simple Pavlovian fear extinction, because yoked partners receiving the exact same pattern of CSs and USs did not show this attenuation and did not differ from yoked partners receiving only reinforced CS presentations. Experiment 2 found that feedback from the master avoidance learner's response is sufficient to produce this attenuation in yoked animals; “control” per se is not necessary. Several possible explanations are discussed regarding the mechanism underlying this role of feedback in diminishing fear of the CS in the avoidance learning context.     

Pavlovian compound conditioning in the rabbit

Two experiments are reported on eyelid conditioning in the rabbit involving compounds of isolable CSs. In Experiment 1 it was demonstrated that subjects could be trained to respond discriminatively on the basis of specific configurations when no other reliable component cues were available. In Experiment II, a novel test procedure failed to provide further evidence that subjects utilized specific configurational cues when reliable isolable components were available. The findings were discussed in terms of the assumption that any stimulus compound involves both isolable and configurational components with the former being more “salient” than the latter.     

Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy

Four-month-old infants sometimes can perceive the unity of a partly hidden object. In each of a series of experiments, infants were habituated to one object whose top and bottom were visible but whose center was occluded by a nearer object. They were then tested with a fully visible continuous object and with two fully visible object pieces with a gap where the occluder had been. Patterns of dishabituation suggested that infants perceive the boundaries of a partly hidden object by analyzing the movements of its surfaces: infants perceived a connected object when its ends moved in a common translation behind the occluder. Infants do not appear to perceive a connected object by analyzing the colors and forms of surfaces: they did not perceive a connected object when its visible parts were stationary, its color was homogeneous, its edges were aligned, and its shape was simple and regular. These findings do not support the thesis, from gestalt psychology, that object perception first arises as a consequence of a tendency to perceive the simplest, most regular configuration, or the Piagetian thesis that object perception depends on the prior coordination of action. Perception of objects may depend on an inherent conception of what an object is.     

Depression and the generation of complex hypotheses in the judgment of contingency

This experiment tests the hypothesis that relative to nondepressed college students, depressed college students will underestimate the potential amount of control they can exert over an environmental outcome when they must generate a complex hypothesis in order to exert control, but not when the complex hypothesis is generated for them. Following the method of Alloy and Abramson (1979b), depressed and nondepressed students' judgments of response-outcome contingency were assessed in either a ‘self-generated’ or an ‘experimenter-generated’ condition. In the ‘self-generated’ condition, subjects generated and tested potential hypotheses for controlling the outcome themselves. In the ‘experimenter-generated’ condition, the experimenter generated a small set of potential hypotheses to be tested by the subject. Relative to nondepressed students, depressed students were less likely to perform the correct controlling response, received fewer rewards, and judged that they exerted less control over the outcome in the ‘self-generated’ condition. These results fail to support the ‘associative’ deficit of the learned helplessness theory of depression, but are consistent with the ‘motivational’ deficit of helplessness theory.