The optimist within? Selective sampling and self-deception

The nature and existence of self-deception is controversial. On a classic conception, self-deceived individuals carry two conflicting representations of reality. Proponents of an alternative, deflationary account dispute this, arguing that putative cases of self-deception simply reflect distorted information processing. To investigate these alternatives, we adapted a paradigm from the “crowd-within” literature. Participants provided two different estimates for each of a series of incentivized questions. Half of the questions were neutral in content, while half referred to undesirable future events. Whereas the first and second estimates for neutral questions did not differ systematically, second estimates for undesirable questions were more optimistic than first estimates. This result suggests that participants were sampling selectively from an internal probability distribution when providing estimates for undesirable events, implying they had access to a less rosy representation of their future prospects than their individual estimates conveyed. In short, self-deception is real.     

Attention in the predictive mind

It has recently become popular to suggest that cognition can be explained as a process of Bayesian prediction error minimization. Some advocates of this view propose that attention should be understood as the optimization of expected precisions in the prediction-error signal (Clark, 2013, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2012, 2013). This proposal successfully accounts for several attention-related phenomena. We claim that it cannot account for all of them, since there are certain forms of voluntary attention that it cannot accommodate. We therefore suggest that, although the theory of Bayesian prediction error minimization introduces some powerful tools for the explanation of mental phenomena, its advocates have been wrong to claim that Bayesian prediction error minimization is ‘all the brain ever does’.     

Spirituality and Religion: The Ninth CACREP Core Curriculum Area

On the basis of the ACA Code of Ethics (American Counseling Association [ACA], 2014) and ACA‐endorsed competencies, the ability to address spirituality and religion is a recommended skill set of counselors. The Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) addresses the “spirit” in the standards; however, in the training of students, additional focus could be placed on this competency. The authors introduce expert‐reviewed standards to be considered as a 9th core curriculum area of the CACREP Standards (CACREP, 2015 ) titled Spirituality and Religion .     

Everyday dynamics in generalized social and political trust

We applied the traits as density distributions of states approach to generalized expectations of trustworthiness, namely, social trust and trust in politicians. Using an experience sampling study (N = 47), we assessed state social trust and trust in politicians four times a day for 2 weeks. Within-person variability was found to be low but meaningful as it was predicted by variations in affect, interactional trust, and prior experiences. There was high stability in interindividual differences in the mean levels of state trustworthiness expectations and in the levels of within-person variability. Our study provides a comprehensive understanding of stability and variability in generalized expectations of trustworthiness and indicates broad applicability of the traits as density distributions of states approach.     

Escaping the Dark Side of Curiosity

Curiosity as a clinical entity has been a neglected subject in the psychoanalytic literature. Freud never addressed the issue of curiosity systematically. His interest was in trying to account for children's sexual questioning. Nevertheless, hinderance to internal curiosity—this is to say, that which intimidates and abates the appetite for an exploration of one's motives—is part and parcel of psychoanalytic inquiry. And, arguably, there is no greater clinical challenge for the analyst than trying to treat an analysand who appears to lack an interest in the underlying causes of his unhappiness. The problem of impeded self-inquiry is usually exacerbated in people with more serious emotional disturbances. My position here is that in studying the conditions that mitigate against curiosity in a seriously disturbed patient, we gain access to an enlarged version of the curiosity problems of our less disturbed patients. Here I interpret my clinical impressions about problems with curiosity with ideas from the writings of Martin Buber and Albert Camus.     

What do you think I think you think?: Strategic reasoning in matrix games

In reasoning about strategic interpersonal situations, such as in playing games, an individual's representation of the situation often includes not only information about the goals and rules of the game, but also a mental model of other minds. Often such mental models involve a hierarchy of reflexive reasoning commonly employed in social situations ("What do you think I think you think..."), and may be related to the developmental notion of 'theory of mind'. In two experiments, the authors formally investigate such interpersonal recursive reasoning in college-age adults within the context of matrix games. Participants are asked to predict the moves of another player (experimenter's confederate) in a two-choice, sequential-move game that may terminate at various stages with different payoffs for each player. Participants are also asked to decide optimally on their own moves based on the prediction made. Errors concerning the prediction, or translation of those predictions into decisions about one's action, were recorded. Results demonstrate the existence of a "default" mental model about the other player in the game context that is dynamically modified as new evidence is accumulated. Predictions about this other player's behavior are, in general, used consistently in decision-making, though the opponent tends to be modeled, by default, to behave in a myopic fashion not anticipating the participant's own action.     

Sense of body and sense of action both contribute to self-recognition

Recognizing oneself, easy as it appears to be, seems at least to require awareness of one's body and one's actions. To investigate the contribution of these factors to self-recognition, we presented normal subjects with an image of both their own and the experimenter's hand. The hands could make the same, a different or no movement and could be displayed in various orientations. Subjects had to tell whether the indicated hand was theirs or not. The results showed that a congruence between visual signals and signals indicating the position of the body is one component on which self-recognition is based. Recognition of one's actions is another component. Subjects had most difficulty in recognizing their hand when movements were absent. When the two hands made different movements, subjects relied exclusively on the movement cue and recognition was almost perfect. Our findings are in line with pathological alterations in the sense of body and the sense of action.     

Children's predictions of consistency in people's actions

Past research suggests that young children are often reluctant to generalize about people's behavior. Three experiments involving 102 4-5-year-olds, 84 7-8-year-olds, and 107 adults explored the conditions under which inductive inferences about people are made. There was an age-based increase in propensity to predict consistency in psychological/intentional causal relations. Children often predicted change; people would behave differently in the future than they did in the past. Younger children limited predictions of consistency to non-psychological contexts. Older children showed some appreciation of stable motivations (e.g. traits, preferences). The results are consistent with the hypothesis that children's theories of mind emphasize situational influences, with personal influences appearing in middle-childhood.