Seven principles of goal activation: a systematic approach to distinguishing goal priming from priming of non-goal constructs.

Countless studies have recently purported to demonstrate effects of goal priming; however, it is difficult to muster unambiguous support for the claims of these studies because of the lack of clear criteria for determining whether goals, as opposed to alternative varieties of mental representations, have indeed been activated. Therefore, the authors offer theoretical guidelines that may help distinguish between semantic, procedural, and goal priming. Seven principles that are hallmarks of self-regulatory processes are proposed: Goal-priming effects (a) involve value, (b) involve postattainment decrements in motivation, (c) involve gradients as a function of distance to the goal, (d) are proportional to the product of expectancy and value, (e) involve inhibition of conflicting goals, (f) involve self-control, and (g) are moderated by equifinality and multifinality. How these principles might help distinguish between automatic activation of goals and priming effects that do not involve goals is discussed.     

Collaborate and share: an experimental study of the effects of task and reward interdependencies in online games.

Today millions of players interact with one another in online games, especially massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These games promote interaction among players by offering interdependency features, but to date few studies have asked what interdependency design factors of MMORPGs make them fun for players, produce experiences of flow, or enhance player performance. In this study, we focused on two game design features: task and reward interdependency. We conducted a controlled experiment that compared the interaction effects of low and high task-interdependency conditions and low and high reward-interdependency conditions on three dependent variables: fun, flow, and performance. We found that in a low task-interdependency condition, players had more fun, experienced higher levels of flow, and perceived better performance when a low reward-interdependency condition also obtained. In contrast, in a high task-interdependency condition, all of these measures were higher when a high reward-interdependency condition also obtained.     

VR-based conversation training program for patients with schizophrenia: a preliminary clinical trial.

Schizophrenia is a devastating mental illness and is characterized by hallucinations and delusions as well as social skills deficits. Generally, social skills training designed to help patients develop social skills includes role-playing, but this form of training has typical shortcomings, which are largely due to a trainer's difficulties to project emotion. Virtual reality (VR)-based techniques have the potential to solve these difficulties, because they provide a computer-generated but realistic three-dimensional world and humanlike avatars that can provide emotional stimuli. In this paper, we report on a method of implementing virtual environments (VEs) in order to train people with schizophrenia to develop conversational skills in specific situations, which could overcome the shortcomings of or complement conventional role-playing techniques. The paper reports the efficacy of the proposed approach in a preliminary clinical trial with 10 patients with schizophrenia.     

Mortality and Re-enchantment: Conscious Dying as Individualized Spirituality

The emergence of conscious dying in modern society suggests that the redefinition of death as consciousness transference not only challenges the fear of death, but also empowers a personal approach to dying moments. It can be considered a form of individualized spirituality, because the meaning of consciousness transference is not exclusively rooted in institutionalized meanings of the sacred, but redefines the sacred in highly individualistic terms. This change in attitudes towards death reflects a process of re-enchantment concomitant with the individualism of the New Age.     

Stability and Change in Personality Disorder

ABSTRACT— The standard view of personality disorder is that it is a maladaptive expression of personality traits, which are relatively stable and unchanging. Thus, personality disorder has been considered to have its roots in childhood and adolescence, to persist in adulthood, and to be difficult to change. However, recent research has challenged this view, revealing that personality continues to change, albeit more slowly, well into adulthood, and that the maladaptive manifestations of personality disorder are much less stable than previously believed. These research findings are described, and factors that influence stability and change in personality disorder are discussed. The emerging view of personality disorder has important implications for diagnosis, assessment, and treatment of personality pathology.     

Morgenbesser's Coin and Counterfactuals with True Components

Is A ∧ C sufficient for the truth of 'If A were the case, C would be the case'? Jonathan Bennett thinks not and produces a putative counterexample. But I argue that anyone who accepts the case of Morgenbesser's coin, as Bennett does, should reject Bennett's counterexample. Moreover, I show that the principle underlying Bennett's counterexample is unmotivated and indeed false. More generally, I argue that Morgenbesser's coin commits us to the sufficiency of A ∧ C for the truth of the corresponding counterfactual.     

Meno's Paradox,the Slave‐Boy Interrogation,and the Unity of Platonic Recollection

Plato invokes the Theory of Recollection to explain both ordinary and philosophical learning. In a new reading of Meno's Paradox and the Slave‐Boy Interrogation, I explain why these two levels are linked in a single theory of learning. Since, for Plato, philosophical inquiry starts in ordinary discourse, the possibility of success in inquiry is tied to the character of the ordinary comprehension we bring to it. Through the claim that all learning is recollection, Plato traces the knowledge achievable through inquiry back to our pretheoretical comprehension, showing not just that knowledge is in us, but that it is inchoate in the grasp of a property—akin to a concept—that enables us to speak and think about it ordinarily. Plato acknowledges in the Meno that a second step of argument, and a second application of Recollection, is needed to explain how knowledge comes to be inchoate in our ordinary grasp of a property. Though this second argument is provided most fully in the Phaedo, the evidence of the Meno is sufficient to outline Recollection as a two‐stage theory of learning, beginning in ordinary speech and thought and extending, through philosophical reflection, to knowledge.     

Processing of the Korean Eojoel Ambiguity

Korean writing is a syllabary where spaces occur between phrases rather than between words. This characteristic of Korean allows different types of information in Korean sentences to be dissociated in ways that are not possible in the languages that have been the focus of most psycholinguistic research, thereby providing new opportunities to investigate mechanisms of ambiguity resolution during sentence comprehension. In experiments using eye-tracking and self-paced reading, we examined how readers resolve the Eojoel ambiguity, where the grouping of syllables is ambiguous with respect to whether a phrase-final syllable is a case marker or a part of a word. This Eojoel ambiguity offers an opportunity to test how relative frequency of the lexical entries and complexity of morphological decomposition affect ambiguity resolution. Overall, the results of the experiments presented here showed that readers noticed and processed the Eojoel ambiguity very rapidly using information about the relative frequency of alternative interpretations, while the complexity of the morphological decomposition had little effect. These results are discussed in terms of constraint-based accounts (MacDonald et al. Psychol Rev 101:676–703, 1994) of ambiguity resolution.     

Can Sex‐Undifferentiated Teacher Expectations Mask an Influence of Sex Stereotypes?Alternative Forms of Sex Bias in Teacher Expectations1

This research investigated different forms of sex bias in teacher expectations relative to gymnastics performance. First, a laboratory experiment including 163 physical education teachers confirmed that stereotypes favorable to boys may influence teacher expectations in gymnastics. Next, a naturalistic study involving 15 teachers and 422 students showed that teachers expected no sex differences, even though girls performed better than boys. However, this sex bias was a result of reliance on nondiagnostic student personal characteristics favorable to boys, rather than on a stereotype per se. These results suggest that egalitarian beliefs may mask a bias in favor of a social group when group differences actually exist, and that sex‐biased teacher expectations do not inevitably involve an influence of sex stereotypes.