Who’s more angry? Comparing driver anger and aggression within work and personal driving contexts

Anger and driver aggression increase crash risk. However, how these manifest according to the purpose of the journey (work vs personal) and the unique relationships between sources of anger and aggressive expressions of that anger is under-researched. The current study examined the relationships between different types of anger and aggression, recent crashes and infringements between drivers who drive mainly for work with those who drive mainly for personal reasons.Participants (N = 630) completed an online questionnaire reporting their driving anger tendencies across situations of travel delays, danger and hostility from others, frequency of aggressive driving (using the vehicle, verbal or physical) and crash and infringements in the previous year. Drivers were classified as work or personal drivers based on the percentage of the time they drove for each reason. Relationships between anger sources and aggression types were examined using Structural Equation Modelling, comparing models between the two groups. The relationships between aggression and safety outcomes were explored using Mann-Whitney U tests.The relationships between anger and aggression were similar across work and personal drivers. However, some group differences in the situations that contributed to anger and aggression were identified. Aggression was more frequent for drivers who drove mainly for work and had received a traffic violation, compared to those who had not received a traffic violation.These findings can inform the development of targeted interventions to manage the triggers of anger and aggression. Interventions are likely to impact work and personal drivers; thus, could target employers and road transport authorities.     

Locus of control as a mediator of the association between attachment and children’s mental health

Locus of control—the expectation that one is in control of one’s outcomes in life—is linked to well-being. The authors explored one of the possible antecedents of locus of control such as secure children’s attachment. The hypothesis was that locus of control acts as a mediator of the association between children’s attachment and their mental health, in terms of depression, anxiety (internalizing problems), and aggression (externalizing problems). Participants were 206 children with ages ranging from 8 to 14 years. The authors obtained data from teachers as well as by self-report. Structural equations modelling yielded significant results for both a direct path from insecure attachment to internalizing problems and an indirect pathway in which locus of control functions as a mediating variable between children’s attachment and internalizing problems. Although the data were consistent with the mediated pathway with regard to internalizing problems, different findings emerged for aggression. Insecure attachment was a significant predictor of aggressive behavior, while locus of control was not a mediator between attachment and aggressive behavior. The authors’ findings confirm the mediating role of the locus of control between attachment and internalizing problems, but not between attachment and externalizing ones.     

Who’s Driving the Syntactic Engine?

The property of being the implementation of a computational structure has been argued to be vacuously instantiated. This claim provides the basis for most antirealist arguments in the field of the philosophy of computation. Standard manoeuvres for combating these antirealist arguments treat the problem as endogenous to computational theories. The contrastive analysis of computational and other mathematical representations put forward here reveals that the problem should instead be treated within the more general framework of the Newman problem in structuralist accounts of mathematical representation. It is argued that purely structuralist and purely functionalist accounts of implementation are inadequate to tackle the problem. An extensive evaluation of semantic accounts is provided, arguing that semantic properties are, unlike structural and functional ones, suitable to restrict the intended domain of implementation of computational properties in such a way as to block the Newman problem. The semantic hypothesis is defended from a number of recent objections.     

Phenomenology and delusions: Who put the ‘alien’ in alien control?

Although current models of delusion converge in proposing that delusions are based on unusual experiences, they differ in the role that they accord experience in the formation of delusions. On some accounts, the experience comprises the very content of the delusion, whereas on other accounts the delusion is adopted in an attempt to explain an unusual experience. We call these the endorsement and explanationist models, respectively. We examine the debate between endorsement and explanationist models with respect to the 'alien control' delusion. People with delusions of alien control believe that their actions and/or thoughts are being controlled by an external agent. Some accounts of alien control (e.g., ) are best thought of in explanationist terms; other accounts (e.g., ) seem more suited to an endorsement approach. We argue that recent cognitive and neurophysiological evidence favours an endorsement model of the delusion of alien control.     

Who’s Winning the War Against Science?

There is an outcry among scientists that they are being attacked on multiple fronts by fake news, alternative facts, climate change denial, fossil fuel industries, shrinking government funding, postmodernism, and religion. Is this siege mentality realistic or paranoid? It’s realistic. This article encourages theologians and other religious leaders to ally themselves with scientists in defense of evidence-based judgments in public policy-making.     

Who is more utilitarian? Negative affect mediates the relation between control deprivation and moral judgment

Current Psychology - This research tried to examine the effect of sense of control on moral judgments and the mediating roles of positive and negative affect. Sixty-one Chinese college students...     

Interaction between color and attentional level in children’s conflict control

Cognitive Processing - Perception of color can affect cognition and behavior in humans. Although there has been increasing interest in the effect of red on cognitive performance in adults, little...     

EEG signal analysis for the assessment and quantification of driver’s fatigue

Fatigue in human drivers is a serious cause of road accidents. Hence, it is important to devise methods to detect and quantify the fatigue. This paper presents a method based on a class of entropy measures on the recorded Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of human subjects for relative quantification of fatigue during driving. These entropy values have been evaluated in the wavelet domain and have been validated using standard subjective measures. Five types of entropies i.e. Shannon’s entropy, Rényi entropy of order 2 and 3, Tsallis wavelet entropy and Generalized Escort-Tsallis entropy, have been considered as possible indicators of fatigue. These entropies along with alpha band relative energy and (α + β)/δ₁ relative energy ratio have been used to develop a method for estimation of unknown fatigue level. Experiments have been designed to test the subjects under simulated driving and actual driving. The EEG signals have been recorded along with subjective assessment of their fatigue levels through standard questionnaire during these experiments. The signal analysis steps involve preprocessing, artifact removal, entropy calculation and validation against the subjective assessment. The results show definite patterns of these entropies during different stages of fatigue.     

Who’s right about rights?

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

On the distinction between Peirce’s abduction and Lipton’s Inference to the best explanation

I argue against the tendency in the philosophy of science literature to link abduction to the inference to the best explanation (IBE), and in particular, to claim that Peircean abduction is a conceptual predecessor to IBE. This is not to discount either abduction or IBE. Rather the purpose of this paper is to clarify the relation between Peircean abduction and IBE in accounting for ampliative inference in science. This paper aims at a proper classification—not justification—of types of scientific reasoning. In particular, I claim that Peircean abduction is an in-depth account of the process of generating explanatory hypotheses, while IBE, at least in Peter Lipton’s thorough treatment, is a more encompassing account of the processes both of generating and of evaluating scientific hypotheses. There is then a two-fold problem with the claim that abduction is IBE. On the one hand, it conflates abduction and induction, which are two distinct forms of logical inference, with two distinct aims, as shown by Charles S. Peirce; on the other hand it lacks a clear sense of the full scope of IBE as an account of scientific inference.     

Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory and the Distinction between Representing and Depicting

In this paper, I draw attention to the often-overlooked Tractarian distinction between representing (darstellen) and depicting (abbilden), provide a clear account of it and examine how it affects our understanding of the notions of ‘being a picture’, meaningfulness, truth, and falsity in the Tractatus. I also look at the recent debate in the literature on the notion of truth and show that Glock’s claim that the official theory of the Tractatus is to be accounted in terms of obtainment only and deflationary accounts such as Hacker’s derive from a failure to notice the distinction between representing and depicting (in the case of Glock) or a misconception of depicting (in the case of Hacker). Finally, I argue against the idea that either representing or depicting should be dispensed with. Both are necessary for Wittgenstein to account for every case of a proposition being a picture of reality.     

Impact of the driver’s visual engagement on situation awareness and takeover quality

During automated driving (SAE Level 3), drivers can delegate control of the vehicle and monitoring of the road to an automated system. They may then devote themselves to tasks other than driving and gradually lose situational awareness (SA). This could result in difficulty in regaining control of the vehicle when the automated system requires it. In this simulator study, the level of SA was manipulated through the time spent performing a non-driving task (NDRT), which alternated with phases where the driver could monitor the driving scene, prior to a critical takeover request (TOR). The SA at the time of TOR, the visual behaviour after TOR, and the takeover quality were analysed. The results showed that monitoring the road just before the TOR allowed the development of limited perception of the driving situation, which only partially compensated for the lack of a consolidated mental model of the situation. The quality of the recovery, assessed through the number of collisions, was consistent with the level of development of SA. The analysis of visual behaviour showed that engagement in the non-driving task at the time of TOR induced a form of perseverance in consulting the interface where the task was displayed, to the detriment of checking the mirrors. These results underline the importance of helping the driver to restore good SA well in advance of a TOR.     

How does the visual system distinguish between illuminance and reflectance?

The experiments in which the strengths of pattern and of fusion differing in kind from brightness were used as measures indicated that the visual system could distinguish between illuminance and reflectance. From this result and an observation of gray papers by a microscope, it is assumed that luminance has two aspects, one refers to the macroscopic density of photons and another to the proportion of the reflected microscopic areas to the absorbed microscopic areas so that brightness constancy occurs in relation to each of the patterns of the various sizes from a macroscopic pattern visible to the naked eye to a microscopic pattern not visible. It is also mentioned that the strength of fusion is rare but promising as a measure for analyzing brightness.     

Angry at your boss: Who cares? Anger recognition and mediation effectiveness

The key to success for workplace mediators lies in establishing a relationship of understanding, empathy, and trust with the conflicting parties. Literature suggests that the recognition of parties’ emotions by the mediator is essential to obtain such a relation. Although anger is one of the most prevailing emotions in conflict, little is known about how parties react to the experience of anger recognition on the part of the mediator, how this affects their perceptions of mediation effectiveness, and whether this is moderated by the hierarchical position parties occupy. Drawing on theories of power, emotions, and conflict, this study tests the hypothesis that conflicting parties in workplace mediation who experience anger recognition on the part of the mediator perceive the mediation as more effective and that this is more so for subordinates than for supervisors. Data collected in real labour mediations support this. Implications for mediation theory and practice are discussed.     

An integrated device to evaluate a driver’s functional state

In the field of cognitive ergonomics, research on car drivers requires multimodal in-vehicle systems for recording not only driving-related behavior, but also contextual information from their surroundings. In addition, reliable information concerning a driver’s functional state should be obtained. In this article, we describe an integrated device simultaneously recording specific physiological data, video recordings of the driver and environment, parameters from the vehicle, and contextual data. Physiological signals from the autonomic nervous system provide objective and quantitative information on the driver’s alertness and his/her ability to process specific driving-related stimuli or other nonspecific information. Consequently, recorded physiological responses can be related to individual driving events. Electrodermal and cardiac activities are sensitive to time-dependent variations in arousal level and to certain external stimuli, so there is great interest in studying drivers’ behavior via measured physiological signals that have been established as suitable behavioral indicators. The present integrated device is capable of processing the relevant indices from raw measured data in real time.