Implementation intentions as goal primes: Boosting self‐control in tempting environments

People often forget their long‐term strivings because their environment confronts them with attractive temptations. Previous research suggests that self‐control failures can be prevented by reminding people of their higher‐order goal. Therefore, we hypothesized that using implementation intentions as a tool to directly re‐activate people's higher‐order goal in tempting situations would effectively enhance self‐control. We tested this in the domain of dieting behavior. Results demonstrated that this specific planning strategy activated the dieting goal for unsuccessful dieters when exposed to tempting food cues (Study 1) and reduced their consumption of calorically dense food across 2 weeks (Study 2) compared to those in control conditions. This suggests that preparing people to think of their higher‐order goal when tempted can be used to protect ongoing goal striving. Appealing to higher‐order goals potentially makes implementation intentions flexible instruments of self‐regulation as this should trigger motivated behavior to reach goals and initiate various goal‐instrumental actions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Linear mapping of numbers onto space requires attention

Mapping of number onto space is fundamental to mathematics and measurement. Previous research suggests that while typical adults with mathematical schooling map numbers veridically onto a linear scale, pre-school children and adults without formal mathematics training, as well as individuals with dyscalculia, show strong compressive, logarithmic-like non-linearities when mapping both symbolic and non-symbolic numbers onto the numberline. Here we show that the use of the linear scale is dependent on attentional resources. We asked typical adults to position clouds of dots on a numberline of various lengths. In agreement with previous research, they did so veridically under normal conditions, but when asked to perform a concurrent attentionally-demanding conjunction task, the mapping followed a compressive, non-linear function. We model the non-linearity both by the commonly assumed logarithmic transform, and also with a Bayesian model of central tendency. These results suggest that veridical representation numerosity requires attentional mechanisms.     

The difficulty with the well-formedness of ontological statements

When Russell argued for his ontological convictions, for instance that there are negative facts or that there are universals, he expressed himself in English. But Wittgenstein must have noticed that from the point of view of Russell's ideal language these ontological statements appear to be pseudo-propositions. He believed therefore that what these statements pretend to say, could not really be said but only shown. Carnap discovered a way out of this mutism: what in the material mode of speech of the object language looks like a pseudo-proposition can be translated into a perfectly meaningful proposition in the formal mode of speech (in the metalinguistic mode of speech of the logical syntax of language). But is this ascent into the metalanguage necessary? Taking advantage of Lésniewski's logical system there exists another way outwe can expand the number of categories of our ideal language. But Le?niewski's formulas raise another profound problem, the problem of “semantical muteness” (cf. W. G. Lycan ‘Semantic Competence and Funny Functors’ Monist 64 (1979), 209–222).     

College Freshmens’ Orientation to Experts’ Personal Characteristics After Failure and the Customary Description of Others in Terms of Dispositions1

A laboratory experiment examined a cognitive response (static thinking) to the stressful experience of a shortcoming. Psychology freshmen performed a memory task that was manipulated in terms of its psychological relevance and difficulty. Additionally, experienced press to succeed was quantified in terms of the specificity of participants’ professional goal in the area of psychology. A control condition performed no task. Dependent measures were personal characteristics ascribed to professional psychologists. The results indicated a strong general tendency to use dispositions to describe others. But in accordance with theoretical predictions by Wicklund (1986a, 1986b), the orientation to traits and external qualities of professional psychologists (i. e., experts) after failure on a psychologically relevant task was correlated with the level of specificity of participants’ professional goal in the area of psychology. These findings suggest that the general orientation to dispositions when describing others is replaced by the process of static thinking after the stressful experience of personal incompetence and when the persons to be described are experts.     

Dynamische Komplexität in der Therapeut-Klient-Interaktion

The importance of client-therapist-relationship in psychotherapy has often been stressed. On the one hand, the quality of this relationship has proved to be an important predictor of therapy outcome, on the other hand the relationship itself is realized as a complex dynamic pattern of interpersonal interaction. It seems appropriate to investigate this dynamics by a microprocess analysis with high resolution. Interactive plans (idiographic self-presentation unities) of client and therapist were coded by a sampling frequency of 10 seconds. The coding system of plan activation follows the idea of synchronous musical score notation of different orchestra instruments. It allows for the representation of contextualized interactive behaviors. The context is introduced by the consideration of synchronous and diachronous plan-activation patterns of the interaction partners. The observed dynamic patterns are fulfilling the prerequisites of usual definitions of “chaos”: irregularity of the process, restricted prediction horizon, and still some global order of the dynamic process. Based on nominal data (on-off-patterns), a method for the identification of order within irregular patterns of plan activations is presented. The frequency distributions of plans realize the shape of 1/f^α-noise, indicating features of self-organized criticality within the dynamic system of client-therapist-interaction.     

Socratic Proofs and Paraconsistency: A Case Study

This paper develops a new proof method for two propositional paraconsistent logics: the propositional part of Batens' weak paraconsistent logic CLuN and Schütte's maximally paraconsistent logic Φ_v. Proofs are de.ned as certain sequences of questions. The method is grounded in Inferential Erotetic Logic.     

Fibred Security Language

We study access control policies based on the says operator by introducing a logical framework called Fibred Security Language (FSL) which is able to deal with features like joint responsibility between sets of principals and to identify them by means of first-order formulas. FSL is based on a multimodal logic methodology. We first discuss the main contributions from the expressiveness point of view, we give semantics for the language both for classical and intuitionistic fragment), we then prove that in order to express well-known properties like ‘speaks-for’ or ‘hand-off’, defined in terms of says, we do not need second-order logic (unlike previous approaches) but a decidable fragment of first-order logic suffices. We propose a model-driven study of the says axiomatization by constraining the Kripke models in order to respect desirable security properties, we study how existing access control logics can be translated into FSL and we give completeness for the logic.     

A Meta-model of Access Control in a Fibred Security Language

The issue of representing access control requirements continues to demand significant attention. The focus of researchers has traditionally been on developing particular access control models and policy specification languages for particular applications. However, this approach has resulted in an unnecessary surfeit of models and languages. In contrast, we describe a general access control model and a logic-based specification language from which both existing and novel access control models may be derived as particular cases and from which several approaches can be developed for domain-specific applications. We will argue that our general framework has a number of specific attractions and an implication of our work is to encourage a methodological shift from a study of the particulars of access control to its generalities.