Guidelines for Writing Letters to Patients

Patient letters provide a permanent record of the genetic counseling that was provided and are unique in medical care; rarely do other health care providers send summaries written specifically to their patients and families. We surveyed genetic counseling training program directors and found that while the acquisition of patient letter-writing skills was considered important, there were no specific guidelines made available to students. To develop letter-writing guidelines, we evaluated patient letters, reviewed references on professional correspondence, surveyed the medical literature, and worked with a writing consultant. The guidelines we subsequently developed and present here include a format for writing patient letters, suggestions on presenting medical information in understandable terms, and wording considerations. These patient letter-writing guidelines are intended to serve as a guide for teaching students this important skill and as a resource for practicing health care professionals.     

小学生工作记忆与推理关系的实验研究

本实验以视觉同时呈现,在形近、音近、义近三种干扰下以再认方法和瑞文渐进推理测验探讨了小学生年级、性别、工作记忆与推理的关系。发现(I)小学生工作记忆与推理能力相关显著。(2)工作记忆和推理能力在小学阶段不存在性别差异。(3)年级和工作记忆是影响小学生推理能力的重要因素,但年级因素对推理能力的作用较工作记忆大。     

Smart and easy: Co-occurring activation of spontaneous trait inferences and spontaneous situational inferences

Social perceivers have been shown to draw spontaneous trait inferences (STI’s) about the behavior of an actor as well as spontaneous situational inferences (SSI’s) about the situation the actor is in. In two studies, we examined inferences about behaviors that allow for both an STI and an SSI. In Experiment 1, using a probe recognition paradigm, we found activation of both STI’s and SSI’s. In Experiment 2, using a relearning paradigm, we again found activation of both STI’s and SSI’s, regardless of temporarily activated processing goals. Results are discussed in light of three-stage models of the process of social inference.     

文本阅读中简单推理情境下的信息整合

研究采用动窗技术探讨了文本阅读中需要简单推理情境下的信息整合发生的时机。本研究通过三个实验证明了在需要简单推理情境下的文本阅读中 ,需要推理的信息整合是即时发生的 ,而不是经过追溯才发生 ,在这种情况下支持文本阅读的更新追随假设理论。同时本研究发现文本阅读中协调性整合不是以词为单位的。     

10‐month‐old infants’ inference of invisible agent: Distinction in causality between object motion and human action1

Abstract: Two habituation experiments investigated 10‐month‐old infants’ interpretation of events where a stationary object began to move without any visible causes. During habituation, infants saw that an object partly hidden by an occluder began to move away from the occluder. Then, they were tested with three test events without the occluder: the ?rst event showed a hand pushing the object, the second event showed a hand failing to touch the object, and the last event had no agent. The objects were a ball in Experiment 1, and a person in Experiment 2. The test event that the infants looked at for the shortest duration in Experiment 1 was where the hand pushed the ball, whereas they looked at the three test events almost equal amounts of time in Experiment 2. These results indicate that 10‐month‐old infants responded to the events in terms of causality and could infer the presence of the agent behind the occluder only when they saw the habituation event featuring the ball.     

Blood pressure and heart rate responses to an intrusion on personal space

Abstract: Yaezawa and Yoshida's (1981 ) findings on the effects of an intrusion on personal space were reinvestigated. Thirty-five female students were confronted with the approach of a male stranger, and blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) were monitored. Throughout the model's approach, HR showed a significant triphasic change (an initial decrease, a subsequent increase, and then a secondary decrease), whereas subjective feelings of anxiety and tension showed significant, gradual increases. These trends were similar to those of Yaezawa and Yoshida's . Nonetheless, their explanation that the triphasic change in HR reflected once hightened and then relieved tension, which was incongruent with the subjective ratings, seemed questionable. As the BP elevated to a moderate degree in spite of the modest HR changes, total peripheral resistance must have been increasing during the model's approach. Blood pressure elevations via this sort of hemodynamic pressor mechanisms have often been reported when a person can only tolerate passively during exposure to stress. This seems to be the case in an intrusion on personal space.     

Do people reason rationally about causally related events? Markov violations,weak inferences,and failures of explaining away

Making judgments by relying on beliefs about the causal relationships between events is a fundamental capacity of everyday cognition. In the last decade, Causal Bayesian Networks have been proposed as a framework for modeling causal reasoning. Two experiments were conducted to provide comprehensive data sets with which to evaluate a variety of different types of judgments in comparison to the standard Bayesian networks calculations. Participants were introduced to a fictional system of three events and observed a set of learning trials that instantiated the multivariate distribution relating the three variables. We tested inferences on chains X₁ → Y → X₂, common cause structures X₁ ← Y → X₂, and common effect structures X₁ → Y ← X₂, on binary and numerical variables, and with high and intermediate causal strengths. We tested transitive inferences, inferences when one variable is irrelevant because it is blocked by an intervening variable (Markov Assumption), inferences from two variables to a middle variable, and inferences about the presence of one cause when the alternative cause was known to have occurred (the normative “explaining away” pattern). Compared to the normative account, in general, when the judgments should change, they change in the normative direction. However, we also discuss a few persistent violations of the standard normative model. In addition, we evaluate the relative success of 12 theoretical explanations for these deviations.     

A Strange Fire: an exploration of psycho‐spiritual development aided by Jungian analysis and Vedanta

This paper explores the process of psychological and spiritual development through a series of active imaginations arising from the author's ‘psycho‐spiritual quest’, a process of transformation in which the individual progressively frees themselves from the ego's identifications and may be afforded a vision of the ‘self as consciousness’, as described by Vedanta. The author describes how this quest was facilitated by the disciplines of Transcendental Meditation, Jungian analysis and Vedanta, and how these three disciplines can work together to foster psycho‐spiritual development. The paper aims to de‐mystify the actual experiences that can accompany these practices. The records of these active imaginations, tracing some key stages in this process, are then presented, with a commentary by Marcus West, linking them to Jung's concepts of ego and Self and recent understandings of consciousness and ego development. There is a discussion of Jung's conceptualizations of the ego and the Self and his rejection of the Vedantic understanding of the Self as consciousness. These views are then explored and a reconciliation is suggested through the understanding of the process of disidentification where the difference between Jung's view of the Self and that of Vedanta is understood to be due to the extent of disidentification from the contents of consciousness.     

An Integrative View of Conflict Adaptation and Active Maintenance

The conflict adaptation (CA) effect refers to the reduction in the interference effect observed in conflict tasks that follow incongruent compared to congruent trials. It has been suggested that CA is caused by the exertion of flexible cognitive control, supported by many behavioral and neuroimaging studies; however, it remains unclear how conflict‐related features of the preceding trial are conveyed to subsequent trials for following adaptation. This review aims to summarize evidence supporting the top‐down modulation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and passive short‐term maintenance in the posterior brain areas as mechanisms underlying CA, respectively, and to suggest a new integrated view of CA, including active maintenance in working memory. We review empirical evidences suggesting that both dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior brain regions play critical roles in CA, rather than either top‐down modulation or passive maintenance alone. Although the active maintenance view of CA appears to explain many existing findings, empirical studies are required to directly test this view.     

A Test by Any Other Name: P Values,Bayes Factors,and Statistical Inference

Procedures used for statistical inference are receiving increased scrutiny as the scientific community studies the factors associated with insuring reproducible research. This note addresses recent negative attention directed at p values, the relationship of confidence intervals and tests, and the role of Bayesian inference and Bayes factors, with an eye toward better understanding these different strategies for statistical inference. We argue that researchers and data analysts too often resort to binary decisions (e.g., whether to reject or accept the null hypothesis) in settings where this may not be required.