Is depression the past tense of anxiety? An empirical study of the temporal distinction

It has long been recognised that depression and anxiety share a common core of negative affect, but research on similarities and differences between these two emotions is growing. The focus of the current study was on whether the timing of a triggering event can determine whether the dominant emotional reaction is depression or anxiety. It was hypothesised that aversive events in the past would elicit more depression than anxiety, whereas the same aversive events in the future would elicit more anxiety than depression. We created temporally varied versions of vignettes describing aversive events occurring at either time, and asked participants to rate the extent to which the events would elicit feelings of depression or anxiety. Results indicated that adverse past events elicited much higher ratings of anticipated depression and adverse future events elicited much higher ratings of anticipated anxiety. Implications for understanding these two emotions and depressive and anxiety disorders are discussed.     

Making sense of surveys and censuses: Issues in religious self-identification

Abstract

Censuses and surveys shape decisions, discourse and debates about people and their lived environments. The outcomes, in the case of a census, inform governments about resource distribution but also shape people's self-understanding about who they are and where they may be going. How people self-identify on censuses and surveys produces certain types of knowledge. This introduction emphasises the impact of those instruments on knowledge production and how numbers can be employed, often anecdotally, to further interests and claims. The way academics use and interpret such instruments has ethical and normative dimensions: numbers are not neutral but shape and are shaped by perceptions and identities. This introduction to a thematic issue of Religion introduces the contributing authors' diverse – historical, qualitative and quantitative – approaches that work together to produce their own kind of multi-disciplinary, academically located knowledge.     

Methodology of Transdisciplinarity

In this article, I will describe the methodology of transdisciplinarity. My analysis will be divided in several parts: what means “beyond disciplines”; the distinction between multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, indisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity; the definition of disciplinary boundaries; the axioms of the methodology of transdisciplinarity: the notion of “levels of Reality”; the logic of included middle; and the universal interdependence. I will conclude by asserting that we are at the threshold of a New Renaissance.     

Is motor knowledge part and parcel of the concepts of manipulable artifacts? Clues from a case of upper limb aplasia

The sensory-motor theory of conceptual representations assumes that motor knowledge of how an artifact is manipulated is constitutive of its conceptual representation. Accordingly, if we assume that the richer the conceptual representation of an object is, the easier that object is identified, manipulable artifacts that are associated with motor knowledge should be identified more accurately and/or faster than manipulable artifacts that are not (everything else being equal). In this study, we tested this prediction by investigating the identification of manipulable artifacts in an individual, DC, who was totally deprived of hand motor experience due to upper limb aplasia. This condition prevents him from interacting with most manipulable artifacts, for which he thus has no motor knowledge at all. However, he had motor knowledge for some of them, which he routinely uses with his feet. We contrasted DC’s performance in a timed picture naming task for manipulable artifacts for which he had motor knowledge versus those for which he had no motor knowledge. No detectable advantage on DC’s naming performance was found for artifacts for which he had motor knowledge compared to those for which he did not. This finding suggests that motor knowledge is not part of the concepts of manipulable artifacts.     

心理学的想象力与行动力

本文由心理学与内卷化问题切入讨论,提出心理学应该具备想象力与行动力.想象力的培养可以借助人类学、历史学、哲学等学科的视野.行动力则需要树立相应的观念,面向社区、生活与人民群众.知行合一或许是可能的选择.     

One-year temporal stability and predictive and incremental validity of the Body,Eating, and Exercise Comparison Orientation Measure (BEECOM) among college women

This study examined the one-year temporal stability and the predictive and incremental validity of the Body, Eating, and Exercise Comparison Measure (BEECOM) in a sample of 237 college women who completed study measures at two time points about one year apart. One-year temporal stability was high for the BEECOM total and subscale (i.e., Body, Eating, and Exercise Comparison Orientation) scores. Additionally, the BEECOM exhibited predictive validity in that it accounted for variance in body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptomatology one year later. These findings held even after controlling for body mass index and existing measures of social comparison orientation. However, results regarding the incremental validity of the BEECOM, or its ability to predict change in these constructs over time, were more mixed. Overall, this study demonstrated additional psychometric properties of the BEECOM among college women, further establishing the usefulness of this measure for more comprehensively assessing eating disorder-related social comparison.     

The Normativity of Meaning: Guidance and Justification

Abstract

The thesis that meaning is normative has come under much scrutiny of late. However, there are aspects of the view that have received comparatively little critical attention which centre on meaning’s capacity to guide and justify linguistic action. Call such a view ‘justification normativity’ (JN). I outline Zalabardo’s (1997) account of JN and his corresponding argument against reductive-naturalistic meaning-factualism and argue that the argument presents a genuine challenge to account for the guiding role of meaning in linguistic action. I then present a proposal regarding how this challenge may be met. This proposal is then compared to recent work by Ginsborg (2011; 2012), who has outlined an alternative view of the normativity of meaning that explicitly rejects the idea that meanings guide and justify linguistic use. I outline how Ginsborg utilises this notion of normativity in order to provide a positive account of what it is to mean something by an expression which is intended to serve as a response to Kripke’s semantic sceptic. Finally, I argue that Ginsborg’s response to the sceptic is unsatisfactory, and that, insofar as it is able to preserve our intuitive view of meaning’s capacity to guide linguistic action, my proposal is to be preferred.     

On the empirical indistinguishability of knowledge structures

In recent years a number of articles have focused on the identifiability of the basic local independence model. The identifiability issue usually concerns two model parameter sets predicting an identical probability distribution on the response patterns. Both parameter sets are applied to the same knowledge structure. However, nothing is known about cases where different knowledge structures predict the same probability distribution. This situation is referred to as ʻempirical indistinguishabilityʼ between two structures and is the main subject of the present paper. Empirical indistinguishability is a stronger form of unidentifiability, which involves not only the parameters, but also the structural and combinatorial properties of the model. In particular, as far as knowledge structures are concerned, a consequence of empirical indistinguishability is that the existence of certain knowledge states cannot be empirically established. Most importantly, it is shown that model identifiability cannot guarantee that a certain knowledge structure is empirically distinguishable from others. The theoretical findings are exemplified in a number of different empirical scenarios.