The Marriage Contract

This article is intended to serve as an introduction to the concept of the marriage contract, which has proved to be a useful clinical tool for clarification and treatment of troubled marriages. Transactional as well as intrapsychic factors are important aspects of marital dynamics. The contract concept employs both these behavioral parameters and facilitates therapeutic intervention at both levels.     

Toward quantifying the abuse liability of ultraviolet tanning: A behavioral economic approach to tanning addiction

Many adults engage in ultraviolet indoor tanning despite evidence of its association with skin cancer. The constellation of behaviors associated with ultraviolet indoor tanning is analogous to that in other behavioral addictions. Despite a growing literature on ultraviolet indoor tanning as an addiction, there remains no consensus on how to identify ultraviolet indoor tanning addictive tendencies. The purpose of the present study was to translate a behavioral economic task more commonly used in substance abuse to quantify the "abuse liability" of ultraviolet indoor tanning, establish construct validity, and determine convergent validity with the most commonly used diagnostic tools for ultraviolet indoor tanning addiction (i.e., mCAGE and mDSM‐IV‐TR). We conducted a between‐groups study using a novel hypothetical Tanning Purchase Task to quantify intensity and elasticity of ultraviolet indoor tanning demand and permit statistical comparisons with the mCAGE and mDSM‐IV‐TR. Results suggest that behavioral economic demand is related to ultraviolet indoor tanning addiction status and adequately discriminates between potential addicted individuals from nonaddicted individuals. Moreover, we provide evidence that the Tanning Purchase Task renders behavioral economic indicators that are relevant to public health research. The present findings are limited to two ultraviolet indoor tanning addiction tools and a relatively small sample of high‐risk ultraviolet indoor tanning users; however, these pilot data demonstrate the potential for behavioral economic assessment tools as diagnostic and research aids in ultraviolet indoor tanning addiction studies.     

A crowdsourced nickel‐and‐dime approach to analog OBM research: A behavioral economic framework for understanding workforce attrition

Incentives are a popular method to achieve desired employee performance; however, research on optimal incentive magnitude is lacking. Behavioral economic demand curves model persistence of responding in the face of increasing cost and may be suitable to examine the reinforcing value of incentives on work performance. The present use‐inspired basic study integrated an experiential human operant task within a crowdsourcing platform to evaluate the applicability of behavioral economics for quantifying changes in workforce attrition. Participants included 88 Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers who earned either a $0.05 or $0.10 incentive for completing a progressively increasing response requirement. Analyses revealed statistically significant differences in breakpoint between the two groups. Additionally, a novel translation of the Kaplan‐Meier survival‐curve analyses for use within a demand curve framework allowed for examination of elasticity of workforce attrition. Results indicate greater inelastic attrition in the $0.05 group. We discuss the benefits of a behavioral economic approach to modeling employee behavior, how the metrics obtained from the elasticity of workforce attrition analyses (e.g., P _max) may be used to set goals for employee behavior while balancing organizational costs, and how economy type may have influenced observed outcomes.     

Updating the Vinaya: Formulating Buddhist Monastic Laws and Pure Rules in Contemporary Korea

Contemporary Buddhist monastic communities often find some of the traditional Vinaya regulations to be outdated, insufficient, difficult to follow and counterproductive to the practice and propagation of the religion in the modern world. Focusing on the Korean Chogye Order, this paper will illustrate the manner in which monastics today negotiate between their historical disciplinary codes and current social values to formulate new Vinaya-related literature. It will demonstrate how the Order’s emerging legal system democratizes the monastic bureaucracy, objectifies financials and establishes a neutral punishment-based judicial system in line with the political values of secular society. In addition, it will introduce the recent creation of new Chogye Order Pure Rules, which update the Vinaya with original codification of modern consumerism, environmental ethics and technological use. Particular attention will be given to the way this new Vinaya construction represents explicit attempts to improve the reputation of the sangha in face of social critique.     

Against the conditional correctness of scepticism

Stroud has argued for many years that scepticism is conditionally correct. We cannot, he claims, both undergo a Cartesian-style examination of the extent of our knowledge as well as avoid scepticism. One reason Stroud's position appears quite plausible is the so-called ‘totality condition’ imposed for this kind of examination: as enquiring philosophers we are called upon to assess all of our knowledge, all at once. However, in this paper I argue that Stroud's apparent understanding of the totality condition is mistaken. Evidently, Stroud thinks that honouring the totality condition amounts to imposing the strong requirement that we initially assume that we do not know anything about external reality. However, there is a weaker requirement available: that we initially not assume that we know anything about external reality. I argue i) that the weaker conception of the totality condition is most suitable for the kind of philosophical examination that Stroud seems to have in mind; and ii) that according to this same conception, scepticism is not conditionally correct.     

Do First- and Second-Generation Migrants Stay Longer in Social Assistance Than Natives in Belgium?

In many European countries, migrants are overrepresented in social assistance. In Belgium, at least 70% of social assistance beneficiaries are first- or second-generation migrants, as natives are often eligible for a social insurance benefit. Lower exit rates among migrants relative to natives could raise concern about the labour market inclusion of beneficiaries, as well as the financial sustainability and solidarity basis of the welfare state. This paper analyses whether migrants remain longer in social assistance than natives and whether migrants vary in their timing of exit by migration-history characteristics. We use longitudinal data from the social assistance administration linked to other administrative sources, including detailed information about migration histories of migrants. Using event history analysis, we track the exits from social assistance for 22,620 beneficiaries in the period June 2005–December 2009. We find that migrants have substantially longer median durations than natives. Controlling for socio-demographic characteristics, benefit and work histories, we find that most migrant groups have (slightly) lower exit rates than natives. Asylum seekers stay substantially longer in social assistance whereas migrants with longer durations of residence have shorter benefit periods than recent migrants. Second-generation migrants do not stay longer in social assistance than natives.     

Latent inhibition and asymmetrical visual-spatial attention in children with ADHD.

The research was designed to determine whether the purported hemispheric asymmetries that are associated with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affect performance on a selective attention visual search task, and whether any obtained asymmetry will be modulated by methylphenidate. Two groups of children (8-15 years) with ADHD, one with methylphenidate treatment (ADHD+) and one without (ADHD+), were compared to matched controls on a two-stage visual search task. The task assessed right-left visual field asymmetries and the effects of changing a previous distractor into a target. Such a procedure, related to latent inhibition (LI; poorer performance to a previously irrelevant stimulus than to a novel one), can provide evidence for dysfunctional processing of irrelevant stimuli. All three groups exhibited the LI effect. The ADHD group, however, exhibited less LI for left- than right-side targets, an effect absent in the control and ADHD+ groups, suggesting a lateralized attentional deficit for ADHD+ that was normalized by methylphenidate.     

Logic programs and connectionist networks

One facet of the question of integration of Logic and Connectionist Systems, and how these can complement each other, concerns the points of contact, in terms of semantics, between neural networks and logic programs. In this paper, we show that certain semantic operators for propositional logic programs can be computed by feedforward connectionist networks, and that the same semantic operators for first-order normal logic programs can be approximated by feedforward connectionist networks. Turning the networks into recurrent ones allows one also to approximate the models associated with the semantic operators. Our methods depend on a well-known theorem of Funahashi, and necessitate the study of when Funahashi's theorem can be applied, and also the study of what means of approximation are appropriate and significant.     

Towards defining a unified concept for the acceptability of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS): A conceptual analysis based on the case of Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA)

A key success factor in the future implementation of new in-vehicle technologies is in understanding how users will experience and respond to these devices. Although it is recognized that acceptance, acceptability and/or support is important, consistency in the definition of acceptability, and how it can be measured, is absent. In this paper we conceptualize acceptance as the attitudes towards a new device after its introduction and acceptability as the attitudes to it before its introduction. It is our goal to describe and conceptualize the most common and relevant socio-psychological factors that can influence acceptance and acceptability of Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA). By analysing the different theories and methods used in ISA trials we arrived at the 14 most potential indicators that could influence the definition of acceptability and acceptance. A test survey was conducted to determine if these indicators are relevant and if they affect acceptability. The use of a factor analysis helped to single out those questions that were deemed relevant in doing our conceptual acceptability analysis, and to allocate correlations between the different items. We conclude that we have found a concept with some main possible indicators that directly influence the acceptability of ISA.     

Sleep deprivation in adolescents and adults: changes in affect

The present study investigated the impact of sleep deprivation on several aspects of affective functioning in healthy participants selected from three different developmental periods: early adolescence (ages 10-13), midadolescence (ages 13-16), and adulthood (ages 30-60). Participants completed an affective functioning battery under conditions of sleep deprivation (a maximum of 6.5 hours total sleep time on the first night followed by a maximum of 2 hours total sleep time on the second night) and rest (approximately 7-8 hours total sleep time each night for two consecutive nights). Less positive affect was observed in the sleep-deprived, compared to rested, condition. This effect held for 9 of the 12 positive affect items on the PANAS-C. Participants also reported a greater increase in anxiety during a catastrophizing task and rated the likelihood of potential catastrophes as higher when sleep deprived, relative to when rested. Early adolescents appraised their main worry as more threatening when sleep deprived, relative to when rested. These results support and extend previous research underscoring the adverse affective consequences of sleep deprivation.