自由飞行下冲突告警对管制员冲突探测绩效的影响

自由飞行是未来空中交通管理系统的设计理念, 会影响管制员的飞行冲突探测绩效, 为其提供自动化的冲突告警是主要的应对思路。已有研究主要围绕冲突告警的通道类型、可靠性、提前呈现时间等单一属性展开, 发现冲突告警的通道类型、可靠性对管制员冲突探测绩效的影响与传统的自动化研究结果存在不一致之处。指出未来在实验中纳入冲突化解任务, 进行冲突告警多属性的整合研究, 有助于解释这些不一致之处、为冲突告警的设计提供更有效的指导。     

Eating Behavior—Choice or Reconstruction of Past Experience? A Randomized Clinical Trial of Changing Eating Intentions of Healthy Adults Through Hypnotic Suggestions

Recent meta-analyses have shown that psychological interventions have a small to medium effect on weight loss. We propose here a different approach to changing eating intentions. According to the Free Will literature, people decide to act before they acknowledge it, and they decide based on the reconstruction of previous experiences. The action can thus be inhibited immediately (max 100 ms) after awareness. We wanted to test if intervention based on this model, using hypnotic suggestions, can effectively change the intentions of eating. This study aims to identify which format of hypnotic suggestion can be more effective in changing eating intentions regarding high-calorie foods. Therefore, 88 healthy adult participants randomized in four groups received one session of hypnotic induction and suggestions or placebo. We measured the eating intentions through a computer task in which participants could choose pictures of low and high caloric food before, during, and after hypnosis. For the within-subject effect, results showed that two types of hypnotic suggestions significantly impacted the intentions of eating on high-calorie foods with large-effect, namely Cognitive Rehearsal (d = 0.81, p < .001) and Memory Substitution (d = 0.82, p < .001). After controlling for pretest ratings, we found a significant between-effect: the Cognitive Rehearsal group differed significantly from the Control in terms of intentions of eating (d = 0.85, p < .05). We conclude that hypnosis with Cognitive Rehearsal suggestions can help to positively impact the intentions of eating.     

Process‐orientated psychoanalytic work in initial interviews and the importance of the opening scene

From the very first moment of the initial interview to the end of a long course of psychoanalysis, the unconscious exchange between analysand and analyst, and the analysis of the relationship between transference and countertransference, are at the heart of psychoanalytic work. Drawing on initial interviews with a psychosomatically and depressively ill student, a psychoanalytic understanding of initial encounters is worked out. The opening scene of the first interview already condenses the central psychopathology – a clinging to the primary object because it was never securely experienced as present by the patient. The author outlines the development of some psychoanalytic theories concerning the initial interview and demonstrates their specific importance as background knowledge for the clinical situation in the following domains: the ‘diagnostic position’, the ‘therapeutic position’, the ‘opening scene’, the ‘countertransference’ and the ‘analyst's free‐floating introspectiveness’. More recent investigations refer to ‘process qualities’ of the analytic relationship, such as ‘synchronization’ and ‘self‐efficacy’. The latter seeks to describe after how much time between the interview sessions constructive or destructive inner processes gain ground in the patient and what significance this may have for the decision about the treatment that follows. All these factors combined can lead to establishing a differential process‐orientated indication that also takes account of the fact that being confronted with the fear of unconscious processes of exchange is specific to the psychoanalytic profession.     

Weakness and compulsion: the essential difference

This paper aims to defend the common-sense view that we exempt compulsive agents from responsibility to the extent that they are unable to choose what they do and hence they cannot control their actions by their choices. This view has been challenged in a seminal paper by Gary Watson, who claimed that akratic agents lack control in the same sense but they are responsible nonetheless. In the first part of the paper, I critically examine the arguments Watson advances for this claim first in his original paper and then in some more recent works. I conclude that his account is based on the widely held assumption that both compulsive behavior and weakness of the will must be understood as a direct result of some inner motivational conflict. In the second part, I argue for an alternative understanding of the difference between weakness and compulsion. My claim is that compulsion is a cognitive rather than a motivational deficiency, since the compulsive, unlike the weak-willed, does not desire to perform the action which she actually performs. Furthermore, I argue that compulsive agents cannot control their actions by their choices because they have a distorted view of their own actional abilities. In the final part of the paper, I discuss a consequence of this account to the conditional analysis of free will as a condition of responsibility.     

A Strawsonian look at desert

P.F. Strawson famously argued that reactive attitudes and ordinary moral practices justify moral assessments of blame, praise, and punishment. Here we consider whether Strawson's approach can illuminate the concept of desert. After reviewing standard attempts to analyze this concept and finding them lacking, we suggest that to deserve something is to justifiably receive a moral assessment in light of certain criteria – in particular, eligibility criteria (a subject's properties that make the subject principally eligible for moral assessments) and assignment criteria (particulars about the subject, act, and circumstances that justify assessments such as blame in a particular case). Strawson's analysis of the ordinary attitudes and practices of moral assessment hints at these criteria but does not unequivocally ground a notion of desert. Following Strawson's general naturalistic approach, we show that recent psychological research on folk concepts and practices regarding freedom, moral responsibility, and blame illuminates how people actually arrive at moral assessments, thus revealing the very eligibility criteria and assignment criteria we suggest ground a concept of desert. By pushing the Strawsonian line even further than Strawson did, by empirically investigating actual moral practice and folk understandings, we can illuminate desert and lend credence to Strawson's general anti-metaphysical position.     

Acceptance as a Positive Attitude

Abstract

We argue in favor of the adaptive value of acceptance and that it deserves a definite status within the ‘positive paradigm’. Acceptance currently suffers from ambiguous connotations because of its lack of optimistic biases and its similarity to resignation. We endeavor to show that acceptance and resignation are distinct attitudes by exploring their relationships with various phenomena–frustration, disappointment, expectation, positive thinking, replanning, and accuracy. The resulting distinguishing features of acceptance–thriving versus returning to baseline; realistic optimism versus hopelessness; persistence and flexible replanning versus disengagement–are crucial for adaptive coping, and appear to be in keeping with the positive paradigm.     

Failing states and ailing leadership in African politics in the era of globalization: libertarian communitarianism and the Kenyan experience

The article discusses the Kenyan post-2007 elections political crisis within the framework of ‘libertarian communitarianism’ that integrates individualistic self-interest with traditional collectivist solidarity in the era of globalization in Africa. The author argues that behind the Kenyan post-election anarchy can be analyzed as a type of ‘prisoner's dilemma’ framework in which self-interested rationality is placed in a collectivist social contract setting. In Kenya, this has allowed political manipulation of ethnicity as well as bad governance, both of which have prevented the building of a strong, impartial state. In Kenya, socio-economic disparities and historical injustices due to corruption, nepotism, cronyism and other forms of favoritism have maintained ethnic and other internal tensions, which exploded into open conflict after the disputed December 2007 elections.

The author shows how the ‘libertarian communitarist’ politico-economic context lacks shared values and precludes forward-looking solutions for social justice that promote public good and national unity. Instead, a nation remains divided with its people set up in competitive positions, because there is public trust neither in partisan and self-interested governments nor in inefficient state structures with often (ethnically and/or regionally) biased (re)distribution of resources and unequal service delivery. The greed of the political elites and grievances of the ordinary citizenry maintain distrust across the nation and focus on past injustices rather than finding a shared agenda for future unity.

The author suggests that in order to build up public trust, to strengthen the state structures and to gain national unity, it is necessary to focus on shared values and a forward-looking concept of justice, acceptable to all.     

Training with anxiety has a positive effect on expert perceptual–motor performance under pressure

In two experiments, we examined whether training with anxiety can prevent choking in experts performing perceptual–motor tasks. In Experiment 1, 17 expert basketball players practised free throws over a 5-week period with or without induced anxiety. Only after training with anxiety did performance no longer deteriorate during the anxiety posttest. In Experiment 2, 17 expert dart players practised dart throwing from a position high or low on a climbing wall, thus with or without anxiety. Again, only after training with anxiety was performance maintained during the anxiety posttest, despite higher levels of anxiety, heart rate, and perceived effort. It is concluded that practising under anxiety can prevent choking in expert perceptual–motor performance, as one acclimatizes to the specific processes accompanying anxiety.     

The rise of information in an evolutionary universe

This paper outlines the grand scenario of cosmic evolution by examining the ongoing changes among radiation, matter and life in standard, big‐bang cosmology. Using aspects of non‐equilibrium thermodynamics and information science, we argue that it is the contrasting temporal behavior of various energy densities that have given rise to the environments needed for the emergence of galaxies, stars, planets, and life forms. We furthermore argue that a necessary (though perhaps not sufficient) condition—a veritable prime mover—for the emergence of such ordered structures of growing complexity is the expansion of the Universe itself. Neither demon‐strably new science nor appeals to non‐science are needed to explain the impressive hierarchy of developmental change, from quark to quasar, from microbe to mind.