The Potential of Anamnestic Comparative Self-Assessment (ACSA) to Reduce Bias in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being

Background: The conventional question (CQ) on subjective well-being (SWB) is e.g. “How is life?”, with ratings between e.g. ‘Best’ and ‘Worst possible’. Disadvantages may be casualness of responses and biases of proximate, peer or cultural relativity. Alternatively, with Anamnestic Comparative Self-Assessment (ACSA), the scale anchors are the respondents’ self-defined memories of their best and worst periods in life. Thus ACSA uses life review and experiential scale anchors. Objective: To compare the validity, sensitivity and responsiveness of the CQ and ACSA. Method: ACSA and the CQ were administered in parallel to 2584 university-hospital patients suffering from a wide range of psychiatric and somatic diseases. Results: ACSA and CQ did not measure the same construct (r = 0.50). CQ ratings were almost normally distributed, whereas ACSA ratings were overall lower, and clearly positively skewed, suggesting greater sensitivity to the respondents’ diseased state. Contrary to CQ, ACSA ratings of critically ill patients with end-stage liver disease were very low. After life-saving liver transplantation, ACSA ratings increased significantly more than CQ ratings, suggesting better responsiveness of ACSA to objective change. Trait-like socio-demographic variables such as sex, age, and marital status influenced CQ, but not ACSA ratings. Conclusion: In between-subject studies, depending on one’s study objectives, ACSA should be considered as a complement or an alternative to conventional SWB instruments. The CQ is probably preferable when socio-demographic variables are study endpoints. In longitudinal or intervention studies and for intercultural comparisons, ACSA, which reduces the need for correction of several biases or confounders, seems more useful.     

Self-predictions overweight strength of current intentions

We suggest that people’s predictions of their future behavior overweight the strength of their current intentions, and underweight situational or contextual factors that influence the ease with which intentions are translated into action. As expected by this account, we find that self-predictions closely follow ratings of current intention strength, and that the actual probability of the behavior being predicted does not increase with intention strength to the extent implied by self-predictions (Study 1). We also find that manipulations designed to strengthen intentions to carry out a behavior have a larger impact on self-predictions than on the behavior being predicted (Studies 1 and 2), whereas a manipulation designed to influence the ease with which intentions are translated into behavior has a larger impact on actual behavior than on self-predictions (Study 2). Observers’ predictions of another’s behavior do not follow the same pattern (Study 3).     

Radical Semantics: A New Theory of Meaning

This paper extends Parikh’s earlier work in semantics with games of partial information and attempts to derive and represent the full content of an utterance from first principles. It also discusses various ways in which this content may be indeterminate.     

An exploratory study about Koreans’ attitudes towards counselling services

This mixed-method design research is an exploratory study of Korean college students’ perceptions of seeking counselling. The quantitative part of the study is a series of factor analyses of the Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale (ATSPPH) to extract culturally valid items and constructs. The qualitative part of the study is a content analysis of the written responses to an open-ended question. The factor analyses of the ATSPPH resulted in selecting 15 items and extracting three constructs: Conditional Usefulness, Fear of Judgment, and Lack of Necessity. The content analysis of the written responses derived three additional constructs, including Utilities of Counselling, Provider and Environment of Counselling, and Socio-Cultural and Practical Issues. The meaning of the findings, implications, limitations, and strengths of this study were discussed.     

中外两种推理理论的实验比较研究

通过两个实验对中国学者提出的“推理题与推理者的推理知识双重结构模型”和Evans提出的“双重加工理论”进行了实验比较研究。实验一通过两种评定方法对相应性质命题进行评定后所得实验结果表明Evans等(1983)有关“信念效应”研究中的“结论可信性”变量可以视为与胡竹菁等(1996)实验中的“内容正确性”变量是同一性质的变量; 实验二根据“形式正确性”和“内容正确性”两个自变量设计的推理实验结果与Evans等(1983)的研究结果基本一致; 但增加“内容熟悉性”这一自变量设计的推理实验结果表明“推理题与推理者的推理知识双重结构模型”比Evans提出的“双重加工理论”能更好地解释推理者对性质三段论的推理结果。     

Trustworthy media news content retrieval from web using truth content discovery algorithm

Nowadays, the internet plays a major role in online information retrieval. As, we are well aware the web provides information related all the fields like national, lifestyle, movies, shopping, spirituality, sports, entertainment and much more. One cannot assume that the web retrieved information is believable or trustworthy due to multiple answers to the same query. The paper aims to study many research articles which are related to truth information discovery. However, the paper found that there is no proper research to find trustworthiness of news content which is extracted from multiple information sources with minimum misclassification error and retrieval time. To alleviate these issues, the truth content discovery algorithm is proposed to produce trustworthy information with minimal time along with multiple domain news information. The system provides reliable information from a various source of news provider with minimum classification error. The proposed method ranked the news content index based on query matches from extracted information. It minimizes the query retrieval time and classification error. Based on the experimental evaluation, proposed TCD + J48 algorithm produced the best result compared to existing approaches. It minimizes reduces 7.54 ms the query retrieval time (QRT), 5% Error rate (ER) and 0.98 and Mean Normalized Absolute Distance (MNAD).     

Specifying the boundary conditions of the multimedia effect: The influence of content and its distribution between text and pictures

It was investigated whether the beneficial effect of picture presentation might be influenced by the content conveyed through text and pictures and the way information is distributed between them. Ninety‐nine students learnt in five between‐subjects learning conditions (i.e., text with spatial contents plus pictures, text with visual contents plus pictures, only text with spatial contents, only text with visual contents, only picture) about a tourist centre and a holiday farm. Results showed that pictures (i.e., maps) were beneficial for learning if spatial knowledge had to be acquired, but did not support learning when non‐spatial, visual knowledge had to be acquired. Furthermore, a high overlap of spatial information in text and picture was helpful, which can be explained by the assumption that learning is a text‐guided process. On the other hand, regarding non‐spatial visual information, a high text‐picture overlap did not influence learning, probably because text alone was sufficient for acquiring visual knowledge. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Dangerous liaisons

In this paper I take side on externalist incompatibilism. However, I intend to radicalize the position. First, based on my criticism of Burge's anaphoric proposal, I argue that there is no reasoning‐transparency: the reasoner is blind to the reasoning he is performing. Second, assuming a global form of content‐externalism, I argue that “in the head” are only logical and formal abilities. That is what I call “bite the bullet and swallow it too.”     

Constructive Logic with Strong Negation is a Substructural Logic. II

The goal of this two-part series of papers is to show that constructive logic with strong negation N is definitionally equivalent to a certain axiomatic extension NFL _ew of the substructural logic FL _ew . The main result of Part I of this series [41] shows that the equivalent variety semantics of N (namely, the variety of Nelson algebras) and the equivalent variety semantics of NFL _ew (namely, a certain variety of FL _ew -algebras) are term equivalent. In this paper, the term equivalence result of Part I [41] is lifted to the setting of deductive systems to establish the definitional equivalence of the logics N and NFL _ew . It follows from the definitional equivalence of these systems that constructive logic with strong negation is a substructural logic. Presented by Heinrich Wansing