Between the street and the consulting room: The role of therapeutic frame in working with homeless clients

This paper explores the context of psychotherapy with people who are homeless and the kinds of dynamics and challenges that typically arise in this work. The paper specifically considers the process of therapy as it takes place with clients who have been recurrently homeless and who have difficulties with sustaining shelter that has its roots in deficits in early containment. Clinical case material from psychotherapy conducted with two homeless men is presented and the implications of the approach adopted are explored both in relation to policies around the provision of services for homeless people and the more specific issue of psychotherapy intervention.

It is argued that a clear, well-articulated set of expectations has to be developed around this work in order to protect it and to provide it with the greatest opportunity for providing the kind of safety that is required for the development of this work. It is argued that the most important issue here relates to the provision of a consistent therapeutic framework and a care around the development of the specific psychotherapeutic frame within, and in relation to, the other frames present in the person's life.     

Choices and opportunities: another effect of framing on decisions

Many decisions can be framed either as ‘choices’ between alternative courses of action (e.g. Should I move to New York or stay in Chicago?) or as ‘opportunities’ to pursue a particular course of action (i.e. Should I move to New York?). Although there is no logical difference between these two different decision frames, there may be important psychological differences between them. In four studies, we explore the differences between ‘choices’ and ‘opportunities’. The results of Studies 1 and 2 show that college students view many of the decisions they typically face as opportunities, rather than choices. Further, the results of Study 2 suggest that the frame students adopt is systematically related to the preferences they express. The latter finding led to Studies 3 and 4, where we show that preferences can be influenced by encouraging people to adopt one decision frame rather than another. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

句子理解过程中词类加工的功能性质

句法优先理论假设词类加工功能上优先于语义、动词论元结构和话语信息加工。来自德语和法语的证据显示, 词类违反阻断语义整合和动词论元结构加工, 因而词类优先于语义和动词论元结构。关于词类加工在功能上是否优先于话语信息加工, 尚无来自任何语言的证据。汉语证据尽管显示词类并不优先于语义, 但未充分讨论任务因素的影响。将来研究有必要使用ERP技术和违反范式, 从语义整合、动词论元结构加工和话语水平加工等多个层面, 同时操纵词类的正确性和非句法因素, 考察句法特性上与德语和法语不同的语言, 如汉语和韩语。这方面研究将有助于洞察一个语言的语言学特性如何制约或调整词类加工的功能性质。     

Relational categories are more mutable than entity categories

Across three experiments, we explore differences between relational categories—whose members share common relational patterns—and entity categories, whose members share common intrinsic properties. Specifically, we test the claim that relational concepts are more semantically mutable in context, and therefore less stable in memory, than entity concepts. We compared memory for entity nouns and relational nouns, tested either in the same context as at encoding or in a different context. We found that (a) participants show better recognition accuracy for entity nouns than for relational nouns, and (b) recognition of relational nouns is more impaired by a change in context than is recognition of entity nouns. We replicated these findings even when controlling for factors highly correlated with relationality, such as abstractness–concreteness. This suggests that the contextual mutability of relational concepts is due to the core semantic property of conveying relational structure and not simply to accompanying characteristics such as abstractness. We note parallels with the distinction between nouns and verbs and suggest implications for lexical and conceptual structure. Finally, we relate these patterns to proposals that a deep distinction exists between words with an essentially referential function and those with a predicate function.     

Grasping remaps the distribution of visuospatial attention and enhances competing action activation

We examined how action goals influence the distribution of visuospatial attention near the body (Experiment 1) and how the temporal relationship between distractors and targets modifies shifts in visuospatial attention (Experiment 2). Targets were light emitting diodes (LEDs) in the left and right hemispace of a visual display. Following left or right target illumination, participants reached to point-to or grasp target object in blocked trials. Coincident with target onset, a distractor LED illuminated in the same or opposite hemispace between the initiation point and target, or no distractor appeared. In Experiment 1, during grasping there was a larger temporal interference effect (slower reach initiation) than with pointing. When grasping versus pointing, participants deviated more towards same-side distractors and away from opposite-side distractors. In Experiment 2, distractors onset 200ms prior to (?200-ms), coincident with (0 ms), or 200ms following (+200 ms) the target. For both reach types, ?200-ms distractors had greater onset temporal interference than 0 ms and +200-ms distractors. For grasping, +200 ms distractors had larger temporal interference than 0 ms distractors. For ?200-ms, reach trajectories deviated more towards opposite-side distractors and away from same-side distractors, the reverse of the pattern for 0 ms and +200-ms distractors.     

Hierarchy and scope of planning in subject–verb agreement production

Two subject–verb agreement error elicitation studies tested the hierarchical feature-passing account of agreement computation in production and three timing-based alternatives: linear distance to the head noun, semantic integration, and a combined effect of both (a scope of planning account). In Experiment 1, participants completed subject noun phrase (NP) stimuli consisting of a head NP followed by two prepositional phrase (PP) modifiers, where the first PP modified the first NP, and the second PP modified one of the two preceding NPs. Semantic integration between the head noun and the local noun within each PP was held constant across structures. The mismatch error pattern showed an effect of linear distance to the head noun and no influence of hierarchical distance. In Experiment 2, participants completed NP PP PP stimuli in which both PPs modified the head noun, and both the order of the two PPs and the local nouns’ degree of semantic integration with the head noun were varied. The pattern of mismatch errors reflected a combination of semantic integration and linear distance to the head noun. These studies indicate that agreement processes are strongly constrained by grammatical-level scope of planning, with local nouns planned closer to the head having a greater chance of interfering with agreement computation.     

Spatial reasoning in Tenejapan Mayans

Language communities differ in their stock of reference frames (coordinate systems for specifying locations and directions). English typically uses egocentrically-defined axes (e.g., “left–right”), especially when describing small-scale relationships. Other languages such as Tseltal Mayan prefer to use geocentrically-defined axes (e.g., “north–south”) and do not use any type of projective body-defined axes. It has been argued that the availability of specific frames of reference in language determines the availability or salience of the corresponding spatial concepts. In four experiments, we explored this hypothesis by testing Tseltal speakers’ spatial reasoning skills. Whereas most prior tasks in this domain were open-ended (allowing several correct solutions), the present tasks required a unique solution that favored adopting a frame-of-reference that was either congruent or incongruent with what is habitually lexicalized in the participants’ language. In these tasks, Tseltal speakers easily solved the language-incongruent problems, and performance was generally more robust for these than for the language-congruent problems that favored geocentrically-defined coordinates. We suggest that listeners’ probabilistic inferences when instruction is open to more than one interpretation account for why there are greater cross-linguistic differences in the solutions to open-ended spatial problems than to less ambiguous ones.     

Differences in Noun and Verb Processing in Lexical Decision Cannot be Attributed to Word Form and Morphological Complexity Alone

It has been suggested that the effect of word category in noun and verb processing reflects typical word class properties, which can be characterized in terms of semantic as well as syntactic and morphological features. The present study is aimed at differentiating and discussing the relative contribution of these aspects with a main focus on syntactic and morphological processing. Experiment 1 established a processing advantage for nouns in German visual lexical decision, using nouns denoting biological and man-made objects as compared to transitive and intransitive verbs. Experiment 2 showed that the noun advantage persisted even when the morphological differences between word categories were reduced by using identical suffixes in nouns and verbs. Overall results suggest that the processing differences cannot be reduced to variables such as frequency, word form, or morphological complexity. Reaction time differences between transitive and intransitive verbs strengthen the role of syntactic information. In line with previous accounts the observed effects are discussed in terms of a category-specific combination of linguistic parameters.     

面向隐喻计算的语料库研究和建设

汉语隐喻计算化研究是中文自然语言处理领域的一个前沿课题,然而研究所需要的隐喻语料资源却极其有限,对隐喻计算研究的发展形成了一定的对影响。本文主要研究了面向隐喻计算的语料库的设计和构建方法,并设计构建了一个具有一万句规模62万字的汉语隐喻标注句库以及一个面向隐喻识别的汉语常用动词搭配库。这些资源的构建建立在对隐喻现象的深入分析基础之上,是隐喻计算模型研究的基础性资源,对汉语隐喻的认知计算有着积极意义。