Английский язык учебник

3.Although hidden observer experiments have been replicated in many laboratories and clinics, they have been criticized on methodological grounds.

4.However convincing declarations of repetance are, antisocial personalities seldom live up to these dec larations.

5.Whatever aggressive the children’s behaviors are, they may have the most comprehensive explana tion.

6.No matter how difficult the problem of high di vorce rate is, there are many approaches to marital therapy.

7.If it is possible, the quickest path toward changing social attitudes is to first change behavior by changing social norms.

8.When the college students were asked to memorize and recall random numbers, they easily overper formed the ten year olds.

9.But when they were tested on their ability to recall actual positions of the chess pieces on the board, the ten year old experts did better than the 18 year old chess amateurs.

10.Regardless of whether low or high similarity had been the basis for room assignments, roommates came to like each other.

Exercise 3. Translate the sentences from Russian into English using ellipses.

1.Если вы заинтересованы в запоминании ваших снов, держите на прикроватной тумбе блокнот и карандаш, чтобы, проснувшись, записать их.

2.Человек может не проявить свои эмоции, даже когда ему сообщают о тяжелой болезни близкого родственника.

3.Когда было проведено повторное исследование в 1984 году, оно показало, что и мужчины и жен

щины отказались бы жениться или выйти замуж без любви.

4.Свидетель чрезвычайного происшествия с мень шей вероятностью вмешается или станет помо гать, если он находится в группе, нежели один.

5.Хотя разговорный словарь годовалого ребенка ограничен, он насчитывает около 10 слов, кото рые ассоциируются с определенными людьми и понятиями.

6.Как бы ни был развит пятилетний ребенок, он все же довольно эгоцентричен в своем видении мира и обычно не знает, как взаимодействовать с другими детьми.

7.Если вы сильно нервничаете перед экзаменом, чтобы снизить тревожность перед экзаменом, уточните дату, время и место его проведения и, если это возможно, посетите аудиторию, где будет проходить экзамен.

8.Каким бы напряженным ни был ваш рабочий день, в нем должны быть перерывы, чтобы вы могли расслабиться, снизить уровень напряжен ности и восстановить свои силы.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

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MEMORY

Every aspect of daily behavior even ones as auto matic as knowing who we are and where we live is guid ed by memories of past experiences. Research scien tists have distinguished three phases of memory. First, registering or encoding an event into a memory trace; next, storing and retaining it over a period of time; and finally, retrieving and using it to guide ac tions. Memory for a particular episode may fail due to errors in any of these three phases. Research is also uncovering many types of memory, each with distinc tive characteristics and functions.

To study memory in humans, researchers have de vised simple laboratory tasks that permit memory re ports to be compared with what actually happened. Subjects may be asked to study a list of words or view a set of pictures or novel shapes; in some cases, they may be presented with more complex material, such as a written narrative, a staged episode, or a film clip. Al though such situations seem far removed from every day remembering, this research has yielded surprising insights into how memory works.

Reconstructive Memory

One important discovery is that remembering is not just a matter of reproducing a copy of what hap pened in the past. In important respects, people active ly reconstruct representations of events based on frag mentary information stored in memory as well as their inferences about what probably occurred. For this rea son, human memory is often not completely reliable. People frequently confuse what happened at one time with what happened at another, or they mix together parts of several memories. When their memories are vague, they fill in the gaps with what they believe to be probably true, often about awareness of their guess work. The tendency to edit and embellish what we re

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call seems to be a natural outcome of the way human memory works. Considerable research shows that knowledge acquired after an event often becomes in corporated into memory for that event. In a typical study, subjects first witness a complex event, such as a simulated crime or an automobile accident. Then half of the participants receive new and misleading infor mation about the event, often subtly disguised in ques tions they are asked about it. The other participants re ceive no such misinformation. When the subjects re call the original event, those given the misleading in formation reveal distorted memories. This effect has been confirmed in many studies. People have recalled nonexistent broken glass and tape recorders, a clean shaven man as having a moustache, straight hair as curly, and even a large barn in a rural scene that had no buildings at all. Going beyond demonstration stud ies, more than a decade of research has revealed the conditions when people are particularly susceptible to post event misinformation. Memories are especially prone to modification when the passage of time allows the original memory to fade and when the misinforma tion is subtle and comes from a credible source. Memo ry reconstruction has also been studied in the context of eyewitness accounts. Interestingly, research shows little relationship between a witness’s degree of cer tainty and the accuracy of the memory, illustrating that confidence levels, like the contents of memory, are malleable. Witnesses become more certain of their re call if they receive corroborating information from someone viewed as having reliable information. These results underscore the point that memory is not pure. What we remember is affected by what we believe about the person or event being remembered.

Emotion and Memory

Recent research has focused on how memories are shaped by a person’s emotional state. Interest in this

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topic started with Freud’s concept of repression, or moti vated forgetting of threatening material. Although in terest in documenting repression like effects continues, recent research has discovered several further phenome na relating memory to emotion and mood.

“Mood congruent memory” occurs when one’s current mood aids the processing of material that has a similar emotional valence. Thus, a depressed mood heightens memory for unpleasant events, while elation heightens memory for pleasant events. Depression affects both the storage and retrieval of memories. Depressed people pay more attention to material that agrees with their current mood, caus ing it to be better learned; at retrieval, sad mood ap parently provides internal cues that help call forth similar emotional memories. Mood congruency is es pecially powerful when remembering autobiographi cal events. Subjects recall personal memories more readily when the mood of those events matches their current mood state.

Such studies are important in indicating how cog nition and emotion interact. Our thoughts can affect our emotional states, just as our emotions can affect how we perceive, think, and remember. Understanding these effects is especially important when depression or anxiety is treated by cognitive behavioral therapy, which often requires clients to acknowledge, remem ber, and rehearse previous times when they were happy and successful or courageous and fearless.

Forms of Memory

Traditional philosophers regarded memory as a single mental faculty, governed by simple rules and processes. However, recent research has shown that, far from being unitary, memory can be analyzed into a number of forms or systems, each with distinct charac teristics and processes.

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Working Memory

“Working memory” refers to the processes in volved in temporary, short term storage and use of fleeting information, such as holding telephone num bers in memory while dialing. Behavioral researchers have made considerable progress in recent years in un derstanding the mechanisms involved in working memory and in clarifying its role in everyday cognitive performance. For example, working memory has a speech based component (strongly implicated in verbal intelligence and understanding language) and a per ceptual imagery component (implicated in spatial abil ity and reasoning with mental images).

Evidence for these components comes from several sources, including studies of brain damaged patients with specific deficits in working memory. For exam ple, stroke patients with lesions in the left temporopa rietal areas often have selective impairments of the speech based component, whereas patients with right hemisphere damage often exhibit selective impair ments of the imagery component.

Implicit Memory

Historically, most research on memory has focused on people’s conscious, intentional recollection of previ ous experiences. This “explicit” memory is involved when we remember what we had for dinner last night, recollect what we saw at the movies last week, or remi nisce about adventures with an old high school friend. Over the past 10 years, however, research has devel oped on unconscious or “implicit” memory, in which people’s past experiences affect their present percep tions and judgments without their awareness or volun tary control. Much recent evidence indicates that ex plicit and implicit memory are separate. For example, implicit memory is often left intact even when explicit memory is profoundly impaired by brain injury. Re searchers have also explored implicit memory in pa

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tients with dissociative disorders such as multiple per sonality, who have several “ego states”, each associat ed with different autobiographical memories. Surpris ingly, implicit memories transfer across the patient’s many personalities even if explicit memories do not. Patients suffering severe amnesia due to brain damage cannot explicitly recollect the items presented in a list of words, but tests show that their implicit memory is intact. Such findings suggest that implicit and explicit memories are supported by different brain structures, only some of which are damaged in patients with amne sia. The spanning of implicit memory may provide an initial avenue for therapies designed to recover memo ry and reintegrate personality. Basic research on im plicit memory has already yielded novel approaches to the practical issue of rehabilitating memory in people with amnesia resulting from brain injury or disease. In several studies, conditioning procedures based on im plicit memory were used to teach such patients rela tively complex skills, such as computer programming, which enabled them to gain employment.

The Cognitive Unconscious

The study of implicit memory provides a general framework for thinking about how unconscious memo ries of past events influence current experience, thought, and action. As one example, laboratory exper iments have shown that people’s preference for ab stract art can be increased by exposures to it that they cannot consciously remember. These effects occur even when the artworks are initially presented subliminally. To carry matters one step further, in one study, sub liminal presentation of faces led subjects to interact more with the actual people depicted an unconscious influence on their social behavior. Unlike explicit memory, which depends critically on adequate atten tion to the information to be learned, implicit memory can be robust even without full attention. People have

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even shown implicit memory for material presented while they were under anaesthesia. Because implicit memory affects behaviour unconsciously, its effects can be difficult to control; people under its influence may not know why they are acting as they do. Studies of people intentionally trying to forget some event re veal that their intention suppresses their conscious recollection, but it has little impact upon their implicit memory of the event. Such effects can have important practical consequences. For example, when jurors are instructed to disregard (i.e., forget) special informa tion, their decisions still reveal the implicit influence of that information. Other studies show that when peo ple are asked to suppress certain thoughts, those very thoughts later come to mind more often than they would have otherwise. Thus, attempts to suppress un pleasant thoughts and images often backfire. Research is revealing more about the ways in which unconscious memories influence our conscious thoughts and actions and how our conscious strategies can be undermined by unconscious forces. These advances should lead to im proved therapies for many mental disorders, including depression and anxiety.

NIMH Public Inquiries, 1998

ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL CONCEPTION

The concept of imagination seems to have been first introduced into philosophy by Aristotle, who tells us that “imagination [phantasia] is the process by which we say that an image [phantasma] is presented to us”. It has been questioned in recent times whether the Greek words phantasia and phantasma are really equivalent to “imagination” and “(mental) image” as heard in contemporary usage. However, there can be little doubt that, at least until very recent times, theo

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retical discussions of phantasia, its Latin translation imaginatio, and their etymological descendants, con tinued to be rooted in the concepts introduced by Aris totle and the problems arising from his rather ellipti cal explanation of them. According to Aristotle “The soul never thinks without a mental image [phantas ma]”. It would appear that, for him (and, again, for most of successors, until very recently), such images played something like the role that is played in con temporary cognitive theory by “mental representa tions”. In this tradition, imagery, and thus imagina tion, has an essential role to play in all forms of thinking. It has no special connection with inven tiveness or creativity.

It does, however, have a special connection with de sire. Aristotle argues that our desire for anything not actually present to the senses must be mediated by an image of the desired object. Aristotle’s treatment is morally neutral, but his notion of desirous imagination may later have become conflated with the Hebraic con cept of yetser, the willful faculty in humanity that led to Adam’s sin. At any rate, in the Judaeo Christian in tellectual tradition (from ancient to relatively ancient times) imagination, although recognized as indispens able to cognition, was usually profoundly distrusted. Unless strictly disciplined by reason it would soon lead us into concupiscence and sin.

But, of course, the connection between imagination and perception is the more fundamental Aristotle’s conception of phantasia/imagination seems to be close ly bound up with his postulation of what came to be called the “common sense” or sensus communis. This is the part of the psyche responsible for the binding of the deliverances of the individual sense organs into a co herent and intelligible representation, and for appre hending the so called “common sensibles”, those aspects of the world that can be known through more than one sense mode without being the characteristic proper ob