幽默平面广告的适用性研究

为了探讨哪一类别商品的平面广告更适合于采用幽默的诉求方式,研究随机选取160大学生为被试,以16则改编平面广告为实验材料,以广告类型（幽默,非幽默）、商品类别为自变量,以广告评价、广告顺序为协变量,以商品的印象程度、喜爱程度、购买意向为因变量,进行平衡设计实验。结果表明,幽默广告具有较好广告效果,可以提高受众对大宗工具、小奖赏和小工具型商品的记忆;幽默平面广告更适用于低风险、功能性商品,不适用于高风险、享乐性商品。     

NARRATIVE AND MEANING IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Differences of understanding in science and in religion can be explored via the distinction between paradigmatic and narrative modes of explanation. Although science is inclusive of the paradigmatic, I propose that in explaining the behavior of complex adaptive systems, and in the human sciences in particular, narratives may well constitute the best scientific explanations. Causal relationships may be embedded within, and expressions of higher-order constraints provided by, complex system dynamics, best understood via the temporal organization of intentionalities that constitute narrative. Complex adaptive systems, out of which intentions emerge, have behavioral trajectories that are in principle unique, contingent, and nondeterministic even in stable states and unpredictable across phase transitions. Given such unpredictability, the only explanation can be an interpretive story that retrospectively retraces the actual changes in dynamics. Without narrative, personality traits and human actions are incomprehensible. Such phenomena do not permit a reduction of purposive acts to nonpurposive elements or of reasons to the causes they constrain. Causality does not exhaust meaning. Given the role of narratives in human lives, religion and mythology provide larger stories within which individual stories make sense. Differences between narrative and historical truth suggest how we can be constituted by what we imagine ourselves to be.     

‘Not in our front garden’: Land use conflict,spatial meaning and the politics of naming place

Strategies aimed at reducing land use conflict often stress the need to make planning decisions more democratic. However, this goal is obstructed by overly‐narrow conceptual perspectives that neglect the symbolic significance of place. We illustrate this by examining place names, which function as repositories of socio‐political meaning. Drawing on elements of discursive and rhetorical psychology and subject positioning theory, we investigated the variety of meanings associated with place names in the context of a proposed housing development in Swindon, in the South of England. Thirty interviews with different stakeholders were conducted to gauge their opinions towards the proposal. Noting differences in the way the proposed site was named, we analysed the range of meanings associated with each name in relation to participants' stances towards development. Our results show how, in naming place, spatial meanings are negotiated and contested in ways that support contrasting political objectives. We conclude that planning professionals should exercise greater sensitivity towards existing spatial meanings, especially place names. In addition, socio‐political understandings of subjective spatial relationships can serve as a basis for achieving more productive dialogue and improving development designs. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What makes a meaningful life? Examining the effects of interpersonal harmony,dialectical coping,and nonattachment

Past cross‐cultural research on well‐being has tended to base Eastern construction of well‐being on the interdependent self‐construal, mainly as an offshoot of Confucius relationalism. However, other influential philosophical traditions in East Asian societies (i.e., Taoism and Buddhism) that portray a different picture of well‐being have received scant scholarly attention. We aim to foreground the distinctiveness of three well‐being constructs salient to Chinese culture, namely, interpersonal harmony, dialectical coping, and nonattachment, by providing experimental evidence on their differential effects on perceived meaning in life. Participants were 173 Taiwanese college students. Using priming procedures, participants primed with interpersonal harmony and dialectical coping reported higher levels of meaning in life as compared to those in the nonattachment and neutral control conditions. In addition, comparisons among the three well‐being constructs revealed that although the effects of interpersonal harmony and dialectical coping on meaning in life were similar in strength, they were both significantly stronger than that of nonattachment. The findings attest to the importance of recognizing within‐culture differences when conducting research on well‐being. Results were considered in terms of their methodological and theoretical implications.     

句子阅读理解过程中句意的建构时间

一般语言学理论认为, 在句子阅读理解过程中, 句子意义建构是基于词汇语义整合的, 其反映在N400之上, 开始于词语呈现后约250 ms。然而, 近年关于语义P600效应的研究却提示句意建构可能存在多通道或方式, 读者甚至可能在N400反映的加工出现之前就已建立了初步句意。为探明在句子阅读理解过程中是否存在比N400反映的加工更早的句意建构, 以及如果存在这样的句意建构, 其是从何时开始的, 本研究开展了四个实验。实验1发现被试在句末双字词呈现200 ms后已将其联系到上文语义表征而建立了句意, 提示句意建构开始于N400反映的加工出现之前。实验2与3进一步发现, 读者开始建立句意的时间约在句末词呈现了150 ms之时。实验4排除了实验1~3效应的其他一些可能解释, 提升了实验1~3结果的可靠性。总体上, 本研究提示：在句子阅读理解过程中, 读者在句末双字词呈现了约150 ms之时就已建立了句意; 可能存在比N400反映的加工更早的句意建构。     

共同方法变异的影响及其统计控制途径的模型分析

共同方法变异(common method variance, CMV)指两个变量之间变异的重叠是因为使用同类测量工具而导致, 而不是代表潜在构念之间的真实关系。虽然以往研究显示CMV不一定导致研究结果的偏差, 在实际研究中应当加以考量。特别是在使用测量方法的研究中, 如果数据来源越单一, 测量方法越类似, CMV效应使研究结果产生偏差的可能性越大。CMV效应的控制方法包括过程控制法和统计控制法。在统计控制法的选择和使用上, 需要重点考虑该方法是否分离了三大变异(特质变异、方法变异和误差变异), CMV效应是在测量构念层面还是题目层面, CMV效应是加法效应还是乘法效应。控制潜在方法因子途径是统计控制方法中最重要的一类方法, 理解其模型是正确使用这类方法的前提。未来研究应当关注多个研究的CMV效应和侧重评估某个理论研究中CMV所引起的潜在的效度威胁。     

大学新生的人生意义与抑郁:交互效应与中介效应

基于Frankl(1963)的意义疗法理论观点和Steger等(2006)提出的人生意义双维构念, 考察人生意义对大学新生抑郁的影响机制, 分析其中可能存在的交互效应和中介效应。采用问卷法调查了某东部省会城市1所理工科大学、1所综合性大学的435名新生, 结果表明:(1)大学新生的意义体验与无聊倾向、抑郁负相关, 与希望正相关;意义寻求与意义体验、抑郁的相关均不显著;(2)意义体验和意义寻求对抑郁具有交互效应, 对意义寻求较低的个体, 意义体验的保护作用更强;(3)意义体验通过无聊倾向和希望的并行多重中介效应影响抑郁, 且无聊倾向的中介效应显著强于希望。     

Proper Semantics for Substructural Logics,from a Stalker Theoretic Point of View

We study filters in residuated structures that are associated with congruence relations (which we call -filters), and develop a semantical theory for general substructural logics based on the notion of primeness for those filters. We first generalize Stone’s sheaf representation theorem to general substructural logics and then define the primeness of -filters as being “points” (or stalkers) of the space, the spectrum, on which the representing sheaf is defined. Prime FL-filters will turn out to coincide with truth sets under various well known semantics for certain substructural logics. We also investigate which structural rules are needed to interpret each connective in terms of prime -filters in the same way as in Kripke or Routley-Meyer semantics. We may consider that the set of the structural rules that each connective needs in this sense reflects the difficulty of giving the meaning of the connective. A surprising discovery is that connectives , ⅋ of linear logic are linearly ordered in terms of the difficulty in this sense. Presented by Wojciech Buszkowski     

Body parts and early-learned verbs

This article reports the structure of associations among 101 common verbs and body parts. The verbs are those typically learned by children learning English prior to 3 years of age. In a free association task, 50 adults were asked to provide the single body part that came to mind when they thought of each verb. Analyses reveal highly systematic and structured patterns of associations that are also related to the normative age of acquisition of the verbs showing a progression from verbs associated with actions by the mouth, to verbs strongly associated with actions by hand and arm, to verbs not so strongly associated with any one body part. The results have implications for proposals about embodied verb meaning and also for processes of early verb learning.     

Overcoming the winner's curse: an adaptive learning perspective

The winner's curse phenomenon refers to the fact that the winner in a common value auction, in order to actually win the auction, is likely to have overestimated the item's value and consequently is likely to gain less than expected and may even lose (i.e., it is said to be “cursed”). Past research, using the “Acquiring a company” task has shown that people do not overcome this bias even after they receive extensive feedback. We suggest that the persistence of the winner's curse is due to a combination of two factors: variability in the environment that leads to ambiguous feedback (i.e., choices and outcomes are only partially correlated) and the tendency of decision makers to learn adaptively. We show in an experiment that by reducing the variance in the feedback, performance can be significantly improved. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.