Affect and the weight of idealistic versus pragmatic concerns in decision situations

Individuals consider abstract values and principles important aspects of their identities. Nonetheless, they often make judgments and decisions that contradict these values and principles for the sake of pragmatic benefits. Assuming that the process of weighting idealistic and pragmatic concerns is context sensitive, the present research argues that affect influences the relative weight of idealistic versus pragmatic concerns in decision situations owing to its influence on the level of abstraction at which individuals represent situations mentally. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that more positive affect increases the prominent weighting of idealistic over pragmatic concerns while less positive affect leads to less differentiation between the relevance of idealistic and pragmatic concerns. Studies 3 and 4 test the assumption that affective influences on mental abstraction are crucial for affect‐dependent shifts in the weighting of idealistic and pragmatic concerns. By bringing together theorizing on affect and cognition with recent theorizing on the role of mental abstraction for decision processes, this article highlights a mechanism through which decisions can be influenced by feelings that goes beyond the mechanisms that have typically been discussed in the affect and cognition literature so far.     

Simultaneous learning of different regularities in sequence learning tasks: limits and characteristics

Two experiments are reported which were designed to investigate the generality and the power of the mechanisms underlying sequence learning. In both experiments, participants reacted to systematic sequences of tones. They were informed that there was a tone systematicity. Participants were not told that the interval between a response to a tone and the onset of the subsequent tone (response-signal interval, RSI) also varied according to a fixed regularity. Experiment 1 showed that the unattended RSIs were learned when they were uniquely related to the tone sequence, but not when the relation was ambiguous. Experiment 2 showed that, on the basis of the traditional reaction time performance measure, participants who learned the RSIs by attending to their systematicity could not be distinguished from those in an incidental learning condition in which the RSI systematicity was unattended. However, a model-based analysis of the processes contributing to judgements about the event sequences suggested that the two groups had acquired qualitatively different knowledge. Received: 3 March 2000 / Accepted: 2 November 2000     

Time, action, and consciousness

Time plays a central role in consciousness, at different levels and in different aspects of information processing. Subliminal perception experiments demonstrate that stimuli presented too briefly to enter conscious awareness are nevertheless processed to some extent. Implicit learning, implicit memory, and conditioning studies suggest that the extent to which memory traces are available for verbal report and for cognitive control is likewise dependent on the time available for processing during acquisition. Differences in the time available for processing also determine not only the extent to which one becomes conscious of action, but also provides the basis for making attributions of authorship to experienced acts. In this paper, we offer a brief overview of these different findings and suggest that they can all be understood based on the fact that consciousness takes time. From this perspective, the availability of representations to conscious awareness depends on the quality of these representations - the extent to which they are strong, stable in time, and distinctive. High-quality representations occur when processes of global competition have had sufficient time to operate so as to make the system settle into the best possible interpretation of the input. Such processes implement global constraint satisfaction and critically depend on reentrant processing, through which representations can be further enriched by high-level constraints. We discuss these ideas in light of current theories of consciousness, emphasizing the fact that consciousness should be viewed as a process rather than as a static property associated with some states and not with others.     

Security of multi-agent systems: A case study on comparison shopping

The multi-agent-systems paradigm is becoming more and more popular as a basis for realizing net-based solutions. This development is accompanied by an increasing relevance of security issues. For instance, the potential loss of privacy and other assets is a major concern for, both merchants and customers, in Internet-based commerce and, without being properly addressed, such very legitimate concerns hamper the growth of e-commerce.This article uses a comparison-shopping scenario to introduce a general methodology for formally verifying the security of multi-agent systems. Following the approach of possibilistic information flow security, the flow of information between and within agents is restricted in order to ensure that secrets will not be disclosed to unauthorized meddlers. The security requirements for the overall system are then decomposed into requirements for the individual agents that can be verified independently from each other. Exploiting the modular structure of a multi-agent system considerably reduces the complexity of the overall security analysis. The techniques for decomposing security requirements, for verifying individual agents, and for deriving global security guarantees for the entire system from locally verified properties are all generic in the sense that they apply also to many other systems and security requirements than the ones that appear in the example scenario.     

Mindestanforderungen für Prognosegutachten1

Die aus Richtern am Bundesgerichtshof, Bundesanw?lten, forensischen Psychiatern und Psychologen, Sexualmedizinern und weiteren Juristen bestehende interdisziplin?re Arbeitsgruppe, die sich bereits mit Mindestanforderungen für Schuldf?higkeitsgutachten befasst hat², hat nun auch die nachfolgenden Empfehlungen für die vielf?ltig zu erstattenden forensischen Prognosegutachten erarbeitet. Wegen der H?ufigkeit und der Bedeutung dieser Gutachten in der Strafvollstreckung ist die Arbeitsgruppe um drei erfahrene Vollstreckungsrichter erweitert worden. Die Mitglieder waren: VRinBGH Dr. Rissing-van Saan, VRiBGH Nack, RiBGH Basdorf, RiBGH Dr. Bode, RiBGH Dr. Boetticher, RiBGH Maatz, RiBGH Pfister, VRiBGH a.D. Dr. Sch?fer, die Bundesanw?lte Hannich und Altvater, die Vollstreckungsrichter RiOLG B?hm, Karlsruhe, RiOLG Dr. Müller-Metz, Frankfurt a.M., VRiLG Dr. Wolf, Marburg, der Kriminologe Prof. Dr. Sch?ch, München, der Rechtsanwalt Dr. Deckers, Düsseldorf, die forensischen Psychiater Prof. Dr. Berner, Hamburg, Prof. Dr. Dittmann, Basel, Prof. Dr. Kr?ber, Berlin, Prof. Dr. Leygraf, Essen, Dr. Müller-Isberner, Gie?en, Prof. Dr. Nedopil, München, Prof. Dr. Sa?, Aachen, Dr. Habermeyer, Rostock, die Sexualmediziner Prof. Dr. Dr. Beier, Berlin, Prof. Dr. Bosinski, Kiel, und der Rechtspsychologe Prof. Dr. K?hnken, Kiel. ¹ Dieser Beitrag ist bereits erschienen in NStZ 26:237–544 (2006), Abdruck mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Verlages C. H. Beck ² NStZ 25:57–62 (2005), Nervenarzt 76:1154–1159 (2005), Forens Psychiatr Psychol Kriminol 1:3–9 (2007)     

Statistical power analyses using G<Superscript>*</Superscript>Power 3.1: Tests for correlation and regression analyses

G^*Power is a free power analysis program for a variety of statistical tests. We present extensions and improvements of the version introduced by Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, and Buchner (2007) in the domain of correlation and regression analyses. In the new version, we have added procedures to analyze the power of tests based on (1) single-sample tetrachoric correlations, (2) comparisons of dependent correlations, (3) bivariate linear regression, (4) multiple linear regression based on the random predictor model, (5) logistic regression, and (6) Poisson regression. We describe these new features and provide a brief introduction to their scope and handling.     

Subjective measures of consciousness in artificial grammar learning task

Consciousness can be measured in various ways, but different measures often yield different conclusions about the extent to which awareness relates to performance. Here, we compare five different subjective measures of awareness in the context of an artificial grammar learning task. Participants (N=217) expressed their subjective awareness of rules using one of five different scales: confidence ratings (CRs), post-decision wagering (PDW), feeling of warmth (FOW), rule awareness (RAS), and continuous scale (SDS). All scales were equally sensitive to conscious knowledge. PDW, however, was affected by risk aversion, and both RAS and SDS applied different minimal criteria for rule awareness. CR seems to capture the largest range of consciousness, but failed to indicate unconscious knowledge with the guessing criterion. We close by discussing the theoretical implications of scale sensitivity and propose that CR's unique features enable (in conjunction with RAS and FOW) a finer assessment of subjective states of awareness.