Emotions,Public Opinion,and U.S. Presidential Approval Rates: A 5‐Year Analysis of Online Political Discussions

This article examines how emotional reactions to political events shape public opinion. We analyze political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online to approximate the public agenda: Online discussions offer a natural approach to the salience of political issues and the means to analyze emotional reactions as political events take place in real time. We measure shifts in emotions of the public over a period that includes 2 U.S. presidential elections, the 9/11 attacks, and the start of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our findings show that emotional reactions to political events help explain approval rates for the same period, which casts novel light on the mechanisms that mediate the association between agenda setting and political evaluations.     

Expertise and error in diagnostic reasoning

An investigation is presented in which a computer simulation model (DIAGNOSER) is used to develop and test predictions for behavior of subjects in a task of medical diagnosis. The first experiment employed a process-tracing methodology in order to compare hypothesis generation and evaluation behavior of DIAGNOSER with individuals at different levels of expertise (students, trainees, experts). A second experiment performed with only DIAGNOSER identified conditions under which errors in reasoning in the first experiment could be related to interpretation of specific data items. Predictions derived from DIAGNOSER's performance were tested in a third experiment with a new sample of subjects. Data from the three experiments indicated that (1) form of diagnostic reasoning was similar for all subjects trained in medicine and for the simulation model, (2) substance of diagnostic reasoning employed by the simulation model was parable with that of the more expert subjects, and (3) errors in subjects' reasoning were attributable to deficiencies in disease knowledge and the interpretation of specific patient data cues predicted by the simulation model.     

Melancholy,Acculturation, and Relief: A Brief Essay on the Religion of Ordinarity

Han is not an idiosyncratic, psychological experience that is peculiar to Koreans, but a multifaceted mode of melancholy experienced by many and various people. What makes this psychological experience particularly familiar to Koreans, however, is that this phenomenon is colored by various, macroscopic factors common in the Korean context, such as sociocultural rigidness, historical instability, political feudality, and economic vulnerability. In this sense, han is an acculturated, multifaceted melancholy. Not only that, it has developed its own religiousness, the goal of which is the restoration of ordinarity, because the state of han premises extraordinary, abnormal, or tension-provoking situations. The explicit and implicit religious idioms developing in the religion of han, such as tongsung-kido and wishing-for-blessing, evolve around this religious telos, helping individuals in Korea restore and live ordinarity.