The rise and fall of the Pacquiao Effect: Contrastive priming and national identification

We demonstrate in a series of field and controlled experiments that assimilative and contrastive priming effects can be observed in the pattern of self‐concept change in response to a major cultural event. Study 1 used the brief implicit association test (BIAT) to measure national identification of Filipinos online across a period of time that encompassed a national sporting event. The pattern of scores support the hypothesis that while people who were ambivalent about identifying with Filipino concepts exhibited an assimilation effect (i.e. a slight rise in identification after the fight), people who already highly identified with being Filipino experienced a contrast effect (i.e. a slight drop in identification). Study 2 replicated this result five months later with a new sample and ruled out several possible alternative hypotheses. A subsequent controlled experiment and a qualitative investigation consistently supported the hypothesis that the pattern observed in the previous studies is more consistent with assimilative and contrastive priming effects rather than disidentification.     

Analytic Rules for Mereology

We present a sequent calculus for extensional mereology. It extends the classical first-order sequent calculus with identity by rules of inference corresponding to well-known mereological axioms. Structural rules, including cut, are admissible.     

Hard and Soft Preparation Sets in Boolean Games

A fundamental problem in game theory is the possibility of reaching equilibrium outcomes with undesirable properties, e.g., inefficiency. The economics literature abounds with models that attempt to modify games in order to avoid such undesirable properties, for example through the use of subsidies and taxation, or by allowing players to undergo a bargaining phase before their decision. In this paper, we consider the effect of such transformations in Boolean games with costs, where players control propositional variables that they can set to true or false, and are primarily motivated to seek the satisfaction of some goal formula, while secondarily motivated to minimise the costs of their actions. We adopt (pure) preparation sets (prep sets) as our basic solution concept. A preparation set is a set of outcomes that contains for every player at least one best response to every outcome in the set. Prep sets are well-suited to the analysis of Boolean games, because we can naturally represent prep sets as propositional formulas, which in turn allows us to refer to prep formulas. The preference structure of Boolean games with costs makes it possible to distinguish between hard and soft prep sets. The hard prep sets of a game are sets of valuations that would be prep sets in that game no matter what the cost function of the game was. The properties defined by hard prep sets typically relate to goal-seeking behaviour, and as such these properties cannot be eliminated from games by, for example, taxation or subsidies. In contrast, soft prep sets can be eliminated by an appropriate system of incentives. Besides considering what can happen in a game by unrestricted manipulation of players’ cost function, we also investigate several mechanisms that allow groups of players to form coalitions and eliminate undesirable outcomes from the game, even when taxes or subsidies are not a possibility.     

Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy for Treating Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in First-onset Schizophrenia

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are perceptive-like experiences happening without appropriate stimuli, occurring in two thirds of schizophrenia patients, where they often cause emotional suffering and dangerous behaviors, and interfere with social relationships. Patients with schizophrenia involving AVHs can also be drug-resistant or they may discontinue medications. The most well-known psychotherapeutic intervention for voice-hearing is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which focuses on reducing distress by modifying hearers’ beliefs about their voices. We hypothesize that it is possible to reinforce the clinical approach to AVHs by taking into consideration (a) that patients generally hear voices in particular interpersonal contexts where they experience negative emotions; (b) the relationship between AVHs and metacognition, namely the ability to make sense of mental states. On this basis, AVHs can be seen not just as a cause of emotional distress as CBT postulates, but the outcome of difficulties in meta-cognitively making sense of interpersonal exchanges. In this paper, we describe the treatment of a young man at the onset of schizophrenia with pervasive negative AVHs. The patient was treated with metacognitive interpersonal therapy (MIT), aimed to promote the patient’s metacognition. With this aim, in the first part of the treatment, each time AVHs emerged, the patient’s level of arousal was high and his metacognitive ability very low, the therapist treated AVHs helping the patient to understand and cope with the emotional suffering connected with AVHs. At a more advanced stage of therapy, the therapist helped the patient reach the point of understanding the social triggers which, together with the patient’s self-schemas, ignited his auditory hallucinations; this created the conditions for a significant reduction of the pervasiveness of AVHs.     

The "Efficiency" Effect of Conceptual Referents on the Generation of Happiness: A Cross-National Analysis

Journal of Happiness Studies - This paper analyses how different definitions of happiness affect the individual assessment of subjective wellbeing. Bearing in mind the production theory, we study...     

Space and Place. A Morphological Perspective

Axiomathes - The morphological account of landscape aims to overcome the contrast between an objectivist/scientific account of space and the more qualitative/subjective account of place. It does so...     

A Comparison of MMPI-2 Profiles Between Parental Alienation Cases and Custody Cases

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The present study aimed at understanding the personality features of mothers and fathers engaged in parental alienation—a family dynamic in which one...     

Temperament and Character Inventory-R (TCI-R) and Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ): convergence and divergence

This study evaluated the correspondence between measures of two competing theories of personality, the five-factor model as measured by the Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ), and Cloninger's psychobiological theory measured by the Temperament and Character Inventory-Revised (TCI-R). A sample of 900 Italian participants, balanced with respect to sex (393 men and 507 women), and representative of the adult population with respect to age (range 18 to 70 years; M = 39.6, SD = 15.7) completed the TCI-R and the Big Five Questionnaire. All TCI-R personality dimensions except Self-Transcendence were moderately correlated with one or more of the Big Five dimensions (from r = .40 to .61), and the two instruments showed areas of convergence. However, the differences outweighed the similarities, indicating that these current conceptualizations and measures of personality are somewhat inconsistent with each other.