Meaning,grounding, and the construction of social reality

Culture has become a critical concept for social psychology over the past quarter of a century. Yet, cultural dynamics, the process and mechanism of formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture, has begun to be investigated only recently. This article reports the current state of play of a research program that takes cultural dynamics as its central question. In this approach, humans are construed as meaning making animals that create, recreate, and exchange information, and turn it into a meaningful basis for action. The locus of meaning making and remaking is an everyday joint activity. The grounding model of cultural transmission describes how cultural information is deliberately or inadvertently transmitted in a joint activity. As we go about our business of living our daily lives, we ground information to our common ground, and construct a social reality that is mutually meaningful and yet only local. If locally grounded information is further generalized to a large collective and disseminated through social networks, repeated and iterative activations of the grounding process maintain the social reality of the collective that we take for granted. Implications of the grounding model of cultural transmission and future research directions are discussed.     

仡佬语借用汉语词的历史文化背景

仡佬族有悠久的历史,自古以来就与外民族互通往来,接触频繁,因而仡佬语中舍有丰富的借词,其中绝大部分是汉语借词。本文参考民族学、历史学的研究成果,概述仡佬族向汉族借词的历史背景,认为仡佬族与汉族的长期交往史是其借用汉族语言词汇的主要原因,汉语、汉文化对仡佬族语言、文化的影响自古就有并且一直延续至今,导致仡佬语中存在大量的借自不同历史时期的汉语借词。     

Two-step communication for the interaction between automated vehicles and pedestrians

An important challenge of automated vehicles (AV) will be the cooperative interaction with surrounding road users such as pedestrians. One solution to compensate for the missing driver-pedestrian interaction might be explicit communication via external human machine interfaces (eHMIs). Additionally, implicit communication such as a vehicle pitch motion might support AVs when interacting with pedestrians. While previous work explored various explicit and implicit communication cues, these concepts communicated the intention of the AV at one single time point. Currently, empirical findings on two-step communication lack so far. In this study, we empirically test the effect of a two-step AV communication that uses an implicit cue at a long distance and subsequently provides an implicit or explicit cues at a short distance. We compared its efficiency to single-step communication concepts providing implicit or explicit cues at the shorter distance only. To explore whether the right communication cue is used at the right distance, we analyzed pedestrians’ fixations while approaching an AV using an eye tracking device.We conducted a virtual reality study (N = 30) with AV communication concept that provided an active pitch motion or an eHMI and compared them with a two-step AV communication concept that provided an additional active pitch motion at a long distance when approaching the pedestrian. Furthermore, we recorded pedestrians’ fixation behavior while the AV approached.Consistently to previous work, single-step AV communication showed a beneficial effect on crossing behavior. Pedestrians initiated their crossing earlier while approaching an AV with an active pitch motion or an eHMI compared to the baseline condition. While active pitch motion reduced subjective safety feeling, eHMI increased it. However, the two-step communication concept did not further improve pedestrians’ crossing initiation times and their safety feeling. The pattern of fixation behavior differed as a function of AV distance. When the approaching AV was far away, pedestrians exclusively looked at the environment. During the approach, pedestrians gradually fixated the bumper and the hood and only then the windshield of the AV. Hence, it seems to be useful to present an AV intent communication at a certain distance from the pedestrian. These findings posit the importance of considering pedestrians’ fixation behavior when developing communication concepts between AVs and pedestrians.     

User gesticulation inside an automated vehicle with external communication can cause confusion in pedestrians and a lower willingness to cross

Automated vehicles are expected to require some form of communication (e.g., via LED strip or display) with vulnerable road users such as pedestrians. However, the passenger inside the automated vehicle could perform gestures or motions which could potentially be interpreted by the pedestrian as contradictory to the outside communication of the car. To explore this conflict, we conducted an online experiment (N = 59) with different message types (no message, intention, command), gestures (no gesture, wave, stop), and user positions (driver, co-driver) and measured the pedestrian’s confidence in crossing. Our results show that certain combinations (e.g., car indicates cross while the user in the driver seat gestures stop) confused the pedestrian, resulting in significantly lower confidence to cross. We further show that designing intention-based external communication led to less confusion and a significantly higher intention to cross.     

Active vehicle pitch motion for communication in automated driving

The number of automated vehicles (AVs) is expected to successively increase in the near future. This development has a considerable impact on the informal communication between AVs and pedestrians. Informal communication with the driver will become obsolete during the interaction with AVs. Literature suggests that external human machine interfaces (eHMIs) might substitute the communication between drivers and pedestrians. In the study, we additionally test a recently discussed type of communication in terms of artificial vehicle motion, namely active pitch motion, as an informal communication cue for AVs.N = 54 participants approached AVs in a virtual inner-city traffic environment. We explored the effect of three communication concepts: an artificial vehicle motion, namely active pitch motion, eHMI and the combination of both. Moreover, vehicle types (sports car, limousine, SUV) were varied. A mixed-method approach was applied to investigate the participantś crossing behavior and subjective safety feeling. Furthermore, eye movement parameters were recorded as indicators for mental workload.The results revealed that any communication concept drove beneficial effects on the crossing behavior. The participants crossed the road earlier when an active pitch motion was present, as this was interpreted as a stronger braking. Further, the eHMI and a combination of eHMI and active pitch motion had a positive effect on the crossing behavior. The active pitch motion showed no effect on the subjective safety feeling, while eHMI and the combination enhanced the pedestrianś safety feeling while crossing. The use of communication resulted in less mental workload, as evidenced by eye-tracking parameters. Variations of vehicle types did not result in significant main effects but revealed interactions between parameters. The active pitch motion revealed no learning. In contrast, it took participants several trials for the eHMI and the combination condition to affect their crossing behavior. To sum up, this study indicates that communication between AVs and pedestrians can benefit from the consideration of vehicle motion.     

Bion's Notes on memory and desire – its initial clinical reception in the United States: A note on archival material

While Bion's 1967 memory and desire paper reflected a crucial episode in his clinical thinking during his epistemological period, it was also central to his evolution as a Kleinian psychoanalyst who worked with seriously disturbed adult patients. The author explicates and contextualizes these claims with a new archival document, the Los Angeles Seminars delivered by Bion in April 1967, and the full‐length version of Notes on memory and desire. Bion here instigated a radical departure from years of theory‐laden work when he made his clinical work and ideas accessible to a new audience of American Freudian analysts. While this new group was keenly interested to hear about Bion's clinical technique with both borderline and psychotic patients, there were varied reactions to Bion's ideas on the technical implications of the analyst's abandonment of memory and desire. Both the Los Angeles Seminars and Notes elicited responses ranging from bewilderment, admiration to skepticism amongst his audience of listeners and readers. These materials also however allow for a more complete and systematic presentation of important ideas about analytic technique – and while his ideas in this domain have been long valued and known by many psychoanalysts, this contribution stresses the crucial aspect of the reception of his ideas about technique in a particular American context. American analysts gained a much more explicit idea of how Bion worked analytically, how he listened, formulated interpretations and factored in the analyst's listening receptivity in the here‐and‐now. The author concludes with a consideration of the importance of Bion's American reception in 1967.     

Social eye gaze modulates processing of speech and co-speech gesture

In human face-to-face communication, language comprehension is a multi-modal, situated activity. However, little is known about how we combine information from different modalities during comprehension, and how perceived communicative intentions, often signaled through visual signals, influence this process. We explored this question by simulating a multi-party communication context in which a speaker alternated her gaze between two recipients. Participants viewed speech-only or speech + gesture object-related messages when being addressed (direct gaze) or unaddressed (gaze averted to other participant). They were then asked to choose which of two object images matched the speaker’s preceding message. Unaddressed recipients responded significantly more slowly than addressees for speech-only utterances. However, perceiving the same speech accompanied by gestures sped unaddressed recipients up to a level identical to that of addressees. That is, when unaddressed recipients’ speech processing suffers, gestures can enhance the comprehension of a speaker’s message. We discuss our findings with respect to two hypotheses attempting to account for how social eye gaze may modulate multi-modal language comprehension.     

From Copenhagen to the consulting room: Pauli and Jung in Copenhagen

In this paper the city of Copenhagen is used as a starting point to highlight some critical historical events, both concerning the exchange of ideas between the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and C.G. Jung and the history of psychotherapy in Scandinavia. Pauli's years in Copenhagen under the influence of Niels Bohr and his philosophy prepared him mentally to receiveC.G. Jung's ideas. The paper also recounts the one occasion that Jung was in Scandinavia, attending the 9th conference of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in Copenhagen, just before going to New York in 1937 to give his final seminars on Pauli's dreams. The reason for focusing on these particular events is that they also constitute part of the history of the reception of psychodynamic psychology in Sweden and Scandinavia.