LANGUAGE AS A VALUES‐REALIZING ACTIVITY: CARING,ACTING, AND PERCEIVING

A problem for natural scientific accounts, psychology in particular, is the existence of value. An ecological account of values is reviewed and illustrated in three domains of research: carrying differing loads; negotiating social dilemmas involving agreement and disagreement; and timing the exposure of various visual presentations. Then it is applied in greater depth to the nature of language. As described and illustrated, values are ontological relationships that are neither subjective nor objective, but which constrain and obligate all significant animate activity physically, socially, and morally. As an embodied social activity, conversational dialogue is characterized in terms of values, pragmatics, and presence rather than in terms of syntactic and semantic rules. In particular the nature of dialogical arrays is explored, and the hypothesis that language is an action system, a perceptual system, and a caring system is explored. Language expands horizons and makes it possible for humans to realize their calling as culture makers and caretakers.     

Five-item Francis scale of attitude toward Christianity: construct and nomological validity and internal consistency among Colombian college students

The Spanish version of the five-item Francis scale of attitude toward Christianity is a refinement of the short version of the Francis scale of attitude toward Christianity. The scale is a good measurement for intrinsic religiosity. It has been applied previously among Colombian adolescent students. The internal consistency and construct and nomological validity were tested among a sample of 1349 Colombian college students from Santa Marta, Colombia. Participants were aged between 18- and 30-years-old; 51% were men; and 68% were social science students. Exploratory analysis factor, Cronbach alpha and omega McDonald were computed. The scale showed high internal consistency (both alpha and omega = .96) and excellent construct and nomological validity (one factor which explained for 88% of variance; women scored higher than men; and Protestants scored higher than Catholics and students with other religion filiations). The five-item Francis scale can be used further researches in Hispano-America among college students.     

Reflections on the work of Hanna Segal (1918–2011),

This paper is based on a talk given at the conference to celebrate the Work of Hanna Segal and attempts to summarise her contribution to psychoanalysis. I suggest that in addition to being the important presenter of the work of Melanie Klein, she made major contributions to our understanding of many analytic ideas, for example, symbol formation, the usefulness of the concept of the death instinct and the relation between phantasy and reality. She was a pioneer in the analytic treatment of psychosis and sh wrote important papers on literature and aesthetics. She was a great teacher and emphasised the central role played by the analytic setting in representing the attitude of the analyst.     

First‐time viewers' comprehension of films: Bridging shot transitions

Which perceptual and cognitive prerequisites must be met in order to be able to comprehend a film is still unresolved and a controversial issue. In order to gain some insights into this issue, our field experiment investigates how first‐time adult viewers extract and integrate meaningful information across film cuts. Three major types of commonalities between adjacent shots were differentiated, which may help first‐time viewers with bridging the shots: pictorial, causal, and conceptual. Twenty first‐time, 20 low‐experienced and 20 high‐experienced viewers from Turkey were shown a set of short film clips containing these three kinds of commonalities. Film clips conformed also to the principles of continuity editing. Analyses of viewers' spontaneous interpretations show that first‐time viewers indeed are able to notice basic pictorial (object identity), causal (chains of activity), as well as conceptual (links between gaze direction and object attention) commonalities between shots due to their close relationship with everyday perception and cognition. However, first‐time viewers' comprehension of the commonalities is to a large degree fragile, indicating the lack of a basic notion of what constitutes a film.     

中学生时间管理自我监控量表的研究

时间管理自我监控是一个多层次多维度的心理结构,按其抽象程度的不同,可分为整体监控和具体监控两个层次,整体监控系统分为主动性、开放性和有效性三个维度,具体监控系统分为目标设置、时间规划、灵活性、自制力和检查评估五个维度。通过对832名中学生的测试结果进行分析,编制了具有较高信度和效度的中学生时间管理自我监控量表。     

Locked Up,Then Locked Out

SUMMARY

Women prisoners face tremendous psychological, emotional, and physical hardships inside prison. These include isolation, separation from their families and children, lack of medical care and general abuse of their basic human rights. When they are released from prison, women confront institutional as well as psychological barriers to a successful return to their communities     

EEG correlates of cognitive time scales in the Necker-Zeno model for bistable perception

The Necker-Zeno model of bistable perception provides a formal relation between the average duration of meta-stable percepts (dwell times T) of ambiguous figures and two other basic time scales (t₀, ΔT) underlying cognitive processing. The model predicts that dwell times T covary with t₀, ΔT or both. We tested this prediction by exploiting that observers, in particular experienced meditators, can volitionally control dwell times T.Meditators and non-meditators observed bistable Necker cubes either passively or tried to hold their current percept. The latencies of a centro-parietal event-related potential (CPP) were recorded as a physiological correlate of t₀.Dwell times T and the CPP latencies, correlated with t₀, differed between conditions and observer groups, while ΔT remained constant in the range predicted by the model. The covariation of CPP latencies and dwell times, as well as their quadratic functional dependence extends previous psychophysical confirmation of the Necker-Zeno model to psychophysiological measures.     

The effects of a high-probability instruction sequence and response-independent reinforcer delivery on child compliance

We compared the effects of a high-probability (high-p) instruction sequence and a fixed-time (FT) schedule of reinforcement on the compliance of 2 typically developing children. A multielement experimental design with a reversal component was implemented according to a multiple baseline across participants arrangement. Both the high-p and FT conditions resulted in increased compliance for both participants during the multielement sessions. These results suggest that it may be possible to increase compliance without a response requirement of the type arranged in the high-p instruction sequence.