The Relationship Between Arousal and the Remembered Duration of Positive Events

The relation between affect and retrospective duration estimation has hardly been examined. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by studying the influence of arousal on the remembered duration of positive events. On the basis of the contextual change model, we expected that high‐arousal positive events would be remembered as longer compared with low‐arousal positive events. To test this hypothesis, we set up a naturalistic study in which participants were asked at the end of a pleasant amusement park ride at the local fair to rate how pleasant and aroused they felt during the ride as well as to estimate the ride's duration. Feeling more aroused during a ride was associated with longer estimates of the ride's duration. Results are discussed within the framework of retrospective time estimation models. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Child Personality as Moderator of Outcome in a School‐based Intervention for Preventing Externalising Behaviour

Studying moderators of intervention effects is essential to elucidate what works for whom. The present study investigated whether child personality moderates short‐term and follow‐up effects of an individualised preventive school‐based intervention for children with externalising behaviour. The sample consisted of 48 schools, with 264 fourth‐grade children displaying externalising behaviour (M_age = 10.2 years), randomly assigned to the intervention (n = 191) or no intervention control (n = 73) condition. Teachers and children reported at pretest, posttest and follow‐up test about reactive and proactive aggression. Child personality was assessed by teachers at pretest. Child conscientiousness moderated short‐term intervention effects, indicating that more organised and planful children benefited more from the intervention. Child extraversion moderated both short‐term and follow‐up intervention effects, with low extraverted children showing larger effects. These results affirm the importance of including personality as moderator of intervention effects in future studies, as interventions adapted to specific child traits might yield larger effects. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning and Affect Following Near‐Miss Outcomes in Simulated Gambling

Gambling near‐misses are non‐rewarded events that resemble a winning configuration. Past research using slot machines has shown that moderate rates of near‐misses increase gambling persistence, but the mechanisms supporting this persistence are unclear. One hypothesis is that near‐misses are mistakenly interpreted as signals of skill acquisition, supporting learning and fuelling the ‘illusion of control’. A slot machine simulation was administered to 60 volunteers, with ratings of the perceived chances of winning, pleasure and motivation to play following particular outcomes. Psychophysiological measures (electrodermal activity and heart rate) were taken, and gambling persistence was measured after 30 trials. Near‐misses were similar to full‐miss outcomes in that they were regarded as unpleasant. However, near‐misses were akin to win outcomes in that they increased motivations to play and electrodermal activity. Learning was evidenced by the expectancy of winning increasing following wins and decreasing after losses. Although there was no overall change in expectancy of winning after near‐misses across all participants, those subjects reporting a greater increase in the expectancy of winning following a near‐miss showed more persistent play, consistent with the learning hypothesis. Greater heart rate acceleration following near‐misses was also associated with persistence. We also observed differential effects of near‐misses where the reel stopped either side of the winning position (‘payline’): motivational effects were restricted to near‐misses stopping before the payline, whereas near‐misses that stopped after the payline were primarily aversive. The payline effects are not predicted by the learning hypothesis and may indicate an affective component to near‐misses, possibly linked to counterfactual processing. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Factors influencing two types of congruence in multirater judgments

In two studies of 360° judgments, it was shown that congruence measured in terms of intercorrelations between ratings by different people (congruence‐r) and in terms of the discrepancy between those ratings (congruence‐d) were empirically independent of each other. Congruence‐r was greatest, and congruence‐d was smallest, between judgments made by a target person and his or her supervisor, rather than by subordinates or peers; the differential observability of rated behaviors predicted congruence‐r but not congruence‐d. Variations in both forms of congruence were found to arise from the source of a judgment, and from a target person's age, gender, cognitive ability, and certain personality attributes. Over‐ and under‐rating associated with a personality or another third factor was shown to derive from substantially different correlations between such a factor and the two separate judgments under consideration.     

Target Detection,Identification, and Marksmanship During Battlefield Noise in a Synthetic Environment

This study was conducted to determine the impact of noise on target detection, identification, and marksmanship (TDI&M) and to examine the effectiveness of a monetary reward to improve performance. Twenty active duty male soldiers participated in a non-reward and reward trial, each comprising three time blocks of two alternating 20-minute sessions, one with 87-dBA battlefield noise and the other relatively quiet. Each session involved 15 minutes of TDI&M testing followed by 5 minutes of rest. Neither noise, time on task, nor reward caused any noteworthy changes in TDI&M performance, except for foe target engagement time (ET). It appears that subjects purposely increased ET over the duration of the task to improve their hit accuracy but did not succeed in doing so. The monetary incentive to improve performance was also ineffective, because the subjects applied a similar “best” effort during the no-reward trial prior to this manipulation.     

How Bias Reduction Is Affected by Covariate Choice,Unreliability, and Mode of Data Analysis: Results From Two Types of Within-Study Comparisons

This study uses within-study comparisons to assess the relative importance of covariate choice, unreliability in the measurement of these covariates, and whether regression or various forms of propensity score analysis are used to analyze the outcome data. Two of the within-study comparisons are of the four-arm type, and many more are of the three-arm type. To examine unreliability, simulations of differences in reliability are deliberately introduced into the 2 four-arm studies. Results are similar across the samples of studies reviewed with their wide range of non-experimental designs and topic areas. Covariate choice counts most, unreliability next most, and the mode of data analysis hardly matters at all. Unreliability has larger effects the more important a covariate is for bias reduction, but even so the very best covariates measured with a reliability of only .60 still do better than substantively poor covariates that are measured perfectly. Why regression methods do as well as propensity score methods used in several different ways is a mystery still because, in theory, propensity scores would seem to have a distinct advantage in many practical applications, especially those where functional forms are in doubt.     

Rational intuition and understanding

Rational intuitions involve a particular form of understanding that gives them a special epistemic status. This form of understanding and its epistemic efficacy are not explained by several current theories of rational intuition, including Phenomenal Conservatism (Huemer, Skepticism and the veil of perception, 2001; Ethical intuitionism, 2005; Philos Phenomenol Res 74:30–55, 2007), Proper Functionalism (Plantinga, Warrant and proper function, 1993), the Competency Theory (Bealer Pac Philos Q 81:1–30, 2000; Sosa, A virtue epistemology, 2007) and the Direct Awareness View (Conee, Philos Phenomenol Res 4:847–857, 1998; Bonjour, In defense of pure reason, 1998). Some overlook it; others try to account for it but fail. We can account for the role of understanding in rational intuition by returning to the view of some of the early Rationalists, e.g. Descartes and Leibniz. While that view carries a prohibitive cost, it does contain an insight that may help us solve the problem of giving understanding its due.     

Modelling Dyadic Interaction with Hawkes Processes

We apply the Hawkes process to the analysis of dyadic interaction. The Hawkes process is applicable to excitatory interactions, wherein the actions of each individual increase the probability of further actions in the near future. We consider the representation of the Hawkes process both as a conditional intensity function and as a cluster Poisson process. The former treats the probability of an action in continuous time via non-stationary distributions with arbitrarily long historical dependency, while the latter is conducive to maximum likelihood estimation using the EM algorithm. We first outline the interpretation of the Hawkes process in the dyadic context, and then illustrate its application with an example concerning email transactions in the work place.     

Are There Enough Injective Sets?

The axiom of choice ensures precisely that, in ZFC, every set is projective: that is, a projective object in the category of sets. In constructive ZF (CZF) the existence of enough projective sets has been discussed as an additional axiom taken from the interpretation of CZF in Martin-Löf’s intuitionistic type theory. On the other hand, every non-empty set is injective in classical ZF, which argument fails to work in CZF. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the problem whether there are (enough) injective sets in CZF. We show that no two element set is injective unless the law of excluded middle is admitted for negated formulas, and that the axiom of power set is required for proving that “there are strongly enough injective sets”. The latter notion is abstracted from the singleton embedding into the power set, which ensures enough injectives both in every topos and in IZF. We further show that it is consistent with CZF to assume that the only injective sets are the singletons. In particular, assuming the consistency of CZF one cannot prove in CZF that there are enough injective sets. As a complement we revisit the duality between injective and projective sets from the point of view of intuitionistic type theory.     

Complexity Results for Modal Dependence Logic

Modal dependence logic was introduced recently by Väänänen. It enhances the basic modal language by an operator = (). For propositional variables p ₁, . . . , p _n , = (p ₁, . . . , p _n-1, p _n ) intuitively states that the value of p _n is determined by those of p ₁, . . . , p _n-1. Sevenster (J. Logic and Computation, 2009) showed that satisfiability for modal dependence logic is complete for nondeterministic exponential time. In this paper we consider fragments of modal dependence logic obtained by restricting the set of allowed propositional connectives. We show that satisfiability for poor man’s dependence logic, the language consisting of formulas built from literals and dependence atoms using ${\wedge, \square, \lozenge}$ (i. e., disallowing disjunction), remains NEXPTIME-complete. If we only allow monotone formulas (without negation, but with disjunction), the complexity drops to PSPACE-completeness. We also extend Väänänen’s language by allowing classical disjunction besides dependence disjunction and show that the satisfiability problem remains NEXPTIME-complete. If we then disallow both negation and dependence disjunction, satisfiability is complete for the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. Additionally we consider the restriction of modal dependence logic where the length of each single dependence atom is bounded by a number that is fixed for the whole logic. We show that the satisfiability problem for this bounded arity dependence logic is PSPACE-complete and that the complexity drops to the third level of the polynomial hierarchy if we then disallow disjunction. In this way we completely classify the computational complexity of the satisfiability problem for all restrictions of propositional and dependence operators considered by Väänänen and Sevenster.