Common reasoning about admissibility

We analyze common reasoning about admissibility in the strategic and extensive form of a game. We define a notion of sequential proper admissibility in the extensive form, and show that, in finite extensive games with perfect recall, the strategies that are consistent with common reasoning about sequential proper admissibility in the extensive form are exactly those that are consistent with common reasoning about admissibility in the strategic form representation of the game. Thus in such games the solution given by common reasoning about admissibility does not depend on how the strategic situation is represented. We further explore the links between iterated admissibility and backward and forward induction.     

A constructive process view of decision making: Multiple strategies in judgment and choice

A viewpoint that has recently emerged in decision research is that preferences for objects of any complexity are often constructed — not merely revealed — in generating a response to a judgement or choice task. This paper reviews a program of research that traces the constructiveness of preferences to the use of multiple strategies in decision making, contingent on task demands. It is argued that individuals often build strategies opportunistically, changing their processing on the spot depending upon the information they encounter during the course of solving the decision problem.     

Fearful distortions

Clinical observations suggesting that perceptual distortions can take place during episodes of fear are described, and two hypotheses are set out: (1) perceptual distortions occur during episodes of fear, and (2) such distortions decline after reduction of the pertinent fear.

An experiment in which fearful subjects were asked to report their perceptions of a feared object during episodes of fear, and then again after fear-reduction, was carried out. Snake-phobic and spider-phobic subjects showed evidence of some distortions in the activity of the pertinent fear object, but no distortions of size. After the reduction of the relevant fear, the subjects reported significant declines in the activity of the pertinent animal. The two hypotheses received partial support.     

Suppression of emotional and neutral material

Previous studies have indicated that suppression of a thought results in an immediate increase of the frequency of this thought and/or in a rebound effect, i.e. in a heightened frequency of this thought later on. The present study (n = 53) examined the relationship between suppression and emotionality of the to-be-suppressed material. More specifically, it was investigated whether suppression of an emotional story results in stronger immediate enhancement or thought rebounds than suppression of a neutral story. There was a clear initial enhancement effect in the group suppressing a neutral story: subjects who tried to suppress experienced more target thoughts than subjects who did not try to suppress. In the neutral-story conditions, no rebound effect occurred. In the groups exposed to an emotional story, there was neither evidence of initial enhancement nor of a rebound. As most obsessions are related to emotional themes, the present findings cast doubt on the claim that the rebound phenomenon represents a valid laboratory model for clinical obsessions.     

Teaching socially valid social interaction responses to students with severe disabilities in an integrated school setting

To evaluate the effects of a procedure designed to teach appropriate social responses to adolescents with severe disabilities in an integrated school setting this study employed an ABA withdrawal design, replicated twice with two students, and an AB design with a third student. Social responses were recorded during daily training sessions and generalization probes. Treatment involved implementation, by the classroom teacher, of a constant time delay procedure utilizing nonhandicapped peers and a socially validated teaching curriculum. The results showed increases in correct responding and decreases in echolalia following intervention. Generalization of appropriate responding to nonhandicapped peers was demonstrated to varying degrees for all participants.     

The Nature and Dynamics of Post-Sterilization Regret in Married Women 1

Data for nine different indicators of regret were collected from 213 married women with a tubal sterilization and 137 wives of men with a vasectomy at 1,2, and 3 years following surgical sterilization. Relationships between the indicators across the 3 years and within each year were analyzed, using two psychological models. A final, combined model was synthesized and fitted to the data. This model addresses many of the important issues of reliability and validity that have plagued the literature on post-sterilization regret for years.     

Conditional discrimination in mentally retarded adults: the development of generalized skills.

The development of generalized conditional discrimination skills was examined in adults with retardation. Two subjects with histories of failure to acquire arbitrary matching under trial-and-error procedures were successful under procedures that trained one or more prerequisite skills. The successive discrimination between the sample stimuli was established by training the subjects to name the stimuli. The simultaneous discrimination between the comparison stimuli was established using either (a) standard simple discrimination training with reversals or (b) a procedure in which each of the two sample-comparison relations in the conditional discrimination was presented in blocks of trials, with the size of the blocks decreasing gradually until sample presentation was randomized. The amount of prerequisite training required varied across subjects and across successive conditional discriminations. After acquiring either two or three conditional discriminations with component training, both subjects learned new conditional discriminations under trial-and-error procedures. In general, each successive conditional discrimination was acquired more rapidly. Tests showed that conditional responding had become a generalized skill. Symmetry was shown for almost all trained relations. Symmetry trial samples were ultimately named the same as the stimuli to which they were related in training.