中国特色社会心理服务体系建设的路径分析

社会心理服务体系作为培育良好社会心态的公共服务体系，有着公共服务体系具有的基本特征：普惠性、公平性和动态性。同时，作为社会治理体系的有机组成部分，这个体系的功能是促进社会治理现代化和科学化，营造和谐的社会心态。中国特色社会心理服务体系建设需要立足我国国情，注重以下方面：党政集中统一领导、针对性的心理服务内容、多元化的心理服务载体、专兼职互补的心理服务队伍、循序渐进的建设重点。     

Driver performance due to small unmanned aerial system applications in the vicinity of roadways

Small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS), or drones, have become increasingly utilized for a myriad of applications in the vicinity of roadways and can offer a low-cost alternative to many labor-intensive data collection techniques, including infrastructure inspection, roadway marking data collection, and more. To collect much of this data with a desired degree of accuracy, sUAS must be flown near moving vehicles, pedestrians, and/or bicyclists. However, sUAS, and their operators, have the potential to be a distraction to drivers. Through a full-immersion driver simulator study and post-experiment questionnaire, this study furthered the current state-of-the-literature and investigated the potential for sUAS to be flown in the vicinity of roadways in the future as well as potential safety implications of those circumstances. Specifically, driver performance due to drone height and the presence of drone operators was evaluated. The results of the driving simulation study revealed that participants were more visually distracted in situations where the operators and drone were both present compared to the drone only scenarios. Furthermore, in 11% of all analyzed situations, drivers were critically visually-distracted as shown by a continuous glance of two seconds or more at the drone or operators. The post-experiment questionnaire revealed that approximately 30% of participants had seen a drone in flight near a roadway prior to this study. Ultimately, this research provides recommendations to policymakers for creating regulations on the use of sUAS in the vicinity of roadways.     

Methodological Considerations in the Neuropsychological Study of Central Nervous System Underarousal with a Specific Emphasis on Coma

Several obstacles exist that impede the scientific study of pathological underarousal (stupor and coma). For instance, there is a lack of a clear, rational, standardized taxonomy with which to describe the phenomenon. Moreover, there is considerable confusion of the construct of arousal with other neurobehavioral constructs. The field also suffers from a general lack of acceptably reliable and valid instruments, especially measures of long-term outcome. Additionally, current treatments for chronic pathological underarousal are frequently presumptive and applied haphazardly, and thus do little to elucidate the process of recovery. It is suggested that biomedical and neuropsychological approaches to the study and treatment of pathological underarousal are complementary and that it is useful to view pathological underarousal as a behavioral, as well as a medical, phenomenon.     

Individual Differences in Spatial Memory and Striatal ChAT Activity among Young and Aged Rats

Individual differences in spatial memory among young and aged rats were assessed using memory tasks related to integrity of the hippocampus and the neostriatum. Relationships were then examined between measures of spatial memory and regional choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) activity, a marker for cholinergic integrity. Twenty-four-month-old Long-Evans rats were impaired in comparisons with 6-month-old rats on measures of place learning, working memory, reference memory, and perseveration in water-maze tasks. Aged rats that were impaired on one measure of memory, however, were not necessarily impaired on other measures. ChAT activity in the ventromedial and dorsolateral neostriatum of aged rats was significantly reduced in comparisons with young rats whereas no difference was found in the hippocampus. Aged rats with the most ChAT activity in the anterior ventromedial neostriatum performed best on the place-learning and reference memory tasks but also made the most perseverative errors on the working memory task. In addition, young and aged rats with the most ChAT activity in the anterior dorsolateral neostriatum were those with the least accurate working memory. No relationships were found between ChAT activity in the hippocampus and spatial memory. Thus age-related memory impairment has components that can be segregated by measuring relationships between cholinergic integrity in subregions of the anterior neostriatum and memory tasks with different strategic requirements.     

Use of experimenter-given cues in dogs

Since the observations of O. Pfungst the use of human-provided cues by animals has been well-known in the behavioural sciences (“Clever Hans effect”). It has recently been shown that rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) are unable to use the direction of gazing by the experimenter as a cue for finding food, although after some training they learned to respond to pointing by hand. Direction of gaze is used by chimpanzees, however. Dogs (Canis familiaris) are believed to be sensitive to human gestural communication but their ability has never been formally tested. In three experiments we examined whether dogs can respond to cues given by humans. We found that dogs are able to utilize pointing, bowing, nodding, head-turning and glancing gestures of humans as cues for finding hidden food. Dogs were also able to generalize from one person (owner) to another familiar person (experimenter) in using the same gestures as cues. Baseline trials were run to test the possibility that odour cues alone could be responsible for the dogs’ performance. During training individual performance showed limited variability, probably because some dogs already “knew” some of the cues from their earlier experiences with humans. We suggest that the phenomenon of dogs responding to cues given by humans is better analysed as a case of interspecific communication than in terms of discrimination learning. Received: 30 May 1998 / Accepted after revision: 6 September 1998     

Assessment and treatment of problem behavior maintained by mand compliance

We modified functional analysis procedures to include a condition in which we reinforced problem behavior by complying with a child's mands. After identifying compliance with mands as a reinforcer, we evaluated the efficacy of a token system with a response‐cost contingency and incorporated discriminative stimuli to signal when mands would be reinforced. The token system with response cost effectively reduced problem behavior. Similar procedures may be beneficial when continuous adult compliance is not possible, when adults want to control when they will comply with the child's mands, or to build a child's tolerance for adult‐directed situations.     

Modern health worries – the dark side of spirituality?

Modern health worries (MHWs) are widespread in modern societies. MHWs were connected to both negative and positive psychological characteristics in previous studies. The study aimed to investigate the relationships among intuitive‐experiential information processing style, spirituality, MHWs, and psychological well‐being. Members of the Hungarian Skeptic Society (N = 128), individuals committed to astrology (N = 601), and people from a non‐representative community sample (N = 554) completed questionnaires assessing intuitive‐experiential information processing style, spirituality, modern health worries (MHWs), and psychological well‐being. Astrologers showed higher levels of spirituality, intuitive‐experiential thinking, and modern health worries than individuals from the community sample; and skeptics scored even lower than the latter group with respect to all three constructs. Within the community sample, medium level connections between measures of spirituality and the experiential thinking style, and weak to medium level correlations between spirituality and MHWs were found. The connection between MHWs and experiential thinking style was completely mediated by spirituality. Individuals with higher levels of spirituality are particularly vulnerable to overgeneralized messages on health related risks. Official communication of potential risks based on rational scientific reasoning is not appropriate to persuade them as it has no impact on the intuitive‐experiential system.     

Artificial consciousness and the consciousness-attention dissociation

Artificial Intelligence is at a turning point, with a substantial increase in projects aiming to implement sophisticated forms of human intelligence in machines. This research attempts to model specific forms of intelligence through brute-force search heuristics and also reproduce features of human perception and cognition, including emotions. Such goals have implications for artificial consciousness, with some arguing that it will be achievable once we overcome short-term engineering challenges. We believe, however, that phenomenal consciousness cannot be implemented in machines. This becomes clear when considering emotions and examining the dissociation between consciousness and attention in humans. While we may be able to program ethical behavior based on rules and machine learning, we will never be able to reproduce emotions or empathy by programming such control systems—these will be merely simulations. Arguments in favor of this claim include considerations about evolution, the neuropsychological aspects of emotions, and the dissociation between attention and consciousness found in humans. Ultimately, we are far from achieving artificial consciousness.     

Perceptual learning effect on decision and confidence thresholds

Practice can enhance of perceptual sensitivity, a well-known phenomenon called perceptual learning. However, the effect of practice on subjective perception has received little attention. We approach this problem from a visual psychophysics and computational modeling perspective. In a sequence of visual search experiments, subjects significantly increased the ability to detect a “trained target”. Before and after training, subjects performed two psychophysical protocols that parametrically vary the visibility of the “trained target”: an attentional blink and a visual masking task. We found that confidence increased after learning only in the attentional blink task. Despite large differences in some observables and task settings, we identify common mechanisms for decision-making and confidence. Specifically, our behavioral results and computational model suggest that perceptual ability is independent of processing time, indicating that changes in early cortical representations are effective, and learning changes decision criteria to convey choice and confidence.