Finding MAPs using strongly equivalent high order recurrent symmetric connectionist networks

Belief revision is the problem of finding the most plausible explanation for an observed set of evidences. It has many applications in various scientific domains like natural language understanding, medical diagnosis and computational biology. Bayesian Networks (BN) is an important probabilistic graphical formalism widely used for belief revision tasks. In BN, belief revision can be achieved by finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) assignment. Finding MAP is an NP-Hard problem. In previous work, we showed how to find the MAP assignment in BN using High Order Recurrent Neural Networks (HORN) through an intermediate representation of Cost-Based Abduction. This method eliminates the need to explicitly construct the energy function in two steps, objective and constraints. This paper builds on that previous work by providing the theoretical foundation and proving that the resultant HORN used to find MAP is strongly equivalent to the original BN it tries to solve.     

And justice for all: Revisiting the Global Belief in a Just World Scale

The Global Belief in a Just World Scale (GBJWS) has been widely used in measuring the Belief in a Just World (BJW) personality trait. Despite its widespread application across the social sciences, the validity of this scale has not been sufficiently tested in the literature. In this research, the authors examine the internal and external validity of the GBJWS using both standard correlational analyses and structural equation modeling (SEM). Specifically, the authors test the concurrent validity, internal consistency, unidimensional structure, convergent validity, and both measurement and latent mean invariance of the scale across gender and culture. The results of a pilot study suggest strong concurrent validity of the GBJWS with other BJW scales, and the findings of the two main studies support the internal and external validity of GBJWS across gender and culture. The authors’ results further show an overall greater level of BJW of Chinese individuals compared to Americans. The present research provides a much needed investigation of the validity of the GBJWS, and answers calls for research examining the scale’s utility across different populations.     

Development and Evaluation of the Belief Acceptance Scale

The Belief Acceptance Scale (BAS) is a nine question scale that was developed to evaluate how open and accepting an individual is to other people’s beliefs across interdependent life domains. The purposes of this article are to demonstrate the internal consistency of the BAS and examine the instrument’s substructure and to correlate the BAS with validated measures of religiosity and demographic data gathered from a web-based Survey of Spiritual Experiences. The BAS focuses on cultural beliefs instead of religious motivations and was designed to be administered to religious and non-religious individuals. Three domains of belief acceptance were tested: the internal or subjective openness to other beliefs (Psychological Domain), willingness to participate in other ideologies and rituals (Reciprocal Domain), and the willingness to date or marry outside one’s belief system or cultural background (Social Domain). Responses from 350 individuals were correlated and analysed to estimate the scale’s internal consistency and subscale structure. Analyses support the validity of the BAS scores in that they demonstrate expected correlations with demographic data and standardised measures of religiosity. The results show that the BAS is an internally consistent scale with a coherent substructure that adequately measures openness to other beliefs, ideologies and belief systems.     

Dynamic doxastic logic: why,how, and where to?

We investigate the research programme of dynamic doxastic logic (DDL) and analyze its underlying methodology. The Ramsey test for conditionals is used to characterize the logical and philosophical differences between two paradigmatic systems, AGM and KGM, which we develop and compare axiomatically and semantically. The importance of Gärdenfors’s impossibility result on the Ramsey test is highlighted by a comparison with Arrow’s impossibility result on social choice. We end with an outlook on the prospects and the future of DDL.     

La représentation des causes de l’état de santé par les infirmiers et les points de vue envisagés des patients et des aidants naturels : une approche socionormative

This study examines the representation of the determining factors of patients’ states of health in therapeutic care situations. We describe the average representation of experienced hospital nurses (n=44) and the differences which they consider to exist between their own and their patients’ points of view. Taking as our starting point the purpose of the care provided and the asymmetry of the carer/patient relationship, we hypothesize, on the one hand, that nurses will have a representation of their patients’ state of health which is based on the care to be provided, with the factors determining the state of health being necessarily perceived as having a general impact on patients’ lives while still being remediable, i.e. capable of changing and being controlled by the provided care. On the other hand, we expect them to attribute a passive position and attitude to their patients, with the factors determining their state of health being necessarily perceived as being out of their own control. The results and the analysis of the representations reported as being those of the patients and their families seem to justify this perception and role of carer: the supposed representations of the latter would appear to be convergent but less focused on health problems and would tend to minimize the patient’s involvement, in particular when the state of health declines. The results are discussed with reference to the Health Belief Model and the social norm of internality as well as the professional practices observed in hospital environments.     

Neural Policy Style Transfer

Style Transfer has been proposed in a number of fields: fine arts, natural language processing, and fixed trajectories. We scale this concept up to control policies within a Deep Reinforcement Learning infrastructure. Each network is trained to maximize the expected reward, which typically encodes the goal of an action, and can be described as the content. The expressive power of deep neural networks enables encoding a secondary task, which can be described as the style. The Neural Policy Style Transfer (NPST)¹ algorithm is proposed to transfer the style of one policy to another, while maintaining the content of the latter. Different policies are defined via Deep Q-Network architectures. These models are trained using demonstrations through Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Two different sets of user demonstrations are performed, one for content and other for style. Different styles are encoded as defined by user demonstrations. The generated policy is the result of feeding a content policy and a style policy to the NPST algorithm. Experiments are performed in a catch-ball game inspired by the Deep Reinforcement Learning classical Atari games; and a real-world painting scenario with a full-sized humanoid robot, based on previous works of the authors. The implementation of three different Q-Network architectures (Shallow, Deep and Deep Recurrent Q-Network) to encode the policies within the NPST framework is proposed and the results obtained in the experiments with each of these architectures compared.     

Do experiments in the virtual world effectively predict how pedestrians evaluate electric vehicle sounds in the real world?

New laws stipulate that electric vehicles must emit additional sounds to alert pedestrians of the vehicles’ approach to prevent potential collisions. These new sounds will also influence pedestrians’ impression of the vehicle brand. A methodology has been developed to evaluate electric vehicle (EV) sounds in a virtual-world environment by assessing; (a) detectability and recognisability to ensure pedestrians’ safety, and (b) emotional evaluation of the sound quality to determine its impact on the perception of the vehicle brand. This experimental study examines external validity of the methodology. Fourteen participants evaluated an EV, emitting three sounds, in a traffic scenario in a real-world and a virtual-world environment. The traffic scenario involved a pedestrian ‘standing’ at a residential road junction while the EV travelled at 12 mph from behind the pedestrian, arriving at the junction at one of two pre-set times. Results show that the presented virtual-world methodology accurately predicts pedestrians’ evaluation of detectability of EV sounds and powerfulness and pleasantness of the vehicle brand in the corresponding real-world scenario. It also predicts the ranked order of sounds in the real-world for detection distance and recognisability. Arguably, for similar methods and setups, virtual-worlds would effectively predict pedestrians’ evaluation in the real-world. Interestingly, varying a vehicle’s arrival time, just like a real-world scenario, is found to affect pedestrians’ detection rate. Unlike experiments in the real-world, the presented methodology for experiments in virtual-world benefits from being reliable, quick, easy to implement, with more experimental control and options to easily manipulate any experiment variables.     

Belief in luck and luckiness: Conceptual clarification and new measure validation

Research on the dimensionality and measurement of luck beliefs has yet to produce a clear conceptual and metrical consensus. This research theorizes a bidimensional model of luck beliefs that is tested through a series of studies (total n = 1205) validating the new Belief in Luck and Luckiness Scale. Unlike existing conceptualizations and measures, this new model is applicable to both believers and non-believers in luck, and reveals belief in luck and personal luckiness to be discrete, uncorrelated, and respectively unidimensional constructs.     

Belief in a just world mediates the relationship between institutional trust and life satisfaction among the elderly in China

This study investigated the relationship between institutional trust and life satisfaction, and the mediating role of belief in a just world (BJW) among the elderly. The General Belief in a Just World Scale (GBJW) and Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) were employed. A self-developed Institutional Trust questionnaire was used to measure participant’ levels of trust in eight institutions. The aggregate score for all eight items represented the level of institutional trust. The questionnaires were completed by 19,352 retirees ranging in age from 50 to 99 (M = 69.7, SD = 8.0). The results showed the following: (1) overall, the retirees tended to report high institutional trust and high life satisfaction; (2) institutional trust was positively associated with life satisfaction; and (3) more importantly, the relationships between institutional trust and life satisfaction were partially mediated by GBJW. This finding provides a new insight into the psychological mechanisms by which institutional trust relates to individual happiness. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings, as well as the study’s limitations, are discussed.     

More than belief,but not more than belief and desire

Manuel A. Vásquez’ More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion paints a rich picture of what a ‘non-reductive materialist framework for the study of religion’ would look like. Although it receives strong motivation from the inability of the predominant meta-approaches of theorizing religion to take seriously a range of materially grounded religious phenomena, it suffers somewhat from a lack of independent and autonomous argumentation. This article explores a convergence between Vásquez’ main points and the basic elements of one of the most influential positions within philosophical semantics – namely the semantic holism of Donald Davidson. Because Davidson's holism (assuming its correctness) provides constraints on all forms of theorizing, the fact that Vásquez’ position, unlike the ones he critiques, conforms to those constraints lends it a degree of rational presumption.     

Believing versus Disbelieving in Free Will: Correlates and Consequences

Some people believe more than others in free will, and researchers have both measured and manipulated those beliefs. Disbelief in free will has been shown to cause dishonest, selfish, aggressive, and conforming behavior, and to reduce helpfulness, learning from one’s misdeeds, thinking for oneself, recycling, expectations for occupational success, and actual quality of performance on the job. Belief in free will has been shown to have only modest or negligible correlations with other variables, indicating that it is a distinct trait. Belief in free will has correlated positively with life satisfaction and finding life meaningful, with self‐efficacy and self‐control, with low levels of stress, and (though not entirely consistently) with internal locus of control. High belief in free will has been linked to a punitive attitude toward wrongdoers and lower forgiveness toward them. The belief seems to involve a sense of agency and expecting others to behave in morally responsible fashion.     

Retrieval practice and elaborative encoding benefit memory in younger and older adults

Retrieval practice has been identified as a powerful tool for promoting retention. Few studies have examined whether retrieval practice enhances performance in older adults as it does in younger adults. Younger and older adults learned unrelated word pairs and were administered a test after a short (10 min) and long (2 day) delay. Encoding condition was manipulated between subjects, with participants studying the pairs twice, studying them once and taking an immediate test with feedback, or encoding them twice under different deep encoding conditions. In both age groups, equivalent benefits of testing relative to restudy were found. Deep processing also improved memory relative to restudy, suggesting that one factor that might benefit retention is varying the type of encoding task (either by testing or by providing a different instructional manipulation) to increase the accessibility of cues. Retrieval practice can support older adults’ memory and is a viable target for training.     

When Effort is Threatening: The Influence of the Belief in a Just World on Americans' Attitudes Toward Antipoverty Policy

In the political context of the reauthorization of federal welfare reform legislation, a nationally representative sample of 1,570 adults in the United States completed a survey examining the factors that affect attitudes and policy preferences with regard to aid for low-income individuals and families in the United States. This study utilized an innovative survey technique, the factorial survey methodology (Rossi & Nock, 1982), which allows for the simultaneous experimental manipulation of a large number of factors through the use of a vignette. This research demonstrates how the portrayal of difficulties faced by people in need and the ways in which they attempt to overcome these difficulties affect support for policies designed to aid low-income individuals and families. In addition, this study of public attitudes considers the role that psychological orientations of the evaluators play in judgments of families in need. In this case, we examined how the evaluators' belief that the world is a just place influences their evaluations of deservingness. Consistent with our expectations, we found that the more efforts the vignette subject engaged in improving her situation, the less deserving of government benefits she was judged to be by respondents with a strong belief in a just world. The reverse was found among respondents with a weaker belief: more efforts were associated with greater judgments of deservingness.     

Index tracking based on deep neural network

Deep learning has a strong ability to extract feature representations from data, since it has a great advantage in processing nonlinear and non-stationary data and reflecting nonlinear interactive relationship. This paper proposes to apply deep learning algorithms including deep neural network and deep autoencoder to track index performance and introduces a dynamic weight calculation method to measure the direct effects of the stocks on index. The empirical study takes historical data of Hang Seng Index (HSI) and its constituents to analyze the effectiveness and practicability of the index tracking method. The results show that the index tracking method based on deep neural network has a smaller tracking error, and thus can effectively track the index.     

Aging and the cross: Explorations in Deep Incarnation

Aging is theologically explored in both creation and the cross through the concept of Deep Incarnation. As a partial extension of Martin Luther's thought, Deep Incarnation affirms God to be intimately involved in the natural processes of all biological creation, including aging, bringing solace, companionship, and hope to the elderly. God conceived as being both in the creation and beyond it (panentheism) allows for divine grace to relate to all creatures from the cellular level on up, including through evolutionary development. Employing the concept of compound theodicy, evolutionary theodicy is also briefly explored.     

Maternal perinatal mental health: Associations with bonding,mindfulness, and self-criticism at 18 months’ postpartum

The perinatal period is a time of significant transition for women, with changes in maternal mental health from pregnancy to 18 months’ postpartum. This study specifically analyzes maternal self-criticism and mindfulness during pregnancy and at 18 months’ postpartum, and their associations with bonding. A longitudinal study (30 weeks’ gestation–18 months’ postpartum) assessed 32 mother–infant dyads, examining changes in maternal depression, anxiety, self-criticism, and mindfulness. In addition, associations between maternal variables during pregnancy and bonding were investigated. Maternal depression and self-criticism significantly increased from pregnancy to postpartum. Maternal anxiety, self-criticism, and facets of mindfulness during pregnancy were also associated with mother–infant bonding at 18 months. Maternal mental health during pregnancy is subject to change postchildbirth. The lack of control and autonomy accompanying motherhood may result in an increase in self-criticism during this period. Such feelings may elevate a woman's vulnerability to postpartum depression and have consequences for later maternal bonding. Early identification of at-risk mothers is important to increase likelihood of positive outcomes.     

DOES FATHERS' PRENATAL MENTAL HEALTH BEAR A RELATIONSHIP TO PARENTING STRESS AT 6 MONTHS?

This study aimed to explore fathers’ mental health and retrospectively reported adverse childhood experiences during pregnancy, as well as various pathways predicting self‐reported stress at 6 months’ postpartum as assessed by the Parenting Stress Index (PSI; R.R. Abidin, 1990 ). A total of 835 fathers contributed data to the study. Data collection comprised five time points during pregnancy and one at 6 months’ postpartum. The main analyses were performed using linear regression and path analyses. First, linear regression analyses showed that paternal anxiety symptoms during pregnancy predicted stress scores in the PSI child domain at 6 months (coefficient = 0.36). Second, path analyses showed that depressive symptoms during pregnancy predicted parenting stress in the child domain, mediated by spousal disharmony at 6 months’ postpartum (coefficient = 0.77). Third, adverse childhood experiences scores predicted parenting stress in the child domain by two different pathways: one mediated by anxiety symptoms in pregnancy (coefficient = 0.29) and the other by depressive symptoms in pregnancy and experienced spousal disharmony at 6 months’ postpartum (coefficient = 0.77). The findings suggest that fathers’ symptoms of anxiety and depression during pregnancy as well as adverse childhood experiences predict paternal stress and a negative perception of their children's behavior at 6 months’ postpartum.     

Timing of the transition to motherhood and union quality: The moderator role of union length

Researchers have examined the contribution of women’s age at first pregnancy to the prediction of union quality across the transition to motherhood, but the emerging picture is inconsistent. The authors investigated the moderator role of union length in the relationship between the 2 variables. A sample of 143 Canadian women completed the Dyadic Adjustment Scale during pregnancy and at 6 months postpartum. As predicted, after partialing out the influence of other demographic variables, union length moderated the relationship between maternal age and changes in union quality across the transition, p < .001. The results showed that postponing motherhood to a later age has positive effects on women’s union quality only among those who are in long‐term relationships.     

The Influence of Body Mass Index on the Perceived Quality of Life during Pregnancy

Obesity contributes to various pregnancy complications and therefore, may compromise maternal quality of life. The study aim was to investigate the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) during pregnancy. Study involved every 6th woman who gave birth in the Clinic for Obstetrics and Gynecology Clinical Center of Serbia during the year 2010. Initial and end pregnancy BMIs were calculated for every woman. The parturients (604) completed the SF36 questionnaire (physical-PHC; mental-MHC; total quality of life-TQL), Beck’s Depression Inventory, Fatigue Severity Scale, Pregnancy Symptom Scale, Multidimensional Personal Support Scale, and Acceptance of Illness Scale. Before pregnancy most women had normal or decreased weight, while at the end of pregnancy the majority were overweight or obese (p?=?0.000). Initial and end pregnancy weights (p?<?0.05) and BMIs (p?<?0.05) were positively correlated with depression. Depression was significantly lower in overweight compared to mildly or morbidly obese women during pregnancy (p?<?0.05). Pregnancy weight change correlated negatively with PHC (p?=?0.029), and positively with fatigue (p?=?0.030), and symptoms (p?=?0.011). Of all BMI categories, morbidly obese women had the worst feeling of social support (p?<?0.05). Pregnancy symptoms were significantly less problematic in women with normal weight compared to overweight and obese women during pregnancy (p?<?0.05). Assessing the impact of all investigated parameters together, we established significant models for PHC (p?=?0.036), depression (p?=?0.030), and fatigue (p?=?0.038). Pregnant women should be advised to keep their gestational weight gain within the normal recommended range to have a good pregnancy outcome and HRQoL.