What are you dieting for? The role of lay theories in dieters' goal setting

Through a qualitative study of a sample of Weight Watchers dieters, this research provides insight about the relationship between goal setting and lay theories—people's basic assumptions about the malleability of their personal attributes. We find that dieters set very different types of superordinate and subordinate goals depending on the lay theory (entity vs. incremental) they hold. Dieters who hold entity theory, which underscores immutability of abilities, set superordinate goals focused on avoiding negative social evaluations. These dieters also seem to set subordinate goals that minimize effort in diet, physical activity, and the use of group meetings necessary for weight loss. Among dieters holding incremental theory, which emphasizes malleability of abilities through learning, weight loss is guided by superordinate goals that promote change in the self. Incremental‐theory dieters also set subordinate goals that encourage rather than limit revamping lifestyle. These findings offer contributions to lay theories and goal setting in consumer research as well as implications for developing more successful weight‐loss practices. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recognition and Reform in Nordic Fiction: Jonas Gardell and Jussi Valtonen

While contemporary Scandinavian literature continues to discuss the problems of welfare state and social justice, it increasingly turns its attention to minority issues, multiculturalism, and the impact of digitalization. Jonas Gardell's HIV/AIDS trilogy Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar (Never wipe tears without gloves) highlights the family relations in the Swedish gay community. Jussi Valtonen's He eivät tiedä mitä tekevät (They do not know what they do) deals with the dystopias of social media and the power of global software companies. Religion and theology play a significant role in the works of both Gardell and Valtonen.     

Determining the implementation order of a general plan by using a multicriteria method

We describe a real-life application of a new multicriteria method in the context of assisting the decision-making for a general plan in the municipality of Kirkkonummi in Uusimaa, Finland. At the time our group started working on the problem, a proposal for an overall plan had already been completed, but the order in which different regional parts of the plan should be implemented needed to be considered based on the environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure. The EIA procedure generated a large amount of data about the different impacts of the alternatives. For this group decision making problem we developed the SMAA-3 decision support method which does not require any explicit preference information from the decision makers during the procedure. The uncertainty of the basic data is modelled using ELECTRE III-type pseudo-criteria with preference and indifference thresholds. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evangelism Challenges the Church's Identity

The gospel of Christ has spread to hundreds of linguistic and cultural communities. Christian churches have come face to face with an extraordinarily positive but nevertheless perplexing problem: Can the churches find the common core message of the holistic gospel or will the actual content of faith become relativized into the interpretation of interpretations? Despite the many different definitions of evangelism/evangelization, evangelism always leads to consideration of the basic questions of faith: its profound understanding and its reception. Evangelism involves the questions of what I believe or believe in, and of what I commit to. In the midst of the constant flow of information and the hectic tempo of life, evangelism challenges the church again and again to reconsider how the gospel can be expressed compactly, but in a rich, understandable, and true‐to‐life way. In the ecumenical discussion, the concept of “witness” as a form of evangelism is becoming increasingly important, because it comprises all the essential dimensions of the whole gospel. Evangelism challenges churches and their members to boldly bear witness by word and deed to Jesus Christ.     

Phonetic variability and prosodic structure in mothers

Spontaneous speech acoustics are highly variable. Such variability may be problematic for infants relying on phonological form to solve the segmentation problem. In the present study, acoustic measures of vowel duration and a computer model of speech segmentation were used to evaluate the problem of phonetic variability for a rhythm-based speech segmentation strategy. The specific questions under study were (1) whether or not mothers realized disyllabic vowel duration patterns consistently in spontaneous infant-directed speech, and (2) whether or not these patterns were distinctive enough in the context of an utterance to provide a useful cue for speech segmentation. Data from four English-speaking mothers indicated that the trochaic-like duration pattern may interact with phrase-position and with grammatical category, but when the resulting patterns are consistent, they provide useful segmentation cues for spontaneous infant-directed speech.     

Some considerations about the biological appearance of pacing stimuli in visuomotor finger-tapping tasks

Sensorimotor synchronization is a crucial function for human daily activities, which relies on the ability of predicting external events. Synchronization performance, as assessed in finger-tapping (FT) tasks, is characterized by an anticipation tendency, as the tap generally precedes the pacing event. This synchronization error (SE) depends on many factors, in particular on the features of the pacing stimulus. Interest is growing in the facilitation effect that action observation has on motor execution. So far, neuroimaging and neurophysiology studies of motor priming via action observation have mainly employed tasks requiring single action instances. The impact of action observation on motor synchronization to periodic stimuli has not yet been tested; to this aim, a synchronization FT task may be an eligible probing task. The purpose of this study was to characterize a biological pacer at the behavioral level and provide information for those interested in studying the brain processes of continuous observation/execution coupling in timed actions using FT tasks. We evaluated the influence of the biological appearance of a pacer (a tapping finger) on SE, when compared to an abstract, kinematically equivalent pacer (a tilting hinged bar) and a more standard stimulus (a pulsating dot). We showed that the continuous visual display of a biological pacer yields comparable results to the abstract pacer, and a more robust performance and larger anticipations than a traditional pulsating stimulus.     

Existence and Predication from Aristotle to Frege

One of the characteristic features of contemporary logic is that it incorporates the Frege-Russell thesis according to which verbs for being are multiply ambiguous. This thesis was not accepted before the nineteenth century. In Aristotle existence could not serve alone as a predicate term. However, it could be a part of the force of the predicate term, depending on the context. For Kant existence could not even be a part of the force of the predicate term. Hence, after Kant, existence was left homeless. It found a home in the algebra of logic in which the operators corresponding to universal and particular judgments were treated as duals, and universal judgments were taken to be relative to some universe of discourse. Because of the duality, existential quantifier expressions came to express existence. The orphaned notion of existence thus found a new home in the existential quantifier.     

Semantic boost on episodic associations: an empirically-based computational model

Words become associated following repeated co-occurrence episodes. This process might be further determined by the semantic characteristics of the words. The present study focused on how semantic and episodic factors interact in incidental formation of word associations. First, we found that human participants associate semantically related words more easily than unrelated words; this advantage increased linearly with repeated co-occurrence. Second, we developed a computational model, SEMANT, suggesting a possible mechanism for this semantic-episodic interaction. In SEMANT, episodic associations are implemented through lateral connections between nodes in a pre-existent self-organized map of word semantics. These connections are strengthened at each instance of concomitant activation, proportionally with the amount of the overlapping activity waves of activated nodes. In computer simulations SEMANT replicated the dynamics of associative learning in humans and led to testable predictions concerning normal associative learning as well as impaired learning in a diffuse semantic system like that characteristic of schizophrenia.     

Location vs. frequency of pure tones as a basis of fast discrimination

There are ample data suggesting that a spatial difference between two competing auditory messages provides a better basis for selective attention and listening than other differences. The present experiments show that the spatial difference (left vs. right ear) between two auditory inputs leads to their faster discrimination than even large differences in frequency (in the same ear). These results might explain the afore-mentioned privileged status of the spatial dimension as a basis of selective attention: spatial differences lead in faster identification of relevant or attended input than differences in other dimensions.