Iranian Psychotherapists’ Behaviors and Beliefs Toward Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

The aim of this study is to investigate Iranian psychotherapists’ behaviors and beliefs toward sexual orientation and gender identity. The sample consisted of 358 Iranian psychotherapists, of whom 29.3% (n = 105) were male and 67% (n = 24) were female. Results from the chi-square analyses showed that more male participants reported accepting homosexual clients and treating them as having a pathological disorder than their female counterparts; and licensed respondents reported engaging more in accepting only male or female clients, accepting more homosexual and transgender clients for treatment, and treating them as having a pathological disorder when compared with their unlicensed counterparts. Furthermore supervised respondents reported accepting more homosexual clients than their unsupervised counterparts. However results from the multivariate analysis of variance has indicated that the female participants reported “accepting homosexuals or transgender clients for treatment” more often than the male participants; unsupervised participants reported “accepting homosexual or transgender clients for treatment” and “treating homosexuality per se as a pathological disorder” more often than their supervised counterparts.     

Perspectives on Systems Change Among Local Change Agents: A Comparative Study

Community organizers and activists draw on multiple traditions of community building and collective action in attempts to galvanize change. The diversity of perspectives on social change processes indicates corresponding differences in perspectives on systems and what is required to change them. Twenty‐two in‐depth interviews with community organizers and activists in the Midwestern USA were conducted to identify differences in perspectives on systems change efforts. Four models used by organizers were identified: action/issue‐centric, identity‐centric, relationship‐centric, and organizing‐development. Strategies for recruitment, issue selection, leadership determination, and action were compared across models. Analyses revealed that some models might be better suited to action on certain issues (e.g. identity‐centric models when organizing around homelessness), whereas others may have advantages for use in certain settings (e.g. relationship‐centric models in congregations). These findings suggest that practitioners and scholars should pay close attention to contextual factors and focal issues when determining strategies for creating systems change. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Representing time in language and memory: The role of similarity structure

Every day we read about or watch events in the world and can easily understand or remember how long they last. What aspects of an event are retained in memory? And how do we extract temporal information from our memory representations? These issues are central to human cognition, as they underlie a fundamental aspect of our mental life, namely our representation of time. This paper reviews previous language studies and reports a visual learning study indicating that properties of the events encoded in memory shape the representation of their duration. The evidence indicates that for a given event, the extent to which its associated properties or sub-components differ from one another modulates our representation of its duration. These properties include the similarity between sub-events and the similarity between the situational contexts in which an event occurs. We suggest that the diversity of representations that we associate with events in memory plays an important role in remembering and estimating the duration of experienced or described events.     

Complex Communication Dynamics: Exploring the Structure of an Academic Talk

Communication is a multimodal phenomenon. The cognitive mechanisms supporting it are still understudied. We explored a natural dataset of academic lectures to determine how communication modalities are used and coordinated during the presentation of complex information. Using automated and semi‐automated techniques, we extracted and analyzed, from the videos of 30 speakers, measures capturing the dynamics of their body movement, their slide change rate, and various aspects of their speech (speech rate, articulation rate, fundamental frequency, and intensity). There were consistent but statistically subtle patterns in the use of speech rate, articulation rate, intensity, and body motion across the presentation. Principal component analysis also revealed patterns of system‐like covariation among modalities. These findings, although tentative, do suggest that the cognitive system is integrating body, slides, and speech in a coordinated manner during natural language use. Further research is needed to clarify the specific coordination patterns that occur between the different modalities.     

Staying Together: A Bidirectional Delay–Coupled Approach to Joint Action

To understand how individuals adapt to and anticipate each other in joint tasks, we employ a bidirectional delay–coupled dynamical system that allows for mutual adaptation and anticipation. In delay–coupled systems, anticipation is achieved when one system compares its own time‐delayed behavior, which implicitly includes past information about the other system’s behavior, with the other system’s instantaneous behavior. Applied to joint music performance, the model allows each system to adapt its behavior to the dynamics of the other. Model predictions of asynchrony between two simultaneously produced musical voices were compared with duet pianists’ behavior; each partner performed one voice while auditory feedback perturbations occurred at unpredictable times during live performance. As the model predicted, when auditory feedback from one musical voice was removed, the asynchrony changed: The pianist’s voice that was removed anticipated (preceded) the actions of their partner. When the auditory feedback returned and both musicians could hear each other, they rapidly returned to baseline levels of asynchrony. To understand how the pianists anticipated each other, their performances were fitted by the model to examine change in model parameters (coupling strength, time‐delay). When auditory feedback for one or both voices was removed, the fits showed the expected decrease in coupling strength and time‐delay between the systems. When feedback about the voice(s) returned, the coupling strength and time‐delay returned to baseline. These findings support the idea that when people perform actions together, they do so as a coupled bidirectional anticipatory system.     

Adaptive rewiring in weighted networks

Human connectome studies suggest that the brain has a modular small world network structure with rich-club effect. Such structure emerges spontaneously in simple model neural networks, (e.g. coupled maps), through adaptive rewiring according to the dynamic functional connectivity. The utility of adaptive rewiring has so far exclusively been demonstrated for unweighted networks; it is anything but guaranteed to work as well for weighted networks. We investigate adaptive rewiring in weighted networks, comparing various right-skewed, symmetrical, and left-skewed fixed weight distributions. We examine how network clustering, path length, modularity, and rich club coefficients develop for weakly, intermediate and strongly coupled networks. At low coupling strength, the weight distribution, as well as episodes of functional synchrony, have a significant effect on network evolution. With increased coupling strengths, all weighted networks robustly develop architectures similar to the unweighted ones. Adaptive rewiring appears relatively ineffective in networks with (biologically implausibly) extreme right-skewed weight distributions but performed most economically in biologically plausible log-normal distributions.     

Speaker identification using multi-modal i-vector approach for varying length speech in voice interactive systems

The development in the interface of smart devices has lead to voice interactive systems. An additional step in this direction is to enable the devices to recognize the speaker. But this is a challenging task because the interaction involves short duration speech utterances. The traditional Gaussian mixture models (GMM) based systems have achieved satisfactory results for speaker recognition only when the speech lengths are sufficiently long. The current state-of-the-art method utilizes i-vector based approach using a GMM based universal background model (GMM-UBM). It prepares an i-vector speaker model from a speaker’s enrollment data and uses it to recognize any new test speech. In this work, we propose a multi-model i-vector system for short speech lengths. We use an open database THUYG-20 for the analysis and development of short speech speaker verification and identification system. By using an optimum set of mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC) based features we are able to achieve an equal error rate (EER) of 3.21% as compared to the previous benchmark score of EER 4.01% on the THUYG-20 database. Experiments are conducted for speech lengths as short as 0.25 s and the results are presented. The proposed method shows improvement as compared to the current i-vector based approach for shorter speech lengths. We are able to achieve improvement of around 28% even for 0.25 s speech samples. We also prepared and tested the proposed approach on our own database with 2500 speech recordings in English language consisting of actual short speech commands used in any voice interactive system.     

Wavelet-frequency analysis for the detection of discontinuities in switched system models of human balance

This paper is concerned with detecting the presence of switching behavior in experimentally obtained posturographic data sets by means of a novel algorithm that is based on a combination of wavelet analysis and Hilbert transform. As a test-bed for the algorithm, we first use a switched model of human balance control during quiet standing with known switching behavior in four distinct configurations. We obtain a time–frequency representation of a signal generated by our model system. We are then able to detect manifestations of discontinuities (switchings) in the signal as spiking behavior. The frequency of switchings, measured by means of our algorithm and detected in our models systems, agrees with the frequency of spiking behavior found in the experimentally obtained posturographic data.     

成人在错误信念任务上的表现

考察成人在错误信念(FB)任务上是否存在"知识偏差"效应。实验1重复Birch等的实验程序并未得到与之一致的结果,成人在FB任务上的表现不理想,且无"知识偏差"效应存在。实验2排除琴盒位置及颜色的突出性影响后,结果与实验1相似。成人在FB任务上的不佳表现与成人具有心理理论的事实相悖,说明把通过FB任务作为衡量心理理论的唯一评定标准有待商榷。