The Body in Religion: The Spatial Mapping of Valence in Tibetan Practitioners of Bön

According to the Body‐Specificity Hypothesis (BSH), people implicitly associate positive ideas with the side of space on which they are able to act more fluently with their dominant hand. Though this hypothesis has been rigorously tested across a variety of populations and tasks, the studies thus far have only been conducted in linguistic and cultural communities which favor the right over the left. Here, we tested the effect of handedness on implicit space‐valence mappings in Tibetan practitioners of Bön who show a strong religious preference for the left, in comparison to an English group. Results showed that Bön right‐handers tended to implicitly associate positive valence more strongly with their dominant side of space despite strong explicit associations between the left and goodness in their religion. This pattern of results found in Bön participants was indistinguishable from that found in English speakers. The findings of the present study support the BSH, demonstrating that space‐valence mappings in people's minds are shaped by their bodily experience, which appears to be independent of space‐valence mappings enshrined in cultural conventions.     

Développement initial et processus de validation de l’échelle d’auto-efficacité émotionnelle au travail

The study aims to develop and present the validation process of a questionnaire on emotional self-efficacy in the work context from the six steps proposed by Dussault et al. (2007). The study is based on the theories of emotional intelligence of Mayer and Salovey (1997), Petrides and Furham (2001) and the self-efficacy of Bandura (1997). Following an expert analysis and a pre-test, the Emotional Self-Efficacy at Work scale is composed of 41 items. The participants are 985 Canadian workers. The results of confirmatory factor analyzes support the seven-dimensional structure, namely the self-efficiency to perceive one's emotions and those of others at work, the self-efficiency to use emotions at work, the self-efficiency to understand one's emotions and those of others at work and finally, the self-efficiency to manage one's emotions and those of others at work. The results also indicate that the seven dimensions have satisfactory internal coherence indices. The results suggest that this questionnaire is well suited to describe emotional self-efficacy at work. The use of the questionnaire will be discussed.     

A transnational family story: A narrative inquiry on the emotional and intergenerational notions of ‘home’

At the core of migratory experiences lie key questions pertaining to one's emotional changing Self: the complexity of conflicting identities, feelings of (un)belonging, varying degrees of emotional place (un)attachment, and the fundamental (re)conceptualizations of ‘home’. Though well-studied from various angles, ‘home’ as an emotional concept in the context of generational family migration research has many gains yet to be made. Through an in-depth study on three generations of one author's own family, this paper provides personal insight into the intergenerational and emotional dimensions of this topic. Unanimously, the findings demonstrate that notions of ‘home’ as where family is remain predominant, with ties to transnationally dispersed family members rendering ‘home’ as multiple. Places of familial heritage further remain central in conceptualizations of ‘home’ through a retainment of cultural practices and values derived from familial homelands. Despite these cross-generational similarities, challenges and emotional uncertainties on the topic are seen to be increasingly prevalent in the youngest generation. Above all, interviewees' post-migration reflections demonstrate that such conceptualizations are intricate, relational and do not exist in an emotional vacuum.     

群体绩效和团队效能研究的新进展

近几年来 ,在群体和团队方面的研究比较活跃 ,并取得了不少新的进展。本文在近几年的国内外文献的基础上 ,着重讨论几个与群体绩效有关的长期存在的问题 ,主要包括群体构成、凝聚力、激励、领导、群体目标等因素。同时探讨团队与组织之间的内在联系。然后 ,讨论团队效能研究中的几个开放性问题 ,以及将来研究的新动向新趋势。最后 ,对影响团队效能的几个关键的调节因素作一简要的讨论。     

Brain dynamics,psychophysiological uncertainty and behavioral learning

The present paper takes a first step toward the integration of recent findings on brain dynamics and learning into established fields of psychophysiological science. Leading-edge studies of brain dynamics have shown that the brain manifests an inherent variability and that, when new stimuli (i.e., “problems”) are presented to the organism, brain chaos increases.     

Similarities derived from 3-d nonlinear psychophysics: Variance distributions

Many-one mappings between stimulus properties and pairwise generated similarities are intrinsic to definitions of similarity. This of itself is not sufficient as a basis for predicting the variance associated with any single similarity judgment. An extension to cover this has to be made either by making ancillary assumptions about noise, or by using nonlinear models. The derivation of the variance of similarity judgments is made from the 3 process in nonlinear psychophysics. The idea of separability of dimensions in metric space theories of similarity is replaced by one parameter which represents the degree of a form of interdimensional crosscoupling     

Reaction-anticipation transitions in human perception-action patterns

We investigated the hypothesis that reaction and anticipation in human perceptual-motor performance are two coordinative modes of a single pattern-forming dynamical system, rather than separate behaviors. Subjects coordinated the onset of finger flexions with visual metronome flashes in each of three patterns: reactive, synchronized, or syncopated. The stimulus frequency was progressively increased (0.125–1.375 Hz) or decreased (1.375-0.125 Hz) in small steps (0.125 Hz) every 10 cycles. We observed qualitative transitions in both the time interval between stimulus and corresponding action (Δt) and their relative phase (ø) at critical values of the stimulus frequency, corresponding to changes from ‘reactive-to-anticipatory’ and ‘anticipatory-to-reactive’ performance. Such transitions provide evidence of a single, multifunctional system, which can be adequately described by the dynamics of collective variables characterizing the respective perception-action patterns.