Explanatory models of mental illness: a qualitative study with Emirati future mental health practitioners

Cultural traits have an influence on the person's interpretation of mental illness, the expression of distress and help-seeking attitudes. UAE has a unique sociological context where Eastern and Western traditions coexist. Given that there is a scarcity of mental health studies and no study on the explanatory models (EM) of mental illness, it is important to examine the connections between Western biomedical approaches and traditional Emirati illness explanations and how those affect the Emirati EM. In order to explore the influence of those connections on Emirati future clinicians, the present study focuses on young Emirati psychology students in a Western-oriented university. In-depth interviews were performed regarding their EM. The results highlighted the influence of cultural traits on the EM formulation, the importance of family in the Emirati society and the impact of the UAE socio-economic and religious reality in forming the participants’ beliefs on mental illness.     

Self Research in Educational Psychology: A Cautionary Tale of Positive Psychology in Action

Recent calls for a positive psychology that would deemphasize human pathology and dysfunction in favor of building an understanding of positive features of human life and human flourishing make two assumptions that the author questions in this article. First, he challenges the assumption that disciplinary psychology has been fixated on pathology and dysfunction by considering work in educational psychology that, both historically and currently, espouses the characteristics of positive psychology as articulated by its major advocates. Second, through a brief, critical consideration of research on the self in educational psychology, he contests the assumption that psychology has sufficient resources to develop into the positive psychology envisioned by its promoters. He argues that psychology's emphasis on the individual, whose core self resides in a deep, internal psyche, radically strips psychology of the historical and sociocultural resources that enable self-development, constrain self-understanding, and constitute the self.     

The anachronism of moral individualism and the responsibility of extended agency

Recent social theory has departed from methodological individualism’s explanation of action according to the motives and dispositions of human individuals in favor of explanation in terms of broader agencies consisting of both human and nonhuman elements described as cyborgs, actor-networks, extended agencies, or distributed cognition. This paper proposes that moral responsibility for action also be vested in extended agencies. It advances a consequentialist view of responsibility that takes moral responsibility to be a species of causal responsibility, and it answers objections that might be raised on the basis of intentions and deserts.

公正世界信念的文化差异

公正世界信念的文化差异是该领域较少关注的研究方向, 但具有一定的理论意义和实践价值。公正世界信念的水平、功能和测量工具存在文化差异, 其影响因素主要包括社会文化因素、自我概念、认知方式和不公平的社会现实。文章进一步探讨了提高公正世界信念跨文化比较准确性的途径和文化影响公正世界信念的机制。未来的研究需要深入探讨文化对公正世界信念功能的影响, 推进公正世界信念的本土化研究。     

Poppers Methodologischer Individualismus und die Sozialwissenschaften

Popper's methodological individualism and the social sciences. Popper's philosophy of social sciences poses a dilemma that arises out of the two theses of methodological individualism and situational logic. In order to find a way out of this dilemma, one must raise the question concerning the epistemological and methodological status of the `laws' of the human sciences. There are indeed `rules' from which human actions depart mostly to a negligible extent, but they remain valid or stay in effect without exception only as far as they are not re-evoked or re-emerge in the consciousness of the agents. The element of truth of methodological individualism lies in the person's capacity to revoke, in principle, the validity of the rules concerning oneself. Situational logic and methodological individualism can thus be reconciled. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Accountability Systems and Group Norms: Balancing the Risks of Mindless Conformity and Reckless Deviation

In dynamic task environments, decision makers are vulnerable to two types of errors: sticking too closely to the rules (excessive conformity) or straying too far from them (excessive deviation). We explore the effects of process and outcome accountability on the susceptibility to these errors. Using a multiple‐cue probability‐learning task, we show that process accountability encourages conformity errors and outcome accountability promotes deviation errors. Two additional studies explore the moderating effects of self‐focused and other‐focused group norms. Self‐focused norms reduce the effect of process accountability on excessive conformity. Other‐focused norms reduce the effect of outcome accountability on excessive deviation. Our results qualify prevailing claims about the benefits of process over outcome accountability and show that those benefits hinge on prevailing group norms, on the effectiveness of prescribed decision rules, and on the amount of irreducible uncertainty in the prediction task. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transcending the evidentiary boundary: Prediction error minimization,embodied interaction,and explanatory pluralism

In a recent paper, Jakob Hohwy argues that the emerging predictive processing (PP) perspective on cognition requires us to explain cognitive functioning in purely internalistic and neurocentric terms. The purpose of the present paper is to challenge the view that PP entails a wholesale rejection of positions that are interested in the embodied, embedded, extended, or enactive dimensions of cognitive processes. I will argue that Hohwy’s argument from analogy, which forces an evidentiary boundary into the picture, lacks the argumentative resources to make a convincing case for the conceptual necessity to interpret PP in solely internalistic terms. For this reason, I will reconsider the postulation and explanatory role of the evidentiary boundary. I will arrive at an account of prediction error minimization and its foundation on the free energy principle that is fully consistent with approaches to cognition that emphasize the embodied and interactive properties of cognitive processes. This gives rise to the suggestion that explanatory pluralism about the application of PP is to be preferred over Hohwy’s explanatory monism that follows from his internalistic and neurocentric view of predictive cognitive systems.     

自我对跨期决策的影响——基于个人-集体主义文化视角

跨期决策是指发生在不同时期的收益和成本的权衡决策。已有研究发现, 决策者的自我意识对跨期决策有着重要影响, 个人?集体主义文化在自我形成中起着重要作用, 但当文化因素被纳入自我对跨期决策影响的研究中时, 三者间的关系显得模糊不清。为了从已有文献中厘清三者间的理论关系, 我们基于个人?集体主义文化视角, 综述了自我对跨期决策影响的相关研究：介绍了跨期决策的相关概念及理论, 详细阐述了跨期决策中的两种自我理论(多重自我模型和自我连续性模型), 探讨了个人?集体主义文化对自我的影响, 并简要介绍了个人主义与集体主义文化下人们的跨期决策偏好差异及其心理机制。最后, 分别从研究内容、研究方法与实际应用三个方面, 提出了将个人?集体主义文化这一因素纳入自我对跨期决策影响过程、系统地考虑三者间关系的研究构想, 以期为未来研究提供新的思路, 深化人们对跨期决策机制的理解。     

“Our Fellow Creatures”

This paper defends “moral individualism” against various arguments that have been intended to show that membership in the human species or participation in our distinctively human form of life is a sufficient basis for a moral status higher than that of any animal. Among the arguments criticized are the “nature-of-the-kind argument,” which claims that it is the nature of all human beings to have certain higher psychological capacities, even if, contingently, some human beings lack them, and various versions of the idea that there is a special form of life that all human beings share but of which no animal can be a full participant. The paper concludes that none of these arguments succeeds in demonstrating that there are moral reasons to permit animals to be treated less well than members of our own species whose psychological capacities and potential are no higher than those of the animals.     

大学生职业性别刻板印象的内隐研究

本研究采用内隐联想测验（IAT）和刻板解释偏差（SEB）两种方法对大学生的职业性别刻板印象进行了内隐研究。发现被试整体在两次实验中均表现出极为显著的内隐刻板印象,女大学生头脑中的刻板印象对其行为归因已形成显著影响。研究结果表明,SEB是一种测量内隐刻板印象的有效方法。