The Appeal to Expert Opinion: Quantitative Support for a Bayesian Network Approach

The appeal to expert opinion is an argument form that uses the verdict of an expert to support a position or hypothesis. A previous scheme‐based treatment of the argument form is formalized within a Bayesian network that is able to capture the critical aspects of the argument form, including the central considerations of the expert's expertise and trustworthiness. We propose this as an appropriate normative framework for the argument form, enabling the development and testing of quantitative predictions as to how people evaluate this argument, suggesting that such an approach might be beneficial to argumentation research generally. We subsequently present two experiments as an example of the potential for future research in this vein, demonstrating that participants' quantitative ratings of the convincingness of a proposition that has been supported with an appeal to expert opinion were broadly consistent with the predictions of the Bayesian model.     

The hegemony of the practical in embodied cognitive science and the question of bodily vulnerability

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - When perception is made the subject of philosophy, it is primarily understood as pre-theoretical sensual knowledge, and the question of its truth content...     

LGBTQ Adolescents’ Positive and Negative Emotions and Experiences in U.S. High Schools

In a national survey of more than 19,000 U.S. high school students, we compared how LGBTQ youth and their non-LGBTQ peers felt at school and how they perceived social and academic experiences. We examined differences in emotions and school experiences across gender identities, sexual identities, and their intersections. LGBTQ adolescents reported significantly more frequent negative emotions and bullying, consistent with previous research. LGBTQ students also reported less frequent experiences of positive emotions at school and less frequent positive school experiences (i.e., positive peer and teacher relationships, subjective task value, and persistence support). Students who were both gender and sexual identity minority reported the most frequent negative and least frequent positive experiences at school, compared to students who were neither a gender or sexual identity minority. Analyses of the intersection of gender and sexual identity showed that heterosexual male students experienced more frequent positive emotions and school experiences, and fewer negative emotions and bullying, compared to all other groups. We discuss how these differences might be addressed through school interventions and future research.     

Gender and Emotions at Work: Organizational Rank Has Greater Emotional Benefits for Men than Women

Sex Roles - The way people feel is important for how they behave and perform in the workplace. Experiencing more positive?and less negative?emotions at work is often associated with...     

Responses to commentaries

This paper is an author response to three commentaries, by Robert Kraut and Itamar Rosenn (2012), Barry Wellman (2012) and Mark van Vugt (2012), on our article entitled ‘Relationships and the social brain: Integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives’ ( Sutcliffe, Dunbar, Binder, & Arrow, 2012 ).     

Aligning Expatriate Managers’ Expectations with Complex Global Assignments

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical, yet practical framework for managing unrealistic expectations of expatriate marketing managers relative to their role in complex global marketing assignments. The formation of these unrealistic expatriate marketing managers’ expectations is examined using relational contracting theory. We explore alternative HRM evaluation/support designs that can suppress the development of expatriate marketing managers’ entitlement process and thus enhance the reality of expatriate marketing managers’ expectations relative to the role in a subsidiary of the multinational enterprise.     

Investigating the link between liking versus wanting self-esteem and depression in a nationally representative sample of american adults

The self‐esteem movement has been around since the 1970s, and may have influenced how much value people place on self‐esteem. We predicted a negative relationship between age and the amount of value placed on self‐esteem boosts. We also investigated the correlates of liking versus wanting self‐esteem boosts (and other pleasant rewards) on depression. A nationally representative sample of American adults (N = 867) indicated how much they liked and wanted several pleasant rewards (i.e., sex, food, alcohol, money, friendship, self‐esteem boost). They also completed a standardized measure of depressive symptoms. As expected, there was a negative relationship between age and valuing self‐esteem boosts, sex, and alcohol. People with depressive symptoms wanted self‐esteem boosts, even though they did not like them very much. Similar effects were obtained for depressive symptoms and alcohol and friendship. This is the first research to show that self‐esteem boosts are more valued among a nationally representative sample of younger American adults. It also is the first research to explore the association between depression and the motivation to boost self‐esteem. People with depressive symptoms want self‐esteem, and may pursue it, but this pursuit may feel unrewarding because they do not derive pleasure from it.     

Toward a cognitive view of trait mindfulness: distinct cognitive skills predict its observing and nonreactivity facets

Dispositional variations in mindfulness and its facets have garnered considerable recent interest in the clinical and personality literatures. Theoretically, high mindful individuals have been characterized as more attuned to momentary sensations and perceptions and/or better able to execute behavior in a controlled manner, yet data of this relatively cognitive type have not been reported. In addition, perceptual attunement and executive control are distinct skills that may underlie, or at least correlate with, distinct facets of mindfulness. In 3 studies involving college students (N = 297), support for the latter idea was found. Individuals high in the observing (but not nonreactivity) facet of mindfulness demonstrated superior perceptual abilities in visual working memory (Study 1) and temporal order (Study 2) tasks. On the other hand, individuals high in the nonreactivity (but not observing) facet of mindfulness exhibited greater cognitive control flexibility (Study 3). Implications for understanding the cognitive basis of mindfulness facets are discussed.     

Targeting regressions: Do readers pay attention to the left?

The perceptual span during normal reading extends approximately 14 to 15 characters to the right and three to four characters to the left of a current fixation. In the present study, we investigated whether the perceptual span extends farther than three to four characters to the left immediately before readers execute a regression. We used a display-change paradigm in which we masked words beyond the three-to-four-character range to the left of a fixation. We hypothesized that if reading behavior was affected by this manipulation before regressions but not before progressions, we would have evidence that the perceptual span extends farther left before leftward eye movements. We observed significantly shorter regressive saccades and longer fixation and gaze durations in the masked condition when a regression was executed. Forward saccades were entirely unaffected by the manipulations. We concluded that the perceptual span during reading changes, depending on the direction of a following saccade.