Global supervenience and belief

Global supervenience of beliefs about physical states of affairs on such states has strongly counter-intuitive consequences about what beliefs we can nomologically hold. This is an argument against a global supervenience of all mental properties on physical ones, and, since that is implied by strong supervenience, also against that as the preferred materialist thesis.     

Errors in Planning and Decision-making and the Nature of Human Information Processing

Cet article aborde la question de la régulation de l'action humaine dans le contrôle des systémes hautement complexes. La "régulation de l'action" recouvre l'intéraction de la fixation des objectifs, des activités de prévision, de l'élaboration des hypothèses, du planning, de la prise de décision et de la réflexion. Des erreurs et des fautes caractéristiques relevant du planning et de la prise de décision sont décrites et rapportées à divers aspects du système humain de traitement de l'information. Beaucoup de fautes et d'erreurs renvoient à un nombre restreint de caractéristiques de l'esprit humain. On montre en outre qu'il n'est en rien facile d'échapper à ces fautes puisque ces processus de traitement de l'information que détient l'esprit humain sont parfaitement fonctionnels dans d'autres contextes.
This article deals with human action regulation when controlling very complex systems. "Action regulation" means the interaction of goal elaboration, forecasting activities, hypothesis formation, planning, decision making, and self reflection. Typical errors and mistakes in human planning and decision making are reported and related to characteristics of the human information processing system. It is demonstrated that a lot of very different errors and mistakes are based on a few characteristies of the human mind. Additionally we demonstrate that it is in no way simple to avoid these mistakes, as these information processing characteristies of the human mind are otherwise quite functional in a number of contexts.     

Position effects in encoding briefly exposed item matrices: evidence for a reading bias or merely a matter of the selection criterion?

Position effects are frequently reported in experiments that investigate the recognition of items from briefly exposed stimulus matrices. A reliable finding is the ability to report items from the first row of the matrix more accurately than from the second row. The present experiments explore whether this position effect depends upon the selection criterion used to indicate the subgroup of items that has to be reported in a given trial. In Experiment 1, German and Chinese participants were presented with language-specific items which had to be selected by column. In Experiment 2, Germans were presented with Latin letters and the selection criterion was letter color. A strong row effect was evident in both experiments although the selection criteria did not prompt a line-by-line grouping of the items. The row effect is seen as a manifestation of top-down processing that is derived from reading habits.     

Some strangeness in the proportion,or how to stop worrying and learn to love the mechanistic forces of darkness

Understanding humans requires viewing them as mechanisms of some sort, since understanding anything requires seeing it as a mechanism. It is science’s job to reveal mechanisms. But science reveals much more than that: it also reveals enduring mystery—strangeness in the proportion. Concentrating just on the scientific side of Selinger’s and Engström’s call for a moratorium on cyborg discourse, I argue that this strangeness prevents cyborg discourse from diminishing us.     

Stationäre Rehabilitation alkoholabhängiger Patienten

Systemic therapy concepts are widely used in therapy and rehabilitation of alcohol addictive patients. Although very useful in practice, evaluation studies are rare. Adequate evaluation strategies should be developed and implemented. This study was realized in a clinical rehabilitation centre (Hirtenstein, Allgäu/Germany), whose systemic concept is characterized by patient's wideranged possibilities of choice concerning therapy measures and therapy goals, the activation of social and personal resources, the development of an individually appropriate life-style, the training of desired competencies, and an offer for marital and family therapy. The evaluation is based on a repeated measures design without control group. The instruments and constructs of the evaluation are: F-SOZU (perceived social support), IIP (perceived interpersonal problems), MLDL (quality of life), SOC (sense of coherence), and an assessment sheet for personal resources (RI). Patients (n= 44) reported increased personal ressources as well as an increased level of quality of life. Perceived social support and the sense of coherence changed only moderately. Scaling of treatment satisfaction and goal attainment at the end of the rehabilitation program resulted in high positive scores. Patients reported only positive, no negative treatment side effects. The results indicate the usefulness of systemic and resource oriented concepts in the rehabilitation of alcohol addictive patients.     

Psychopathy and Anxiety in Children and Adolescents: New Insights on Developmental Pathways to Offending

This study examined the relation between psychopathy and anxiety in 130 juvenile offenders. Adolescents were administered three psychopathy scales (PCL-YV, APSD, and SRP-II), a measure of psychopathology (APS), and subsequently followed prospectively in the community for three years in order to track recidivism. Three mediational models were tested to determine whether psychopathy mediates the relation between anxiety (trait anxiety, fearlessness, and trauma) and future offending. Findings indicated that psychopathy mediated the relation between two types of anxiety (trait anxiety and fearlessness) and recidivism when using the PCL-YV as an index for psychopathy. These influences were not supported when using self-report measures of psychopathy (APSD and SRP-II) and the meditational models did not apply to the anxiety subtype of trauma for any of the psychopathy measures. The PCL-YV mediational models provide new insights on the relation between psychopathy anxiety and offending. Specifically, pathways from fearlessness to psychopathy and later offending were in the expected direction. Surprisingly, higher levels of trait anxiety were linked with higher levels of psychopathy and subsequent offending. This developmental difference is in contrast with theory and the adult literature on this topic. The results from the current study suggest that both fear and anxiety may be important considerations in treatment planning for the reduction of adolescent offending.     

Tonic Activity Level in the Right Prefrontal Cortex Predicts Individuals' Risk Taking

ABSTRACT— Human risk taking is characterized by a large amount of individual heterogeneity. In this study, we applied resting-state electroencephalography, which captures stable individual differences in neural activity, before subjects performed a risk-taking task. Using a source-localization technique, we found that the baseline cortical activity in the right prefrontal cortex predicts individual risk-taking behavior. Individuals with higher baseline cortical activity in this brain area display more risk aversion than do other individuals. This finding demonstrates that neural characteristics that are stable over time can predict a highly complex behavior such as risk-taking behavior and furthermore suggests that hypoactivity in the right prefrontal cortex might serve as a dispositional indicator of lower regulatory abilities, which is expressed in greater risk-taking behavior.