Moral violations reduce oral consumption

Consumers frequently encounter moral violations in everyday life. They watch movies and television shows about crime and deception, hear news reports of corporate fraud and tax evasion, and hear gossip about cheaters and thieves. How does exposure to moral violations influence consumption? Because moral violations arouse disgust and because disgust is an evolutionarily important signal of contamination that should provoke a multi-modal response, we hypothesize that moral violations affect a key behavioral response to disgust: reduced oral consumption. In three experiments, compared with those in control conditions, people drank less water and chocolate milk while (a) watching a film portraying the moral violations of incest, (b) writing about moral violations of cheating or theft, and (c) listening to a report about fraud and manipulation. These findings imply that “moral disgust” influences consumption in ways similar to core disgust, and thus provide evidence for the associations between moral violations, emotions, and consumer behavior.     

Leveraging social media content to support engagement in positive interventions

A key challenge for positive psychology interventions is promoting sustained engagement to improve long-term outcomes. One way to increase engagement is to introduce variety to reduce hedonic adaptation. Here, we propose supplementing intervention prompts with items from a person’s social media archive to add variety. Through a one-week pilot study of six positive psychology activities via a Facebook application, we explore whether Facebook content is useful to keep people engaged in activities and what attributes of content make it most useful. A total of 260 participants used our application, and analysis of usage showed that displaying content is engaging. By looking at which content was marked as useful by participants, we find that useful content is in itself meaningful and engaging (photos, longer texts, and content about close friends). We also find that certain intervention activities are more engaging and better suited for making use of Facebook content than others.     

Ideology and Gender: Observers’ System Justification and Targets’ Gender as Interactive Predictors of Citizenship Expectations

We integrate system justification and social role theory to explain how observers’ system justification and target employees’ gender interact to predict observers’ expectations of targets’ sportsmanship citizenship behaviors. In contrast with social role theory predictions, observers did not expect greater levels of sportsmanship from women compared to men. Yet observers expected more sportsmanship from women (a) when observers were ideologically motivated by gender-specific beliefs (gender-specific system justification; Study 1) and (b) when system justification was cued experimentally (Study 2). A heretofore-unexamined aspect, observers’ ideology, modifies their expectations of sportsmanship citizenship across target genders. This has implications for system justification, social role, and organizational citizenship theoretical perspectives.     

Optimistic Naturalism: Scientific Advancement and the Meaning of Life

Naturalist theories of the meaning of life are sometimes criticised for not setting the bar high enough for what counts as a meaningful life. Tolstoy’s version of this criticism is that Naturalist theories do not describe really meaningful lives because they do not require that we connect our finite lives with the infinite. Another criticism of Naturalist theories is that they cannot adequately resolve the Absurd—the vast difference between how meaningful our actions and lives appear from subjective and objective viewpoints. This article proposes a novel view, Optimistic Naturalism, in order to refute these criticisms. Optimistic Naturalism is the view that scientific and technological advancement might allow us to lead Truly Meaningful lives in a purely physical universe by enabling our actions, which we find meaningful partly because they might have particular infinite consequences, to actually have infinite consequences for life. The central tenets of Optimistic Naturalism are Infinite Consequence and Scientific Optimism. By explaining how the correct connection of the subjective and objective meaning of actions can result in True Meaning, Infinite Consequence provides a theoretical blueprint for resolving the Absurd. Scientific Optimism provides reason to think that it is possible to follow that blueprint in a purely physical universe. Therefore, when taken together, these two principles provide relatively plausible reasons to think that at least one kind of Naturalist theory can connect the finite with the infinite in a meaningful way and resolve the Absurd.     

Lewis vs Lewis on the problem of the many

Consider a cat on a mat. On the one hand, there seems to be just one cat, but on the other there seem to be many things with as good a claim as anything in the vicinity to being a cat. Hence, the problem of the many. In his ‘Many, but Almost One,’ David Lewis offered two solutions. According to the first, only one of the many is indeed a cat, although it is indeterminate exactly which one. According to the second, the many are all cats, but they are almost identical to each other, and hence they are almost one. For Lewis, the two solutions do not compete with each other but are mutually complementary, as each one can assist the other. This paper has two aims: to give some reasons against the first of these two solutions, but then to defend the second as a self-standing solution from Lewis’s considerations to the contrary.     

Financial deprivation selectively shifts moral standards and compromises moral decisions

Previous research suggests people firmly value moral standards. However, research has also shown that various factors can compromise moral behavior. Inspired by the recent financial turmoil, we investigate whether financial deprivation might shift people’s moral standards and consequently compromise their moral decisions. Across one pilot survey and five experiments, we find that people believe financial deprivation should not excuse immoral conduct; yet when people actually experience deprivation they seem to apply their moral standards more leniently. Thus, people who feel deprived tend to cheat more for financial gains and judge deprived moral offenders who cheat for financial gains less harshly. These effects are mediated by shifts in people’s moral standards: beliefs in whether deprivation is an acceptable reason for immorality. The effect of deprivation on immoral conduct diminishes when it is explicit that immoral conduct cannot help alleviate imbalances in deprived actors’ financial states, when financial deprivation seems fair or deserved, and when acting immorally seems unfair.     

Nozick's experience machine is dead,long live the experience machine!

Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment (Nozick's scenario) is widely used as the basis for a “knockdown” argument against all internalist mental state theories of well-being. Recently, however, it has been convincingly argued that Nozick's scenario should not be used in this way because it elicits judgments marred by status quo bias and other irrelevant factors. These arguments all include alternate experience machine thought experiments, but these scenarios also elicit judgments marred by status quo bias and other irrelevant factors. In this paper, several experiments are conducted in order to create and test a relatively bias-free experience machine scenario. It is argued that if an experience machine thought experiment is used to evaluate internalist mental state theories of well-being, then this relatively bias-free scenario should be used over any of the existing scenarios. Unlike the existing experience machine scenarios, when this new scenario is used to assess internalist mental state theories of well-being, it does not provide strong evidence to refute or endorse them.     

Analyzing the Rate at Which Languages Lose the Influence of a Common Ancestor

Analyzing the rate at which languages change can clarify whether similarities across languages are solely the result of cognitive biases or might be partially due to descent from a common ancestor. To demonstrate this approach, we use a simple model of language evolution to mathematically determine how long it should take for the distribution over languages to lose the influence of a common ancestor and converge to a form that is determined by constraints on language learning. We show that modeling language learning as Bayesian inference of n binary parameters or the ordering of n constraints results in convergence in a number of generations that is on the order of n log n. We relax some of the simplifying assumptions of this model to explore how different assumptions about language evolution affect predictions about the time to convergence; in general, convergence time increases as the model becomes more realistic. This allows us to characterize the assumptions about language learning (given the models that we consider) that are sufficient for convergence to have taken place on a timescale that is consistent with the origin of human languages. These results clearly identify the consequences of a set of simple models of language evolution and show how analysis of convergence rates provides a tool that can be used to explore questions about the relationship between accounts of language learning and the origins of similarities across languages.     

老年膀胱癌患者术后生活质量及其影响因素的研究

调查老年膀胱癌患者术后生活质量现状及其影响因素,为护理干预和健康管理提供依据。选择我院2013年6月至2014年1月收治的老年膀胱癌患者142例作为研究对象,于患者术后3个月采用膀胱癌特异性量表（FACT-BL）,社会支持评定量表（SSRS）进行数据收集。结果老年膀胱癌患者术后FACT-BL平均得分为（94．33＆#177;8．31）分,SSRS平均得分为（33．70＆#177;4．42）分,不同手术方式躯体状况（PWB）,社会/家庭状况（FWB）,FACT-BL 得分差异具有统计学意义（P＜0．05）,老年膀胱癌患者术后生活质量与社会支持呈正相关关系（P＜0．05）。手术方式与老年膀胱癌患者术后生活质量密切相关,应结合患者的具体情况选择合适的手术方式,实时观察患者的社会支持水平。     

青少年早期社交回避与同伴关系问题:有调节的中介模型

为探讨青少年早期社交回避、同伴关系问题、情绪调节能力和学业成绩的关系,本研究构建了一个有调节的中介模型。采用自我报告、同伴提名和学校记录的方式对上海地区小学4年级至初中1年级共660名被试进行测查,结果显示:(1)社交回避可以正向预测同伴关系问题;(2)情绪调节能力在社交回避与同伴关系问题之间起部分中介作用;(3)学业成绩调节了社交回避通过情绪调节能力影响同伴关系问题的中介作用前半路径。相对于学业成绩较高的儿童,社交回避更容易通过学业成绩较低儿童的情绪调节能力影响同伴关系问题。研究结果不仅可以从情绪调节能力和学业成绩的角度为社交回避个体的同伴关系问题提供解释,而且对引导同伴社会化、提升社会适应的过程具有启示意义。