植物状态的残存脑功能和意识研究

综述了有关植物状态患者对外加刺激脑反应的功能成像研究文献,着重讨论了研究发现的非典型激活的临床价值以及植物状态患者是否存在意识的功能脑成像证据。     

新时期中医药进退之争的前提条件

以科学、理性的态度对待当前中医药进退之争,就必须正确应用与表述争辩中出现的关键性概念、名词以及正确认识相关问题。认为关键性概念和名词的正确应用与表述是这场之争的前提条件,积极探索现代与传统两种医学体系关系则必须正确认识相关问题。     

生态伦理视野中的儒道思想

儒道二家提出的生态伦理思想构成了传统伦理生态文明观的核心,他们在生态环境问题上表现出的智慧和远见卓识,直至今日令我们赞叹不已。这些深邃的思考既展现了圣人先哲独特的生存智慧,又为我们提供了应对现代生态挑战可资借鉴的思想资源。只要我们充分利用儒道传统生态伦理观的优势和长处,并及时赋予新的时代内容,对实现人类与自然的和谐相处、建立现代生态文明是大有裨益的。     

现代社会祛除伦理的社会机制

在对犹太人进行的大屠杀中,我们可以清楚看到纳粹如何借助于现代工业技术体系和官僚体系弱化人们的道德情感、混淆人们的道德责任,并最终阻止人们的道德行为,六百万犹太人就这样在大众平静的沉默中离去。现代社会祛除伦理的机制仍然没有改变,让人们保持道德沉默的可能性仍然存在,人类的大罪恶随时随地都可能再现。     

诚信如何可能——儒家诚说的意蕴

诚信缺失是目前中国社会生活中的严重问题之一。信赖社会的构建有赖于充分挖掘和吸收中国传统伦理道德学说中的诚信思想资源。怎样才能成为一个诚信的主体 ?这是传统儒家诚信理论的重心所在。而诚信主体的确立又主要表现在是否“诚意”之上。欲使主体的“意诚” ,就必须通过“存养”和“省察”工夫来使人性中的“诚性”呈现与挺立起来。因而从本质上说 ,儒家的诚信论是一种道德修养论。     

Unconscious Emotion

Abstract— Conscious feelings have traditionally been viewed as a central and necessary ingredient of emotion. Here we argue that emotion also can be genuinely unconscious. We describe evidence that positive and negative reactions can be elicited subliminally and remain inaccessible to introspection. Despite the absence of subjective feelings in such cases, subliminally induced affective reactions still influence people's preference judgments and even the amount of beverage they consume. This evidence is consistent with evolutionary considerations suggesting that systems underlying basic affective reactions originated prior to systems for conscious awareness. The idea of unconscious emotion is also supported by evidence from affective neuroscience indicating that subcortical brain systems underlie basic "liking" reactions. More research is needed to clarify the relations and differences between conscious and unconscious emotion, and their underlying mechanisms. However, even under the current state of knowledge, it appears that processes underlying conscious feelings can become decoupled from processes underlying emotional reactions, resulting in genuinely unconscious emotion.     

The universe of our concerns: the human as person in the praxis of analysis

Since its inception, psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists have used the reductionistic methods of science to explain both human development and analytic practice. The most recent iteration of this tendency uses attachment as the explanatory principle. This disposition has created theories that understand the human solely as an organism. While this is a satisfactory way to view human development, it is not appropriate for the practice of analysis. In this context, the human must be viewed as a person that is explicable in his/her own terms. Interpretation based on reductionism eliminates personhood. Humans appear as persons in 'the feeling of what happens' or of 'being there', and, on the basis of this experience, develop stories in which their personhood evolves. The psychoanalytic, philosophical and neuro-scientific basis for this view of the human as person is discussed, and its relevance for analytic practice is considered.     

Self‐absorption paradox is not a paradox: Illuminating the dark side of self‐reflection

Although considered an important component of a healthy personality, self‐reflection has not so far been shown to have any specific benefits for mental health. This research addresses this issue by taking into consideration two important suppressor variables, self‐rumination and the need for absolute truth. The latter is an innovative variable, defined and presented in this research. The first two studies aimed to validate a new measure that acts as an operational definition of the need for absolute truth. The first study was conducted with two group of participants; the first group consisted of 129 females and 67 males, mean age = 20 years, and the second 182 females and 104 males, mean age = 27. In the second study, participants were 22 females and 18 males, mean age = 20.5. In the final study, conducted with 296 female, 163 male participants (mean age = 37), suppressor effects were tested using structural equation modeling. The results showed that by taking account of these two suppressor variables, particularly the need for absolute truth, the expected relationship between self‐reflection and mental health was revealed. The need for absolute truth was shown to be crucial for understanding the effects of self‐reflection on mental health, therefore it should be considered in all processes of psychotherapy.     

On The Infinitely Hard Problem Of Consciousness

I show that the recursive structure of Leibniz's Law requires agents to perform infinitely many operations to psychologically identify the referents of phenomenal and physical concepts, even though the referents of ordinary concepts (e.g. Hesperus and Phosphorus) can be identified in a finite number of steps. The resulting problem resembles the hard problem of consciousness in the fact that it appears (and indeed is) unsolvable by anyone for whom it arises, and in the fact that it invites dualist and eliminativist responses. Moreover, if this is the hard problem then we can predict that regardless of the strength of the argument for physicalism, and regardless of physicalism's truth, an ineliminable dissatisfaction is bound to accompany any physicalist theory of consciousness. Accordingly, I suggest that this is the hard problem of consciousness, and therefore that the hard problem arises from a recursively degenerate application of Leibniz's Law.     

Social intuition as a form of implicit learning: Sequences of body movements are learned less explicitly than letter sequences

In the current paper, we first evaluate the suitability of traditional serial reaction time (SRT) and artificial grammar learning (AGL) experiments for measuring implicit learning of social signals. We then report the results of a novel sequence learning task which combines aspects of the SRT and AGL paradigms to meet our suggested criteria for how implicit learning experiments can be adapted to increase their relevance to situations of social intuition. The sequences followed standard finite-state grammars. Sequence learning and consciousness of acquired knowledge were compared between 2 groups of 24 participants viewing either sequences of individually presented letters or sequences of body-posture pictures, which were described as series of yoga movements. Participants in both conditions showed above-chance classification accuracy, indicating that sequence learning had occurred in both stimulus conditions. This shows that sequence learning can still be found when learning procedures reflect the characteristics of social intuition. Rule awareness was measured using trial-by-trial evaluation of decision strategy (Dienes & Scott, 2005; Scott & Dienes, 2008). For letters, sequence classification was best on trials where participants reported responding on the basis of explicit rules or memory, indicating some explicit learning in this condition. For body-posture, classification was not above chance on these types of trial, but instead showed a trend to be best on those trials where participants reported that their responses were based on intuition, familiarity, or random choice, suggesting that learning was more implicit. Results therefore indicate that the use of traditional stimuli in research on sequence learning might underestimate the extent to which learning is implicit in domains such as social learning, contributing to ongoing debate about levels of conscious awareness in implicit learning.