The Impact of Perceived Justice on Contingent Value Judgments1

We asked citizens suffering from road traffic about their willingness to pay for the building of a new road bypassing their home village. Opponents of the project were asked what they would consider adequate compensation for accepting the bypass. The perceived fairness of a monetary exchange was the only predictor for the decision in principle to pay or to claim compensation, whereas the exact amount was determined by the expected utility provided by the bypass. Norms of equity or equality introduced in 2 experimental priming conditions biased respondents' willingness to pay. We suggest feeding back the results of contingent valuation surveys into the public debate, instead of interpreting them as a static measure of economic preferences.     

A Comparison of Help Giving to Individuals Versus Humanitarian Organizations1

The theories of social conduct, seriousness of need, and similarity; cost–benefit models; and individual differences in ideology are used to predict self‐reported help giving that is interpersonal or through humanitarian organizations. The results indicate that persons tend to be more helpful interpersonally than through organizations, are more responsive to characteristics of the needy when helping interpersonally than through organizations, and have stronger affective responses toward individuals than toward individuals represented by organizations. For both interpersonal and organization‐mediated assistance, perceived benefit to the donor strongly predicts help giving. Relatively conservative persons report less helpfulness, both interpersonally and through humanitarian organizations. Collectively, these findings offer an integrative approach to help giving and have implications for fundraising in the humanitarian sector.     

Base-rate neglect as a function of base rates in probabilistic contingency learning

When humans predict criterion events based on probabilistic predictors, they often lend excessive weight to the predictor and insufficient weight to the base rate of the criterion event. In an operant analysis, using a matching-to-sample paradigm, Goodie and Fantino (1996) showed that humans exhibit base-rate neglect when predictors are associated with criterion events through physical similarity. In partial replications of their studies, we demonstrated similar effects when the predictors resembled the criterion events in terms of similarly skewed base rates. Participants' predictions were biased toward the more (or less) frequent criterion event following the more (or less) frequent predictor. This finding adds to the growing evidence for pseudocontingencies (Fiedler & Freytag, 2004), a framework that stresses base-rate influences on contingency learning.     

Not all emotions are created equal: the negativity bias in social-emotional development

There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never been seriously considered. The authors argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development and that it is evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. They discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, the authors suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and they make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development.     

Losing more than gaining from overall stable prices: the differential perception of increasing versus decreasing prices made the Euro look like a price booster

The present research examined whether price trend misperceptions can be explained by the differential perception of increasing versus decreasing prices. We expected price increases (losses to consumers) to be perceived as being more intense than price decreases (gains to consumers) of the same magnitude. This tendency, in turn, should be positively associated with how people perceive the overall price trend. To test this reasoning, participants in the first two studies were asked to compare German Mark (DM) and Euro prices. First, participants received a menu containing 21 dishes with DM prices, and their price trend expectations were assessed. Then, participants indicated for each dish to what extent the price had changed. Finally, participants' overall price trend judgments were assessed. In both studies, results indicate that price trend judgments were biased toward rising prices. In addition, price increases were perceived as rising more than price decreases of the same magnitude were perceived as falling. This tendency was positively associated with overall price trend judgments, even after controlling for expectations. Study 3 was to replicate these findings in a different domain to demonstrate the general nature and impact of the hypothesized effect. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Omissions and semantic errors in aphasic naming: is there a link?

Within a discrete two-stage model of lexicalization, semantic errors and errors of omission are assumed to be independent events. In contrast, cascading and interactive models allow for an influence of word form on lexical selection and thus for an inherent relationship in accounting for both error types. A group of 17 aphasic patients was assessed with a naming test controlling for semantic competition of the target items. Semantic errors were more frequent for targets with many competitors than for targets with few competitors while omissions were more frequent when few competitors were available. However, the overall sums of errors in both item groups were comparable. These results imply a common source of both error types and thus speak against a strictly serial model of naming.     

Increasing wealth inequality may increase interpersonal hostility: The relationship between personal relative deprivation and aggression

In most Western societies, wealth inequality is increasing, which in turn could increase people’s belief that one’s standing is relatively disadvantaged. Based on relative deprivation theory, we argue that such an experience of personal relative deprivation should causally lead to greater interpersonal hostility. Indeed, three experiments show that participants in a personal relative deprivation condition reported higher levels of aggressive affect and behaved more aggressively than participants in a personal relative gratification condition. Compared to a control condition, participants experiencing personal relative deprivation were more aggressive rather than participants experiencing personal relative gratification being less aggressive. However, personal relative deprivation increased aggressive behavior only toward targets that were the source for participants’ experience of disadvantage, but it did not increase aggression toward neutral targets.     

Perceptual biases in the horizontal and vertical dimensions are driven by separate cognitive mechanisms

Perceptual attention in healthy participants is characterized by two biases, one operating in the horizontal plane, which draws attention leftward, and the other operating in the vertical plane, which draws attention upward. Given that these biases are reliably found in the same individual, and appear similar at a surface level, a number of researchers have investigated the relationship between horizontal and vertical attentional biases. To date, these investigations have failed to find an association, and this may be due to the fact that one-dimensional vertical and horizontal stimuli were presented separately rather than being measured from a single, two-dimensional stimulus. Across three experiments, two dimensional stimuli were presented, and participants marked the centre of the stimuli. In addition, the shapes of the stimuli were manipulated to determine whether this produced the same modulation of the two biases. Across 13 stimuli and three experiments there were no correlations between the vertical and horizontal biases. In addition, manipulations of stimulus shape, which affected biases in one dimension, did not affect biases in the other dimension. There were, however, consistent correlations between the degree of bias within each dimension across the different stimuli. This study has produced converging evidence that horizontal and vertical biases in spatial judgments rely on separate cognitive mechanisms. To account for these results we discuss a model whereby horizontal asymmetries rely more on space-based mechanisms whereas vertical asymmetries rely more on object-based mechanisms.     

Can Persistence be a Matter of Convention?

This paper asks whether persistence can be a matter of convention. It argues that in a rather unexciting de dicto sense persistence is indeed a matter of convention, but it rejects the notion that persistence can be a matter of convention in a more substantial de re sense. However, scenarios can be imagined that appear to involve conventional persistence of the latter kind. Since there are strong reasons for thinking that such conventionality is impossible, it is desirable that our metaphysical-cum-semantic theories of persistence be able to account for such scenarios in terms of conventions of the first kind. Later parts of the article therefore investigate whether three of the currently most influential metaphysical-cum-semantic theories of persistence—the endurance theory, the stage theory, and the perdurance theory—can do this. Fortunately, for them, it turns out that all can, though some philosophers have disputed this. However, when we ask how they account for a typical case of “conventional persistence” some problematic features of the theories—having to do with reference, persistence conditions, how they relate, and the epistemology of persistence—are revealed.     

Emotional processing in anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex

Negative emotional stimuli activate a broad network of brain regions, including the medial prefrontal (mPFC) and anterior cingulate (ACC) cortices. An early influential view dichotomized these regions into dorsal-caudal cognitive and ventral-rostral affective subdivisions. In this review, we examine a wealth of recent research on negative emotions in animals and humans, using the example of fear or anxiety, and conclude that, contrary to the traditional dichotomy, both subdivisions make key contributions to emotional processing. Specifically, dorsal-caudal regions of the ACC and mPFC are involved in appraisal and expression of negative emotion, whereas ventral-rostral portions of the ACC and mPFC have a regulatory role with respect to limbic regions involved in generating emotional responses. Moreover, this new framework is broadly consistent with emerging data on other negative and positive emotions.