Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events

Prospective hindsight involves generating an explanation for a future event as if it had already happened; i.e., one goes forward in time, and then looks back. In order to examine how shifts in perspective might influence people's perceptions of events, we investigated two possible factors: temporal perspective (whether an event is set in the future or past) and uncertainty (whether the event's occurrence is certain or uncertain). In the first experiment, temporal perspective showed little influence while outcome uncertainty strongly affected the nature of explanations for events. Explanations for sure events tended to be longer, to contain a higher proportion of episodic reasons, and to be expressed in past tense. Evidence from the second experiment supports the view that uncertainty mediates not the amount of time spent explaining, but rather subjects' choice of explanation type. The implications of these findings for the use of temporal perspective in decision aiding are discussed.     

Effects of Expectancies and Personalized Feedback on Fat Consumption, Taste, and Preference

Previous studies have shown that people develop expectations about the taste and effects of consumed substances and that those expectations can guide future behavior, cognitions, and affect. Identifying expectancies for the taste of both low- and high-fat foods is important in determining people's reactions to changes in their diets. Study 1 was designed to determine the existence of expectancies for the taste of low-and high-fat foods and the effects of these expectations on food consumption and preference. Ninety-seven subjects tasted a bowl of ice cream and rated the taste on taste judgment forms. The fat content of the ice cream (high- versus low-fat) and the expectancy of high- versus low-fat content were independently manipulated using a balanced placebo design. Expectancy affected the consumption of ice cream under most circumstances: For women who received high-fat ice cream and for men, regardless of the ice cream received, consumption was higher when high-fat ice cream was expected than when low-fat ice cream was expected. Study 2 was designed to investigate the effects of educating individuals about the diet-cancer link on consumption and preference. Receiving information about diet and cancer, especially when the information was personalized, decreased overall consumption and reported preference. Current levels of daily fat consumption also affected laboratory consumption and preference. This study has several implications for interventions to lower dietary fat.     

On the metaphysical presuppositions of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Conclusion In what precedes, I have argued that Aristotle does not, in his ethics, commit three metaphysical errors sometimes imputed to him: he does not define the good as a fact; he does not claim that human beings move by nature towards their telos; he does not claim, in the ergon argument, that human beings are fixed rather than versatile. Instead, I have shown, he does the opposite in each case: he argues that the good cannot be defined as a fact; he claims that human beings move towards their telos only if they have virtue and virtue is not by nature; he locates, in the human ergon, that which is responsible for human versatility. Finally, I have shown by example that the metaphysical commitments of Aristotle's account of human happiness are not as controversial as they seem.If all of this is true, then perhaps the disorder that has existed in ethics since the enlightenment has been misdiagnosed. Perhaps it is not due to an unhappy choice between end-neutral emotivism on the one hand and Aristotle's bad metaphysics on the other. Perhaps instead it is due, at least in part, to a too hasty rejection of Aristotle's ethics on the grounds of a rejection of his biology.     

Aggression as One Response to Conflict1

This paper presents two studies that explore the link between self-reported conflict management strategies and aggression. It was predicted that conflict strategies involving concern for the needs of the other would be inconsistent with aggressive behavior. On the other hand, conflict strategies that involve coercion and domination were predicted to be positively related to aggressive behavior. Studies using self-report and behavioral measures of aggression provide support for these predictions.     

Prompt comprehension in UNIX command production

We hypothesize that a cognitive analysis based on the construction-integration theory of comprehension (Kintsch, 1988) can predict what is difficult about generating complex composite commands in the UNIX operating system. We provide empirical support for assumptions of the Doane, Kintsch, and Polson (1989, 1990) construction-integration model for generating complex commands in UNIX. We asked users whose UNIX experience varied to produce complex UNIX commands, and then provided help prompts whenever the commands that they produced were erroneous. The help prompts were designed to assist subjects with respect to both the knowledge and the memory processes that our UNIX modeling efforts have suggested are lacking in less expert users. It appears that experts respond to different prompts than do novices. Expert performance is helped by the presentation of abstract information, whereas novice and intermediate performance is modified by presentation of concrete information. Second, while presentation of specific prompts helps less expert subjects, they do not provide sufficient information to obtain correct performance. Our analyses suggest that information about the ordering of commands is required to help the less expert with both knowledge and memory load problems in a manner consistent with skill acquisition theories.     

Information tradeoffs in complex stimulus structure: Local and global levels in naturalistic scenes

An information tradeoff is an increased processing or utilization of information from one stimulus source at the expense of processing or utilization of information from a different source. An experiment was conducted to determine whether information tradeoffs occurred when subjects attended selectively to one of two different structural levels of naturalistic scenes. The subjects’ attentional focus was directed to either the global or local structure of a scene (i.e., the scene or an object in the scene, respectively) either before or after presentation of a scene. They then had to use the information obtained from a 100-msec exposure of the scene to choose between two forced-choice alternatives that described one of the levels. The nature of the alternatives was such that both alternatives adequately characterized one of the structural levels on the basis of physical and semantic relations within the scene. Results showed that the subjects were significantly slower and less accurate when their attentional focus and the forced-choice alternatives were at different levels of stimulus structure than when they were at the same level, providingevidence of an information tradeoffwhen different types of information from a scene were used. When processinginformation from a particular structural level, information fromtheother level either was less available or was not used efficiently. Furthermore, the information tradeoffs were more severe in the precue than in the postcue condition, indicating differences in the efficiency of the selectivity process. The results are interpreted with respect to the role of selective attention in processing complex stimuli such as naturalistic scenes.     

Psychological distress and well-being in advanced cancer: The effects of optimism and coping

This study examined the relations among optimism, coping, functional status, and psychological adjustment in 75 adults diagnosed with cancer. Both the positive and the negative aspects of psychological adjustment were assessed. All participants had been diagnosed with advanced stages of cancer (i.e., Stages II, III, and IV). Participants completed three assessments across a 4-month time period. Both optimism and coping were associated with psychological adjustment, even after controlling for functional status and prior adjustment. Additionally, optimism and coping were differentially related to distress and well-being. Optimism was strongly and positively associated with well-being and inversely related to distress. Escape-Avoidance coping was positively associated with distress and Accepting Responsibility coping was negatively associated with well-being. Comparisons between the current and prior studies indicated that individuals who are diagnosed with more advanced stages of cancer or who have survived bone marrow transplantation exhibit higher levels of optimism than do healthy individuals and individuals with early-stage disease.     

Helping Groups Determine Their Most Accurate Member: The Role of Outcome Feedback1

One of the difficulties groups have when making quantitative judgments is determining the relative quality of members’ inputs. Outcome feedback was investigated as a method for improving the ability of groups to identify their most accurate member. Results indicate that groups given outcome feedback were better at identifying their best member than were groups that practiced without feedback. This occurred even though the same individual was seldom the most accurate across items. However, groups given feedback were not as accurate as their best member any more often. This suggests that groups given feedback are learning how to discriminate valid from invalid cues, but are not using this information consistently when making their group estimates.     

Culture change: A training program for recent immigrant professionals from the former Soviet Union

The article describes a training program in structural/integrative family therapy for immigrant professionals from the former Soviet Union at the Training Center of the Shiluv Institute for Family and Couple Therapy in Jerusalem. The program was instituted to meet the pressing needs of a mass immigration of half a million people that came to Israel between 1990 and 1992. This is a retrospective look at the journey of the initial group of psychiatrists and psychologists who changed country, culture, language, and professional orientation in just two years. The authors state their conclusions as to the most expedient way to organize therapy for families from the former Soviet Union — a population in need of help but lacking an awareness of therapy and suspicious of the outsider.     

What readers bring to the processing of fictional texts

Research on text processing has generally focused on the types of inferences that all readers draw in common. Our research examines aspects of processing that depend on the particular relation of the reader to the text. Students read fictional stories that contained weak and unsupported assertions and that were set either at their own school or at another school. We expected that they would be prompted to process the story information thoroughly enough to reject the assertions only if they were familiar with the story setting. Consistent with this expectation, the results showed that the away-school story, but not the home-school story, had a significant impact on students’ beliefs. These results support the view that readers must actively construct disbelief when processing fictional information.