Acquisition of decision making criteria: reward rate ultimately beats accuracy

Speed-accuracy trade-offs strongly influence the rate of reward that can be earned in many decision-making tasks. Previous reports suggest that human participants often adopt suboptimal speed-accuracy trade-offs in single session, two-alternative forced-choice tasks. We investigated whether humans acquired optimal speed-accuracy trade-offs when extensively trained with multiple signal qualities. When performance was characterized in terms of decision time and accuracy, our participants eventually performed nearly optimally in the case of higher signal qualities. Rather than adopting decision criteria that were individually optimal for each signal quality, participants adopted a single threshold that was nearly optimal for most signal qualities. However, setting a single threshold for different coherence conditions resulted in only negligible decrements in the maximum possible reward rate. Finally, we tested two hypotheses regarding the possible sources of suboptimal performance: (1) favoring accuracy over reward rate and (2) misestimating the reward rate due to timing uncertainty. Our findings provide support for both hypotheses, but also for the hypothesis that participants can learn to approach optimality. We find specifically that an accuracy bias dominates early performance, but diminishes greatly with practice. The residual discrepancy between optimal and observed performance can be explained by an adaptive response to uncertainty in time estimation.     

Counterproductive Work Behavior Among White‐Collar Employees: A study from Turkey

The current study was designed to evaluate the magnitude and types of counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) among a group of white‐collar employees from different firms. A total of 766 employees voluntarily participated in our study. We focused especially on employees' perceptions of their work environment and on their affective responses to those perceptions. Data were dependent on self‐reporting and privacy, and anonymity measures were taken into account. The five different instruments used to evaluate job satisfaction were, organizational constraints, interpersonal conflict, quantitative workload and CWB. We found a high degree of job satisfaction, a minimal quantitative workload and a limited exhibition of CWBs among our sample. Organizational constraints were found to be the most strongly correlated to exhibited CWBs, followed by interpersonal conflict and quantitative workload. Job satisfaction had a diminishing effect on CWBs. Among the five dimensions of CWBs, abuse and withdrawal were found to be the most important. The most frequently reported CWB was ‘came to work late without permission.’ Except for income we found no statistically significant relationship between demographic characteristics and the exhibition of CWBs. We concluded that by abolishing pre‐existing organizational constraints there may be a reduction in CWBs.     

A Picture Database for Verbs and Nouns with Different Action Content in Turkish

In this study we present a picture database of 160 nouns and 160 verbs. All verbs and nouns are divided into two groups as action and non-action words. Age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, name agreement and complexity norms are reported alongside frequency, word length and morpheme count for each word. Data were collected from 600 native Turkish adults in total. The results show that although several measures have weak correlations with each other, only age of acquisition had moderate downhill relationships with familiarity and frequency with familiarity and frequency having a rather strong positive correlation with each other. The norms and the picture database are available as supplemental materials for use in psycholinguistic studies in Turkish.     

Factors Challenging the Spiritual Rehabilitation of Iranian Men Affected by Natural Disasters: A Qualitative Study

Journal of Religion and Health - Spiritual health is one important dimension of human health. Natural disasters, however, can adversely affect human spiritual health. One of the undeniable...