Simulating Personal Wealth in the Laboratory

During laboratory gambling tasks participants are not typically allowed to wager their personal wealth. Instead, wealth is simulated by telling participants they have been endowed with game tokens that will be later exchanged for money. Past research indicates that participants undervalue game tokens following this procedure, which leads to elevated risk taking compared to procedures that add saliency or realism to the monetary payoff. A between-subjects experiment tested whether showing a picture of money during the endowment instructions and repeating token-money exchange information during the session influenced participants' preference for risky and riskless options. The results showed no effect of the money picture. However, repeated token-money exchange information significantly decreased risk taking. Together with past studies, this finding suggests that endowment procedures might establish greater value in game tokens, and therefore better simulate personal wealth, when the eventual exchange between game tokens and money is made more salient to participants.     

Maternal Depressed Mood and Perceptions of Child Temperament

Research has suggested that women who experience postpartum depression are subsequently more likely to perceive their preschool-aged children as temperamentally difficult and maladjusted. However, previous studies have not controlled for the effects of concurrent depression levels on maternal ratings of child temperament or evaluated the accuracy of maternal reports. In the present study we assessed maternal and paternal ratings of child temperament 2 years after subjects had participated in a study of postpartum depression. The findings indicate that correlations between postpartum depression and subsequent child temperament ratings were accounted for statistically by concurrent levels of depression. Although fathers' ratings corroborated some aspects of maternal perceptions, levels of parental agreement were only moderately high. Moreover, discrepancies between the parents' reports were significantly associated with maternal depression, indicating that parental disagreement is more likely when the wife is dysphoric.     

Communal Versus Individual Learning of a Math-Estimation Task: African American Children and the Culture of Learning Contexts

The authors compared the performance of 78 African American 5th-grade students who studied a math-estimation task in one of two learning contexts. Learning contexts differed in the degree to which they afforded the expression of communalism. ANCOVA confirmed that posttest performance was best for students who studied in the high communal-learning context. The findings support A. W. Boykin's (1994) contention that the cultural context of learning can be a critical mediator of children's performance.     

False Memories in Individuals at Risk for Developing an Eating Disorder

In the present study, the authors used the Roediger and McDermott paradigm (H. L. Roediger & K. B. McDermott, 1995) to examine the creation of false memories in individuals at risk for developing an eating disorder. Thirty-three controls and 34 individuals at risk for eating disorders studied 6 word lists taken from the paradigm. Three lists were food related (bread, fruit, sweet), and 3 were not food related (king, doctor, black). Both groups produced false memories (i.e., recalled or recollected words that were not presented in the lists), and controls actually produced more false memories than the at-risk individuals produced in the recall of the food-related items. Groups did not differ in their recall of items not related to food.     

The structure of “communities” and communications in the new millennium

The three lineages of information,—the genetic, the cultural and artifactual—will increasingly merge their constituent information contents through advances in biotechnology and information technology. This will redefine what constitutes “social” and what constitutes “community.” A community's members communicate with their “significant others” and change their internal information states (and their internal and external behaviors). Under conditions of merging, information exchanges occur across all the three lineages. In this sense, the concept of significant other,—that is, a communicating entity—, is now spread from human communities to encompass also the biological and the artifactual. A seamless merging between the three realms now occurs affecting their respective internal information stores. The resulting image of interactions that now arises is of multiple oceans of communities, operating at different levels, the genetic, the cultural and the artifactual. There are exchanges across the different levels, up and down and sideways, as information is translated from one realm to the other. These dynamics result in changes in the evolutionary characteristics of each lineage and sub‐lineage, including the internal perceptions from within a lineage, namely in the language of evolutionary epistemology, its “meanings” and “hypotheses” on the world. A future sociology must necessarily take into account these factors and incorporate the dynamics of all three realms.     

The natural history of information processors

By spanning the traditional scientific theories in the search for an epistemological home for information it is found that Physics (together with some inputs from Automata Theory) provides the criteria to identify the universals that characterize information processors. It is well known, however, that Physics and Mathematics alone are insufficient to answer some fundamental questions that arise in further speculations on the subject of information. It seems that Biology, in the realm of Evolution Theory and in terms of Natural Selection, is at present the only place able to offer the objective context required to properly characterize information as an object of scientific inquiry.

In this communication we intend to show, by establishing a working equivalence between the epistemological questions that should characterize a theory of information and those questions that characterize the science of Biology, how a science of information can be more objectively characterized. It is only by referring to selective pressures that we can solve the otherwise unanswerable philosophical question of whether it is possible to know if two players of a game are, in fact, playing the same game (the semantic question). It is also shown that it is possible, by using conventional criteria, to establish a phylogenesis of information processors from where we conclude that every information processor now existing in the universe (even computers and robots) has an ancestor that has once been a living being.

It is here suggested, however, that Biology is only a provisory epistemological ground for laying the foundations of an information science. A more inclusive theory should be founded on a generalization of the Theory of Evolution where mutation and natural selection should be described, not in terms of the characteristic media and mechanisms of biological systems, but of the identified universals of information processors.     

On the archetypes in information systems development: An exploration

In this paper I examine possible archetypes that embody the role that systems analyst play in different models of systems development and briefly review attendant epistemological and ontological assumptions.     

The feigenbaum scenario in a unified science of life and mind

In exploring the possibilities for creating a model of the creative cosmos, it is important to seek mathematical models that can express the common relationships unifying the sciences of matter, life and mind. Current candidates for such all embracing mathematical models come from the burgeoning fields of non‐linear dynamics that are described under varying labels as Chaos Theory, Self‐Organization Theory and Adaptive Complexity Theory. In this paper we will limit ourselves to only one mathematical model called, “The Feigenbaum Scenario.” A major virtue of The Feigenbaum Scenario is that it is relatively easy to understand by non‐mathematicians and it has led to new depths of profound understanding in a wide variety of the physical and biological sciences. Everything from purely mechanical systems, fluid dynamics and the weather to the patterns of biological growth in nature and the dynamics of heart, hormone and brain rhythms have been found to exhibit aspects of the Feigenbaum scenario. We explore the possibility that the Feigenbaum scenario can be extended to experiences of mind, sensation, perception and human behavior as well. We conclude that a major function of consciousness may be to transform the non‐linear, irrational, unconscious and difficult to predict dynamics of unconscious nature into the more linear, rational and predictable psycho‐dynamics that make human experience and social life possible.     

All of The Myriad Worlds: Life in the Akashic Plenum

This article explores some experiential implications of Laszlo's Akashic Field hypothesis as well as similar information-rich field models such as those suggested by Bohm and Sheldrake. It examines the implications of such models for both ordinary and anomalous human experience, and proposes the idea that these models allow for the possibility of alternative experiential worlds as real as ordinary “material” reality. Such alternative realities are posited by many, if not all, major mythic and religious systems, and are said to be directly experienced in certain contemplative and shamanic traditions as well as during postmortem and near-death experiences. We note that information-rich holographic fields may be able to store concentrated non-overlapping quantities of information that can be selectively activated by distinct eliciting stimuli. Individual human consciousness itself might constitute just such a stimulus, thus accounting for the individual and cultural variations on commonly shared motifs in shamanic, near death, and other experiences of alternative realities.     

Emotional reactivity,self-control and children's hostile attributions over middle childhood

Hostile attribution bias, a child's tendency to interpret ambiguous social information as threatening or hostile, has been discussed as an important point in which social, emotional and cognitive information intersect. This study explores the natural changes that occur in children's hostile attributions across three grades during middle childhood and examines how emotional reactivity and self-control at third, fourth and fifth grade independently and interactively relate to these trajectories. Participants included 919 children whose mothers reported on their emotional reactivity, whose teachers reported on their self-control and who completed an attribution bias interview, all at grades 3, 4 and 5. Results revealed that among children with a greater tendency to make hostile attributions at third grade, lower self-control at third grade was associated with greater initial hostile attribution bias and less decline in biases over time. Additionally, greater emotional reactivity at fourth grade was associated with declines in these children's hostile attributions, but only when self-control was also higher at fourth grade.