ICD-11 guidelines for psychotic,mood, anxiety and stress-related disorders in Mexico: Clinical utility and reliability

Background/Objective: The World Health Organization's diagnostic guidelines for ICD-11 mental and behavioural disorders must be tested in clinical settings around the world to ensure that they are clinically useful and genuinely global. The objective is evaluate the inter-rater reliability and clinical utility of ICD-11 guidelines for psychotic, mood, anxiety- and stress-related disorders in Mexican patients. Method: Adult volunteers exhibiting the selected symptoms were referred from the pre-consultation unit of a public psychiatric hospital to an interview by a pair of clinicians, who subsequently assigned independent diagnoses and evaluated the clinical utility of the diagnostic guidelines as applied to each particular case, on the basis of a scale developed for this purpose. Results: 23 clinicians evaluated 153 patients. Kappa scores were strong for psychotic disorders (.83), moderate for stress-related (.77) and mood disorders (.60) and week for anxiety and fear-related disorders (.43). A high proportion of clinicians considered all diagnostic guidelines to be quite to extremely useful as applied to their patients. Conclusions: ICD-11 guidelines for psychotic, stress-related and mood disorders allow adequate inter-rater consistency among Mexican clinicians, who also considered them as clinical useful tools.     

A Simple Axiomatization of Binary Rank-Dependent Utility of Gains (Losses)

For binary gambles composed only of gains (losses) relative to a status quo, the rank-dependent utility model with a representation that is dense in intervals is shown to be equivalent to ten elementary properties plus event commutativity and a gamble partition assumption. The proof reduces to a (difficult) functional equation that has been solved by Aczél, Maksa, and Páles (in press).     

Diminishing Returns to Income, Companionship – and Happiness

From philosophical and intuitive sources, I find three goods that should serve as ultimate ends in assessing a high quality of life: subjective well-being, human development, and justice. With acknowledged plural ends (we use them whether we acknowledge them or not), each takes its value from its scarcity relative to the other two – a version of diminishing marginal utility. Contrary to economists' belief that income (together with leisure) is the source of all utility, evidence shows that companionship, which does not pass through the market, has higher utility and contributes more to well-being than does income. But if money income has diminishing marginal utility, so does this competing good, companionship. With arguments drawn from the meaning of happiness, I show that happiness, too, may have diminishing marginal utility and that often it must rely for its hedonic and social value on such other goods as human development and justice.     

Hypothetical Retrospection

Moral theory has mostly focused on idealized situations in which the morally relevant properties of human actions can be known beforehand. Here, a framework is proposed that is intended to sharpen moral intuitions and improve moral argumentation in problems involving risk and uncertainty. Guidelines are proposed for a systematic search of suitable future viewpoints for hypothetical retrospection. In hypothetical retrospection, a decision is evaluated under the assumption that one of the branches of possible future developments has materialized. This evaluation is based on the deliberator’s present values, and each decision is judged in relation to the information available when it was taken. The basic decision rule is to choose an alternative that comes out as morally acceptable (permissible) from all hypothetical retrospections.

Reference-dependent expected utility with incomplete preferences

An important reason why people deviate from expected utility is reference-dependence of preferences, implying loss aversion. Bleichrodt [Bleichrodt H. (2007). Reference-dependent utility with shifting reference points and incomplete preferences. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 51, 266-276] argued that in the empirically realistic case where the reference point is always an element of the decision maker’s opportunity set, reference-dependent preferences have to be taken as incomplete. This incompleteness is a consequence of reference-dependence and is different in nature from the type of incompleteness usually considered in the literature. It cannot be handled by existing characterizations of reference-dependence, which all assume complete preferences. This paper presents new preference foundations that extend reference-dependent expected utility to cover this case of incompleteness caused by reference-dependence. The paper uses intuitive axioms that are easy to test. Two special cases of reference-dependent expected utility are also characterized: one model in which utility is decomposed into a normative and a psychological component and one model in which loss aversion is constant. The latter model has been frequently used in empirical research on reference-dependence.     

Take it or leave it for something better? Responses to fair offers in ultimatum bargaining

We investigated if responders accept a 50–50 split in a modified version of the ultimatum game, in which rejection yields a higher payoff (€7) than accepting the equal offer (€5). Therefore, the decision to accept the 50–50 split in this modified ultimatum game cannot be perceived as a self-interest act, as opposed to the standard game, in which acceptance may reflect resignation in the knowledge that the equal split is the best one can expect. A substantial proportion of responders accepts the equal split in this modified game (Study 1), which clearly establishes egalitarian preferences. Further studies show that the willingness to accept is not an artifact of indifference towards the extra payoff (Study 2), but reflects true concerns for proposers’ outcomes (Study 3).     

“涟漪效应”与“心理台风眼效应”：不同程度COVID-19疫情地区民众风险认知与焦虑的双视角检验

在因防控COVID-19疫情武汉"封城"后的一个半月内,对全国34个省(区市)4833名民众的风险认知与焦虑进行了当事人视角和旁观者视角的调查研究。结果表明,(1)基于当事人视角时,不同程度疫情地区民众的风险认知和焦虑存在类似"涟漪效应"的趋势,疫情严重地区大于其他地区;(2)基于旁观者视角,民众对武汉居民的焦虑和对所需心理咨询工作者和医生数量的评估存在"心理台风眼效应";(3)基于旁观者视角,在风险认知上,低风险地区民众对武汉居民的评估显著低于高、中高及中风险地区的评估,部分支持"涟漪效应";研究还发现了"边缘带效应"和"心理可控阈限"的存在。本研究一方面为"心理台风眼效应"研究的"当事人与旁观者"视角知觉差异提供了更为丰富的直接证据,另一方面为突发公共卫生事件应急管理提供了有针对性的心理依据。     

Rethinking value elicitation for personal consequential decisions

The application of multiattribute decision analysis to personal consequential decision problems can be unhelpful particularly where the analysis fails to help the decision maker to discover new values, or where the decision maker is unable to visualize the experience that may result from choosing a particular course of action. We concur with James March that values are best discovered by the act of choosing and experimenting but acknowledge that the act of choice can lead to irreversible consequences. Both of these problems suggest that techniques which assist the decision maker to envisage the consequences of choice need to be developed and incorporated into the modelling process. We suggest some forms that these techniques might take. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Note on lexicographic‐order preservation and stochastic dominance

This note concerns two issues left unresolved in our study of lexicographic‐order preservation and stochastic dominance in settings where preferences are represented by utility vectors, ordered lexicographically, and judgements emerge as matrices that premultiply utility vectors in expected utility sums. First, a generalization of the ‘Conjecture Σ’, which implied transitivity of a stochastic dominance relation under non‐vacuous resolution‐level information, is proved. Second, this paper comments on using resolution‐level information in higher as well as in first degree stochastic dominance analysis. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Valuing the future: a MADA example involving nuclear waste storage

Intertemporal decision making involves decisions that have consequences that span several periods of time and often extend far into the future. The purpose of this paper is to discuss and highlight the differences associated with different evaluation methods designed to cope with the long-term impacts of a decision including discounting. The concepts and ideas are illustrated in the context of a decision about a nuclear waste facility. We show how applying different discounting methodologies can greatly affect the decision made, especially over long time periods. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.