Attribution and aggression: The misattribution of anger

An experiment was designed to test the effect of misattribution of anger on subsequent aggression. Subjects were induced to take a placebo with half of the subjects led to expect arousal symptoms and the other half led to expect relaxation. Crosscutting the pill manipulation, half of the subjects were provoked by a confederate and half were not. All subjects were then given an opportunity to aggress against the confederate. As predicted, relaxation pill-provoked subjects were significantly more aggressive than subjects in the other conditions (p < .025), with arousal pill-provoked subjects no more aggressive than no provocation controls.     

Center median "alerting" and verbal learning dysfunction

Previous data have shown that stereotaxic center median lesions alone or lesions in the amygdala, unilateral left and right and bilateral, do not impair verbal paired-word associates learning. However, “interactional” combined lesions in the amygdala and center median nucleus on the left side result in a significant decrease in test scores. Analysis of the types of errors made postoperatively by the six patients with this lesion combination indicates the persistence over trials of misnaming errors vs errors of omission. These findings are compatible with hypotheses of an alerting function performed by medial thalamic structures which, for effective learning, cosponsor attention to stimulus cues. Defective alerting is held to result in faulty labeling and subsequent mismatching (see Ojemann, 1975, Brain and Language, 2, 101–120, and Fedio &; Van Buren, 1975, Brain and Language, 2, 78–100).     

Aphasics' comprehension of contextually conveyed meaning

Eighteen aphasics and seven normal controls were examined as to their ability to comprehend utterances when correct interpretation required integration of extralinguistic cues in a natural setting. Videotaped situations were presented in which the correct interpretation of an utterance was not the literal interpretation but was the meaning conveyed by the request in a particular context. The aphasics' performance with indirect requests was superior to their performance on a standard battery of auditory comprehension tasks. Standard tests of auditory language comprehension, therefore, offer a measure of aphasic breakdown in linguistic processing but do not adequately reflect aphasics' receptive abilities in natural communicative settings. When the aphasic subjects did demonstrate difficulties with natural settings, their difficulty was, in part, a function of their level of performance on the standard battery. In addition, when the linguistic element of the communicative setting conveyed negative intent, aphasics were further reduced in their ability to interpret a message correctly. Otherwise, the aphasic subjects performance resembled that of the normal controls in that they demonstrated the capacity to utilize extralinguistic cues to discern correctly the conveyed intent in many requests.     

The social semantics of Mikhail Pokrovskij and Nikolaj Marr

Criticizing the works of “Western” specialists in semantics, Soviet academician M. M. Pokrovskij (1868–1942) comes to the conclusion that social factors are essential for semantic evolution, while psychological factors constitute an intermediate link between the “external” life of a society and the semantics of the corresponding language. This conception resembles the general explanations of semantic evolution proposed by N. Ja. Marr (1864–1934). Nevertheless, despite a number of common points in the semantic theories of these two researchers, Pokrovskij’s attitude towards Marr was negative: in particular, he disagreed with the thesis of the chronological primacy of Marr’s discoveries in the domain of semantics. The article investigates why Pokrovskij had for a long time constituted an intermediate link between Russian and “Western” “traditions” in the field of semantics.

朱熹对宋代易学的发展——兼论朱熹、程颐易学思想之异同

朱熹提出《易》之本义为卜筮的见解,由此对程颐易学和义理学派提出批评。朱熹主张区分《周易》经传,提出易学发展阶段说。通过比较《周易本义》和《周易程氏传》,可见两者之异同。朱熹以象数、卜筮求易理,把义理学派与象数学派统一起来,从而发展了宋代易学。     

Salience,Imagination, and Moral Luck

One key desideratum of a theory of blame is that it be able to explain why we typically have differing blaming responses in cases involving significant degrees of luck. T.M. Scanlon has proposed a relational account of blame, and he has argued that his account succeeds in this regard and that this success makes his view preferable to reactive attitude accounts of blame. In this paper, I aim to show that Scanlon's view is open to a different kind of luck-based objection. I then offer a way of understanding moral luck cases which allows for a plausible explanation of our differential blaming responses by appealing to the salience of certain relevant features of the action in question.