The embodiment of beauty: Evidence from viewing Chinese concrete words and pictographs

How is beauty embodied? According to the viewpoint of embodied cognition, the aesthetic processing of words or pictographs has roots in their referential archetypes. Four experiments tested whether the beauty of referential archetypes was routinely activated during the explicit and implicit aesthetic evaluations of the font structures of concrete Chinese words and pictographs in congruent or incongruent font colour. Results showed font structures of simplified Chinese words and pictographs were judged to be more beautiful when they referred to beautiful archetypes; and this pattern was reversed when they referred to ugly archetypes. Moreover, judgement was facilitated when font colour was congruent for Chinese words and pictographs referred to beautiful archetypes. For those referred to ugly archetypes, judgement was inhibited in congruent font colour but facilitated in incongruent font colour, suggesting aesthetic perceptions of the font structures of Chinese words and pictographs were derived from their referential natural objects. The spontaneous generation hypothesis of beauty is proposed to account for these findings.     

汉语常用颜色词的概念结构

采用自然分类和多维标度的方法,研究了汉语常用颜色词的概念结构。结果表明,汉语常用颜色词的语义空间具有按原型分布的特点。常用颜色词的概念结构有3个维度:1.彩色/非彩色;2.暖色/冷色;3.颜色的互补和对比。整个研究表明,颜色认知既受光波的物理属性和人眼的生物特性影响,又受语言和社会文化影响。     

视觉表象操作加工的眼动实验研究

本研究通过视觉表象旋转和扫描的眼动实验探讨表象的心理表征方式。实验一结果表明,眼动指标具有与反应时相类似的旋转角度效应。实验二结果显示,表象扫描的反应时和眼动指标都具有与知觉扫描加工一样的距离效应。由此可以认为,表象眼动与知觉眼动模式具有相似性;表象具有相对独立的心理表征方式并有其特殊的加工过程;表象的心理表征可以是形象表征,而非一定是抽象的命题或符号表征     

用“你”表述物体的功能会抑制成因对归类的影响

已有研究显示物体的成因等变量会影响人造物概念的分类;但这种影响的中介变量为何,基于设计和基于用途的理论有不同的假设。实验采用物体自由命名任务,在陈述物体的功能时,操纵角色词的类型（旁观者“有人”和使用者“你”）,比较被试对物体的命名在领域水平的分类倾向。结果发现,呈现“旁观者”角色词时,呈现或不呈现物体自然形成的成因故事会造成不同的分类倾向;但是在呈现“使用者”角色词时,成因故事对分类倾向的影响消失了。提示物体的功能是成因和分类的中介变量,支持基于用途的人造物分类模型     

Recollective Experience During Recognition of Emotional Words in Clinical Depression

Earlier work has shown that free recall tasks produce a robust mood-congruent memory effect in depression, whereas recognition tasks produce heterogeneous results. This study aimed to further investigate recognition memory for positive, negative and neutral words in depressed patients and matched comparison participants with the Remember/Know/Guess procedure for assessing recollection and familiarity. No mood-congruent memory bias effect was detected in discrimination abilities. However, depressed patients recollected (more Remember responses) more negative than positive or neutral words, whereas comparison participants recollected more positive than neutral words. No mood-congruent pattern was evidenced for Know responses. However, the depressed patients responded to fewer words overall with Know responses than the comparison participants. These results suggest that the mood-congruent memory pattern in depressed patients is related to conscious recollection rather than to familiarity. Attentional biases toward negative words and elaboration processes and/or encoding in reference to the self may contribute to these findings.     

Evaluative priming from subliminal emotional words: Insights from event-related potentials and individual differences related to anxiety

The present ERP study investigated effects of subliminal emotional words on preference judgments about subsequent visual target stimuli (paintings, portraits). Each target was preceded by a masked 17-ms emotional adjective. Four classes of prime words were distinguished according to the combinations of positive/negative valence and high/low arousal. Targets were liked significantly more after positive-arousing primes (e.g., happy), relative to negative-arousing (brutal), positive-nonarousing (mild), and negative-nonarousing primes (lazy). In the target ERP, amplitude of right-hemisphere positive slow wave was increased after positive-arousing compared to negative-arousing primes. Evaluative priming effects on judgments and ERPs were more pronounced in high state-anxious participants. The results suggest that (1) there is indeed affective/semantic processing of unconscious words, (2) evaluative priming operates relatively late during target processing, (3) to be effective, prime words need to score high on the arousal dimension, and (4) individual differences in state anxiety modulate the susceptibility to subliminal evaluative priming.     

Levels of number knowledge during early childhood

Researchers have long disagreed about whether number concepts are essentially continuous (unchanging) or discontinuous over development. Among those who take the discontinuity position, there is disagreement about how development proceeds. The current study addressed these questions with new quantitative analyses of children’s incorrect responses on the Give-N task. Using data from 280 children, ages 2 to 4 years, this study showed that most wrong answers were simply guesses, not counting or estimation errors. Their mean was unrelated to the target number, and they were lower-bounded by the numbers children actually knew. In addition, children learned the number-word meanings one at a time and in order; they treated the number words as mutually exclusive; and once they figured out the cardinal principle of counting, they generalized this principle to the rest of their count list. Findings support the ‘discontinuity’ account of number development in general and the ‘knower-levels’ account in particular.     

Loci of stuttering of English- and Korean-speaking children who stutter: Preliminary findings

PurposeThe purpose of the study was to determine whether differences exist between young English- and Korean-speaking children who stutter (CWS) in the loci of stuttering.MethodParticipants were 10 Korean-speaking and 11 English-speaking CWS between the ages of 3 and 7 years. Participants produced narratives while viewing various picture scenes and a wordless picture book.ResultsFindings indicated that Korean-speaking CWS stuttered more on content than function words whereas English-speaking CWS stuttered more on function than content words. Furthermore, both Korean- and English-speaking CWS tended to stutter more on utterance-initial words. These findings appear to be related to the differences in linguistic/syntactic structures between Korean and English. Specifically, in the Korean-speaking CWS’s narratives, most utterance-initial words (73.60 %) were content words whereas in the English-speaking CWS’s narratives, most utterance-initial words (83.57 %) were function words.ConclusionThese preliminary findings, although in need of replication with a larger sample size, seem to suggest that the word class (i.e., content/function words) contributions to stuttering loci are more language-specific whereas the word position (i.e., utterance-initial position) contributions to stuttering loci are more language-nonspecific. Given that the true characteristics of stuttering may be rather language-nonspecific than language-specific, further research may need to focus more on stuttering loci related to word position than word class.     

民族接触减弱民族本质论：文化认同与文化相似性的中介作用

采用问卷法,以911名少数民族和汉族大学生为被试,探讨了民族接触减弱民族本质论及其机制问题。研究1检验了民族接触与民族本质论、民族交往态度的关系,结果表明,少数民族被试的民族接触与民族本质论存在显著负相关,汉族被试存在负相关但不显著;研究2检验了少数民族被试的本民族文化认同和与汉族文化的相似性感知在民族接触和民族本质论之间的中介作用。结果表明,文化认同和文化相似性完全中介了民族接触和民族本质论之间的负相关。文章认为民族接触可以通过增加民族之间文化相似性感知、降低内群体的文化认同而减弱民族本质论信念。最后讨论了本研究在理论和实践方面的贡献,以及存在的局限性。     

共同经历不公平降低个体的不公平感知

以往鲜有研究考察个体与他人共同经历不公平如何影响其不公平感知。本研究实验1~2采用最后通牒博弈任务考察个体独自经历,以及与他人共同经历不公平时的不公平感知。结果表明,共同经历不公平,相比独自经历不公平,降低了个体的不公平感知。实验3采用眼动技术考察共同经历不公平降低个体不公平感知的内部心理机制,结果表明,个体越关注共同经历者的收益,其不公平感知越低,该结果支持社会比较的观点。