Physiological Arousal and Political Beliefs

It is by now well known that political attitudes can be affected by emotions. Most earlier studies have focused on emotions generated by some political event (e.g., terrorism or increased immigration). However, the methods used in previous efforts have made it difficult to untangle the various causal pathways that might link emotions to political beliefs. In contrast, we focus on emotions incidental (i.e., irrelevant) to the decision process, allowing us to cleanly trace and estimate the effect of experimentally induced anxiety on political beliefs. Further, we build upon innovative new work that links physiological reactivity (Hatemi, McDermott, Eaves, Kendler, & Neale, 2013; Oxley et al., 2008a) to attitudes by using skin conductance reactivity as a measure of emotional arousal. We found that anxiety—generated by a video stimulus—significantly affected physiological arousal as measured by tonic skin‐conductance levels, and that higher physiological reactivity predicted more anti‐immigration attitudes. We show that physiological reactivity mediated the relationship between anxiety and political attitudes.     

Older sisters and younger brothers: The impact of siblings on preference for competition

Psychology studies have long argued the possibility that sibling structure, such as birth order and the sex of siblings, shapes one’s personality traits. One of the core issues involved is that of who rates subjects’ personality traits in studies. The present studies (N = 135 in Study 1, N = 232 in Study 2) surpassed the examinations performed in previous studies by obtaining information regarding one of the key personality traits, preference for competition, using a framework developed via experimental economics rather than subjective ratings. Despite the fact that the two studies involved different types of task, we consistently observed that older sisters exerted a significant impact on their younger siblings in both studies. In particular, having an older sister was negatively associated with men’s competitive preferences. We also obtained suggestive evidence that having an older sister was positively associated with women’s competitive preferences. Our results support sibling hypotheses from the perspective of experimental economics.     

The seven sins of consumer psychology

Consumer psychology faces serious issues of internal and external relevance. Most of these issues originate in seven fundamental problems with the way consumer psychologists plan and conduct their research—problems that could be called “the seven sins of consumer psychology.” These seven “sins” are (1) a narrow conception of the scope of consumer behavior research; (2) adoption of a narrow set of theoretical lenses; (3) adherence to a narrow epistemology of consumer research; (4) an almost exclusive emphasis on psychological processes as opposed to psychological content; (5) a strong tendency to overgeneralize from finite empirical results, both as authors and as reviewers; (6) a predisposition to design studies based on methodological convenience rather than on substantive considerations; and (7) a pervasive confusion between “theories of studies” and studies of theories. Addressing these problems (“atoning for these sins”) would greatly enhance the relevance of the field. However, this may require a substantial rebalancing of the field's incentives to reward actual research impact rather than sheer number of publications in major journals.     

On the Fundamental Worldview of the Integral Culture: Integrating Science,Religion, and Art: Part One

In the present essay the author suggests that the main reason why history failed to develop societies in harmony with Nature, including our internal nature as well, is that we failed to evaluate the exact basis of the factor ultimately governing our thoughts. We failed to realize that it is the worldview that ultimately governs our thoughts and through our thoughts, our actions. In this work we consider the ultimate foundations of philosophy, science, religion, and art, pointing out that they were and can be again in harmony with each other if their ultimate tasks are specified. It is specified here the first task of philosophy as considering the philosophical significance of the ultimate principles of physics, biology and man/society. These ultimate principles are in direct connection with the ultimate questions of religion. It is shown that the fundamental nature of art makes it able to perceive the ultimate destination of mankind and the Universe, the world-to-be. It is proposed that philosophy, religion and art together are able to supply us with an inter-subjective picture of the world-process, including the inter-subjective picture of the future of mankind and the Universe. Care is taken to enlighten the possible role of values in founding scientific research in the frame of present wide-ranging discussions. It is found that universal values of respect for existence, life and reason represent the inevitable basis of science. The exact foundations of a new, integral worldview are outlined, involving the worldprocess-picture, Nature-picture, images of man, society, self, history and manipulation. A list of our common tasks for founding the Integral Culture is proposed.     

The challenges and opportunities of first-person inquiry in experimental psychology

Psychology is concerned with outward (behavioural) and inward (mental and experiential) dimensions of inquiry. To study behaviour, psychologists are equipped with a comprehensive repertoire of measurement instruments. These instruments are not well suited to study the qualitative nature of inner experience, however: they yield data which, by their very nature as symbolic representations, abstract away from the primary phenomenon. To study qualitative experience, it would hence appear logical to engage a first-person, introspective method of inquiry. Psychology has a turbulent relationship to introspective research, however. In this article we review the concerns regarding the introspective approach; delineate the strengths – and also the limitations – of the experimental method; and, critically, outline a hybrid approach towards studying experience by exploring how important ingredients of the experimental approach can be transferred to the study of qualitative experience. This approach is a methodological proposal rather than an epistemological or ontological defence of introspection.     

The phantom limb in dreams

Mulder and colleagues [Mulder, T., Hochstenbach, J., Dijkstra, P. U., Geertzen, J. H. B. (2008). Born to adapt, but not in your dreams. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1266–1271.] report that a majority of amputees continue to experience a normally-limbed body during their night dreams. They interprete this observation as a failure of the body schema to adapt to the new body shape. The present note does not question this interpretation, but points to the already existing literature on the phenomenology of the phantom limb in dreams. A summary of published investigations is complemented by a note on phantom phenomena in the dreams of paraplegic patients and persons born without a limb. Integration of the available data allows the recommendation for prospective studies to consider dream content in more detail. For instance, “adaptation” to the loss of a limb can also manifest itself by seeing oneself surrounded by amputees. Such projective types of anosognosia (“transitivism”) in nocturnal dreams should also be experimentally induced in normally-limbed individuals, and some relevant techniques are mentioned.     

Acceptance versus distraction: brief instructions, metaphors and exercises in increasing tolerance for self-delivered electric shocks

The current study compared the effects of an acceptance versus distraction rationale on coping with experimentally induced pain. Eighty participants were randomly assigned to one of five conditions: Full-Acceptance, Full-Distraction, Instruction-only-Acceptance, Instruction-only-Distraction and No-Instructions. Participants completed a simple matching task and were intermittently given the choice either to receive an electric shock and continue, or to avoid the shock and terminate the task. Only the Full-Acceptance strategy (that included experiential exercises and a metaphor) had a significant effect on task tolerance as measured by an increase in the number of shocks delivered post-intervention relative to baseline. In addition, the participants in both of the acceptance conditions showed lower levels of believability in that they were more likely to continue with the task even when reporting more pain. The results support the prediction that acceptance-based interventions work by undermining the behavioural-control functions of pain-related thoughts and feelings, and call for a systematic analysis of how metaphors and exercises work in analogue research.     

A Dynamic-Logical Perspective on Quantum Behavior

In this paper we show how recent concepts from Dynamic Logic, and in particular from Dynamic Epistemic logic, can be used to model and interpret quantum behavior. Our main thesis is that all the non-classical properties of quantum systems are explainable in terms of the non-classical flow of quantum information. We give a logical analysis of quantum measurements (formalized using modal operators) as triggers for quantum information flow, and we compare them with other logical operators previously used to model various forms of classical information flow: the “test” operator from Dynamic Logic, the “announcement” operator from Dynamic Epistemic Logic and the “revision” operator from Belief Revision theory. The main points stressed in our investigation are the following: (1) The perspective and the techniques of “logical dynamics” are useful for understanding quantum information flow. (2) Quantum mechanics does not require any modification of the classical laws of “static” propositional logic, but only a non-classical dynamics of information. (3) The main such non-classical feature is that, in a quantum world, all information-gathering actions have some ontic side-effects. (4) This ontic impact can affect in its turn the flow of information, leading to non-classical epistemic side-effects (e.g. a type of non-monotonicity) and to states of “objectively imperfect information”. (5) Moreover, the ontic impact is non-local: an information-gathering action on one part of a quantum system can have ontic side-effects on other, far-away parts of the system.     

Justice and forgiveness: Experimental evidence for compatibility

A 3 (justice prime: restorative, retributive, no prime) × 3 (contextual prime: criminal justice system, intimate relationship, workplace) experimental design was used with 173 participants reading hypothetical transgression scenarios to test the hypothesis that people associate forgiveness more with restorative justice than with retributive justice, and that such relationships hold regardless of the social context. As predicted, there were main effects for justice prime, with participants more likely to associate benevolent responding, and less likely to associate revenge and avoidant responses, with restorative justice than with retributive justice. They were also more likely to associate benevolence, and less likely to associate revenge and avoidant responses, with intimate relationships than with criminal justice and the workplace. Also as predicted, there was no interaction between justice and context for benevolence and revenge. Although one should be cautious about extrapolating from ‘no difference’ hypotheses, these results provide some indication that the forgiveness-justice relationship may be generalised beyond the criminal justice system.