The condom purchase task: A hypothetical demand method for evaluating sexual health decision-making

Behavioral economic theory has proved useful for understanding the influence of delay and probability on sexual health decision-making. Demand is another principle at the intersection of microeconomics and psychology that has helped advance research relevant to health behaviors. The purpose of the present study was to develop and test a demand measure related to sexual health decision-making and the influence of sexually transmitted infection (STI) risk. Participants (N = 438) recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk completed a commodity purchase task assessing hypothetical condom demand. Condom demand was evaluated at varied prices for use with hypothetical sexual partners that varied in STI risk. Demand was characterized by prototypic decreases in consumption with increases in cost. Higher partner STI risk was associated with greater intentions for condom-protected sex at no cost and smaller decreases in condom demand with increases in cost. Price sensitivity was also related to individual difference factors relevant to sexual health (e.g., alcohol use severity, lower STI knowledge). This study supports the utility of a condom purchase task for indexing condom valuation and capturing individual difference and contextual risk factors relevant to STI transmission. Future studies may leverage this methodology as a means to study sexual health decision-making.     

Equity and derogation of those against whom we have aggressed

Casting the classic provocation-retaliation paradigm in an equity framework, we hypothesized that persons realizing their retribution was excessive would derogate their victim, but only when they did not anticipate an opportunity to compensate her. After retaliating against a peer who had harshly evaluated their essays, 40 female undergraduates were informed that either a serious or mild misfortune had recently been suffered by their partner, and were led to believe that at the outset of the experiment they had carelessly overlooked this “mitigating” information. Half the participants anticipated a later opportunity to do a favor for the other woman. Regardless of the severity of the mitigating information the women were more negative in their evaluation of the partner when they did not anticipate a subsequent opportunity to do the partner a favor. The results are discussed in terms of equity restoration in reactions to having aggressed. © 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

CAB: Connectionist Analogy Builder

The ability to make informative comparisons is central to human cognition. Comparison involves aligning two representations and placing their elements into correspondence. Detecting correspondences is a necessary component of analogical inference, recognition, categorization, schema formation, and similarity judgment. Connectionist Analogy Builder (CAB) determines correspondences through a simple iterative computation that matches elements in one representation with elements playing compatible roles in the other representation while simultaneously enforcing structural constraints. CAB shows promise as a process model of comparison as its performance can be related to human performance (e.g., solution trajectory, error patterns, time‐on‐task). Furthermore, CAB's bounded working memory allows it to account for the inherent capacity limitations of human processing. CAB's strengths are its parsimony, transparency of operations, and ability to generate performance predictions. In this paper, CAB is evaluated against benchmark phenomena from the analogy literature.     

Dogmatism repuzzled

Harman and Lewis credit Kripke with having formulated a puzzle that seems to show that knowledge entails dogmatism. The puzzle is widely regarded as having been solved. In this paper we argue that this standard solution, in its various versions, addresses only a limited aspect of the puzzle and holds no promise of fully resolving it. Analyzing this failure and the proper rendering of the puzzle, it is suggested that it poses a significant challenge for the defense of epistemic closure.     

Sleeping Beauty meets Monday

The Sleeping Beauty problem—first presented by A. Elga in a philosophical context—has captured much attention. The problem, we contend, is more aptly regarded as a paradox: apparently, there are cases where one ought to change one’s credence in an event’s taking place even though one gains no new information or evidence, or alternatively, one ought to have a credence other than 1/2 in the outcome of a future coin toss even though one knows that the coin is fair. In this paper we argue for two claims. First, that Sleeping Beauty does gain potentially new relevant information upon waking up on Monday. Second, his credence shift is warranted provided it accords with a calculation that is a result of conditionalization on the relevant information: “this day is an experiment waking day” (a day within the experiment on which one is woken up). Since Sleeping Beauty knows what days d could refer to, he can calculate the probability that the referred to waking day is a Monday or a Tuesday providing an adequate resolution of the paradox.     

Effects of daylight-saving time changes on stock market volatility: a comment

In a recent article in this journal, Berument, Dogan, and Onar (2010) challenged the existence of the previously documented daylight-saving effect. Kamstra, Kramer, and Levi's original finding (2000) was that average stock market returns on Mondays following time changes are economically and statistically significantly lower than typical Monday returns. Kamstra, et al. hypothesized that the effect may arise due to heightened anxiety or risk aversion on the part of market participants after they experience a 1-hr. disruption in their sleep habits, in accordance with prior findings in the psychology literature linking sleep desynchronosis with anxiety. Berument, et al. replicated the original findings using ordinary least squares estimation, but when they modeled the mean of returns using a method prone to producing biased estimates, they obtained puzzling results. The analysis here, based on standard, unbiased modeling techniques, shows that the daylight-saving effect remains intact in the U.S.     

A growth mindset intervention to improve mental health in adolescents during COVID-19

COVID-19 poses a considerable threat to adolescent mental health. We investigated depression rates in teens from pre to post-COVID. We also explored if leveraging a growth mindset intervention (“Healthy Minds”) could improve adolescent mental health outcomes during the pandemic, especially for adolescents experiencing the most distress. In Study 1, we recruited youth from schools in a rural southern community (N = 239) and used a pre-post design. In Study 2, we recruited an online sample (N = 833) and used a longitudinal randomized control trial design to test the effectiveness of Healthy Minds. Across both studies, there is evidence of higher rates of depression in youth during COVID-19, relative to pre-pandemic numbers. In Study 1, the intervention effectively changed psychological and behavioral processes related to mental health, especially for adolescents experiencing greater COVID-19 stress. However, in Study 2, the intervention failed to impact depression rates or symptoms at follow-up.