神经科学与心理学2022frontiersin.org
应避免的心理学与精神病学术语
Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
进阶 · 约 45 分钟读完前置知识:心理学基础、精神病学基础、研究方法与测量
导读
这篇论文讨论心理学和精神病学中应当避免或慎用的术语,指出许多常见说法不精确、带有日常或历史包袱,甚至暗含未经检验的哲学假设,主张用更严谨的表述来提升研究的可交流性与可信度。文章列举约50个术语并逐一说明问题,目标是帮助领域内研究者统一概念、减少误解。
HN 关注点:HN 读者围绕心理学术语是否该迎合日常理解、软科学的严谨性,以及“化学失衡”“多巴胺冲击”等简化说法展开争论。
HN 评论精选
这几条评论里:支持 2 补充 1 亲历 1
支持认为文章论证严谨,术语精确化是心理学进步必需,反对用日常理解否定专业术语。
说实话,我对这个帖子引发的讨论水平有点失望。我也公开质疑心理学领域的很多发现,但这篇文章结构良好、论证充分。如果接受许多评论里的挑刺,反而会让心理学变得不那么严谨和精确。心理学的很多问题来自它看起来太贴近日常经验。距离 Lewis Terman 和 H. H. Goddard 以为让人圈出“更有吸引力”的脸就能测智力,才过去100年;这是一门年轻科学,改进表述的严谨性对进步至关重要。很多术语被错误使用,这也是论文发表的原因;而且它们带有日常和历史包袱,不反映学术界甚至科学认识论上的理解。词语有定义,如果两人定义不一致,沟通就会崩溃,研究被误解,领域受损。这是给领域内人整合知识用的,我不明白为什么人们坚持要把外行对话言和学科的理解反映到专业术语中。用工程师更能理解的例子,很多术语就像“人时”这种看似直观但工程上无用的表述。
lofatdairy查看英文原文
Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed by the level of discourse this post has generated. I'm also an outspoken skeptic of findings in the field of psychology, but the article is quite well formed and well argued. If anything, accepting the nitpicking from a lot of these comments would result in psychology being _less_ rigorous and precise. A lot of psychology's problems comes from how readily available it seems to be to everyday experience. We're only 100 years from Lewis Terman and H. H. Goddard thinking they could measure intelligence by having people circle a face judged to be "more attractive", it's a young science and improving the rigor of how things are expressed is essential to advancement. Not only are a lot of these terms being used incorrectly, hence why this paper was even published, but because they carry a colloquial and historic baggage that don't reflect academic understandings, or even philosophical understandings of the epistemological concept of science. Words have definitions, and if two people don't share the same definition, then communication breaks down, research is misunderstood, and the field is worse off. This is for people operating within the field to consolidate knowledge, I don't know why people insist that lay understandings of language and a field of study need to be reflected in the terms of art. To put it in terms that engineers are more likely to appreciate, a lot of these terms would be like "man-hours". Man-hours is obviously a useless term because it 1) implies that increasing workers scales production linearly, 2) implies each individual produces at the same rate, 3) inherits from a factory mode of production that engineers typically don't believe fits their situation, and 4) generally results in poor estimations of cost and delivery times. Obviously if you're trying to be productive as an engineer, your managers only using man-hours as a term invites ambiguity and worse working conditions. Same goes for things like the lay understanding of attention vs its specific meaning as an implementation template within deep learning, or even AI more broadly vs specific neural network techniques.
补充赞赏文章揭示术语隐含的哲学假设,尤其反对生物因果优先和心身二元论。
很高兴看到人们意识到措辞会无意中预设哲学立场。例如,我曾怀疑是否有人意识到,每当暗示生理/生物学是意识内容的原因(或意识本身的原因)时,他们就做了一个跳跃;但第29条让我安心。文中说:把生物功能视为比心理功能更“根本”(因果上在先)是误导;生物变量与其他变量几乎总是双向关系。例如反社会人格障碍者的P300波幅较小,并不一定意味着P300缺陷先于或导致ASPD;同样可能的是ASPD相关的人格倾向(注意力差、动机低、冲动控制差)导致P300较小。我认为这种反向因果的同等可能性及其影响在现代医学中严重探讨不足。同样欣赏第40条对意外预设心身二元论的警告。
strogonoff查看英文原文
It is good to see awareness being raised of accidental philosophical positions, sometimes unwittingly assumed through word choice. For example, I was starting to doubt whether anyone realizes that they make a leap whenever they imply physiology/biology is the cause of what happens in our consciousness (or indeed causes consciousness to happen), but entry 29 reassured me not all hope is lost (emphasis mine): > Nevertheless, conceptualizing biological functioning as inherently more “fundamental” than (that is, causally prior to) psychological functioning, such as cognitive and emotional functioning, is misleading (Miller, 1996). The relation between biological variables and other variables is virtually always bidirectional. For example, although the magnitude of the P300 event-related potential tends to be diminished among individuals with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) compared with other individuals (Costa et al., 2000), this finding does not necessarily mean that the P300 deficit precedes, let alone plays a causal role in, ASPD. It is at least equally plausible that the personality dispositions associated with ASPD, such as inattention, low motivation, and poor impulse control, contribute to smaller P300 magnitudes (Lilienfeld, 2014). I believe the equal likelihood of such reverse causality and its implications are severely underexplored in modern medicine. Similarly appreciated the warning against accidentally assuming mind-body dualism (entry 40) and a fundamental point about natural sciences—that there is never definitive proof, only limited to various degrees models (entry 45).
亲历心理学家反驳工程师的轻蔑:行为社会科学更复杂,软科学更难。
我觉得文章不错(我对50个术语中的一个强烈不同意,除此之外做得很好)。我算是HN新人,但作为心理学家(也玩黑客),有些反应令人遗憾地印证了计算机/工程类型的刻板印象:不知道自己不知道什么。有些工程师不明白人类行为世界比原子、分子、元件、芯片、软件世界复杂得多。行为与社会科学研究者其实意识到这一点,并且在处理构念、定义和测量方面领先。“软科学”在很多方面其实比“硬科学”更难。
xmddmx查看英文原文
I think the aritcle is pretty good (I have a strong disiagreement with one of the 50 terms, but otherwise I think they did a good job). I'm relatively new here at HN, but as a psychologist (who also dabbles in hacking) some of the reactions do support, sadly, the stereoytype that computer/engineer-types suffer anoagnosia (the lack of knowledge of what you do not know). Some engineers do not understand that the world of human behavior is far more complex than the world of atoms, molecules, components, chips, software, etc. Behavioral and social scientists are, you may be surprised to learn, aware of this fact, and actually lead in scientific investigation of the difficulty, specifically: dealing with constructs, and figure out how to define and measure them. "Soft sciences" actually are much harder than "hard sciences" in many ways.
支持支持将“化学失衡”等神经递质简化说法列入避免清单。
很高兴“化学失衡”上榜。人们常把“多巴胺冲击”“内啡肽飙升”“血清素低”等说法用得不符合科学。我猜是为了显得懂行或让观点像有科学背书,但神经递质的作用远比这些用法复杂微妙,情绪和行为也远比“我的神经递质让我这样”的叙事复杂。
NickM查看英文原文
Glad to see "chemical imbalance" make the list. It is very common to see people use terms like "dopamine hit", "endorphin rush", "low serotonin", etc. in ways that don't make scientific sense. I assume people do it to sound knowledgeable or to make it sound like their ideas are backed by science, but neurotransmitters are vastly more complicated and subtle in their effects than is implied by these kinds of usages, and emotions and behaviors are tremendously more complex than the "my neurotransmitters made me do it/feel it" narrative would suggest.
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