Mechanisms for enhancing the credibility of an adviser: prepayment and aligned incentives

We tested the effectiveness of prepayment for advice and aligned incentives as mechanisms for enhancing trust in unfamiliar advisers in decision‐making under uncertainty. Participants were low‐income Zimbabweans who played two rounds of the Monty Hall three‐door game. In round 1, participants who purchased advice were significantly more likely to follow advice for how to win the game than were participants who received free advice. In round 2, the apparent effectiveness of advisers' suggestions in round 1 moderated participants' propensity to follow advice. If the round 1 advice appeared wrong, the credibility enhancing benefits of prepayment diminished. If the advice appeared right, the benefits of prepayment maintained. Hypotheses with regard to the benefits of aligned incentives received only weak support. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interlevel Relations and Manipulative Causality

Summary  The topic of this article is the analysis of the relations between different levels of reality. The core argument is based on considerations of both an epistemology of action and manipulative causality as a criterion of object identity. The argumentation is extended towards the concepts of self-organization and self-regulation. Finally, several views on reduction and the problems of emergence and complexity are discussed.     

Continuous Dynamics in Real-Time Cognition

ABSTRACT— Real-time cognition is best described not as a sequence of logical operations performed on discrete symbols but as a continuously changing pattern of neuronal activity. The continuity in these dynamics indicates that, in between describable states of mind, mental activity does not lend itself to the linguistic labels relied on by much of psychology. We discuss eye-tracking and mouse-tracking evidence for this temporal continuity and provide geometric visualizations of mental activity, depicting it as a continuous trajectory through a state space (a multidimensional space in which locations correspond to mental states). When the state of the system travels toward a frequently visited region of that space, the destination may constitute recognition of a particular word or a particular object; but on the way there, the majority of the mental trajectory is in intermediate regions of that space, revealing graded mixtures of mental states.     

网络医疗的发展和思考

随着科学技术、网络技术迅猛的发展,许多互联网业务如网上求医、网上购药、网上保健也日渐火热,成为人们防治疾病的又一手段。网络医疗是网络科技与医疗技术结合的产物,在信息高速发展的今天,它已成为医学交流中一道亮丽的风景线,各国都在不遗余力发展自己的远程医疗系统,这无疑将推动医学模式的进步。然而作为一种新的医疗手段,网络医疗目前仍存在着诸多的弊端和问题,这些问题反过来又可制约网络医疗的发展,因此必须在技术、政策、法律各方面予以完善,使之更好地服务于人类。     

社会医疗保险道德风险博弈与防控措施研究

通过对社会医疗保险道德风险产生原因与特征的探讨,根据不完全信息重复博弈模型对社会医疗保险道德风险进行了系统分析,据此提出了社会医疗保险道德风险的防控措施,以期实现对道德风险的有效防控,提高社会医疗保险基金的安全。     

汉语中词长效应的初步实验研究

该文以回忆出一个词表的序列呈现顺序的正确率为指标考察汉语中的词长效应(Word-Length Effect)。实验材料为汉语中不同音节数目的词语。实验结果发现,在纯词表中,存在显著的词长效应。但是在混合词表中(包括长短词交替词表以及随机词表),词长效应会消失。研究结果支持词长效应的基于词表的解释,同时,项目的特异性也具有一定的作用。     

Lutherans in Public—Four Lively Options

Abstract : The basic question regarding faith and the public square is not whether religion should become public. Rather, we should ask: how ought religion to become public? This article reviews four models: (1) the ethics of character, according to which ethically formed individuals exert indirect and unintentional influence on the public square; (2) the ethics of conscience with its indirect and intentional influence: (3) the church as social conscience with direct and intentional influence; and (4) the church with power exerting direct and intentional action. Generally, it is best for Lutherans to let direct action be carried on by the laity according to the first two models; yet, when rare yet extraordinary circumstances call for it, the church as an institution may resort to models three and four and take direct action.     

Mentalization, insightfulness, and therapeutic action The importance of mental organization

Continuing debates over the relative importance of the role of interpretation leading to insight versus the relationship with the analyst as contributing to structural change are based on traditional defi nitions of insight as gaining knowledge of unconscious content. This defi nition inevitably privileges verbal interpretation as self‐knowledge becomes equated with understanding the contents of the mind. It is suggested that a way out of this debate is to redefi ne insight as a process, one that is called insightfulness. This term builds on concepts such as mentalization, or theory of mind, and suggests that patients present with diffi culties being able to fully mentalize. Awareness of repudiated content will usually accompany the attainment of insightfulness. But the point of insightfulness is to regain access to inhibited or repudiated mentalization, not to specifi c content, per se. Emphasizing the process of insightfulness integrates the importance of the relationship with the analyst with the facilitation of insightfulness. A variety of interventions help patients gain the capacity to refl ect upon and become aware of the intricate workings of their minds, of which verbal interpretation is only one. For example, often it seems less important to focus on a particular confl ict than to show interest in our patients’ minds. Furthermore, analysands develop insightfulness by becoming interested in and observing our minds in action. Because the mind originates in bodily experience, mental functioning will always fl uctuate between action modes of experiencing and expressing and verbal, symbolic modes. The analyst's role becomes making the patient aware of regressions to action modes, understanding the reasons for doing so, and subordinating this tendency to the verbal, symbolic mode. All mental functions work better and facilitate greater self‐regulation when they work in abstract, symbolic ways. Psychopathology can be understood as failing to develop or losing the symbolic level of organization, either in circumscribed areas or more ubiquitously. And mutative action occurs through helping our patients attain or regain the symbolic level in regard to all mental functions. Such work is best accomplished in the transference. The concept of transference of defense is expanded to all mental structure, so that transference is seen as the interpersonalization of mental structure. That is, patients transfer their mental structure, including their various levels of mentalizing, into the analytic interaction. The analyst observes all levels of the patient's mental functioning and intervenes to raise them to a symbolic one. At times, this will require action interpretations, allowing oneself to be pulled into an enactment with the patient that is then reprocessed at a verbal, symbolic level. Such actions are not corrective emotional experiences but are interpretations and confrontations of the patient's transferred mental organization at a level affectively and cognitively consistent with the level of communication. Nonetheless, the goal becomes raising the communication to a symbolic level as being able to refl ect symbolically on all aspects of one's mind with a minimum of restriction is the greatest guarantee of mental health.     

Beyond transference,countertransference, the silences and the opinion1

The author examines several works of an intersubjectivist trend, as well as writings by Hanly, Cavell and Bion, defending many of the named psychoanalysts' viewpoints. These viewpoints are expressed in the search and the struggle for truth, recognizing, like Popper, that truth exists but that we cannot know with certainty whether and when we touch upon it, only that this endless effort merits a lifetime's work because it is the attempt at an encounter with ourselves‐the true encounter. The author explains the criticisms by Green of Jacobs, and defends the maintenance of ‘a certain possible neutrality’ (Eizirik). He poses some questions with regard to Ogden's ‘third subject’, considering it, among other aspects, from the supervisory point of view, which may demonstrate the existence of ‘a certain possible objectivity’ of the emotional confl ict. He develops some criticisms concerning silence as an interpretative action by Ogden, and summarizes two case histories. Both were unconsciously attempting to manipulate the analyst intensely‐one of them to get the analyst to intervene in his love life, and the other to interrupt acting out.     

When what you say about others says something about you: Language abstraction and inferences about describers’ attitudes and goals

According to the linguistic category model ( [Semin and Fiedler, 1988] and [Semin and Fiedler, 1991]), a person’s behavior can be described at varying levels of abstraction from concrete (e.g., “Lisa slaps Ann”) to abstract (e.g., “Lisa is aggressive”). Research has shown that language abstraction conveys information about the person whose behavior is described (Wigboldus, Semin, & Spears, 2000). However to date, little research has examined the information that language abstraction may convey about describers themselves. In this paper, we report three experiments demonstrating that describers who use relatively abstract language to describe others’ behaviors are perceived to have biased attitudes and motives compared with those describers who use more concrete language.