Negotiator cognitions: A descriptive approach to negotiators' understanding of their opponents

Substantial evidence exists that negotiators frequently fail to attain readily available and mutually beneficial outcomes. This paper provides a preliminary model of why these failures occur. We assume that negotiators are decision makers, and that their errors derive from cognitive processes ignored by utility-maximization theories. We focus on one part of the model: the systematic tendency to ignore the cognitions of opponent negotiators. Empirical evidence clarifying negotiators' cognitive processes is generated using verbal protocol techniques in a controlled negotiation task. The results show that subjects simplify the negotiation task, in part by ignoring contingencies introduced by the knowledge possessed by their opponents. The discussion focuses on how subjects simplify the task and how the decision-making perspective helps redirect the negotiation literature.     

Four Dimensions of Criticism Against Gender-Fair Language

Sex Roles - The gender-neutral third-person pronoun singular hen was recently introduced in Swedish as a complement to she (hon) and he (han). The initiative to add hen initially received strong...     

Semantic interference in the picture-word interference task: Is there a pre-lexical,conceptual contribution to the effect?

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Picture naming takes longer in the presence of a semantic-categorically related distractor word compared to an unrelated distractor word. This semantic...     

Profiling Korean sex crimes: Offender characteristics and crime scene actions

The present study aimed to examine the demographic information of sex offenders in South Korea and explore whether a U.K. thematic model of criminal behaviour could be replicated in the Korean context. The 27 variables of crime scene actions derived from 50 Korean sexual offences through a content analysis were analysed with smallest space analysis. Chi‐square was also administered to explore the differences in offender characteristics among behavioural themes. Consequently, three separate action themes, hostility–involvement, theft, and control, were revealed. Next, each case was assigned to one of the dominant or hybrid themes, with 84% of the total cases being classified to the dominant themes. Moreover, there were significant differences in four offender characteristics between the themes: “previous conviction of robbery,” “previous conviction of sexual crime,” “knowing the victim,” and “vehicle use.” These outcomes have implications for the development of the Korean profiling system.     

The Families and Democracy Project

The Families and Democracy Project moves family therapists and other professionals into the community via a critique of traditional provider/consumer models of family services, a set of principles about the civic engagement of families in partnership with professionals, and a set of public practices for working on community problems. We describe the Families and Democracy model and three specific projects. We distinguish the model from traditional hierarchical and collaborative models of working with families. And we discuss lessons we have learned, and our plans to take this work to its next developmental stage.     

Polysynaptic potentiation at different levels of rat olfactory pathways following learning

This study was aimed at investigating the consequences of learning on late polysynaptic components of evoked field potential signals recorded in parallel at different levels of the olfactory pathways. For this, evoked field potentials induced by electrical stimulation of the olfactory bulb were recorded simultaneously in the anterior piriform cortex, the posterior piriform cortex, the lateral entorhinal cortex, and the dentate gyrus. The different parameters of late components were measured in each site before and after completion of associative learning in anesthetized rats. In the learning task, rats were trained to associate electrical stimulation of one olfactory bulb electrode with the delivery of sucrose (positive reward) and stimulation of a second olfactory bulb electrode with the delivery of quinine (negative reward). In this way, stimulation of the same olfactory bulb electrodes used for inducing field potentials served as a discriminative cue in the learning paradigm. The data confirmed previous observation that learning was associated with a lowering in late-component-1 intensity of induction in the posterior piriform cortex. The use of simultaneous recording allowed us to further specify the consequences of learning on late-component distribution in the studied network. Indeed the data showed that whereas before learning, late component 1 was rather uniformly distributed among the recorded sites; following learning, its expression was facilitated preferentially in the posterior piriform cortex and lateral entorhinal cortex. Furthermore, learning was accompanied by the emergence of a new late component (late component 2), which occurred simultaneously in the four recording sites. The possible involvement of potentiation of polysynaptic components in recognition and/or consolidation processes will be discussed.     

Immediate serial recall of words and nonwords: Tests of the retrieval-based hypothesis

In two experiments, the immediate serial recall of lists of words or nonwords was investigated under quiet and articulatory suppression conditions. The results showed better item recall for words but better order recall for nonwords, as measured with proportion of order errors per item recalled. Articulatory suppression hindered the recall of item information for both types of lists and of order information for words. These results are interpreted in light of a retrieval account in which degraded phonological traces must undergo a reconstruction process calling on long-term knowledge of the tobe-remembered items. The minimal long-term representations for nonwords are thought to be responsible for their lower item recall and their better order recall. Under suppression, phonological representations are thought to be minimal, producing trace interpretation problems responsible for the greater number of item and order errors, relative to quiet conditions. The very low performance for nonwords under suppression is attributed to the combination of degraded phonological information and minimal long-term knowledge.