Instructional Control with Preschoolers and Stimulus Equivalence

The Psychological Record - The stimulus equivalence paradigm is a behavioral model to study meaning. This study extends work that has used the equivalence paradigm to study the meaning of...     

Pediatric Living Lung Donor Transplant Candidates: Psychiatric Status of Utilized and Non-Utilized Donors

Living donor lung (lobar) transplantation has greatly decreased in the past decade due to the success of the lung allocation score (LAS) system, instituted in 2005 by the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). Between 1993 and 2006, 460 living lung donor transplants were performed in the United States with 369 donations occurring at the University of Southern California and Washington University in St. Louis. These two centers accounted for over 80% of all living donor lung transplants between 1994 and 2006. All potential donors received a psychological/psychiatric evaluation as part of the donor selection process, which is standard practice in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Utilized and non-utilized lung donors were compared in terms of their psychiatric history and present status. Results indicated that 31% (N?=?54) of the total sample had a lifetime prevalence of a psychiatric disorder, which is less than that the 46% lifetime rate for the general population (Kessler in Arch Gen Psychiatry 62:593–602, 2005). This study did find that psychiatric history or status was not exclusion factor for transplant surgery in either group. This observation about psychiatric issues in potential living lung donors should be useful to transplant centers who utilize adult live donors of any solid organ type for pediatric recipients and in Japan where live donor lung transplants still represent a significant proportion of lung transplants (Date in J Thorac Dis 8: S631–S636, 2016).

     

The enactment of shared agency in teams exploring Mars through rovers

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - This paper examines the enactment of agency in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. We argue that MER functioned as a distributed cognitive system,...     

Sensorimotor expectations and the visual field

Sensorimotor expectations concern how visual experience covaries with bodily movement. Sensorimotor theorists argue from such expectations to the conclusion that the phenomenology of vision is constitutively embodied: objects within the visual field are experienced as 3-D because sensorimotor expectations partially constitute our experience of such objects. Critics argue that there are (at least) two ways to block the above inference: to explain how we visually experience objects as 3-D, one may appeal to such non-bodily factors as (1) expectations about movements of objects, not the perceiver, or to (2) the role of mental imagery in visual experience. But instead of using sensorimotor expectations to explain how objects are experienced within the visual field, we can instead use them to explain our experience of the visual field itself and, in particular, our experience of its limits; that is, our ever-present visual sense of there being more to see, beyond what’s currently within the visual field. Crucially, this inference from sensorimotor expectations to the constitutive embodiment of visual phenomenology is not threatened by the above two challenges. I thus present here a sensorimotor theory of the phenomenology of the visual field, that is, our experience of our visual fields as such.

     

“Transformation Tuesday”: Temporal context and post valence influence the provision of social support on social media

Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook have become integral in the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships. Users of SNSs seek social support and validation, often using posts that illustrate how they have changed over time. The purpose of the present research is to examine how the valence and temporal context of an SNS post affect the likelihood of other users providing social support. Participants viewed hypothetical SNS posts and reported their intentions to provide social support to the users. Results revealed that participants were more likely to provide social support for posts that were positive and included temporal context (i.e., depicted improvement over time; Study 1). Furthermore, this research suggests that visual representations of change over time are needed to elicit social support (Study 2). Results are discussed in terms of their practical implications for SNS users and theoretical implications for the literature on social support and social media.     

《上帝:一切虚构作品中最令人不快的形象》

正作者从基督教福音派牧师转变为坚定的无神论者,被认为比很多基督徒和无神论者能更好地理解《圣经》。上帝的形象是怎样的?仁慈,公正,宽容?本书通过圣经《旧约》和《新约》的文本考察,却详细论证了:他妒忌(jealous)、不公正(urimjust)、残忍(malevolent)……并没有多少令人羡慕的品格。在英美,一些人信仰基督教多年却并未读过圣经,读过此书,认为:基督徒应该自己阅读圣经,更应该阅读此书,     

If You Are Going to Pay Within the Next 24 Hours,Press 1: Automatic Planning Prompt Reduces Credit Card Delinquency

People often form intentions but fail to follow through on them. Mounting evidence suggests that such intention‐action gaps can be narrowed with prompts to make concrete plans about when, where, and how to act to achieve the intention. In this paper, we pushed the notion of plan‐concreteness to test the efficacy of a prompt under a minimalist automated calling setting, where respondents were only prompted to indicate a narrower duration within which they intent to act. In a field experiment, this planning prompt significantly helped people to pay their past dues and get out of debt delinquency. These results suggest that minimalist automatic planning prompts are a scalable, cost‐effective intervention.     

Patients’ expectations for the functional and psychosocial outcomes of orbital decompression surgery for thyroid eye disease: a qualitative study

Patients with appearance-altering conditions may be dissatisfied with the outcomes of reconstructive surgery due to unmet expectations. This study explored patients’ expectations of orbital decompression surgery for thyroid eye disease (TED) and whether these were met. Semi-structured interviews were conducted at two times: (1) in the weeks after patients were listed for decompression surgery and before surgery; (2) up to 12 months after surgery. Thematic analysis was performed for each time point, to identify themes within the data. Fourteen adults with TED were interviewed prior to surgery and five were followed up after surgery. Thematic analyses found: (1) Prior to surgery, patients had formed expectations through online information about the procedure, consultations with physicians, the impact TED had on their lives, and speaking to relevant others. Patients had specific expectations about the procedure, the recovery, post-operative appearance and post-operative vision. (2) After surgery, patients generally felt their appearance and well-being had improved. However, dissatisfaction was linked to unanticipated specific aspects of surgical care, recovery, or appearance. Dissatisfaction can arise from unmet expectations for the outcomes of reconstructive surgery. Physicians should be aware of the processes by which patients form expectations, for example different types and quality of online information. Ensuring that preoperative expectations are realistic could enhance satisfaction after surgery.