社会性发展迟滞大学生的情绪韵律识别特点

情绪韵律识别指个体通过对他人话语中除语义以外的声学线索进行分析,推断他人情绪状态的过程。本研究通过2个实验对社会性发展迟滞大学生的情绪韵律识别特点进行探索。结果发现：（1）社会性发展迟滞组厌恶和恐惧韵律的识别正确率显著低于对照组,两组在其他情绪韵律识别正确率上无显著差异;且两组被试情绪韵律识别趋势一致：高兴、愤怒、悲伤、恐惧和厌恶韵律识别正确率依次递减;（2）当语义与韵律矛盾时,迟滞组比对照组更易受语义干扰。     

REVIEW OF ROBERT SPAEMANN'S PERSONS

This review presents the principal themes of Robert Spaemann's Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something.’ To be a person is not to be identical with one's teleological nature, but rather, to have that nature. Personal consciousness is necessarily temporal consciousness. Persons have a range of distinctively personal acts, such as recognizing and respecting one another, understanding their lives as wholes, making judgments of conscience, promising, and forgiving. All members of the human species, whatever their stage of development or limitations, are persons. The present review also briefly considers certain objections that have been raised against Spaemann's position.     

Effect of racial bias on composite construction

We investigated how prior bias about a face's racial characteristics can affect its encoding and resultant facial composite construction. In total, 61 participants (24 Europeans, 18 Indians living in India and 19 Indians living in Europe) saw a racially ambiguous unfamiliar face and were led to believe it was either European or Indian. They created a composite of this face, using EFIT6. Two groups of independent raters (one Indian, the other European) then assessed the apparent race of each composite. A different two groups (one Indian, one European) assessed each composite's degree of resemblance to the target face, to determine whether this was influenced by the constructors' initial categorisation of the target face as “own-race” or “other-race.” Composites appeared significantly more “Asian” or “European” according to the bias induced in their creators, but there was no evidence of any own-race bias in the resemblance ratings for the composites.     

A cognitive architecture for modeling emotion dynamics: Intensity estimation from physiological signals

Current approaches to emotion recognition do not address the fact that emotions are dynamic processes. This work concerns itself with the development of a cognitive architecture for modeling the dynamics of emotions with specific focus on a gray-box model for dynamic emotion intensity estimation that can incorporate findings from appraisal models, specifically Scherer’s Component Process Model. It is based on Dynamic Field Theory which allows the combination of theoretical knowledge with data-driven experimental approaches. A user study is conducted applying the proposed model to estimate intensity of negative emotions from physiological signals. Results show significant improvements of the proposed model to common methodology and baselines. The flexible cognitive architecture opens a wide field of experiments and directions to deepen the understanding of emotion processes as a whole.     

Phoneme‐Order Encoding During Spoken Word Recognition: A Priming Investigation

In three experiments, we examined priming effects where primes were formed by transposing the first and last phoneme of tri‐phonemic target words (e.g., /byt/ as a prime for /tyb/). Auditory lexical decisions were found not to be sensitive to this transposed‐phoneme priming manipulation in long‐term priming (Experiment 1), with primes and targets presented in two separated blocks of stimuli and with unrelated primes used as control condition (/mul/‐/tyb/), while a long‐term repetition priming effect was observed (/tyb/‐/tyb/). However, a clear transposed‐phoneme priming effect was found in two short‐term priming experiments (Experiments 2 and 3), with primes and targets presented in close temporal succession. The transposed‐phoneme priming effect was found when unrelated prime‐target pairs (/mul/‐/tyb/) were used as control and more important when prime‐target pairs sharing the medial vowel (/pys/‐/tyb/) served as control condition, thus indicating that the effect is not due to vocalic overlap. Finally, in Experiment 3, a transposed‐phoneme priming effect was found when primes sharing the medial vowel plus one consonant in an incorrect position with the targets (/byl/‐/tyb/) served as control condition, and this condition did not differ significantly from the vowel‐only condition. Altogether, these results provide further evidence for a role for position‐independent phonemes in spoken word recognition, such that a phoneme at a given position in a word also provides evidence for the presence of words that contain that phoneme at a different position.     

Concurrent and prospective associations between facial affect recognition accuracy and childhood antisocial behavior

This study examined the concurrent and prospective associations between children's ability to accurately recognize facial affect at age 8.5 and antisocial behavior at age 8.5 and 10.5 years in a sub sample of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children cohort (5,396 children; 2,644, 49% males). All observed effects were small. It was found that at age 8.5 years, in contrast to nonantisocial children; antisocial children were less accurate at decoding happy and sad expressions when presented at low intensity. In addition, concurrent antisocial behavior was associated with misidentifying expressions of fear as expressions of sadness. In longitudinal analyses, children who misidentified fear as anger exhibited a decreased risk of antisocial behavior 2 years later. The study suggests that concurrent rather than future antisocial behavior is associated with facial affect recognition accuracy. Aggr. Behav. 36:305–314, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Recognition and mental manipulation of body parts dissociate in locked-in syndrome

Several lines of evidence demonstrate that the motor system is involved in motor simulation of actions, but some uncertainty exists about the consequences of lesions of descending motor pathways on mental imagery tasks. Moreover, recent findings suggest that the motor system could also have a role in recognition of body parts. To address these issues in the present study we assessed patients with a complete damage of descending motor pathways (locked-in syndrome, LIS) on the hand laterality task, requiring subjects to decide whether a hand stimulus in a given spatial orientation represents a left or a right hand. LIS patients were less accurate than healthy controls in judging hand laterality; more importantly, LIS patients’ performance was modulated by spatial orientation of hand stimuli whereas it was not affected by biomechanical constraints. These findings demonstrate a dissociation between spared hand recognition and impaired access to action simulation processes in LIS patients.     

Crossed-categorization, evaluation, and face recognition

We investigated the relationship between evaluative intergroup bias and biased errors in intergroup face recognition after crossed-categorization (the combination of two social categories in defining a target of perception). Although evaluative bias and recognition bias often operate in parallel, we draw on two previously unconnected literatures to predict a divergence between these two processes after crossed-categorization. We tested this hypothesis by assessing participants’ evaluations of and recognition of targets who shared two ingroups with participants, targets who shared only one ingroup with participants, and targets who shared neither ingroup. Consistent with predictions, targets’ shared and unshared group memberships combined additively to affect evaluation, but targets who shared two ingroup memberships were better recognized than all other category combinations. These results document the relationship between evaluative bias and recognition bias after crossed-categorization and indicate that crossed-categorization affects evaluative bias and recognition bias in different ways.     

Reducing mind to molecular pathways: explicating the reductionism implicit in current cellular and molecular neuroscience

As opposed to the dismissive attitude toward reductionism that is popular in current philosophy of mind, a “ruthless reductionism” is alive and thriving in “molecular and cellular cognition”—a field of research within cellular and molecular neuroscience, the current mainstream of the discipline. Basic experimental practices and emerging results from this field imply that two common assertions by philosophers and cognitive scientists are false: (1) that we do not know much about how the brain works, and (2) that lower-level neuroscience cannot explain cognition and complex behavior directly. These experimental practices involve intervening directly with molecular components of sub-cellular and gene expression pathways in neurons and then measuring specific behaviors. These behaviors are tracked using tests that are widely accepted by experimental psychologists to study the psychological phenomenon at issue (e.g., memory, attention, and perception). Here I illustrate these practices and their importance for explanation and reduction in current mainstream neuroscience by describing recent work on social recognition memory in mammals.