Retrieving autobiographical memories influences judgments about others: the role of metacognitive experiences.

Science.gov (United States)

Woltin, Karl-Andrew; Corneille, Olivier; Yzerbyt, Vincent Y

2014-04-01

This research investigates whether metacognitive experiences accompanying the retrieval of autobiographical memories influence judgments about others. Based on social projection research, we tested the hypothesis that ease-of-retrieval, affecting how the self is perceived, affects first impressions. In line with this prediction, Experiment 1 showed that participants asked to recall a few personal instances of assertive behavior (easy retrieval) judged an unknown person to be more assertive than participants recalling many instances (difficult retrieval). Experiment 2, targeting creativity, provided evidence for the retrieval-ease mechanism: The effect disappeared when ease-of-retrieval was discredited as informational source in a misattribution paradigm. Finally, Experiments 3 and 4 replicated this pattern for the same personality traits and demonstrated two boundary conditions: Participants' ease of autobiographical recalls affected judgments of in- but not outgroup members (Experiment 3), and judgments of unknown others were affected after autobiographical recall but not after recalling behaviors of someone else (Experiment 4).

Judgments of brand similarity

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bijmolt, THA; Wedel, M; Pieters, RGM; DeSarbo, WS

This paper provides empirical insight into the way consumers make pairwise similarity judgments between brands, and how familiarity with the brands, serial position of the pair in a sequence, and the presentation format affect these judgments. Within the similarity judgment process both the

Is retrieval the key? Metamemory judgment and testing as learning strategies.

Science.gov (United States)

Akdoğan, Elçin; Izaute, Marie; Danion, Jean-Marie; Vidailhet, Pierre; Bacon, Elisabeth

2016-11-01

Re-reading is the most common learning strategy, albeit not a very efficient one. Testing is highly efficient, but not perceived by students as a learning strategy. Prospective judgment-of-learning (JOL) reflect the learner's impression of subsequently being able to retrieve the ongoing learning in a cued-recall task. Estimating JOL involves attempting to retrieve the information, as in testing. The few studies that have explored the potential mnemonic benefit of JOL have yielded contradictory results. Our aim was to compare JOL and testing with re-study and to examine the impact of these strategies according to the relative difficulty of the material (cue-target association strength) in two experiments. After a first encoding phase, participants re-studied, provided JOL, or took a test. Forty-eight hours later, they participated in a final cued-recall test, during which their confidence level judgments were collected. The main result was that delayed JOL behaved in the same way as testing, and both yielded better performances than re-study when material was of moderate difficulty. The easy or very difficult material revealed no differences between these strategies. JOL is proposed as an alternative to testing when faced with difficult material.

Emotion and moral judgment

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Avramova, Y.R.; Inbar, Y.

2013-01-01

Research in psychology and cognitive science has consistently demonstrated the importance of emotion in a wide range of everyday judgments, including moral judgment. Most current accounts of moral judgment hold that emotion plays an important role, but the nature and extent of this role are still

Co-workers' Justice Judgments, own Justice Judgments and Employee Commitment: A multi-foci approach

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Florence Stinglhamber

2008-06-01

Full Text Available Using a sample of 212 employees, we conducted a study to examine whether employees use their co-workers' fairness perceptions to generate their own justice judgments and to develop their subsequent affective commitment. The conceptual framework used to investigate these linkages is social exchange theory combined with a multiple foci approach. Results of the structural equation modeling analyses revealed that co-workers' procedural justice judgments strengthened employee's own procedural justice judgments, which in turn influenced their affective commitment to the organisation. Similarly, co-workers' interactional justice judgments increased employee's own interactional justice judgments, which in turn impacted on their affective commitment to both the supervisor and the organisation. As a whole, findings suggest that coworkers' justice judgments strengthened employee's affective attachments toward the justice sources by reinforcing employee's own justice perceptions.

Are 'counter-intuitive' deontological judgments really counter-intuitive? An empirical reply to.

Science.gov (United States)

Paxton, Joseph M; Bruni, Tommaso; Greene, Joshua D

2014-09-01

A substantial body of evidence indicates that utilitarian judgments (favoring the greater good) made in response to difficult moral dilemmas are preferentially supported by controlled, reflective processes, whereas deontological judgments (favoring rights/duties) in such cases are preferentially supported by automatic, intuitive processes. A recent neuroimaging study by Kahane et al. challenges this claim, using a new set of moral dilemmas that allegedly reverse the previously observed association. We report on a study in which we both induced and measured reflective responding to one of Greene et al.'s original dilemmas and one of Kahane et al.'s new dilemmas. For the original dilemma, induced reflection led to more utilitarian responding, replicating previous findings using the same methods. There was no overall effect of induced reflection for the new dilemma. However, for both dilemmas, the degree to which an individual engaged in prior reflection predicted the subsequent degree of utilitarian responding, with more reflective subjects providing more utilitarian judgments. These results cast doubt on Kahane et al.'s conclusions and buttress the original claim linking controlled, reflective processes to utilitarian judgment and automatic, intuitive processes to deontological judgment. Importantly, these results also speak to the generality of the underlying theory, indicating that what holds for cases involving utilitarian physical harms also holds for cases involving utilitarian lies. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Comparing temporal order judgments and choice reaction time tasks as indices of exogenous spatial cuing.

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Eskes, Gail A; Klein, Raymond M; Dove, Mary Beth; Coolican, Jamesie; Shore, David I

2007-11-30

Attentional disorders are common in individuals with neurological or psychiatric conditions and impact on recovery and outcome. Thus, it is critical to develop theory-based measures of attentional function to understand potential mechanisms underlying the disorder and to evaluate the effect of intervention. The present study compared two alternative methods to measure the effects of attentional cuing that could be used in populations of individuals who may not be able to make manual responses normally or may show overall slowing in responses. Spatial attention was measured with speeded and unspeeded methods using either manual or voice responses in two standard attention paradigms: the cued target discrimination reaction time (RT) paradigm and the unspeeded temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. The comparison of speeded and unspeeded tasks specifically addresses the concern about interpreting RT differences between cued and uncued trials (taken as a proxy for attention) in the context of drastically different baseline RTs. We found significant cuing effects for both tasks (speeded RT and untimed TOJ) and both response types (vocal and manual) giving clinicians and researchers alternative methods with which to measure the effects of attention in different populations who may not be able to perform the standard speeded RT task.

Spatial representations are specific to different domains of knowledge.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rowena Beecham

Full Text Available There is evidence that many abstract concepts are represented cognitively in a spatial format. However, it is unknown whether similar spatial processes are employed in different knowledge domains, or whether individuals exhibit similar spatial profiles within and across domains. This research investigated similarities in spatial representation in two knowledge domains--mathematics and music. Sixty-one adults completed analogous number magnitude and pitch discrimination tasks: the Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes and Spatial-Musical Association of Response Codes tasks. Subgroups of individuals with different response patterns were identified through cluster analyses. For both the mathematical and musical tasks, approximately half of the participants showed the expected spatial judgment effect when explicitly cued to focus on the spatial properties of the stimuli. Despite this, performances on the two tasks were largely independent. Consistent with previous research, the study provides evidence for the spatial representation of number and pitch in the majority of individuals. However, there was little evidence to support the claim that the same spatial representation processes underpin mathematical and musical judgments.

Improved quality of input data for maintenance optimization using expert judgment

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Oien, Knut

1998-01-01

Most maintenance optimization models need an estimate of the so-called 'naked' failure rate function as input. In practice it is very difficult to estimate the 'naked' failure rate, because overhauls and other preventive maintenance actions tend to 'corrupt' the recorded lifelengths. The purpose of this paper is to stress the importance of utilizing the knowledge of maintenance engineers, i.e., expert judgment, in addition to recorded equipment lifelengths, in order to get credible input data. We have shown that without utilizing expert judgment, the estimated mean time to failure may be strongly biased, often by a factor of 2-3, depending on the life distribution that is assumed. We recommend including a simple question about the mean remaining lifelength on the work-order forms. By this approach the knowledge of maintenance engineers may be incorporated in a simple and cost-effective way

Functional Equivalence of Spatial Images from Touch and Vision: Evidence from Spatial Updating in Blind and Sighted Individuals

Science.gov (United States)

Giudice, Nicholas A.; Betty, Maryann R.; Loomis, Jack M.

2011-01-01

This research examined whether visual and haptic map learning yield functionally equivalent spatial images in working memory, as evidenced by similar encoding bias and updating performance. In 3 experiments, participants learned 4-point routes either by seeing or feeling the maps. At test, blindfolded participants made spatial judgments about the…

Task- and age-dependent effects of visual stimulus properties on children's explicit numerosity judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Defever, Emmy; Reynvoet, Bert; Gebuis, Titia

2013-10-01

Researchers investigating numerosity processing manipulate the visual stimulus properties (e.g., surface). This is done to control for the confound between numerosity and its visual properties and should allow the examination of pure number processes. Nevertheless, several studies have shown that, despite different visual controls, visual cues remained to exert their influence on numerosity judgments. This study, therefore, investigated whether the impact of the visual stimulus manipulations on numerosity judgments is dependent on the task at hand (comparison task vs. same-different task) and whether this impact changes throughout development. In addition, we examined whether the influence of visual stimulus manipulations on numerosity judgments plays a role in the relation between performance on numerosity tasks and mathematics achievement. Our findings confirmed that the visual stimulus manipulations affect numerosity judgments; more important, we found that these influences changed with increasing age and differed between the comparison and the same-different tasks. Consequently, direct comparisons between numerosity studies using different tasks and age groups are difficult. No meaningful relationship between the performance on the comparison and same-different tasks and mathematics achievement was found in typically developing children, nor did we find consistent differences between children with and without mathematical learning disability (MLD). Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Spatial modelling of landscape aesthetic potential in urban-rural fringes.

Science.gov (United States)

Sahraoui, Yohan; Clauzel, Céline; Foltête, Jean-Christophe

2016-10-01

The aesthetic potential of landscape has to be modelled to provide tools for land-use planning. This involves identifying landscape attributes and revealing individuals' landscape preferences. Landscape aesthetic judgments of individuals (n = 1420) were studied by means of a photo-based survey. A set of landscape visibility metrics was created to measure landscape composition and configuration in each photograph using spatial data. These metrics were used as explanatory variables in multiple linear regressions to explain aesthetic judgments. We demonstrate that landscape aesthetic judgments may be synthesized in three consensus groups. The statistical results obtained show that landscape visibility metrics have good explanatory power. Ultimately, we propose a spatial modelling of landscape aesthetic potential based on these results combined with systematic computation of visibility metrics. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

What Makes Difficult History Difficult?

Science.gov (United States)

Gross, Magdalena H.; Terra, Luke

2018-01-01

All modern nation-states have periods of difficult history that teachers fail to address or address inadequately. The authors present a framework for defining difficult histories and understanding what makes them difficult. These events 1) are central to a nation's history, 2) contradict accepted histories or values, 3) connect with present…

Towards a Kantian Theory of Judgment : the power of judgment in its practical and aesthetic employment

NARCIS (Netherlands)

During, D.K.; Duwell, M.

2015-01-01

Human beings orient themselves in the world via judgments; factual, moral, prudential, aesthetic, and all kinds of mixed judgments. Particularly for normative orientation in complex and contested contexts of action, it can be challenging to form judgments. This paper explores what one can reasonably

Spatio-temporal patterns of event-related potentials related to audiovisual synchrony judgments in older adults.

Science.gov (United States)

Chan, Yu Man; Pianta, Michael Julian; Bode, Stefan; McKendrick, Allison Maree

2017-07-01

Older adults have altered perception of the relative timing between auditory and visual stimuli, even when stimuli are scaled to equate detectability. To help understand why, this study investigated the neural correlates of audiovisual synchrony judgments in older adults using electroencephalography (EEG). Fourteen younger (18-32 year old) and 16 older (61-74 year old) adults performed an audiovisual synchrony judgment task on flash-pip stimuli while EEG was recorded. All participants were assessed to have healthy vision and hearing for their age. Observers responded to whether audiovisual pairs were perceived as synchronous or asynchronous via a button press. The results showed that the onset of predictive sensory information for synchrony judgments was not different between groups. Channels over auditory areas contributed more to this predictive sensory information than visual areas. The spatial-temporal profile of the EEG activity also indicates that older adults used different resources to maintain a similar level of performance in audiovisual synchrony judgments compared with younger adults. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Moral judgment in episodic amnesia.

Science.gov (United States)

Craver, Carl F; Keven, Nazim; Kwan, Donna; Kurczek, Jake; Duff, Melissa C; Rosenbaum, R Shayna

2016-08-01

To investigate the role of episodic thought about the past and future in moral judgment, we administered a well-established moral judgment battery to individuals with hippocampal damage and deficits in episodic thought (insert Greene et al. 2001). Healthy controls select deontological answers in high-conflict moral scenarios more frequently when they vividly imagine themselves in the scenarios than when they imagine scenarios abstractly, at some personal remove. If this bias is mediated by episodic thought, individuals with deficits in episodic thought should not exhibit this effect. We report that individuals with deficits in episodic memory and future thought make moral judgments and exhibit the biasing effect of vivid, personal imaginings on moral judgment. These results strongly suggest that the biasing effect of vivid personal imagining on moral judgment is not due to episodic thought about the past and future. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Hague Judgments Convention

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Peter Arnt

2011-01-01

The Hague Judgments Convention of 2005 is the first global convention on international jurisdiction and recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters. The author explains the political and legal background of the Convention, its content and certain crucial issues during...

Calibrating Legal Judgments

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Frederick Schauer

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Objective to study the notion and essence of legal judgments calibration the possibilities of using it in the lawenforcement activity to explore the expenses and advantages of using it. Methods dialectic approach to the cognition of social phenomena which enables to analyze them in historical development and functioning in the context of the integrity of objective and subjective factors it determined the choice of the following research methods formallegal comparative legal sociological methods of cognitive psychology and philosophy. Results In ordinary life people who assess other peoplersaquos judgments typically take into account the other judgments of those they are assessing in order to calibrate the judgment presently being assessed. The restaurant and hotel rating website TripAdvisor is exemplary because it facilitates calibration by providing access to a raterrsaquos previous ratings. Such information allows a user to see whether a particular rating comes from a rater who is enthusiastic about every place she patronizes or instead from someone who is incessantly hard to please. And even when less systematized as in assessing a letter of recommendation or college transcript calibration by recourse to the decisional history of those whose judgments are being assessed is ubiquitous. Yet despite the ubiquity and utility of such calibration the legal system seems perversely to reject it. Appellate courts do not openly adjust their standard of review based on the previous judgments of the judge whose decision they are reviewing nor do judges in reviewing legislative or administrative decisions magistrates in evaluating search warrant representations or jurors in assessing witness perception. In most legal domains calibration by reference to the prior decisions of the reviewee is invisible either because it does not exist or because reviewing bodies are unwilling to admit using what they in fact know and employ. Scientific novelty for the first

Moral judgment of alcohol addicts

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Mladenović Ivica

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Introduction. Alcoholism could represent an important factor of crime and different forms of abuse of family members (physical and emotional exist in many alcohol-addict cases, as well as characteristics of immoral behaviour. Objective. The objective of our study was to determine the predominating forms in moral judgment of alcohol addicts, and to examine whether there was any statistically significant difference in moral judgment between alcohol addicted persons and non-alcoholics from general population. Methods. The sample consisted of 62 subjects, divided into a study (alcoholics and a control group (non-alcoholics from general population. The following instruments were used: social-demographic data, AUDIT, MMPI-201, cybernetic battery of IQ tests (KOG-3 and the TMR moral reasoning test. Results. Mature forms of moral judgment prevailed in both group of subjects, alcohol addicted persons and non-alcoholics. Regarding mature forms of moral judgment (driven by emotions and cognitive non-alcoholics from the general population had higher scores, but the difference was not statistically significant. Regarding socially adapted and egocentric orientation alcohol addicted persons had higher scores. However, only regarding intuitive-irrational orientation there was a statistically significant difference in the level of moral judgment (p<0.05 between alcoholics and non-alcoholics, in favour of the alcoholics. Conclusion. Moral judgment is not a category differing alcohol addicted persons from those who are not. Nevertheless, the potential destructivity of alcoholism is reflected in lower scores regarding mature orientations in moral judgment.

The development of intent-based moral judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Cushman, Fiery; Sheketoff, Rachel; Wharton, Sophie; Carey, Susan

2013-04-01

Between the ages of 4 and 8 children increasingly make moral judgments on the basis of an actor's intent, as opposed to the outcome that the actor brings about. Does this reflect a reorganization of concepts in the moral domain, or simply the development of capacities outside the moral domain such as theory of mind and executive function? Motivated by the past evidence that adults rely partially on outcome-based judgment for judgments of deserved punishment, but not for judgments of moral wrongness, we explore the same categories of judgment in young children. We find that intent-based judgments emerge first in children's assessments of naughtiness and that this subsequently constrains their judgments of deserved punishment. We also find that this developmental trajectory differs for judgments of accidental harm (a bad outcome with benign intent) and judgments of attempted harm (a benign outcome with bad intent). Our findings support a two process model derived from studies of adults: a mental-state based process of judging wrongness constrains an outcome-based process of assigning punishment. The emergence of this two-process architecture in childhood suggests that the developmental shift from outcome- to intent-based judgment involves a conceptual reorganization within the moral domain. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Influence diagram in evaluating the subjective judgment

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hong, Y.

1997-01-01

The author developed the idea of the subjective influence diagrams to evaluate subjective judgment. The subjective judgment of a stake holder is a primary decision making proposition. It involves a basic decision process an the individual attitude of the stake holder for his decision purpose. The subjective judgment dominates the some final decisions. A complex decision process may include the subjective judgment. An influence diagram framework is a simplest tool for analyzing subjective judgment process. In the framework, the characters of influence diagrams generate the describing the analyzing, and the evaluating of the subjective judgment. The relationship between the information and the decision, such as independent character between them, is the main issue. Then utility function is the calculating tool to evaluation, the stake holder can make optimal decision. Through the analysis about the decision process and relationship, the building process of the influence diagram identically describes the subjective judgment. Some examples are given to explain the property of subjective judgment and the analysis process

5 CFR 919.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Civil judgment. 919.920 Section 919.920 Administrative Personnel OFFICE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT (CONTINUED) CIVIL SERVICE REGULATIONS (CONTINUED) GOVERNMENTWIDE DEBARMENT AND SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 919.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment...

Global-local visual biases correspond with visual-spatial orientation.

Science.gov (United States)

Basso, Michael R; Lowery, Natasha

2004-02-01

Within the past decade, numerous investigations have demonstrated reliable associations of global-local visual processing biases with right and left hemisphere function, respectively (cf. Van Kleeck, 1989). Yet the relevance of these biases to other cognitive functions is not well understood. Towards this end, the present research examined the relationship between global-local visual biases and perception of visual-spatial orientation. Twenty-six women and 23 men completed a global-local judgment task (Kimchi and Palmer, 1982) and the Judgment of Line Orientation Test (JLO; Benton, Sivan, Hamsher, Varney, and Spreen, 1994), a measure of visual-spatial orientation. As expected, men had better performance on JLO. Extending previous findings, global biases were related to better visual-spatial acuity on JLO. The findings suggest that global-local biases and visual-spatial orientation may share underlying cerebral mechanisms. Implications of these findings for other visually mediated cognitive outcomes are discussed.

Judgments relative to patterns: how temporal sequence patterns affect judgments and memory.

Science.gov (United States)

Kusev, Petko; Ayton, Peter; van Schaik, Paul; Tsaneva-Atanasova, Krasimira; Stewart, Neil; Chater, Nick

2011-12-01

Six experiments studied relative frequency judgment and recall of sequentially presented items drawn from 2 distinct categories (i.e., city and animal). The experiments show that judged frequencies of categories of sequentially encountered stimuli are affected by certain properties of the sequence configuration. We found (a) a first-run effect whereby people overestimated the frequency of a given category when that category was the first repeated category to occur in the sequence and (b) a dissociation between judgments and recall; respondents may judge 1 event more likely than the other and yet recall more instances of the latter. Specifically, the distribution of recalled items does not correspond to the frequency estimates for the event categories, indicating that participants do not make frequency judgments by sampling their memory for individual items as implied by other accounts such as the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) and the availability process model (Hastie & Park, 1986). We interpret these findings as reflecting the operation of a judgment heuristic sensitive to sequential patterns and offer an account for the relationship between memory and judged frequencies of sequentially encountered stimuli.

Associative Processes in Intuitive Judgment

Science.gov (United States)

Morewedge, Carey K.; Kahneman, Daniel

2014-01-01

Dual-system models of reasoning attribute errors of judgment to two failures. The automatic operations of a “System 1” generate a faulty intuition, which the controlled operations of a “System 2” fail to detect and correct. We identify System 1 with the automatic operations of associative memory and draw on research in the priming paradigm to describe how it operates. We explain how three features of associative memory—associative coherence, attribute substitution, and processing fluency—give rise to major biases of intuitive judgment. Our article highlights both the ability of System 1 to create complex and skilled judgments and the role of the system as a source of judgment errors. PMID:20696611

Inability and Obligation in Moral Judgment

Science.gov (United States)

Buckwalter, Wesley; Turri, John

2015-01-01

It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a variety of moral vocabulary to probe moral judgments and was insensitive to different levels of seriousness for the consequences of inaction (Experiment 4). Judgments about moral obligation were no different for individuals who can or cannot perform physical actions, and these judgments differed from evaluations of a non-moral obligation (Experiment 7). Together these results demonstrate that commonsense morality rejects the “ought implies can” principle for moral requirements, and that judgments about moral obligation are made independently of considerations about ability. By contrast, judgments of blame were highly sensitive to considerations about ability (Experiment 8), which suggests that commonsense morality might accept a “blame implies can” principle. PMID:26296206

Relative contributions of visual and auditory spatial representations to tactile localization.

Science.gov (United States)

Noel, Jean-Paul; Wallace, Mark

2016-02-01

Spatial localization of touch is critically dependent upon coordinate transformation between different reference frames, which must ultimately allow for alignment between somatotopic and external representations of space. Although prior work has shown an important role for cues such as body posture in influencing the spatial localization of touch, the relative contributions of the different sensory systems to this process are unknown. In the current study, we had participants perform a tactile temporal order judgment (TOJ) under different body postures and conditions of sensory deprivation. Specifically, participants performed non-speeded judgments about the order of two tactile stimuli presented in rapid succession on their ankles during conditions in which their legs were either uncrossed or crossed (and thus bringing somatotopic and external reference frames into conflict). These judgments were made in the absence of 1) visual, 2) auditory, or 3) combined audio-visual spatial information by blindfolding and/or placing participants in an anechoic chamber. As expected, results revealed that tactile temporal acuity was poorer under crossed than uncrossed leg postures. Intriguingly, results also revealed that auditory and audio-visual deprivation exacerbated the difference in tactile temporal acuity between uncrossed to crossed leg postures, an effect not seen for visual-only deprivation. Furthermore, the effects under combined audio-visual deprivation were greater than those seen for auditory deprivation. Collectively, these results indicate that mechanisms governing the alignment between somatotopic and external reference frames extend beyond those imposed by body posture to include spatial features conveyed by the auditory and visual modalities - with a heavier weighting of auditory than visual spatial information. Thus, sensory modalities conveying exteroceptive spatial information contribute to judgments regarding the localization of touch. Copyright © 2016

Do social utility judgments influence attentional processing?

Science.gov (United States)

Shore, Danielle M; Heerey, Erin A

2013-10-01

Research shows that social judgments influence decision-making in social environments. For example, judgments about an interaction partners' trustworthiness affect a variety of social behaviors and decisions. One mechanism by which social judgments may influence social decisions is by biasing the automatic allocation of attention toward certain social partners, thereby shaping the information people acquire. Using an attentional blink paradigm, we investigate how trustworthiness judgments alter the allocation of attention to social stimuli in a set of two experiments. The first experiment investigates trustworthiness judgments based solely on a social partner's facial appearance. The second experiment examines the effect of trustworthiness judgments based on experienced behavior. In the first, strong appearance-based judgments (positive and negative) enhanced stimulus recognizability but did not alter the size of the attentional blink, suggesting that appearance-based social judgments enhance face memory but do not affect pre-attentive processing. However, in the second experiment, in which judgments were based on behavioral experience rather than appearance, positive judgments enhanced pre-attentive processing of trustworthy faces. This suggests that a stimulus's potential benefits, rather than its disadvantages, shape the automatic distribution of attentional resources. These results have implications for understanding how appearance- and behavior-based social cues shape attention distribution in social environments. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

7 CFR 3017.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 15 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Civil judgment. 3017.920 Section 3017.920 Agriculture... AGRICULTURE GOVERNMENTWIDE DEBARMENT AND SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 3017.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of competent jurisdiction, whether...

29 CFR 1471.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 29 Labor 4 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Civil judgment. 1471.920 Section 1471.920 Labor Regulations... SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 1471.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of competent jurisdiction, whether by verdict, decision, settlement...

Research on Judgment Aggregation Based on Logic

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Li Dai

2014-05-01

Full Text Available Preference aggregation and judgment aggregation are two basic research models of group decision making. And preference aggregation has been deeply studied in social choice theory. However, researches of social choice theory gradually focus on judgment aggregation which appears recently. Judgment aggregation focuses on how to aggregate many consistent logical formulas into one, from the perspective of logic. We try to start with judgment aggregation model based on logic and then explore different solutions to problem of judgment aggregation.

31 CFR 19.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Civil judgment. 19.920 Section 19.920... SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 19.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of competent jurisdiction, whether by verdict, decision, settlement...

Spatial extent in demographic research - approach and problems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Knežević Aleksandar

2015-01-01

Full Text Available One of the starting methodological problems in demographic research is the definition of spatial extent, which mostly doesn’t correspond to spatial extent already defined by different levels of administrative-territorial unitsthat are used for distribution of usable statistical data. That’s why determining the spatial extent of a demographic research is closely tied with administrative-territorial division of the territory that is being researched, wherein the fact that differentiation of demographic phenomena and processes cannot be the only basis of setting the principles of regionalization must be strictly acknowledged. This problem is particularly common in historical demographic analyses of geographically determined wholes, which are in administratively-territorial sense represented by one or more smaller territorial units, with their borders changing through the history, which directly affects comparability of the statistical data, and makes it considerably more difficult to track demographic change through longer time intervals. The result of these efforts is usually a solution based on a compromise which enables us to examine the dynamics of population change with little deviation from already defined borders of regional geographic wholes. For that reason in this paper the problem of defining spatial extent in demographic research is examined trough several different approaches in case of Eastern Serbia, as a geographically determined region, a historic area, a spatially functioning whole and as a statistical unit for demographic research, with no judgment calls in regard to any of the regionalization principles. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. III 47006

29 CFR 98.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 29 Labor 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 true Civil judgment. 98.920 Section 98.920 Labor Office of the Secretary of Labor GOVERNMENTWIDE DEBARMENT AND SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 98.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of competent jurisdiction...

Are you sure the library is that way? An investigation of spatial metamemory

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Stevens, Christopher

2014-01-01

Very little research exists on how people monitor the use of their spatial knowledge. In the present studies, participants made judgments of relative direction by pointing at target buildings in well-known or just-learned environments, using given headings. Confidence in pointing judgments might be

Achievement goals affect metacognitive judgments

Science.gov (United States)

Ikeda, Kenji; Yue, Carole L.; Murayama, Kou; Castel, Alan D.

2017-01-01

The present study examined the effect of achievement goals on metacognitive judgments, such as judgments of learning (JOLs) and metacomprehension judgments, and actual recall performance. We conducted five experiments manipulating the instruction of achievement goals. In each experiment, participants were instructed to adopt mastery-approach goals (i.e., develop their own mental ability through a memory task) or performance-approach goals (i.e., demonstrate their strong memory ability through getting a high score on a memory task). The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that JOLs of word pairs in the performance-approach goal condition tended to be higher than those in the mastery-approach goal condition. In contrast, cued recall performance did not differ between the two goal conditions. Experiment 3 also demonstrated that metacomprehension judgments of text passages were higher in the performance-approach goal condition than in the mastery-approach goals condition, whereas test performance did not differ between conditions. These findings suggest that achievement motivation affects metacognitive judgments during learning, even when achievement motivation does not influence actual performance. PMID:28983496

Assessment of moral judgment and empathy in young sex offenders: a comparison of clinical judgment and test results.

Science.gov (United States)

van Vugt, Eveline; Asscher, Jessica; Hendriks, Jan; Stams, Geert Jan; Bijleveld, Catrien; van der Laan, Peter

2012-10-01

Professional decision making in forensic clinical practice may have lifelong consequences for offenders. Although information on moral development is important for prediction of reoffending and referral to adequate treatment, conclusions regarding moral development are still largely based on unstructured clinical judgment instead of assessment instruments. For this study, the authors examined to what extent unstructured clinical judgment of both moral judgment and victim empathy concurred with test results in a group of young sex offenders. Moral judgment was measured with the Sociomoral Reflection Measure-Short Form (SRM-SF), whereas victim empathy was measured with an extended version of the Basic Empathy Scale (BES). No significant associations were found between clinical judgment of moral judgment and the mean scores on the SRM-SF. However, clinical judgment of victim empathy was significantly associated with victim empathy on the Victim Empathy Scale but not consistently in the expected direction. Juvenile sex offenders, who were judged by clinicians to show little victim empathy, displayed lower mean scores on the Victim Empathy Scale than juvenile sex offenders who were evaluated to lack victim empathy or to have intact victim empathy. This study showed unstructured clinical judgment of moral development not to concur with test results. To improve decision-making processes regarding moral development, clinicians are advised to rely on instruments that assess moral development to inform clinical judgment. Further research is needed to examine which predictions are more accurate and to establish the predictive validity of moral development evaluations.

22 CFR 208.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 22 Foreign Relations 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Civil judgment. 208.920 Section 208.920 Foreign...) Definitions § 208.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

34 CFR 85.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 34 Education 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Civil judgment. 85.920 Section 85.920 Education Office...) Definitions § 85.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

2 CFR 180.915 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 2 Grants and Agreements 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Civil judgment. 180.915 Section 180.915... § 180.915 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

22 CFR 1006.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 22 Foreign Relations 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 true Civil judgment. 1006.920 Section 1006.920...) Definitions § 1006.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

22 CFR 1508.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 22 Foreign Relations 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 true Civil judgment. 1508.920 Section 1508.920...) Definitions § 1508.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

Are ‘counter-intuitive’ deontological judgments really counter-intuitive? An empirical reply to Kahane et al. (2012)

Science.gov (United States)

Bruni, Tommaso; Greene, Joshua D.

2014-01-01

A substantial body of evidence indicates that utilitarian judgments (favoring the greater good) made in response to difficult moral dilemmas are preferentially supported by controlled, reflective processes, whereas deontological judgments (favoring rights/duties) in such cases are preferentially supported by automatic, intuitive processes. A recent neuroimaging study by Kahane et al. challenges this claim, using a new set of moral dilemmas that allegedly reverse the previously observed association. We report on a study in which we both induced and measured reflective responding to one of Greene et al.’s original dilemmas and one of Kahane et al.’s new dilemmas. For the original dilemma, induced reflection led to more utilitarian responding, replicating previous findings using the same methods. There was no overall effect of induced reflection for the new dilemma. However, for both dilemmas, the degree to which an individual engaged in prior reflection predicted the subsequent degree of utilitarian responding, with more reflective subjects providing more utilitarian judgments. These results cast doubt on Kahane et al.’s conclusions and buttress the original claim linking controlled, reflective processes to utilitarian judgment and automatic, intuitive processes to deontological judgment. Importantly, these results also speak to the generality of the underlying theory, indicating that what holds for cases involving utilitarian physical harms also holds for cases involving utilitarian lies. PMID:23887818

21 CFR 1404.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 21 Food and Drugs 9 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Civil judgment. 1404.920 Section 1404.920 Food and...) Definitions § 1404.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of... creates a civil liability for the complained of wrongful acts, or a final determination of liability under...

Individual moral judgment and cultural ideologies.

Science.gov (United States)

Narvaez, D; Getz, I; Rest, J R; Thoma, S J

1999-03-01

Moral judgment cannot be reduced to cultural ideology, or vice versa. But when each construct is measured separately, then combined, the product predicts powerfully to moral thinking. In Study 1, 2 churches (N = 96) were selected for their differences on religious ideology, political identity, and moral judgment. By combining these 3 variables, a multiple correlation of .79 predicted to members' moral thinking (opinions on human rights issues). Study 2 replicated this finding in a secular sample, with the formula established in Study 1 (R = .77). Individual conceptual development in moral judgment and socialization into cultural ideology co-occur, simultaneously and reciprocally, in parallel, and not serially. Individual development in moral judgment provides the epistemological categories for cultural ideology, which in turn influences the course of moral judgment, to produce moral thinking (e.g., opinions about abortion, free speech).

Calisthenics with Words: The Effect of Readability and Investor Sophistication on Investors’ Performance Judgment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xiao Carol Cui

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Since the 1990s, the SEC has advocated for financial disclosures to be in “plain English” so that they would be more readable and informative. Past research has shown that high readability is related to more extreme investor judgments of firm performance. Processing fluency is the prevalent theory to explain this: higher readability increases the investor’s subconscious reliance on the disclosure, so positive (negative news leads to more positive (negative judgments. The relationship may not be so simple, though: drawing on research from cognitive psychology, I predict and find that investor financial literacy simultaneously influences investor decision-making, and that it has an interactive effect with readability. When presented with financial disclosure containing conflicting financial information, investors with higher financial literacy make more negative judgments than investors with low financial literacy when the disclosure is easy to read, but the effect becomes insignificant when the disclosure becomes difficult to read. This effect is moderated by a comprehension gap between the two investor groups. Financial literacy and readability interact to impact both how and how well the investor processes financial information.

Judgment, Probability, and Aristotle's Rhetoric.

Science.gov (United States)

Warnick, Barbara

1989-01-01

Discusses Aristotle's five means of making judgments: intelligence, "episteme" (scientific knowledge), "sophia" (theoretical wisdom), "techne" (art), and "phronesis" (practical wisdom). Sets Aristotle's theory of rhetorical argument within the context of his overall view of human judgment. Notes that…

Indoor Spatial Updating with Reduced Visual Information

OpenAIRE

Legge, Gordon E.; Gage, Rachel; Baek, Yihwa; Bochsler, Tiana M.

2016-01-01

Purpose Spatial updating refers to the ability to keep track of position and orientation while moving through an environment. People with impaired vision may be less accurate in spatial updating with adverse consequences for indoor navigation. In this study, we asked how artificial restrictions on visual acuity and field size affect spatial updating, and also judgments of the size of rooms. Methods Normally sighted young adults were tested with artificial restriction of acuity in Mild Blur (S...

Aspects of application of auditor’s judgments

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

O.L. Sherstiuk

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Users should receive an adequate level of confidence in the possibility of its use for training, study and implementation of management decisions according to the results of audit of financial information. The source of this confidence is the audit report, based on the auditor's judgment, which is formed as the results of the procedures for obtaining and evaluating of audit evidence. Thus, the judgment of the auditor as a result of his work, has a leading role in forming of results of the audit. 517 The evaluative judgments have the special role among the auditor's judgment, which he creates and justifies in the tasks of the audit. Their content is to determine the set of parameters that determine the nature of the subject of judgment. Auditor’s judgements may be used for the purposes of identification (ID judgment. Identification is the process of definition of information, events, circumstances and other objects. Auditor's procedural judgment has content of the regarding procedures that can be used to obtain information and their volume. The classification makes it possible to identify the application targets of auditor’s professional judgment that in its turn, enables the optimization of measures to meet the tasks of auditing financial information.

Neural Correlates of Causal Power Judgments

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Denise Dellarosa Cummins

2014-12-01

Full Text Available Causal inference is a fundamental component of cognition and perception. Probabilistic theories of causal judgment (most notably causal Bayes networks derive causal judgments using metrics that integrate contingency information. But human estimates typically diverge from these normative predictions. This is because human causal power judgments are typically strongly influenced by beliefs concerning underlying causal mechanisms, and because of the way knowledge is retrieved from human memory during the judgment process. Neuroimaging studies indicate that the brain distinguishes causal events from mere covariation, and between perceived and inferred causality. Areas involved in error prediction are also activated, implying automatic activation of possible exception cases during causal decision-making.

When psychopathy impairs moral judgments: neural responses during judgments about causing fear.

Science.gov (United States)

Marsh, Abigail A; Cardinale, Elise M

2014-01-01

Psychopathy is a disorder characterized by reduced empathy, shallow affect and behaviors that cause victims distress, like threats, bullying and violence. Neuroimaging research in both institutionalized and community samples implicates amygdala dysfunction in the etiology of psychopathic traits. Reduced amygdala responsiveness may disrupt processing of fear-relevant stimuli like fearful facial expressions. The present study links amygdala dysfunction in response to fear-relevant stimuli to the willingness of individuals with psychopathic traits to cause fear in other people. Thirty-three healthy adult participants varying in psychopathic traits underwent whole-brain fMRI scanning while they viewed statements that selectively evoke anger, disgust, fear, happiness or sadness. During scanning, participants judged whether it is morally acceptable to make each statement to another person. Psychopathy was associated with reduced activity in right amygdala during judgments of fear-evoking statements and with more lenient moral judgments about causing fear. No group differences in amygdala function or moral judgments emerged for other emotion categories. Psychopathy was also associated with increased activity in middle frontal gyrus (BA 10) during the task. These results implicate amygdala dysfunction in impaired judgments about causing distress in psychopathy and suggest that atypical amygdala responses to fear in psychopathy extend across multiple classes of stimuli.

Distortions in Judged Spatial Relations.

Science.gov (United States)

Stevens, Albert

1978-01-01

Distortions in judgments of relative geographical relations were observed, particularly when the locations were in different geographical or political units. Subjects distorted the judged relation to conform with the relation of the superordinate political unit. A model for the hierachical storage of spatial information is presented. (Author/RD)

Pengaruh Gender dan Pengalaman Audit terhadap Audit Judgment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Erna Pasanda

2013-12-01

Full Text Available This study aims to examine the influence of gender and audit experience toward audit judgment and to examine gender and audit experience towards audit judgment when moderated by client credibility. The research was conducted on auditors who worked on KAP in Makassar South Sulawesi using survey. Sampling technique in this study was random sampling based on judgment. Data collected and then analyzed by employing regression method and Moderated Regression Analysis (MRA. The result indicates that gender does not significantly influence audit judgment while audit experience significantly influences audit judgment. Client credibility does not moderate the influence of gender and audit experience on the audit judgment.

Thinking about memories for everyday and shocking events: do people use ease-of-retrieval cues in memory judgments?

Science.gov (United States)

Echterhoff, Gerald; Hirst, William

2006-06-01

Extant research shows that people use retrieval ease, a feeling-based cue, to judge how well they remember life periods. Extending this approach, we investigated the role of retrieval ease in memory judgments for single events. In Experiment 1, participants who were asked to recall many memories of an everyday event (New Year's Eve) rated retrieval as more difficult and judged their memory as worse than did participants asked to recall only a few memories. In Experiment 2, this ease-of-retrieval effect was found to interact with the shocking character of the remembered event: There was no effect when the event was highly shocking (i.e., learning about the attacks of September 11, 2001), whereas an effect was found when the event was experienced as less shocking (due either to increased distance to "9/11" or to the nonshocking nature of the event itself). Memory vividness accounted for additional variance in memory judgments, indicating an independent contribution of content-based cues in judgments of event memories.

Original and Derived Judgment

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Foss, Kirsten; Foss, Nicolai Juul; Klein, Peter G.

2007-01-01

Recent work links entrepreneurship to the economic theory of the firm, using the concept of entrepreneurship as judgment introduced by Frank Knight. When judgment is complementary to other assets, it makes sense for entrepreneurs to hire labour and to own assets. The entrepreneur's role, then...... to subordinates, who exercise derived judgment. We call these employees `proxy-entrepreneurs', and ask how the firm's organizational structure - its formal and informal systems of rewards and punishments, rules for settling disputes and renegotiating agreements, means of evaluating performance and so on - can...... be designed to encourage forms of proxy entrepreneurship that increase firm value while discouraging actions that destroy value. Building on key ideas from the entrepreneurship literature, Austrian economics and the economic theory of the firm, we develop a framework for analysing the trade-off between...

Inference of trustworthiness from intuitive moral judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Everett, Jim A C; Pizarro, David A; Crockett, M J

2016-06-01

Moral judgments play a critical role in motivating and enforcing human cooperation, and research on the proximate mechanisms of moral judgments highlights the importance of intuitive, automatic processes in forming such judgments. Intuitive moral judgments often share characteristics with deontological theories in normative ethics, which argue that certain acts (such as killing) are absolutely wrong, regardless of their consequences. Why do moral intuitions typically follow deontological prescriptions, as opposed to those of other ethical theories? Here, we test a functional explanation for this phenomenon by investigating whether agents who express deontological moral judgments are more valued as social partners. Across 5 studies, we show that people who make characteristically deontological judgments are preferred as social partners, perceived as more moral and trustworthy, and are trusted more in economic games. These findings provide empirical support for a partner choice account of moral intuitions whereby typically deontological judgments confer an adaptive function by increasing a person's likelihood of being chosen as a cooperation partner. Therefore, deontological moral intuitions may represent an evolutionarily prescribed prior that was selected for through partner choice mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Feminist Judgments as Teaching Resources

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rosemary Hunter

2012-10-01

Full Text Available This paper discusses feminist judgments as a specific vehicle for teaching students to think critically about law. The analysis of appellate judgments forms a central plank of Anglo-Commonwealth and US jurisprudence and legal education. While academic scholarship generally offers various forms of commentary on decided cases, feminist judgment-writing projects have recently embarked on a new form of critical scholarship. Rather than critiquing judgments from a feminist perspective in academic essays, the participants in these projects have set out instead to write alternative judgments, as if they had been one of the judges sitting on the court at the time. After introducing the UK Feminist Judgments Project and describing what is ‘different’ about the judgments it has produced, the paper explains some of the ways in which these judgments have been used in UK law schools to teach critical thinking. The paper finally speculates on the potential production and application of feminist judgments or their equivalents beyond the common law context. Este artículo analiza las sentencias feministas como un vehículo específico para enseñar a los estudiantes a analizar el derecho desde un punto de vista crítico. El análisis de las sentencias de apelación constituye un elemento central de la jurisprudencia y la enseñanza del derecho en los países angloamericanos y de la Commonwealth. Mientras la comunidad académica ofrece generalmente diversas formas de comentario de casos resueltos, los proyectos de literatura judicial feminista se han embarcado recientemente en un nuevo sistema de crítica académica. En lugar de redactar ensayos académicos criticando las sentencias judiciales desde una perspectiva feminista, los participantes de estos proyectos se han propuesto redactar sentencias alternativas, como si hubieran sido uno de los jueces del tribunal en cuestión. Después de presentar el Proyecto de Sentencias Feministas del Reino Unido y

41 CFR 105-68.920 - Civil judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 41 Public Contracts and Property Management 3 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Civil judgment. 105-68... Administration 68-GOVERNMENTWIDE DEBARMENT AND SUSPENSION (NONPROCUREMENT) Definitions § 105-68.920 Civil judgment. Civil judgment means the disposition of a civil action by any court of competent jurisdiction...

On judgment and judgmentalism: how counselling can make people better.

Science.gov (United States)

Gibson, S

2005-10-01

Counsellors, like other members of the caring professions, are required to practise within an ethical framework, at least in so far as they seek professional accreditation. As such, the counsellor is called upon to exercise her moral agency. In most professional contexts this requirement is, in itself, unproblematic. It has been suggested, however, that counselling practice does present a problem in this respect, in so far as the counsellor is expected to take a non-judgemental stance and an attitude of "unconditional positive regard" toward the client. If, as might appear to be the case, this stance and attitude are at odds with the making of moral judgments, the possibility of an adequate ethics of counselling is called into question. This paper explores the nature and extent of the problem suggesting that, understood in a Kantian context, non-judgmentalism can be seen to be at odds with neither the moral agency of the counsellor nor that of the client. Instead, it is argued, the relationship between the non-judgmental counsellor and her client is a fundamentally moral relationship, based on respect for the client's unconditional worth as a moral agent.

Moral judgment as information processing: an integrative review.

Science.gov (United States)

Guglielmo, Steve

2015-01-01

How do humans make moral judgments about others' behavior? This article reviews dominant models of moral judgment, organizing them within an overarching framework of information processing. This framework poses two distinct questions: (1) What input information guides moral judgments? and (2) What psychological processes generate these judgments? Information Models address the first question, identifying critical information elements (including causality, intentionality, and mental states) that shape moral judgments. A subclass of Biased Information Models holds that perceptions of these information elements are themselves driven by prior moral judgments. Processing Models address the second question, and existing models have focused on the relative contribution of intuitive versus deliberative processes. This review organizes existing moral judgment models within this framework and critically evaluates them on empirical and theoretical grounds; it then outlines a general integrative model grounded in information processing, and concludes with conceptual and methodological suggestions for future research. The information-processing framework provides a useful theoretical lens through which to organize extant and future work in the rapidly growing field of moral judgment.

Moral judgment as information processing: an integrative review

Science.gov (United States)

Guglielmo, Steve

2015-01-01

How do humans make moral judgments about others’ behavior? This article reviews dominant models of moral judgment, organizing them within an overarching framework of information processing. This framework poses two distinct questions: (1) What input information guides moral judgments? and (2) What psychological processes generate these judgments? Information Models address the first question, identifying critical information elements (including causality, intentionality, and mental states) that shape moral judgments. A subclass of Biased Information Models holds that perceptions of these information elements are themselves driven by prior moral judgments. Processing Models address the second question, and existing models have focused on the relative contribution of intuitive versus deliberative processes. This review organizes existing moral judgment models within this framework and critically evaluates them on empirical and theoretical grounds; it then outlines a general integrative model grounded in information processing, and concludes with conceptual and methodological suggestions for future research. The information-processing framework provides a useful theoretical lens through which to organize extant and future work in the rapidly growing field of moral judgment. PMID:26579022

Reflective journaling for clinical judgment development and evaluation.

Science.gov (United States)

Lasater, Kathie; Nielsen, Ann

2009-01-01

Reflective journaling is a strategy used often in clinical education to gain insight into students' clinical thinking; however, studies indicate that students may benefit from guided reflections. Numerous tools have been used to structure student reflection with varying results. This article describes the outcomes from using the Guide for Reflection based on Tanner's Clinical Judgment Model. The Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric, created from the Model, is used to evaluate development of clinical judgment and provides language to communicate about clinical thinking with students. Senior immersion course competencies, also developed with language from Tanner's Clinical Judgment Model,offer a comprehensive package that fosters students' clinical judgment development, faculty-student communication about clinical judgment, and evaluation of students' clinical thinking.

Pitfalls in Teaching Judgment Heuristics

Science.gov (United States)

Shepperd, James A.; Koch, Erika J.

2005-01-01

Demonstrations of judgment heuristics typically focus on how heuristics can lead to poor judgments. However, exclusive focus on the negative consequences of heuristics can prove problematic. We illustrate the problem with the representativeness heuristic and present a study (N = 45) that examined how examples influence understanding of the…

Improving moral judgments: philosophical considerations

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kalis, A.

2010-01-01

In contemporary moral psychology, an often-heard claim is that knowing how we make moral judgments can help us make better moral judgments. Discussions about moral development and improvement are often framed in terms of the question of which mental processes have a better chance of leading to good

Risk Emotions and Risk Judgments: Passive Bodily Experience and Active Moral Reasoning in Judgmental Constellations.

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Coeckelbergh, Mark; Roeser, Sabine

2010-01-01

Experts typically accuse lay people of “emotional” responses to technological risk as opposed to their own “rational” judgment. This attitude is in tune with risk perception research that qualifies lay people’s responses in terms of bias. By contrast, cognitivists argue that emotions are judgments

Moral Motivation, Moral Judgment, and Antisocial Behavior

Science.gov (United States)

Brooks, Jeff; Bock, Tonia; Narvaez, Darcia

2013-01-01

The link between judgment and action is weak throughout psychology, including moral psychology. That is, people often do not act in accordance with their reasoning. Might moral judgment development be better viewed as a capacity that inhibits "immoral" behavior? One model that helps account for the moral judgment-action gap is Rest's…

Deliberation's blindsight: how cognitive load can improve judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Hoffmann, Janina A; von Helversen, Bettina; Rieskamp, Jörg

2013-06-01

Multitasking poses a major challenge in modern work environments by putting the worker under cognitive load. Performance decrements often occur when people are under high cognitive load because they switch to less demanding--and often less accurate--cognitive strategies. Although cognitive load disturbs performance over a wide range of tasks, it may also carry benefits. In the experiments reported here, we showed that judgment performance can increase under cognitive load. Participants solved a multiple-cue judgment task in which high performance could be achieved by using a similarity-based judgment strategy but not by using a more demanding rule-based judgment strategy. Accordingly, cognitive load induced a shift to a similarity-based judgment strategy, which consequently led to more accurate judgments. By contrast, shifting to a similarity-based strategy harmed judgments in a task best solved by using a rule-based strategy. These results show how important it is to consider the cognitive strategies people rely on to understand how people perform in demanding work environments.

Moral Judgment as Information Processing: An Integrative Review

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Steve eGuglielmo

2015-10-01

Full Text Available This article reviews dominant models of moral judgment, organizing them within an overarching framework of information processing. This framework poses two fundamental questions: (1 What input information guides moral judgments?; and (2 What psychological processes generate these judgments? Information Models address the first question, identifying critical information elements (including causality, intentionality, and mental states that shape moral judgments. A subclass of Biased Information Models holds that perceptions of these information elements are themselves driven by prior moral judgments. Processing Models address the second question, and existing models have focused on the relative contribution of intuitive versus deliberative processes. This review organizes existing moral judgment models within this framework, critically evaluates them on empirical and theoretical grounds, outlines a general integrative model grounded in information processing, and offers conceptual and methodological suggestions for future research. The information processing perspective provides a useful theoretical framework for organizing extant and future work in the rapidly growing field of moral judgment.

The roles of categorical and coordinate spatial relations in recognizing buildings.

Science.gov (United States)

Palermo, Liana; Piccardi, Laura; Nori, Raffaella; Giusberti, Fiorella; Guariglia, Cecilia

2012-11-01

Categorical spatial information is considered more useful for recognizing objects, and coordinate spatial information for guiding actions--for example, during navigation or grasping. In contrast with this assumption, we hypothesized that buildings, unlike other categories of objects, require both categorical and coordinate spatial information in order to be recognized. This hypothesis arose from evidence that right-brain-damaged patients have deficits in both coordinate judgments and recognition of buildings and from the fact that buildings are very useful for guiding navigation in urban environments. To test this hypothesis, we assessed 210 healthy college students while they performed four different tasks that required categorical and coordinate judgments and the recognition of common objects and buildings. Our results showed that both categorical and coordinate spatial representations are necessary to recognize a building, whereas only categorical representations are necessary to recognize an object. We discuss our data in view of a recent neural framework for visuospatial processing, suggesting that recognizing buildings may specifically activate the parieto-medial-temporal pathway.

Involvement of right piriform cortex in olfactory familiarity judgments. : Familiarity judgment in olfaction

OpenAIRE

Plailly , Jane; Bensafi , Moustafa; Pachot-Clouard , Mathilde; Delon-Martin , Chantal; Kareken , David ,; Rouby , Catherine; Segebarth , Christoph; Royet , Jean ,

2005-01-01

International audience; Previous studies have shown activation of right orbitofrontal cortex during judgments of odor familiarity. In the present study, we sought to extend our knowledge about the neural circuits involved in such a task by exploring the involvement of the right prefrontal areas and limbic/primary olfactory structures. Fourteen right-handed male subjects were tested using fMRI with a single functional run of two olfactory conditions (odor detection and familiarity judgments). ...

Electrophysiological difference between the representations of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Qingfei; Liang, Xiuling; Lei, Yi; Li, Hong

2015-05-01

Causally related concepts like "virus" and "epidemic" and general associatively related concepts like "ring" and "emerald" are represented and accessed separately. The Evoked Response Potential (ERP) procedure was used to examine the representations of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory. Participants were required to remember a task cue (causal or associative) presented at the beginning of each trial, and assess whether the relationship between subsequently presented words matched the initial task cue. The ERP data showed that an N400 effect (250-450 ms) was more negative for unrelated words than for all related words. Furthermore, the N400 effect elicited by causal relations was more positive than for associative relations in causal cue condition, whereas no significant difference was found in the associative cue condition. The centrally distributed late ERP component (650-750 ms) elicited by the causal cue condition was more positive than for the associative cue condition. These results suggested that the processing of causal judgment and associative judgment in semantic memory recruited different degrees of attentional and executive resources. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The neural basis of intuitive and counterintuitive moral judgment

Science.gov (United States)

Wiech, Katja; Shackel, Nicholas; Farias, Miguel; Savulescu, Julian; Tracey, Irene

2012-01-01

Neuroimaging studies on moral decision-making have thus far largely focused on differences between moral judgments with opposing utilitarian (well-being maximizing) and deontological (duty-based) content. However, these studies have investigated moral dilemmas involving extreme situations, and did not control for two distinct dimensions of moral judgment: whether or not it is intuitive (immediately compelling to most people) and whether it is utilitarian or deontological in content. By contrasting dilemmas where utilitarian judgments are counterintuitive with dilemmas in which they are intuitive, we were able to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of intuitive and counterintuitive judgments across a range of moral situations. Irrespective of content (utilitarian/deontological), counterintuitive moral judgments were associated with greater difficulty and with activation in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that such judgments may involve emotional conflict; intuitive judgments were linked to activation in the visual and premotor cortex. In addition, we obtained evidence that neural differences in moral judgment in such dilemmas are largely due to whether they are intuitive and not, as previously assumed, to differences between utilitarian and deontological judgments. Our findings therefore do not support theories that have generally associated utilitarian and deontological judgments with distinct neural systems. PMID:21421730

Process and representation in multiple-cue judgment

OpenAIRE

Olsson, Anna-Carin

2002-01-01

This thesis investigates the cognitive processes and representations underlying human judgment in a multiple-cue judgment task. Several recent models assume that people have several qualitatively distinct and competing levels of knowledge representations (Ashby, Alfonso-Reese, Turken, & Waldron, 1998; Erickson & Kruschke, 1998; Nosofsky, Palmeri, & McKinley, 1994; Sloman, 1996). The most successful cognitive models in categorization and multiple-cue judgment are, respectively, exe...

A STUDY OF ESTHETIC JUDGMENT.

Science.gov (United States)

CHILD, IRVIN L.

THE ABILITY OF COLLEGE STUDENTS TO RECOGNIZE DEGREES OF ESTHETIC MERIT IN OBJECTS OF ART WAS STUDIED. THE OBJECTIVE WAS TO DETERMINE BY EXPERIMENTATION SOME OF THE FACTORS WHICH MAY BE IMPORTANT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF ESTHETIC JUDGMENT. A SAMPLE OF MALE COLLEGE STUDENTS WAS GIVEN SEVERAL TESTS OF ESTHETIC JUDGMENT. FROM THESE SUBJECTS WERE CHOSEN…

Thermodynamic Model of Spatial Memory

Science.gov (United States)

Kaufman, Miron; Allen, P.

1998-03-01

We develop and test a thermodynamic model of spatial memory. Our model is an application of statistical thermodynamics to cognitive science. It is related to applications of the statistical mechanics framework in parallel distributed processes research. Our macroscopic model allows us to evaluate an entropy associated with spatial memory tasks. We find that older adults exhibit higher levels of entropy than younger adults. Thurstone's Law of Categorical Judgment, according to which the discriminal processes along the psychological continuum produced by presentations of a single stimulus are normally distributed, is explained by using a Hooke spring model of spatial memory. We have also analyzed a nonlinear modification of the ideal spring model of spatial memory. This work is supported by NIH/NIA grant AG09282-06.

The Influence of Judgment Calls on Meta-Analytic Findings.

Science.gov (United States)

Tarrahi, Farid; Eisend, Martin

2016-01-01

Previous research has suggested that judgment calls (i.e., methodological choices made in the process of conducting a meta-analysis) have a strong influence on meta-analytic findings and question their robustness. However, prior research applies case study comparison or reanalysis of a few meta-analyses with a focus on a few selected judgment calls. These studies neglect the fact that different judgment calls are related to each other and simultaneously influence the outcomes of a meta-analysis, and that meta-analytic findings can vary due to non-judgment call differences between meta-analyses (e.g., variations of effects over time). The current study analyzes the influence of 13 judgment calls in 176 meta-analyses in marketing research by applying a multivariate, multilevel meta-meta-analysis. The analysis considers simultaneous influences from different judgment calls on meta-analytic effect sizes and controls for alternative explanations based on non-judgment call differences between meta-analyses. The findings suggest that judgment calls have only a minor influence on meta-analytic findings, whereas non-judgment call differences between meta-analyses are more likely to explain differences in meta-analytic findings. The findings support the robustness of meta-analytic results and conclusions.

People's Judgments About Classic Property Law Cases.

Science.gov (United States)

DeScioli, Peter; Karpoff, Rachel

2015-06-01

People's judgments about property shape how they relate to other people with respect to resources. Property law cases can provide a valuable window into ownership judgments because disputants often use conflicting rules for ownership, offering opportunities to distinguish these basic rules. Here we report a series of ten studies investigating people's judgments about classic property law cases dealing with found objects. The cases address a range of issues, including the relativity of ownership, finder versus landowner rights, object location, objects below- versus above-ground, mislaid versus lost objects, contracts between landowners and finders, and the distinction between public and private space. The results show nuanced patterns in ownership judgments that are not well-explained by previous psychological theories. Also, people's judgments often conflict with court decisions and legal principles. These empirical patterns can be used to generate and test novel hypotheses about the intuitive logic of ownership.

40 CFR 194.26 - Expert judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... CFR PART 191 DISPOSAL REGULATIONS Compliance Certification and Re-certification General Requirements... experts (by name and employer) involved in any expert judgment elicitation processes used to support the... judgment elicitation processes and the reasoning behind those results. Documentation of interviews used to...

32 CFR 1602.13 - Judgmental Classification.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 32 National Defense 6 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Judgmental Classification. 1602.13 Section 1602.13 National Defense Other Regulations Relating to National Defense SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM DEFINITIONS § 1602.13 Judgmental Classification. A classification action relating to a registrant's claim for...

Examining corporate reputation judgments with generalizability theory.

Science.gov (United States)

Highhouse, Scott; Broadfoot, Alison; Yugo, Jennifer E; Devendorf, Shelba A

2009-05-01

The researchers used generalizability theory to examine whether reputation judgments about corporations function in a manner consistent with contemporary theory in the corporate-reputation literature. University professors (n = 86) of finance, marketing, and human resources management made repeated judgments about the general reputations of highly visible American companies. Minimal variability in the judgments is explained by items, time, persons, and field of specialization. Moreover, experts from the different specializations reveal considerable agreement in how they weigh different aspects of corporate performance in arriving at their global reputation judgments. The results generally support the theory of the reputation construct and suggest that stable estimates of global reputation can be achieved with a small number of items and experts. (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved.

Judgment sampling: a health care improvement perspective.

Science.gov (United States)

Perla, Rocco J; Provost, Lloyd P

2012-01-01

Sampling plays a major role in quality improvement work. Random sampling (assumed by most traditional statistical methods) is the exception in improvement situations. In most cases, some type of "judgment sample" is used to collect data from a system. Unfortunately, judgment sampling is not well understood. Judgment sampling relies upon those with process and subject matter knowledge to select useful samples for learning about process performance and the impact of changes over time. It many cases, where the goal is to learn about or improve a specific process or system, judgment samples are not merely the most convenient and economical approach, they are technically and conceptually the most appropriate approach. This is because improvement work is done in the real world in complex situations involving specific areas of concern and focus; in these situations, the assumptions of classical measurement theory neither can be met nor should an attempt be made to meet them. The purpose of this article is to describe judgment sampling and its importance in quality improvement work and studies with a focus on health care settings.

Implications of Cognitive Load for Hypothesis Generation and Probability Judgment.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Amber M Sprenger

2011-06-01

Full Text Available We tested the predictions of HyGene (Thomas, Dougherty, Sprenger, & Harbison, 2008 that both divided attention at encoding and judgment should affect degree to which participants’ probability judgments violate the principle of additivity. In two experiments, we showed that divided attention during judgment leads to an increase in subadditivity, suggesting that the comparison process for probability judgments is capacity limited. Contrary to the predictions of HyGene, a third experiment revealed that divided attention during encoding leads to an increase in later probability judgment made under full attention. The effect of divided attention at encoding on judgment was completely mediated by the number of hypotheses participants generated, indicating that limitations in both encoding and recall can cascade into biases in judgments.

Probative value of absolute and relative judgments in eyewitness identification.

Science.gov (United States)

Clark, Steven E; Erickson, Michael A; Breneman, Jesse

2011-10-01

It is well-accepted that eyewitness identification decisions based on relative judgments are less accurate than identification decisions based on absolute judgments. However, the theoretical foundation for this view has not been established. In this study relative and absolute judgments were compared through simulations of the WITNESS model (Clark, Appl Cogn Psychol 17:629-654, 2003) to address the question: Do suspect identifications based on absolute judgments have higher probative value than suspect identifications based on relative judgments? Simulations of the WITNESS model showed a consistent advantage for absolute judgments over relative judgments for suspect-matched lineups. However, simulations of same-foils lineups showed a complex interaction based on the accuracy of memory and the similarity relationships among lineup members.

Implications of Cognitive Load for Hypothesis Generation and Probability Judgment

Science.gov (United States)

Sprenger, Amber M.; Dougherty, Michael R.; Atkins, Sharona M.; Franco-Watkins, Ana M.; Thomas, Rick P.; Lange, Nicholas; Abbs, Brandon

2011-01-01

We tested the predictions of HyGene (Thomas et al., 2008) that both divided attention at encoding and judgment should affect the degree to which participants’ probability judgments violate the principle of additivity. In two experiments, we showed that divided attention during judgment leads to an increase in subadditivity, suggesting that the comparison process for probability judgments is capacity limited. Contrary to the predictions of HyGene, a third experiment revealed that divided attention during encoding leads to an increase in later probability judgment made under full attention. The effect of divided attention during encoding on judgment was completely mediated by the number of hypotheses participants generated, indicating that limitations in both encoding and recall can cascade into biases in judgments. PMID:21734897

25 CFR 87.11 - Investment of judgment funds.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Investment of judgment funds. 87.11 Section 87.11 Indians... JUDGMENT FUNDS § 87.11 Investment of judgment funds. As soon as possible after the appropriation of... distribution of the funds, the Commissioner shall invest such funds pursuant to 25 U.S.C. 162a. Investments of...

25 CFR 11.501 - Judgments in civil actions.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 25 Indians 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Judgments in civil actions. 11.501 Section 11.501 Indians BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR LAW AND ORDER COURTS OF INDIAN OFFENSES AND LAW AND ORDER CODE Civil Actions § 11.501 Judgments in civil actions. (a) In all civil cases, judgment shall...

Individual Moral Judgment and Cultural Ideologies.

Science.gov (United States)

Narvaez, Darcia; Getz, Irene; Rest, James R.; Thoma, Stephen J.

1999-01-01

Two studies examined how moral judgment and cultural ideology combine to predict moral thinking in members of a conservative church and a liberal church, and in a secular sample of university undergraduates. Found that a combination of religious ideology, political identity, and moral judgment predicted the church members' opinions on human-rights…

Impression formation of tests: retrospective judgments of performance are higher when easier questions come first.

Science.gov (United States)

Jackson, Abigail; Greene, Robert L

2014-11-01

Four experiments are reported on the importance of retrospective judgments of performance (postdictions) on tests. Participants answered general knowledge questions and estimated how many questions they answered correctly. They gave higher postdictions when easy questions preceded difficult questions. This was true when time to answer each question was equalized and constrained, when participants were instructed not to write answers, and when questions were presented in a multiple-choice format. Results are consistent with the notion that first impressions predominate in overall perception of test difficulty.

Wording effects in moral judgments

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ross E. O'Hara

2010-12-01

Full Text Available As the study of moral judgments grows, it becomes imperative to compare results across studies in order to create unified theories within the field. These efforts are potentially undermined, however, by variations in wording used by different researchers. The current study sought to determine whether, when, and how variations in wording influence moral judgments. Online participants responded to 15 different moral vignettes (e.g., the trolley problem using 1 of 4 adjectives: ``wrong'', ``inappropriate'', ``forbidden'', or ``blameworthy''. For half of the sample, these adjectives were preceded by the adverb ``morally''. Results indicated that people were more apt to judge an act as wrong or inappropriate than forbidden or blameworthy, and that disgusting acts were rated as more acceptable when ``morally'' was included. Although some wording differences emerged, effects sizes were small and suggest that studies of moral judgment with different wordings can legitimately be compared.

Atypical moral judgment following traumatic brain injury

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Angelica Muresan

2012-07-01

Full Text Available Previous research has shown an association between emotions, particularly social emotions, and moral judgments. Some studies suggested an association between blunted emotion and the utilitarian moral judgments observed in patients with prefrontal lesions. In order to investigate how prefrontal brain damage affects moral judgment, we asked a sample of 29 TBI patients (12 females and 17 males and 41 healthy participants (16 females and 25 males to judge 22 hypothetical dilemmas split into three different categories (non-moral, impersonal and personal moral. The TBI group presented a higher proportion of affirmative (utilitarian responses for personal moral dilemmas when compared to controls, suggesting an atypical pattern of utilitarian judgements. We also found a negative association between the performance on recognition of social emotions and the proportion of affirmative responses on personal moral dilemmas. These results suggested that the preference for utilitarian responses in this type of dilemmas is accompanied by difficulties in social emotion recognition. Overall, our findings suggest that deontological moral judgments are associated with normal social emotion processing and that frontal lobe plays an important role in both emotion and moral judgment.

Latent Fairness in Adults' Relationship-Based Moral Judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Hao, Jian; Liu, Yanchun; Li, Jiafeng

2015-01-01

Can adults make fair moral judgments when individuals with whom they have different relationships are involved? The present study explored the fairness of adults' relationship-based moral judgments in two respects by performing three experiments involving 999 participants. In Experiment 1, 65 adults were asked to decide whether to harm a specific person to save five strangers in the footbridge and trolley dilemmas in a within-subject design. The lone potential victim was a relative, a best friend, a person they disliked, a criminal or a stranger. Adults' genetic relatedness to, familiarity with and affective relatedness to the lone potential victims varied. The results indicated that adults made different moral judgments involving the lone potential victims with whom they had different relationships. In Experiment 2, 306 adults responded to the footbridge and trolley dilemmas involving five types of lone potential victims in a within-subject design, and the extent to which they were familiar with and affectively related to the lone potential victim was measured. The results generally replicated those of Experiment 1. In addition, for close individuals, adults' moral judgments were less deontological relative to their familiarity with or positive affect toward these individuals. For individuals they were not close to, adults made deontological choices to a larger extent relative to their unfamiliarity with or negative affect toward these individuals. Moreover, for familiar individuals, the extent to which adults made deontological moral judgments more closely approximated the extent to which they were familiar with the individual. The adults' deontological moral judgments involving unfamiliar individuals more closely approximated their affective relatedness to the individuals. In Experiment 3, 628 adults were asked to make moral judgments with the type of lone potential victim as the between-subject variable. The results generally replicated those of the previous

Latent Fairness in Adults’ Relationship-Based Moral Judgments

Science.gov (United States)

Hao, Jian; Liu, Yanchun; Li, Jiafeng

2015-01-01

Can adults make fair moral judgments when individuals with whom they have different relationships are involved? The present study explored the fairness of adults’ relationship-based moral judgments in two respects by performing three experiments involving 999 participants. In Experiment 1, 65 adults were asked to decide whether to harm a specific person to save five strangers in the footbridge and trolley dilemmas in a within-subject design. The lone potential victim was a relative, a best friend, a person they disliked, a criminal or a stranger. Adults’ genetic relatedness to, familiarity with and affective relatedness to the lone potential victims varied. The results indicated that adults made different moral judgments involving the lone potential victims with whom they had different relationships. In Experiment 2, 306 adults responded to the footbridge and trolley dilemmas involving five types of lone potential victims in a within-subject design, and the extent to which they were familiar with and affectively related to the lone potential victim was measured. The results generally replicated those of Experiment 1. In addition, for close individuals, adults’ moral judgments were less deontological relative to their familiarity with or positive affect toward these individuals. For individuals they were not close to, adults made deontological choices to a larger extent relative to their unfamiliarity with or negative affect toward these individuals. Moreover, for familiar individuals, the extent to which adults made deontological moral judgments more closely approximated the extent to which they were familiar with the individual. The adults’ deontological moral judgments involving unfamiliar individuals more closely approximated their affective relatedness to the individuals. In Experiment 3, 628 adults were asked to make moral judgments with the type of lone potential victim as the between-subject variable. The results generally replicated those of the

Laterality judgments in people with low back pain--A cross-sectional observational and test-retest reliability study.

Science.gov (United States)

Linder, Martin; Michaelson, Peter; Röijezon, Ulrik

2016-02-01

Disruption of cortical representation, or body schema, has been indicated as a factor in the persistence and recurrence of low back pain (LBP). This has been observed through impaired laterality judgment ability and it has been suggested that this ability is affected in a spatial rather than anatomical manner. We compared laterality judgment performance of foot and trunk movements between people with LBP with or without leg pain and healthy controls, and investigated associations between test performance and pain. We also assessed the test-retest reliability of the Recognise Online™ software when used in a clinical and a home setting. Cross-sectional observational and test-retest study. Thirty individuals with LBP and 30 healthy controls performed judgment tests of foot and trunk laterality once supervised in a clinic and twice at home. No statistically significant group differences were found. LBP intensity was negatively related to trunk laterality accuracy (p = 0.019). Intraclass correlation values ranged from 0.51 to 0.91. Reaction time improved significantly between test occasions while accuracy did not. Laterality judgments were not impaired in subjects with LBP compared to controls. Further research may clarify the relationship between pain mechanisms in LBP and laterality judgment ability. Reliability values were mostly acceptable, with wide and low confidence intervals, suggesting test-retest reliability for Recognise Online™ could be questioned in this trial. A significant learning effect was observed which should be considered in clinical and research application of the test. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Modeling Music Emotion Judgments Using Machine Learning Methods

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Naresh N. Vempala

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Emotion judgments and five channels of physiological data were obtained from 60 participants listening to 60 music excerpts. Various machine learning (ML methods were used to model the emotion judgments inclusive of neural networks, linear regression, and random forests. Input for models of perceived emotion consisted of audio features extracted from the music recordings. Input for models of felt emotion consisted of physiological features extracted from the physiological recordings. Models were trained and interpreted with consideration of the classic debate in music emotion between cognitivists and emotivists. Our models supported a hybrid position wherein emotion judgments were influenced by a combination of perceived and felt emotions. In comparing the different ML approaches that were used for modeling, we conclude that neural networks were optimal, yielding models that were flexible as well as interpretable. Inspection of a committee machine, encompassing an ensemble of networks, revealed that arousal judgments were predominantly influenced by felt emotion, whereas valence judgments were predominantly influenced by perceived emotion.

'To Think Representatively': Arendt on Judgment and the Imagination

African Journals Online (AJOL)

... the standpoint of the spectator, I go on to examine their most distinctive features, in particular, the link between judgment, the imagination, and the ability to think 'representatively'. I also examine the philosophical sources of Arendt's theory of judgment, namely, Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment and its criteria of validity.

Pengaruh Gender dan Pengalaman Audit terhadap Audit Judgment

OpenAIRE

Erna Pasanda; Natalia Paranoan

2013-01-01

This study aims to examine the influence of gender and audit experience toward audit judgment and to examine gender and audit experience towards audit judgment when moderated by client credibility. The research was conducted on auditors who worked on KAP in Makassar South Sulawesi using survey. Sampling technique in this study was random sampling based on judgment. Data collected and then analyzed by employing regression method and Moderated Regression Analysis (MRA). The result indicates tha...

Study on Accuracy of Judgments by Chinese Fingerprint Examiners

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shiquan Liu

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The interpretation of fingerprint evidence depends on the judgments of fingerprint examiners. This study assessed the accuracy of different judgments made by fingerprint examiners following the Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation (ACE process. Each examiner was given five marks for analysis, comparison, and evaluation. We compared the experts′ judgments against the ground truth and used an annotation platform to evaluate how Chinese fingerprint examiners document their comparisons during the identification process. The results showed that different examiners demonstrated different accuracy of judgments and different mechanisms to reach them.

Probability judgments under ambiguity and conflict.

Science.gov (United States)

Smithson, Michael

2015-01-01

Whether conflict and ambiguity are distinct kinds of uncertainty remains an open question, as does their joint impact on judgments of overall uncertainty. This paper reviews recent advances in our understanding of human judgment and decision making when both ambiguity and conflict are present, and presents two types of testable models of judgments under conflict and ambiguity. The first type concerns estimate-pooling to arrive at "best" probability estimates. The second type is models of subjective assessments of conflict and ambiguity. These models are developed for dealing with both described and experienced information. A framework for testing these models in the described-information setting is presented, including a reanalysis of a multi-nation data-set to test best-estimate models, and a study of participants' assessments of conflict, ambiguity, and overall uncertainty reported by Smithson (2013). A framework for research in the experienced-information setting is then developed, that differs substantially from extant paradigms in the literature. This framework yields new models of "best" estimates and perceived conflict. The paper concludes with specific suggestions for future research on judgment and decision making under conflict and ambiguity.

Does ADHD in adults affect the relative accuracy of metamemory judgments?

Science.gov (United States)

Knouse, Laura E; Paradise, Matthew J; Dunlosky, John

2006-11-01

Prior research suggests that individuals with ADHD overestimate their performance across domains despite performing more poorly in these domains. The authors introduce measures of accuracy from the larger realm of judgment and decision making--namely, relative accuracy and calibration--to the study of self-evaluative judgment accuracy in adults with ADHD. Twenty-eight adults with ADHD and 28 matched controls participate in a computer-administered paired-associate learning task and predict their future recall using immediate and delayed judgments of learning (JOLs). Retrospective confidence judgments are also collected. Groups perform equally in terms of judgment magnitude and absolute judgment accuracy as measured by discrepancy scores and calibration curves. Both groups benefit equally from making their JOL at a delay, and the group with ADHD show higher relative accuracy for delayed judgments. Results suggest that under certain circumstances, adults with ADHD can make accurate judgments about their future memory.

Principal Holistic Judgments and High-Stakes Evaluations of Teachers

Science.gov (United States)

Briggs, Derek C.; Dadey, Nathan

2017-01-01

Results from a sample of 1,013 Georgia principals who rated 12,617 teachers are used to compare holistic and analytic principal judgments with indicators of student growth central to the state's teacher evaluation system. Holistic principal judgments were compared to mean student growth percentiles (MGPs) and analytic judgments from a formal…

Dissociating contributions of head and torso to spatial reference frames

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Alsmith, Adrian J T; Ferrè, Elisa R; Longo, Matthew R.

2017-01-01

contribution of each part to spatial judgments. Both the head and the torso contributed to judgements, though with greater contributions from the torso. A second experiment manipulating visual contrast of the torso showed that this does not reflect low-level differences in visual salience between body parts....... Our results demonstrate that spatial perspective-taking relies on a weighted combination of reference frames centred on different parts of the body....

Do physician outcome judgments and judgment biases contribute to inappropriate use of treatments? Study protocol

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lott Alison

2007-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background There are many examples of physicians using treatments inappropriately, despite clear evidence about the circumstances under which the benefits of such treatments outweigh their harms. When such over- or under- use of treatments occurs for common diseases, the burden to the healthcare system and risks to patients can be substantial. We propose that a major contributor to inappropriate treatment may be how clinicians judge the likelihood of important treatment outcomes, and how these judgments influence their treatment decisions. The current study will examine the role of judged outcome probabilities and other cognitive factors in the context of two clinical treatment decisions: 1 prescription of antibiotics for sore throat, where we hypothesize overestimation of benefit and underestimation of harm leads to over-prescription of antibiotics; and 2 initiation of anticoagulation for patients with atrial fibrillation (AF, where we hypothesize that underestimation of benefit and overestimation of harm leads to under-prescription of warfarin. Methods For each of the two conditions, we will administer surveys of two types (Type 1 and Type 2 to different samples of Canadian physicians. The primary goal of the Type 1 survey is to assess physicians' perceived outcome probabilities (both good and bad outcomes for the target treatment. Type 1 surveys will assess judged outcome probabilities in the context of a representative patient, and include questions about how physicians currently treat such cases, the recollection of rare or vivid outcomes, as well as practice and demographic details. The primary goal of the Type 2 surveys is to measure the specific factors that drive individual clinical judgments and treatment decisions, using a 'clinical judgment analysis' or 'lens modeling' approach. This survey will manipulate eight clinical variables across a series of sixteen realistic case vignettes. Based on the survey responses, we will be

Hierarchical acquisition of visual specificity in spatial contextual cueing.

Science.gov (United States)

Lie, Kin-Pou

2015-01-01

Spatial contextual cueing refers to visual search performance's being improved when invariant associations between target locations and distractor spatial configurations are learned incidentally. Using the instance theory of automatization and the reverse hierarchy theory of visual perceptual learning, this study explores the acquisition of visual specificity in spatial contextual cueing. Two experiments in which detailed visual features were irrelevant for distinguishing between spatial contexts found that spatial contextual cueing was visually generic in difficult trials when the trials were not preceded by easy trials (Experiment 1) but that spatial contextual cueing progressed to visual specificity when difficult trials were preceded by easy trials (Experiment 2). These findings support reverse hierarchy theory, which predicts that even when detailed visual features are irrelevant for distinguishing between spatial contexts, spatial contextual cueing can progress to visual specificity if the stimuli remain constant, the task is difficult, and difficult trials are preceded by easy trials. However, these findings are inconsistent with instance theory, which predicts that when detailed visual features are irrelevant for distinguishing between spatial contexts, spatial contextual cueing will not progress to visual specificity. This study concludes that the acquisition of visual specificity in spatial contextual cueing is more plausibly hierarchical, rather than instance-based.

Training complex judgment: The effects of critical thinking and complex judgment

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Helsdingen, Anne; Van Gog, Tamara; Van Merriënboer, Jeroen

2010-01-01

Helsdingen, A. S., Van Gog, T., & Van Merrienboer, J. J. G. (2009). Training complex judgment: The effects of critical thinking and contextual interference. Paper presented at the International Center for Learning, Education and Performance Systems (ICLEPS). Talahassee, Florida: Florida State

Adaptive decision making in a dynamic environment: a test of a sequential sampling model of relative judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Vuckovic, Anita; Kwantes, Peter J; Neal, Andrew

2013-09-01

Research has identified a wide range of factors that influence performance in relative judgment tasks. However, the findings from this research have been inconsistent. Studies have varied with respect to the identification of causal variables and the perceptual and decision-making mechanisms underlying performance. Drawing on the ecological rationality approach, we present a theory of the judgment and decision-making processes involved in a relative judgment task that explains how people judge a stimulus and adapt their decision process to accommodate their own uncertainty associated with those judgments. Undergraduate participants performed a simulated air traffic control conflict detection task. Across two experiments, we systematically manipulated variables known to affect performance. In the first experiment, we manipulated the relative distances of aircraft to a common destination while holding aircraft speeds constant. In a follow-up experiment, we introduced a direct manipulation of relative speed. We then fit a sequential sampling model to the data, and used the best fitting parameters to infer the decision-making processes responsible for performance. Findings were consistent with the theory that people adapt to their own uncertainty by adjusting their criterion and the amount of time they take to collect evidence in order to make a more accurate decision. From a practical perspective, the paper demonstrates that one can use a sequential sampling model to understand performance in a dynamic environment, allowing one to make sense of and interpret complex patterns of empirical findings that would otherwise be difficult to interpret using standard statistical analyses. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Encoding, storage and judgment of experienced frequency and duration

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tilmann Betsch

2010-08-01

Full Text Available This paper examines conditions that do or do not lead to accurate judgments of frequency (JOF and judgments of duration (JOD. In three experiments, duration and frequency of visually presented stimuli are varied orthogonally in a within-subjects design. Experiment 1 reveals an asymmetric judgment pattern. JOFs reflected actual presentation frequency quite accurately and were unbiased by exposure duration. Conversely, JODs were almost insensitive to actual exposure duration and were systematically biased by presentation frequency. We show, however, that a tendency towards a symmetric judgment pattern can be obtained by manipulating encoding conditions. Sustaining attention during encoding (Experiment 2 or enhancing richness of the encoded stimuli (Experiment 3 increases judgment sensitivity in JOD and yields biases in both directions (JOF biased by exposure duration, JOD biased by presentation frequency. The implications of these findings for underlying memory mechanisms are discussed.

Contrasting cue-density effects in causal and prediction judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Vadillo, Miguel A; Musca, Serban C; Blanco, Fernando; Matute, Helena

2011-02-01

Many theories of contingency learning assume (either explicitly or implicitly) that predicting whether an outcome will occur should be easier than making a causal judgment. Previous research suggests that outcome predictions would depart from normative standards less often than causal judgments, which is consistent with the idea that the latter are based on more numerous and complex processes. However, only indirect evidence exists for this view. The experiment presented here specifically addresses this issue by allowing for a fair comparison of causal judgments and outcome predictions, both collected at the same stage with identical rating scales. Cue density, a parameter known to affect judgments, is manipulated in a contingency learning paradigm. The results show that, if anything, the cue-density bias is stronger in outcome predictions than in causal judgments. These results contradict key assumptions of many influential theories of contingency learning.

Known Unknowns in Judgment and Choice

OpenAIRE

Walters, Daniel

2017-01-01

This dissertation investigates how people make inferences about missing information. Whereas most prior literature focuses on how people process known information, I show that the extent to which people make inferences about missing information impacts judgments and choices. Specifically, I investigate how (1) awareness of known unknowns affects overconfidence in judgment in Chapter 1, (2) beliefs about the knowability of unknowns impacts investment strategies in Chapter 2, and (3) inferences...

Neural Substrates of Similarity and Rule-based Strategies in Judgment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bettina eVon Helversen

2014-10-01

Full Text Available Making accurate judgments is a core human competence and a prerequisite for success in many areas of life. Plenty of evidence exists that people can employ different judgment strategies to solve identical judgment problems. In categorization, it has been demonstrated that similarity-based and rule-based strategies are associated with activity in different brain regions. Building on this research, the present work tests whether solving two identical judgment problems recruits different neural substrates depending on people's judgment strategies. Combining cognitive modeling of judgment strategies at the behavioral level with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, we compare brain activity when using two archetypal judgment strategies: a similarity-based exemplar strategy and a rule-based heuristic strategy. Using an exemplar-based strategy should recruit areas involved in long-term memory processes to a larger extent than a heuristic strategy. In contrast, using a heuristic strategy should recruit areas involved in the application of rules to a larger extent than an exemplar-based strategy. Largely consistent with our hypotheses, we found that using an exemplar-based strategy led to relatively higher BOLD activity in the anterior prefrontal and inferior parietal cortex, presumably related to retrieval and selective attention processes. In contrast, using a heuristic strategy led to relatively higher activity in areas in the dorsolateral prefrontal and the temporal-parietal cortex associated with cognitive control and information integration. Thus, even when people solve identical judgment problems, different neural substrates can be recruited depending on the judgment strategy involved.

Interactions between the spatial and temporal stimulus factors that influence multisensory integration in human performance.

Science.gov (United States)

Stevenson, Ryan A; Fister, Juliane Krueger; Barnett, Zachary P; Nidiffer, Aaron R; Wallace, Mark T

2012-05-01

In natural environments, human sensory systems work in a coordinated and integrated manner to perceive and respond to external events. Previous research has shown that the spatial and temporal relationships of sensory signals are paramount in determining how information is integrated across sensory modalities, but in ecologically plausible settings, these factors are not independent. In the current study, we provide a novel exploration of the impact on behavioral performance for systematic manipulations of the spatial location and temporal synchrony of a visual-auditory stimulus pair. Simple auditory and visual stimuli were presented across a range of spatial locations and stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), and participants performed both a spatial localization and simultaneity judgment task. Response times in localizing paired visual-auditory stimuli were slower in the periphery and at larger SOAs, but most importantly, an interaction was found between the two factors, in which the effect of SOA was greater in peripheral as opposed to central locations. Simultaneity judgments also revealed a novel interaction between space and time: individuals were more likely to judge stimuli as synchronous when occurring in the periphery at large SOAs. The results of this study provide novel insights into (a) how the speed of spatial localization of an audiovisual stimulus is affected by location and temporal coincidence and the interaction between these two factors and (b) how the location of a multisensory stimulus impacts judgments concerning the temporal relationship of the paired stimuli. These findings provide strong evidence for a complex interdependency between spatial location and temporal structure in determining the ultimate behavioral and perceptual outcome associated with a paired multisensory (i.e., visual-auditory) stimulus.

Layout Geometry in Encoding and Retrieval of Spatial Memory

Science.gov (United States)

Mou, Weimin; Liu, Xianyun; McNamara, Timothy P.

2009-01-01

Two experiments investigated whether the spatial reference directions that are used to specify objects' locations in memory can be solely determined by layout geometry. Participants studied a layout of objects from a single viewpoint while their eye movements were recorded. Subsequently, participants used memory to make judgments of relative…

A psychophysical investigation of differences between synchrony and temporal order judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Love, Scott A; Petrini, Karin; Cheng, Adam; Pollick, Frank E

2013-01-01

Synchrony judgments involve deciding whether cues to an event are in synch or out of synch, while temporal order judgments involve deciding which of the cues came first. When the cues come from different sensory modalities these judgments can be used to investigate multisensory integration in the temporal domain. However, evidence indicates that that these two tasks should not be used interchangeably as it is unlikely that they measure the same perceptual mechanism. The current experiment further explores this issue across a variety of different audiovisual stimulus types. Participants were presented with 5 audiovisual stimulus types, each at 11 parametrically manipulated levels of cue asynchrony. During separate blocks, participants had to make synchrony judgments or temporal order judgments. For some stimulus types many participants were unable to successfully make temporal order judgments, but they were able to make synchrony judgments. The mean points of subjective simultaneity for synchrony judgments were all video-leading, while those for temporal order judgments were all audio-leading. In the within participants analyses no correlation was found across the two tasks for either the point of subjective simultaneity or the temporal integration window. Stimulus type influenced how the two tasks differed; nevertheless, consistent differences were found between the two tasks regardless of stimulus type. Therefore, in line with previous work, we conclude that synchrony and temporal order judgments are supported by different perceptual mechanisms and should not be interpreted as being representative of the same perceptual process.

Personality judgments from everyday images of faces

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Clare AM Sutherland

2015-10-01

Full Text Available People readily make personality attributions to images of strangers’ faces. Here we investigated the basis of these personality attributions as made to everyday, naturalistic face images. In a first study, we used 1,000 highly varying ‘ambient image’ face photographs to test the correspondence between personality judgments of the Big Five and dimensions known to underlie a range of facial first impressions: approachability, dominance and youthful-attractiveness. Interestingly, the facial Big Five judgments were found to separate to some extent: judgments of openness, extraversion, emotional stability and agreeableness were mainly linked to facial first impressions of approachability, whereas conscientiousness judgments involved a combination of approachability and dominance. In a second study we used average face images to investigate which main cues are used by perceivers to make impressions of the Big Five, by extracting consistent cues to impressions from the large variation in the original images. When forming impressions of strangers from highly varying, naturalistic face photographs, perceivers mainly seem to rely on broad facial cues to approachability, such as smiling.

Confidence-Accuracy Calibration in Absolute and Relative Face Recognition Judgments

Science.gov (United States)

Weber, Nathan; Brewer, Neil

2004-01-01

Confidence-accuracy (CA) calibration was examined for absolute and relative face recognition judgments as well as for recognition judgments from groups of stimuli presented simultaneously or sequentially (i.e., simultaneous or sequential mini-lineups). When the effect of difficulty was controlled, absolute and relative judgments produced…

Religiosity and agency and communion: their relationship to religious judgmentalism.

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Beck, R; Miller, C D

2000-05-01

The present study is an introduction to the construct of religious judgmentalism, defined as a willingness to make religious or moral judgments of others based on a limited period of observation; the study offers a prediction about which individuals will engage in such judgmental behavior. It was predicted that agency motives would significantly predict religious judgmentalism in a religious population but that communion motives and intrinsic religiosity would moderate this effect. Overall, the findings supported these predictions. Agency motives were positively correlated with religious judgmentalism. Intrinsic religiosity predicted a general unwillingness to make religious evaluations of others. Both intrinsic religiosity and communion motives did moderate the effects of high agency motives. Specifically, increases in communion motive and intrinsic religiosity, at high levels of agency motives, significantly predicted lower scores for religious judgmentalism. These findings were conceptualized as preliminary evidence for the position that interpersonal motives, rather than religiousness or religious motivation, predict social intolerance and criticism in religious individuals.

Aging and Confidence Judgments in Item Recognition

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Voskuilen, Chelsea; Ratcliff, Roger; McKoon, Gail

2018-01-01

We examined the effects of aging on performance in an item-recognition experiment with confidence judgments. A model for confidence judgments and response time (RTs; Ratcliff & Starns, 2013) was used to fit a large amount of data from a new sample of older adults and a previously reported sample of younger adults. This model of confidence…

Training complex judgment: the effects of critical thinking and complex judgment

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Helsdingen, Anne; Van Gog, Tamara; Van Merriënboer, Jeroen; Van den Bosch, Karel

2010-01-01

Helsdingen, A. S., Van Gog, T., Van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Van den Bosch, K. (2009). Training complex judgment: the effects of critical thinking and contextual interference. Poster presented at the international conference on cognitive load theory. March, 2-4, 2009, Heerlen, The Netherlands.

The tacit dimension of clinical judgment.

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Goldman, G. M.

1990-01-01

Two distinct views of the nature of clinical judgment are identified and contrasted. The dominant view that clinical judgment is a fully explicit process is compared to the relatively neglected view that tacit knowledge plays a substantial role in the clinician's mental operations. The tacit dimension of medical thinking is explored at length. The discussion suggests severe limits when applying decision analysis, expert systems, and computer-aided cost-benefit review to medicine. The goals and practices of postgraduate medical education are also examined from this perspective, as are various other implications for the clinician. The paper concludes that it is valuable to explore the nature of medical thinking in order to improve clinical practice and education. Such explorations should, however, take cognizance of the often overlooked tacit dimension of clinical judgment. Possible constraints on the medical applicability of both formal expert systems and heavily didactic instructional programs are considered. PMID:2356625

Clinical judgment, moral anxiety, and the limits of psychiatry.

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Murray, Bradley

2017-12-01

It is common for clinicians working in psychiatry and related clinical disciplines to be called on to make diagnostic clinical judgments concerning moral anxiety, which is a kind of anxiety that is closely bound up with decisions individuals face as moral agents. To make such a judgment, it is necessary to make a moral judgment. Although it has been common to acknowledge that there are ways in which moral and clinical judgment interact, this type of interaction has remained unacknowledged. This raises questions as to the nature and limits of psychiatry-particularly concerning the extent to which psychiatric discourse ought to incorporate moral discourse, and the role of the clinician as an expert in identifying problematic anxiety.

A Psychophysical Investigation of Differences between Synchrony and Temporal Order Judgments

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Love, Scott A.; Petrini, Karin; Cheng, Adam; Pollick, Frank E.

2013-01-01

Background Synchrony judgments involve deciding whether cues to an event are in synch or out of synch, while temporal order judgments involve deciding which of the cues came first. When the cues come from different sensory modalities these judgments can be used to investigate multisensory integration in the temporal domain. However, evidence indicates that that these two tasks should not be used interchangeably as it is unlikely that they measure the same perceptual mechanism. The current experiment further explores this issue across a variety of different audiovisual stimulus types. Methodology/Principal Findings Participants were presented with 5 audiovisual stimulus types, each at 11 parametrically manipulated levels of cue asynchrony. During separate blocks, participants had to make synchrony judgments or temporal order judgments. For some stimulus types many participants were unable to successfully make temporal order judgments, but they were able to make synchrony judgments. The mean points of subjective simultaneity for synchrony judgments were all video-leading, while those for temporal order judgments were all audio-leading. In the within participants analyses no correlation was found across the two tasks for either the point of subjective simultaneity or the temporal integration window. Conclusions Stimulus type influenced how the two tasks differed; nevertheless, consistent differences were found between the two tasks regardless of stimulus type. Therefore, in line with previous work, we conclude that synchrony and temporal order judgments are supported by different perceptual mechanisms and should not be interpreted as being representative of the same perceptual process. PMID:23349971

A psychophysical investigation of differences between synchrony and temporal order judgments.

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Scott A Love

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Synchrony judgments involve deciding whether cues to an event are in synch or out of synch, while temporal order judgments involve deciding which of the cues came first. When the cues come from different sensory modalities these judgments can be used to investigate multisensory integration in the temporal domain. However, evidence indicates that that these two tasks should not be used interchangeably as it is unlikely that they measure the same perceptual mechanism. The current experiment further explores this issue across a variety of different audiovisual stimulus types. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants were presented with 5 audiovisual stimulus types, each at 11 parametrically manipulated levels of cue asynchrony. During separate blocks, participants had to make synchrony judgments or temporal order judgments. For some stimulus types many participants were unable to successfully make temporal order judgments, but they were able to make synchrony judgments. The mean points of subjective simultaneity for synchrony judgments were all video-leading, while those for temporal order judgments were all audio-leading. In the within participants analyses no correlation was found across the two tasks for either the point of subjective simultaneity or the temporal integration window. CONCLUSIONS: Stimulus type influenced how the two tasks differed; nevertheless, consistent differences were found between the two tasks regardless of stimulus type. Therefore, in line with previous work, we conclude that synchrony and temporal order judgments are supported by different perceptual mechanisms and should not be interpreted as being representative of the same perceptual process.

Relative Contribution of Perception/Cognition and Language on Spatial Categorization

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Choi, Soonja; Hattrup, Kate

2012-01-01

This study investigated the relative contribution of perception/cognition and language-specific semantics in nonverbal categorization of spatial relations. English and Korean speakers completed a video-based similarity judgment task involving containment, support, tight fit, and loose fit. Both perception/cognition and language served as resources…

Training complex judgment: the effects of critical thinking and complex judgment

OpenAIRE

Helsdingen, Anne; Van Gog, Tamara; Van Merriënboer, Jeroen; Van den Bosch, Karel

2010-01-01

Helsdingen, A. S., Van Gog, T., Van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Van den Bosch, K. (2009). Training complex judgment: the effects of critical thinking and contextual interference. Poster presented at the international conference on cognitive load theory. March, 2-4, 2009, Heerlen, The Netherlands. [Poster presentation

The Spatial and the Visual in Mental Spatial Reasoning: An Ill-Posed Distinction

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Schultheis, Holger; Bertel, Sven; Barkowsky, Thomas; Seifert, Inessa

It is an ongoing and controversial debate in cognitive science which aspects of knowledge humans process visually and which ones they process spatially. Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science research, in building computational cognitive systems, tended to use strictly spatial or strictly visual representations. The resulting systems, however, were suboptimal both with respect to computational efficiency and cognitive plau sibility. In this paper, we propose that the problems in both research strands stem from a mis conception of the visual and the spatial in mental spatial knowl edge pro cessing. Instead of viewing the visual and the spatial as two clearly separable categories, they should be conceptualized as the extremes of a con tinuous dimension of representation. Regarding psychology, a continuous di mension avoids the need to exclusively assign processes and representations to either one of the cate gories and, thus, facilitates a more unambiguous rating of processes and rep resentations. Regarding AI and cognitive science, the con cept of a continuous spatial / visual dimension provides the possibility of rep re sentation structures which can vary continuously along the spatial / visual di mension. As a first step in exploiting these potential advantages of the pro posed conception we (a) introduce criteria allowing for a non-dichotomic judgment of processes and representations and (b) present an approach towards rep re sentation structures that can flexibly vary along the spatial / visual dimension.

Moral Judgment Reloaded: A Moral Dilemma validation study

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Julia F. Christensen

2014-07-01

Full Text Available We propose a revised set of moral dilemmas for studies on moral judgment. We selected a total of 46 moral dilemmas available in the literature and fine-tuned them in terms of four conceptual factors (Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, Evitability and Intention and methodological aspects of the dilemma formulation (word count, expression style, question formats that have been shown to influence moral judgment. Second, we obtained normative codings of arousal and valence for each dilemma showing that emotional arousal in response to moral dilemmas depends crucially on the factors Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, and Intentionality. Third, we validated the dilemma set confirming that people's moral judgment is sensitive to all four conceptual factors, and to their interactions. Results are discussed in the context of this field of research, outlining also the relevance of our RT effects for the Dual Process account of moral judgment. Finally, we suggest tentative theoretical avenues for future testing, particularly stressing the importance of the factor Intentionality in moral judgment. Additionally, due to the importance of cross-cultural studies in the quest for universals in human moral cognition, we provide the new set dilemmas in six languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan and Danish. The norming values provided here refer to the Spanish dilemma set.

Moral judgment reloaded: a moral dilemma validation study

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Christensen, Julia F.; Flexas, Albert; Calabrese, Margareta; Gut, Nadine K.; Gomila, Antoni

2014-01-01

We propose a revised set of moral dilemmas for studies on moral judgment. We selected a total of 46 moral dilemmas available in the literature and fine-tuned them in terms of four conceptual factors (Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, Evitability, and Intention) and methodological aspects of the dilemma formulation (word count, expression style, question formats) that have been shown to influence moral judgment. Second, we obtained normative codings of arousal and valence for each dilemma showing that emotional arousal in response to moral dilemmas depends crucially on the factors Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, and Intentionality. Third, we validated the dilemma set confirming that people's moral judgment is sensitive to all four conceptual factors, and to their interactions. Results are discussed in the context of this field of research, outlining also the relevance of our RT effects for the Dual Process account of moral judgment. Finally, we suggest tentative theoretical avenues for future testing, particularly stressing the importance of the factor Intentionality in moral judgment. Additionally, due to the importance of cross-cultural studies in the quest for universals in human moral cognition, we provide the new set dilemmas in six languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Catalan, and Danish). The norming values provided here refer to the Spanish dilemma set. PMID:25071621

Low levels of empathic concern predict utilitarian moral judgment.

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Gleichgerrcht, Ezequiel; Young, Liane

2013-01-01

Is it permissible to harm one to save many? Classic moral dilemmas are often defined by the conflict between a putatively rational response to maximize aggregate welfare (i.e., the utilitarian judgment) and an emotional aversion to harm (i.e., the non-utilitarian judgment). Here, we address two questions. First, what specific aspect of emotional responding is relevant for these judgments? Second, is this aspect of emotional responding selectively reduced in utilitarians or enhanced in non-utilitarians? The results reveal a key relationship between moral judgment and empathic concern in particular (i.e., feelings of warmth and compassion in response to someone in distress). Utilitarian participants showed significantly reduced empathic concern on an independent empathy measure. These findings therefore reveal diminished empathic concern in utilitarian moral judges.

Utilitarian Moral Judgment Exclusively Coheres with Inference from Is to Ought.

Science.gov (United States)

Elqayam, Shira; Wilkinson, Meredith R; Thompson, Valerie A; Over, David E; Evans, Jonathan St B T

2017-01-01

Faced with moral choice, people either judge according to pre-existing obligations ( deontological judgment), or by taking into account the consequences of their actions ( utilitarian judgment). We propose that the latter coheres with a more general cognitive mechanism - deontic introduction , the tendency to infer normative ('deontic') conclusions from descriptive premises (is-ought inference). Participants were presented with vignettes that allowed either deontological or utilitarian choice, and asked to draw a range of deontic conclusions, as well as judge the overall moral rightness of each choice separately. We predicted and found a selective defeasibility pattern, in which manipulations that suppressed deontic introduction also suppressed utilitarian moral judgment, but had little effect on deontological moral judgment. Thus, deontic introduction coheres with utilitarian moral judgment almost exclusively. We suggest a family of norm-generating informal inferences, in which normative conclusions are drawn from descriptive (although value-laden) premises. This family includes deontic introduction and utilitarian moral judgment as well as other informal inferences. We conclude with a call for greater integration of research in moral judgment and research into deontic reasoning and informal inference.

A person-centered approach to moral judgment.

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Uhlmann, Eric Luis; Pizarro, David A; Diermeier, Daniel

2015-01-01

Both normative theories of ethics in philosophy and contemporary models of moral judgment in psychology have focused almost exclusively on the permissibility of acts, in particular whether acts should be judged on the basis of their material outcomes (consequentialist ethics) or on the basis of rules, duties, and obligations (deontological ethics). However, a longstanding third perspective on morality, virtue ethics, may offer a richer descriptive account of a wide range of lay moral judgments. Building on this ethical tradition, we offer a person-centered account of moral judgment, which focuses on individuals as the unit of analysis for moral evaluations rather than on acts. Because social perceivers are fundamentally motivated to acquire information about the moral character of others, features of an act that seem most informative of character often hold more weight than either the consequences of the act or whether a moral rule has been broken. This approach, we argue, can account for numerous empirical findings that are either not predicted by current theories of moral psychology or are simply categorized as biases or irrational quirks in the way individuals make moral judgments. © The Author(s) 2014.

Futility and the varieties of medical judgment.

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Sulmasy, D P

1997-01-01

Pellegrino has argued that end-of-life decisions should be based upon the physician's assessment of the effectiveness of the treatment and the patient's assessment of its benefits and burdens. This would seem to imply that conditions for medical futility could be met either if there were a judgment of ineffectiveness, or if the patient were in a state in which he or she were incapable of a subjective judgment of the benefits and burdens of the treatment. I argue that a theory of futility according to Pellegrino would deny that latter but would permit some cases of the former. I call this the "circumspect" view. I show that Pellegrino would adopt the circumspect view because he would see the medical futility debate in the context of a system of medical ethics based firmly upon a philosophy of medicine. The circumspect view is challenged by those who would deny that one can distinguish objective from subjective medical judgments. I defend the circumspect view on the basis of a previously neglected aspect of the philosophy of medicine-an examination of varieties of medical judgment. I then offer some practical applications of this theory in clinical practice.

Similar Task Features Shape Judgment and Categorization Processes

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Hoffmann, Janina A.; von Helversen, Bettina; Rieskamp, Jörg

2016-01-01

The distinction between similarity-based and rule-based strategies has instigated a large body of research in categorization and judgment. Within both domains, the task characteristics guiding strategy shifts are increasingly well documented. Across domains, past research has observed shifts from rule-based strategies in judgment to…

Ethical Ideology and Ethical Judgments of Accounting Practitioners in Malaysia

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Suhaiza Ismail

2011-09-01

Full Text Available The paper intends to explore the ethical ideology and ethical judgments of accounting practitioners in Malaysia. The objectives of this study are twofold. First, the paper intends to examine the factors that contribute to the different ethical ideology among Malaysian accounting practitioners. Second, it aims to investigate the influence of demographic factors and ethical ideology on ethical judgments of accounting practitioners. The study used Forsyth’s (1980 Ethics Position Questionnaire instrument to examine the ethical ideology of the accountants and adopted ethics vignettes used by Emerson et al. (2007 to assess the ethical judgments of the respondents. From the statistical analysis, this study found that age and gender have a significant impact on ethical judgment but not on ethical ideology. In addition, idealism and relativism have a significant influence on ethical judgment, especially in a legally unethical situation.

Can we use human judgments to determine the discount rate?

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Baron, J

2000-12-01

It has been suggested that the long-term discount rate for environmental goods should decrease at longer delays. One justification for this suggestion is that human judgments support it. This article presents an experiment showing that judgments concerning discount rates are internally inconsistent. These results point to potential problems with the use of judgments referenda for determining discount rates in cost-benefit analyses.

Unawareness of Self-interest Bias in Moral Judgments of Others’ Behavior

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Bocian Konrad

2014-12-01

Full Text Available Previous studies (Bocian & Wojciszke, 2014 showed that self-interest biases moral perception of others’ unethical actions. Moreover, affective changes in attitudinal responses towards the perpetrator of an immoral act drives the bias. In the present studies, we attempted to answer the question whether people are aware of the self-interest bias in their judgments of others’ behavior. We conducted two experiments showing that moral judgments of verbally described and imagined actions were dominated by norms rather than self-interest (Study 1 and that people were not aware that self-interest distorted their moral judgment (Study 2. The unawareness of the self-interest bias among the participants was attributable to omission of their own emotional responses when forecasting their moral judgments. We discuss the importance of emotions presence in studies on moral judgments as well as contribution of the present research to the intuitionist approach to moral judgment.

The use of experts and their judgments in nursing research: an overview

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JC Bruce

2008-09-01

Full Text Available Experts and their judgments are widely used in the fields of research, education, health care, law, commerce and technology. Expert judgment is known for its subjectivity and its potential for bias, which brings into question the accuracy and authenticity of judgmental data. At the same time there is acknowledgment of the valued contribution of judgmental data towards valid inferences in research and education. Maximizing the use of experts and their judgments has therefore become an endeavour of educationists and researchers alike.

FOREIGN JUDGMENTS PROJECT OF HAGUE CONFERENCE: FOR A GLOBAL REGIME OF INTERNATIONAL CIRCULATION OF JUDGMENTS ON CIVIL AND COMMERCIAL SUBJECTS

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Nadia de Araujo

2017-02-01

Full Text Available The Hague Conference on Private International Law is promoting the adoption of rules designed to circumvent usual obstacles to the international circulation of judgments. The Judgments Project initiated in the nineties aims at mitigating uncertainties and risks associated with the international commerce by setting forth a simple and safe system according to which foreign judgments may circulate from country to country. The purpose of this article is to preserve the historical moment of the negotiations taking place at the Hague, as well as to pinpoint some technical issues raised in the course of the project that may be of general interest to those involved in the subject of international jurisdiction.

Low levels of empathic concern predict utilitarian moral judgment.

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Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht

Full Text Available Is it permissible to harm one to save many? Classic moral dilemmas are often defined by the conflict between a putatively rational response to maximize aggregate welfare (i.e., the utilitarian judgment and an emotional aversion to harm (i.e., the non-utilitarian judgment. Here, we address two questions. First, what specific aspect of emotional responding is relevant for these judgments? Second, is this aspect of emotional responding selectively reduced in utilitarians or enhanced in non-utilitarians? The results reveal a key relationship between moral judgment and empathic concern in particular (i.e., feelings of warmth and compassion in response to someone in distress. Utilitarian participants showed significantly reduced empathic concern on an independent empathy measure. These findings therefore reveal diminished empathic concern in utilitarian moral judges.

Representing Spatial Layout According to Intrinsic Frames of Reference.

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Xie, Chaoxiang; Li, Shiyi; Tao, Weidong; Wei, Yiping; Sun, Hong-Jin

2017-01-01

Mou and McNamara have suggested that object locations are represented according to intrinsic reference frames. In three experiments, we investigated the limitations of intrinsic reference frames as a mean to represent object locations in spatial memory. Participants learned the locations of seven or eight common objects in a rectangular room and then made judgments of relative direction based on their memory of the layout. The results of all experiments showed that when all objects were positioned regularly, judgments of relative direction were faster or more accurate for novel headings that were aligned with the primary intrinsic structure than for other novel headings; however, when one irregularly positioned object was added to the layout, this advantage was eliminated. The experiments further indicated that with a single view at study, participants could represent the layout from either an egocentric orientation or a different orientation, according to experimental instructions. Together, these results suggest that environmental reference frames and intrinsic axes can influence performance for novel headings, but their role in spatial memory depends on egocentric experience, layout regularity, and instructions.

BCI and a User’s Judgment of Agency

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Vlek, R.J.; Acken, J.P. van; Beurskens, E.; Roijendijk, L.M.M.; Haselager, W.F.G.; Grübler, G.; Hildt, E.

2014-01-01

Performing an action with the assistance of a BCI may affect a user’s judgment of agency, resulting in an illusion of control, or automatism. We analyze this possibility from a theoretical perspective and discuss various factors that might influence a user’s judgment of agency in a BCI context. We

Disgust sensitivity is primarily associated with purity-based moral judgments.

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Wagemans, Fieke M A; Brandt, Mark J; Zeelenberg, Marcel

2018-03-01

Individual differences in disgust sensitivity are associated with a range of judgments and attitudes related to the moral domain. Some perspectives suggest that the association between disgust sensitivity and moral judgments will be equally strong across all moral domains (i.e., purity, authority, loyalty, care, fairness, and liberty). Other perspectives predict that disgust sensitivity is primarily associated with judgments of specific moral domains (e.g., primarily purity). However, no study has systematically tested if disgust sensitivity is associated with moral judgments of the purity domain specifically, more generally to moral judgments of the binding moral domains, or to moral judgments of all of the moral domains equally. Across 5 studies (total N = 1,104), we find consistent evidence for the notion that disgust sensitivity relates more strongly to moral condemnation of purity-based transgressions (meta-analytic r = .40) than to moral condemnation of transgressions of any of the other domains (range meta-analytic rs: .07-.27). Our findings are in line with predictions from Moral Foundations Theory, which predicts that personality characteristics like disgust sensitivity make people more sensitive to a certain set of moral issues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Utilitarian Moral Judgment Exclusively Coheres with Inference from Is to Ought

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Shira Elqayam

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Faced with moral choice, people either judge according to pre-existing obligations (deontological judgment, or by taking into account the consequences of their actions (utilitarian judgment. We propose that the latter coheres with a more general cognitive mechanism – deontic introduction, the tendency to infer normative (‘deontic’ conclusions from descriptive premises (is-ought inference. Participants were presented with vignettes that allowed either deontological or utilitarian choice, and asked to draw a range of deontic conclusions, as well as judge the overall moral rightness of each choice separately. We predicted and found a selective defeasibility pattern, in which manipulations that suppressed deontic introduction also suppressed utilitarian moral judgment, but had little effect on deontological moral judgment. Thus, deontic introduction coheres with utilitarian moral judgment almost exclusively. We suggest a family of norm-generating informal inferences, in which normative conclusions are drawn from descriptive (although value-laden premises. This family includes deontic introduction and utilitarian moral judgment as well as other informal inferences. We conclude with a call for greater integration of research in moral judgment and research into deontic reasoning and informal inference.

The mere exposure effect is differentially sensitive to different judgment tasks.

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Seamon, J G; McKenna, P A; Binder, N

1998-03-01

The mere exposure effect is the increase in positive affect that results from the repeated exposure to previously novel stimuli. We sought to determine if judgments other than affective preference could reliably produce a mere exposure effect for two-dimensional random shapes. In two experiments, we found that brighter and darker judgments did not differentiate target from distracter shapes, liking judgments led to target selection greater than chance, and disliking judgments led to distracter selection greater than chance. These results for brighter, darker, and liking judgments were obtained regardless of whether shape recognition was greater (Experiment 1) or not greater (Experiment 2) than chance. Effects of prior exposure to novel shapes were reliably observed only for affective judgment tasks. These results are inconsistent with general predictions made by the nonspecific activation hypothesis, but not the affective primacy or perceptual fluency hypotheses which were discussed in terms of cognitive neuroscience research. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

Judgments of subtle facial expressions of emotion.

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Matsumoto, David; Hwang, Hyisung C

2014-04-01

Most studies on judgments of facial expressions of emotion have primarily utilized prototypical, high-intensity expressions. This paper examines judgments of subtle facial expressions of emotion, including not only low-intensity versions of full-face prototypes but also variants of those prototypes. A dynamic paradigm was used in which observers were shown a neutral expression followed by the target expression to judge, and then the neutral expression again, allowing for a simulation of the emergence of the expression from and then return to a baseline. We also examined how signal and intensity clarities of the expressions (explained more fully in the Introduction) were associated with judgment agreement levels. Low-intensity, full-face prototypical expressions of emotion were judged as the intended emotion at rates significantly greater than chance. A number of the proposed variants were also judged as the intended emotions. Both signal and intensity clarities were individually associated with agreement rates; when their interrelationships were taken into account, signal clarity independently predicted agreement rates but intensity clarity did not. The presence or absence of specific muscles appeared to be more important to agreement rates than their intensity levels, with the exception of the intensity of zygomatic major, which was positively correlated with agreement rates for judgments of joy.

Assessing Human Judgment of Computationally Generated Swarming Behavior

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John Harvey

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Computer-based swarm systems, aiming to replicate the flocking behavior of birds, were first introduced by Reynolds in 1987. In his initial work, Reynolds noted that while it was difficult to quantify the dynamics of the behavior from the model, observers of his model immediately recognized them as a representation of a natural flock. Considerable analysis has been conducted since then on quantifying the dynamics of flocking/swarming behavior. However, no systematic analysis has been conducted on human identification of swarming. In this paper, we assess subjects’ assessment of the behavior of a simplified version of Reynolds’ model. Factors that affect the identification of swarming are discussed and future applications of the resulting models are proposed. Differences in decision times for swarming-related questions asked during the study indicate that different brain mechanisms may be involved in different elements of the behavior assessment task. The relatively simple but finely tunable model used in this study provides a useful methodology for assessing individual human judgment of swarming behavior.

Intuitive Face Judgments Rely on Holistic Eye Movement Pattern.

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Mega, Laura F; Volz, Kirsten G

2017-01-01

Non-verbal signals such as facial expressions are of paramount importance for social encounters. Their perception predominantly occurs without conscious awareness and is effortlessly integrated into social interactions. In other words, face perception is intuitive. Contrary to classical intuition tasks, this work investigates intuitive processes in the realm of every-day type social judgments. Two differently instructed groups of participants judged the authenticity of emotional facial expressions, while their eye movements were recorded: an 'intuitive group,' instructed to rely on their "gut feeling" for the authenticity judgments, and a 'deliberative group,' instructed to make their judgments after careful analysis of the face. Pixel-wise statistical maps of the resulting eye movements revealed a differential viewing pattern, wherein the intuitive judgments relied on fewer, longer and more centrally located fixations. These markers have been associated with a global/holistic viewing strategy. The holistic pattern of intuitive face judgments is in line with evidence showing that intuition is related to processing the "gestalt" of an object, rather than focusing on details. Our work thereby provides further evidence that intuitive processes are characterized by holistic perception, in an understudied and real world domain of intuition research.

A Framework of a Computerized Decision Aid to Improve Group Judgments

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Utpal Bose

2009-09-01

Full Text Available In organizations, groups of decision makers often meet to make judgments as a group on issues and tasks such as, hiring a person who best fits an open position. In such tasks called cognitive conflict tasks, where there is no conflict of interest, group members attempting to reach a common solution often differ on their perspectives to the problem. Cognitive conflicts have been studied in the context of Social Judgment Theory, which posits that persons or judges make a set of judgments about a set of events based on observation of a set of cues related to the events. Disagreement arises because the judges fail to understand each other’s judgment making policies. In order to reduce disagreement and move the group towards a group judgment policy that has the consensus of the group members and is applied consistently, a computerized decision aid is proposed that can be built around a Group Support System using cognitive mapping as a method of providing cognitive feedback and the Analytic Hierarchy Process to process the conflicting criteria and help an individual formulate a judgment policy, as well as aggregate the individual policies into a group judgment policy. It is argued that such as decision aid by supporting every decision maker in the group to effectively use information about the task so that they have a good understanding of the judgment policy they form, to communicate their evaluation policies accurately to other members, and by providing an iterative mechanism through which members can arrive at a compromise solution to the task, is expected to improve the quality of group judgments.

Judgments Relative to Patterns: How Temporal Sequence Patterns Affect Judgments and Memory

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Kusev, Petko; Ayton, Peter; van Schaik, Paul; Tsaneva-Atanasova, Krasimira; Stewart, Neil; Chater, Nick

2011-01-01

RESix experiments studied relative frequency judgment and recall of sequentially presented items drawn from 2 distinct categories (i.e., city and animal). The experiments show that judged frequencies of categories of sequentially encountered stimuli are affected by certain properties of the sequence configuration. We found (a) a "first-run…

TU Delft expert judgment data base

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Cooke, Roger M.; Goossens, Louis L.H.J.

2008-01-01

We review the applications of structured expert judgment uncertainty quantification using the 'classical model' developed at the Delft University of Technology over the last 17 years [Cooke RM. Experts in uncertainty. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1991; Expert judgment study on atmospheric dispersion and deposition. Report Faculty of Technical Mathematics and Informatics No.01-81, Delft University of Technology; 1991]. These involve 45 expert panels, performed under contract with problem owners who reviewed and approved the results. With a few exceptions, all these applications involved the use of seed variables; that is, variables from the experts' area of expertise for which the true values are available post hoc. Seed variables are used to (1) measure expert performance, (2) enable performance-based weighted combination of experts' distributions, and (3) evaluate and hopefully validate the resulting combination or 'decision maker'. This article reviews the classical model for structured expert judgment and the performance measures, reviews applications, comparing performance-based decision makers with 'equal weight' decision makers, and collects some lessons learned

The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Finucane, M.; Slovic, P.; Johnson, S.M.; Alhakami, A.

1998-01-01

The role of affect in judgment of risks and benefits is examined in two studies. Despite using different methodologies the two studies suggest that risk and benefit are linked somehow in people's perception, consequently influencing their judgments. Short paper

COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH OVER THE PROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT OF THE FINANCIAL ANALYST

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Viorica Mirela ŞTEFAN-DUICU

2016-06-01

Full Text Available The professional judgment is emblematical at a decisional level. This paper aims to highlight the valences of the professional judgment of the financial analyst by describing the components of its activity and also through highlighting the typologies of the mechanisms involved. Within this paper we have presented the types of financial analysts, the responsibilities that guide the professional judgment and also the interdependent elements of their activity.

The Application of Moral Judgments to Other Cultures: Relativism and Universality.

Science.gov (United States)

Wainryb, Cecilia

1993-01-01

Sixth and tenth graders and college students were asked to apply moral judgments which they had made about a familiar context to contexts in cultures different from their own. Most subjects contextualized their judgments with respect to cultures with different informational beliefs but made nonrelativistic judgments with respect to cultures with…

Electronic health record tools' support of nurses' clinical judgment and team communication.

Science.gov (United States)

Kossman, Susan P; Bonney, Leigh Ann; Kim, Myoung Jin

2013-11-01

Nurses need to quickly process information to form clinical judgments, communicate with the healthcare team, and guide optimal patient care. Electronic health records not only offer potential for enhanced care but also introduce unintended consequences through changes in workflow, clinical judgment, and communication. We investigated nurses' use of improvised (self-made) and electronic health record-generated cognitive artifacts on clinical judgment and team communication. Tanner's Clinical Judgment Model provided a framework and basis for questions in an online survey and focus group interviews. Findings indicated that (1) nurses rated self-made work lists and medication administration records highest for both clinical judgment and communication, (2) tools aided different dimensions of clinical judgment, and (3) interdisciplinary tools enhance team communication. Implications are that electronic health record tool redesign could better support nursing work.

Psychophysical evaluation of image quality : from judgment to impression

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ridder, de H.; Rogowitz, B.E.; Pappas, T.N.

1998-01-01

Designs of imaging systems, image processing algorithms etc. usually take for granted that methods for assessing perceived image quality produce unbiased estimates of the viewers' quality impression. Quality judgments, however, are affected by the judgment strategies induced by the experimental

The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Finucane, M.; Slovic, P.; Johnson, S.M. [Decision Research, 1201 Oak St, Eugene, Oregon (United States); Alhakami, A. [Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University Psychology Dept. (Saudi Arabia)

1998-07-01

The role of affect in judgment of risks and benefits is examined in two studies. Despite using different methodologies the two studies suggest that risk and benefit are linked somehow in people's perception, consequently influencing their judgments. Short paper.

The ABC of moral development: an attachment approach to moral judgment

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Govrin, Aner

2014-01-01

As with other cognitive faculties, the etiology of moral judgment and its connection to early development is complex. Because research is limited, the causative and contributory factors to the development of moral judgment in preverbal infants are unclear. However, evidence is emerging from studies within both infant research and moral psychology that may contribute to our understanding of the early development of moral judgments. Though its finding are preliminary, this proposed paradigm synthesizes these findings to generate an overarching, model of the process that appears to contribute to the development of moral judgment in the first year of life. I will propose that through early interactions with the caregiver, the child acquires an internal representation of a system of rules that determine how right/wrong judgments are to be construed, used, and understood. By breaking moral situations down into their defining features, the attachment model of moral judgment outlines a framework for a universal moral faculty based on a universal, innate, deep structure that appears uniformly in the structure of almost all moral judgments regardless of their content. The implications of the model for our understanding of innateness, universal morality, and the representations of moral situations are discussed. PMID:24478739

Are all spatial reference frames egocentric? Reinterpreting evidence for allocentric, object-centered, or world-centered reference frames

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Flavia eFilimon

2015-12-01

Full Text Available The use and neural representation of egocentric spatial reference frames is well documented. In contrast, whether the brain represents spatial relationships between objects in allocentric, object-centered, or world-centered coordinates is debated. Here, I review behavioral, neuropsychological, neurophysiological (neuronal recording, and neuroimaging evidence for and against allocentric, object-centered, or world-centered spatial reference frames. Based on theoretical considerations, simulations, and empirical findings from spatial navigation, spatial judgments, and goal-directed movements, I suggest that all spatial representations may in fact be dependent on egocentric reference frames.

Experiencing Physical Pain Leads to More Sympathetic Moral Judgments

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Xiao, Qianguo; Zhu, Yi; Luo, Wen-bo

2015-01-01

Previous studies have shown that observing another’s pain can evoke other-oriented emotions, which instigate empathic concern for another’s needs. It is not clear whether experiencing first-hand physical pain may also evoke other-oriented emotion and thus influence people’s moral judgment. Based on the embodied simulation literature and neuroimaging evidence, the present research tested the idea that participants who experienced physical pain would be more sympathetic in their moral judgments. Study 1 showed that ice-induced physical pain facilitated higher self-assessments of empathy, which motivated participants to be more sympathetic in their moral judgments. Study 2 confirmed findings in study 1 and also showed that State Perspective Taking subscale of the State Empathy Scale mediated the effects of physical pain on moral judgment. These results provide support for embodied view of morality and for the view that pain can serve a positive psychosocial function. PMID:26465603

The accuracy of meta-metacognitive judgments: regulating the realism of confidence.

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Buratti, Sandra; Allwood, Carl Martin

2012-08-01

Can people improve the realism of their confidence judgments about the correctness of their episodic memory reports by deselecting the least realistic judgments? An assumption of Koriat and Goldsmith's (Psychol Rev 103:490-517, 1996) model is that confidence judgments regulate the reporting of memory reports. We tested whether this assumption generalizes to the regulation of the realism (accuracy) of confidence judgments. In two experiments, 270 adults in separate conditions answered 50 recognition and recall questions about the contents of a just-seen video. After each answer, they made confidence judgments about the answer's correctness. In Experiment 1, the participants in the recognition conditions significantly increased their absolute bias when they excluded 15 questions. In Experiment 2, the participants in the recall condition significantly improved their calibration. The results indicate that recall, more than recognition, offers valid cues for participants to increase the realism of their report. However, the effects were small with only weak support for the conclusion that people have some ability to regulate the realism in their confidence judgments.

Improving a gold standard: treating human relevance judgments of MEDLINE document pairs

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Kim Won

2011-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Given prior human judgments of the condition of an object it is possible to use these judgments to make a maximal likelihood estimate of what future human judgments of the condition of that object will be. However, if one has a reasonably large collection of similar objects and the prior human judgments of a number of judges regarding the condition of each object in the collection, then it is possible to make predictions of future human judgments for the whole collection that are superior to the simple maximal likelihood estimate for each object in isolation. This is possible because the multiple judgments over the collection allow an analysis to determine the relative value of a judge as compared with the other judges in the group and this value can be used to augment or diminish a particular judge’s influence in predicting future judgments. Here we study and compare five different methods for making such improved predictions and show that each is superior to simple maximal likelihood estimates.

Construal levels and moral judgment: Some complications

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Han Gong

2012-09-01

Full Text Available Eyal, T., Liberman, N., and Trope, Y., (2008. Judging near and distant virtue and vice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1204-1209, explored how psychological distance influences moral judgment and found that more extreme moral appraisals were given to distal behaviors rather than proximal behaviors. Contrary to Eyal et al., the current paper presents converging evidence showing that moral judgments become more extreme at lower-level construals compared to higher-level construals. In four experiments using two different priming techniques, we manipulated construal levels and assessed their effects on moral judgment. High-level consturals elicited less moral outrage toward transgressions and less positive ratings of virtuous behaviors than low-level construals. A replication study was also conducted to reconcile the inconsistencies between the current results and those of Eyal et al. Possible explanations for the different results between two studies are discussed.

Extraversion, neuroticism, immoral judgment and criminal behaviour.

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Addad, M; Leslau, A

1989-01-01

The present study examines delinquent behaviour by integrating two approaches until now employed separately: Eysnck's theory linking delinquency to extraversion and neuroticism, and Kohlberg's theory of moral development and its connection to moral behaviour. The study analyzes the relations between extraversion, neuroticism and moral judgment, as well as their independent and/or interactive effect upon the development of anti-social behaviour. The relationships are tested by retrospective measurements of personality traits and moral judgment in three groups: delinquency (N = 203), control (N = 82) and comparative (N = 407) groups. Findings show that criminals are higher than control subjects in neuroticism and immoral judgment but not in extraversion. Similar relationships were found between criminals and the comparative group, with one exception: here extraversion was found to be positively related to delinquency, both independently and interactively with neuroticism. The implications of these results for differential development of anti-social behaviour are discussed.

How Large Is the Role of Emotion in Judgments of Moral Dilemmas?

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Horne, Zachary; Powell, Derek

2016-01-01

Moral dilemmas often pose dramatic and gut-wrenching emotional choices. It is now widely accepted that emotions are not simply experienced alongside people's judgments about moral dilemmas, but that our affective processes play a central role in determining those judgments. However, much of the evidence purporting to demonstrate the connection between people's emotional responses and their judgments about moral dilemmas has recently been called into question. In the present studies, we reexamined the role of emotion in people's judgments about moral dilemmas using a validated self-report measure of emotion. We measured participants' specific emotional responses to moral dilemmas and, although we found that moral dilemmas evoked strong emotional responses, we found that these responses were only weakly correlated with participants' moral judgments. We argue that the purportedly strong connection between emotion and judgments of moral dilemmas may have been overestimated.

Implied motion language can influence visual spatial memory.

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Vinson, David W; Engelen, Jan; Zwaan, Rolf A; Matlock, Teenie; Dale, Rick

2017-07-01

How do language and vision interact? Specifically, what impact can language have on visual processing, especially related to spatial memory? What are typically considered errors in visual processing, such as remembering the location of an object to be farther along its motion trajectory than it actually is, can be explained as perceptual achievements that are driven by our ability to anticipate future events. In two experiments, we tested whether the prior presentation of motion language influences visual spatial memory in ways that afford greater perceptual prediction. Experiment 1 showed that motion language influenced judgments for the spatial memory of an object beyond the known effects of implied motion present in the image itself. Experiment 2 replicated this finding. Our findings support a theory of perception as prediction.

Dissociation of Recognition and Recency Memory Judgments After Anterior Thalamic Nuclei Lesions in Rats

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Dumont, Julie R.; Aggleton, John P.

2013-01-01

The anterior thalamic nuclei form part of a network for episodic memory in humans. The importance of these nuclei for recognition and recency judgments remains, however, unclear. Rats with anterior thalamic nuclei lesions and their controls were tested on object recognition, along with two types of recency judgment. The spontaneous discrimination of a novel object or a novel odor from a familiar counterpart (recognition memory) was not affected by anterior thalamic lesions when tested after retention delays of 1 and 60 min. To measure recency memory, rats were shown two familiar objects, one of which had been explored more recently. In one condition, rats were presented with two lists (List A, List B) of objects separated by a delay, thereby creating two distinct blocks of stimuli. After an additional delay, rats were presented with pairs of objects, one from List A and one from List B (between-block recency). No lesion-induced deficit was apparent for recency discriminations between objects from different lists, despite using three different levels of task difficulty. In contrast, rats with anterior thalamic lesions were significantly impaired when presented with a continuous list of objects and then tested on their ability to distinguish between those items early and late in the same list (within-block recency). The contrasting effects on recognition and recency support the notion that interlinked hippocampal–anterior thalamic interconnections support aspects of both spatial and nonspatial learning, although the role of the anterior thalamic nuclei may be restricted to a subclass of recency judgments (within-block). PMID:23731076

Intuitive and Deliberate Judgments Are Based on Common Principles

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Kruglanski, Arie W.; Gigerenzer, Gerd

2011-01-01

A popular distinction in cognitive and social psychology has been between "intuitive" and "deliberate" judgments. This juxtaposition has aligned in dual-process theories of reasoning associative, unconscious, effortless, heuristic, and suboptimal processes (assumed to foster intuitive judgments) versus rule-based, conscious, effortful, analytic,…

Judgment and decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

Mellers, B A; Schwartz, A; Cooke, A D

1998-01-01

For many decades, research in judgment and decision making has examined behavioral violations of rational choice theory. In that framework, rationality is expressed as a single correct decision shared by experimenters and subjects that satisfies internal coherence within a set of preferences and beliefs. Outside of psychology, social scientists are now debating the need to modify rational choice theory with behavioral assumptions. Within psychology, researchers are debating assumptions about errors for many different definitions of rationality. Alternative frameworks are being proposed. These frameworks view decisions as more reasonable and adaptive that previously thought. For example, "rule following." Rule following, which occurs when a rule or norm is applied to a situation, often minimizes effort and provides satisfying solutions that are "good enough," though not necessarily the best. When rules are ambiguous, people look for reasons to guide their decisions. They may also let their emotions take charge. This chapter presents recent research on judgment and decision making from traditional and alternative frameworks.

Ensemble coding remains accurate under object and spatial visual working memory load.

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Epstein, Michael L; Emmanouil, Tatiana A

2017-10-01

A number of studies have provided evidence that the visual system statistically summarizes large amounts of information that would exceed the limitations of attention and working memory (ensemble coding). However the necessity of working memory resources for ensemble coding has not yet been tested directly. In the current study, we used a dual task design to test the effect of object and spatial visual working memory load on size averaging accuracy. In Experiment 1, we tested participants' accuracy in comparing the mean size of two sets under various levels of object visual working memory load. Although the accuracy of average size judgments depended on the difference in mean size between the two sets, we found no effect of working memory load. In Experiment 2, we tested the same average size judgment while participants were under spatial visual working memory load, again finding no effect of load on averaging accuracy. Overall our results reveal that ensemble coding can proceed unimpeded and highly accurately under both object and spatial visual working memory load, providing further evidence that ensemble coding reflects a basic perceptual process distinct from that of individual object processing.

Can model-free reinforcement learning explain deontological moral judgments?

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Ayars, Alisabeth

2016-05-01

Dual-systems frameworks propose that moral judgments are derived from both an immediate emotional response, and controlled/rational cognition. Recently Cushman (2013) proposed a new dual-system theory based on model-free and model-based reinforcement learning. Model-free learning attaches values to actions based on their history of reward and punishment, and explains some deontological, non-utilitarian judgments. Model-based learning involves the construction of a causal model of the world and allows for far-sighted planning; this form of learning fits well with utilitarian considerations that seek to maximize certain kinds of outcomes. I present three concerns regarding the use of model-free reinforcement learning to explain deontological moral judgment. First, many actions that humans find aversive from model-free learning are not judged to be morally wrong. Moral judgment must require something in addition to model-free learning. Second, there is a dearth of evidence for central predictions of the reinforcement account-e.g., that people with different reinforcement histories will, all else equal, make different moral judgments. Finally, to account for the effect of intention within the framework requires certain assumptions which lack support. These challenges are reasonable foci for future empirical/theoretical work on the model-free/model-based framework. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Intuitive Face Judgments Rely on Holistic Eye Movement Pattern

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Laura F. Mega

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Non-verbal signals such as facial expressions are of paramount importance for social encounters. Their perception predominantly occurs without conscious awareness and is effortlessly integrated into social interactions. In other words, face perception is intuitive. Contrary to classical intuition tasks, this work investigates intuitive processes in the realm of every-day type social judgments. Two differently instructed groups of participants judged the authenticity of emotional facial expressions, while their eye movements were recorded: an ‘intuitive group,’ instructed to rely on their “gut feeling” for the authenticity judgments, and a ‘deliberative group,’ instructed to make their judgments after careful analysis of the face. Pixel-wise statistical maps of the resulting eye movements revealed a differential viewing pattern, wherein the intuitive judgments relied on fewer, longer and more centrally located fixations. These markers have been associated with a global/holistic viewing strategy. The holistic pattern of intuitive face judgments is in line with evidence showing that intuition is related to processing the “gestalt” of an object, rather than focusing on details. Our work thereby provides further evidence that intuitive processes are characterized by holistic perception, in an understudied and real world domain of intuition research.

Error Parsing: An alternative method of implementing social judgment theory

OpenAIRE

Crystal C. Hall; Daniel M. Oppenheimer

2015-01-01

We present a novel method of judgment analysis called Error Parsing, based upon an alternative method of implementing Social Judgment Theory (SJT). SJT and Error Parsing both posit the same three components of error in human judgment: error due to noise, error due to cue weighting, and error due to inconsistency. In that sense, the broad theory and framework are the same. However, SJT and Error Parsing were developed to answer different questions, and thus use different m...

Simplification and Shift in Cognition of Political Difference: Applying the Geometric Modeling to the Analysis of Semantic Similarity Judgment

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Kato, Junko; Okada, Kensuke

2011-01-01

Perceiving differences by means of spatial analogies is intrinsic to human cognition. Multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) analysis based on Minkowski geometry has been used primarily on data on sensory similarity judgments, leaving judgments on abstractive differences unanalyzed. Indeed, analysts have failed to find appropriate experimental or real-life data in this regard. Our MDS analysis used survey data on political scientists' judgments of the similarities and differences between political positions expressed in terms of distance. Both distance smoothing and majorization techniques were applied to a three-way dataset of similarity judgments provided by at least seven experts on at least five parties' positions on at least seven policies (i.e., originally yielding 245 dimensions) to substantially reduce the risk of local minima. The analysis found two dimensions, which were sufficient for mapping differences, and fit the city-block dimensions better than the Euclidean metric in all datasets obtained from 13 countries. Most city-block dimensions were highly correlated with the simplified criterion (i.e., the left–right ideology) for differences that are actually used in real politics. The isometry of the city-block and dominance metrics in two-dimensional space carries further implications. More specifically, individuals may pay attention to two dimensions (if represented in the city-block metric) or focus on a single dimension (if represented in the dominance metric) when judging differences between the same objects. Switching between metrics may be expected to occur during cognitive processing as frequently as the apparent discontinuities and shifts in human attention that may underlie changing judgments in real situations occur. Consequently, the result has extended strong support for the validity of the geometric models to represent an important social cognition, i.e., the one of political differences, which is deeply rooted in human nature. PMID:21673959

How Large Is the Role of Emotion in Judgments of Moral Dilemmas?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zachary Horne

Full Text Available Moral dilemmas often pose dramatic and gut-wrenching emotional choices. It is now widely accepted that emotions are not simply experienced alongside people's judgments about moral dilemmas, but that our affective processes play a central role in determining those judgments. However, much of the evidence purporting to demonstrate the connection between people's emotional responses and their judgments about moral dilemmas has recently been called into question. In the present studies, we reexamined the role of emotion in people's judgments about moral dilemmas using a validated self-report measure of emotion. We measured participants' specific emotional responses to moral dilemmas and, although we found that moral dilemmas evoked strong emotional responses, we found that these responses were only weakly correlated with participants' moral judgments. We argue that the purportedly strong connection between emotion and judgments of moral dilemmas may have been overestimated.

Original and Derived Judgment

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Foss, Kirsten; Foss, Nicolai Juul; Klein, Peter G.

and own assets. The entrepreneur's role, then, is to arrange or organize the human and capital assets under his control. We extend this Knightian concept of the firm by developing a theory of delegation under Knightian uncertainty. What we call original judgment belongs exclusively to owners, but owners...

Variability of Creativity Judgments

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Caroff, Xavier; Besancon, Maud

2008-01-01

The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), developed by Amabile [Amabile, T.M. (1982). "Social psychology of creativity: A consensual assessment technique." "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology," 43, 997-1013], is frequently used to evaluate the creativity of productions. Judgments obtained with CAT are usually reliable and valid.…

Clinical judgment in reflective journals of prelicensure nursing students.

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Bussard, Michelle E

2015-01-01

Clinical judgment is an essential skill needed by RNs. Employers expect new graduate nurses to enter the work-force with established clinical judgment skills. Therefore, nurse educators must ensure that prelicensure nursing students develop clinical judgment before graduation. This qualitative, interpretive description study reviewed the reflective journals of 30 prelicensure nursing students who participated in four progressive high-fidelity simulation (HFS) scenarios during a medical-surgical nursing course. Eight themes were identified in the reflective journals: (a) expectations about the patient, (b) recognition of a focused assessment, (c) interpretation of medications, laboratory data, and diagnostics, (d) communication with the patient, (e) collaboration and interprofessionalism, (f) prioritizing interventions, (g) skillfulness with interventions, and (h) incorporation of skills and information into real patient situations. This study indicated that reflective journaling following progressive HFS scenarios may be an effective teaching-learning strategy to assist prelicensure nursing students in the development of clinical judgment. Copyright 2015, SLACK Incorporated.

Credibility judgments of narratives: language, plausibility, and absorption.

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Nahari, Galit; Glicksohn, Joseph; Nachson, Israel

2010-01-01

Two experiments were conducted in order to find out whether textual features of narratives differentially affect credibility judgments made by judges having different levels of absorption (a disposition associated with rich visual imagination). Participants in both experiments were exposed to a textual narrative and requested to judge whether the narrator actually experienced the event he described in his story. In Experiment 1, the narrative varied in terms of language (literal, figurative) and plausibility (ordinary, anomalous). In Experiment 2, the narrative varied in terms of language only. The participants' perceptions of the plausibility of the story described and the extent to which they were absorbed in reading were measured. The data from both experiments together suggest that the groups applied entirely different criteria in credibility judgments. For high-absorption individuals, their credibility judgment depends on the degree to which the text can be assimilated into their own vivid imagination, whereas for low-absorption individuals it depends mainly on plausibility. That is, high-absorption individuals applied an experiential mental set while judging the credibility of the narrator, whereas low-absorption individuals applied an instrumental mental set. Possible cognitive mechanisms and implications for credibility judgments are discussed.

Comparing children's Homo sapiens and chimpanzees' Pan troglodytes quantity judgments of sequentially presented sets of items

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Michael J. BERAN, Julie S. JOHNSON-PYNN, Christopher READY

2011-08-01

Full Text Available We presented a quantity judgment task that involved comparing two sequentially presented sets of items to preschoolers and chimpanzees using nearly identical procedures that excluded verbal instructions to children. Trial difficulty in this task reflected the ratio difference between sets of discrete items where larger ratios (e.g., 0.80 as from comparing 4 to 5 were more difficult than smaller ones (e.g., 0.50 as from comparing 4 to 8. Children also completed verbal-based tasks probing the relationship between counting proficiency and performance on the quantity judgment task of sequentially presented identical sized items. Both species’ performance was best when ratios between comparison sets were small regardless of set size in all types of tasks. Generally, chimpanzees and older children performed better than younger children except at larger ratios. Children’s counting proficiency was not related to success in choosing the larger of two quantities of identical-sized items. These results indicate that chimpanzees and children share an approximate number sense that is reflected through analog magnitude estimation when comparing quantities [Current Zoology 57 (4: 419–428, 2011].

Neural development of mentalizing in moral judgment from adolescence to adulthood.

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Harenski, Carla L; Harenski, Keith A; Shane, Matthew S; Kiehl, Kent A

2012-01-01

The neural mechanisms underlying moral judgment have been extensively studied in healthy adults. How these mechanisms evolve from adolescence to adulthood has received less attention. Brain regions that have been consistently implicated in moral judgment in adults, including the superior temporal cortex and prefrontal cortex, undergo extensive developmental changes from adolescence to adulthood. Thus, their role in moral judgment may also change over time. In the present study, 51 healthy male participants age 13–53 were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed pictures that did or did not depict situations considered by most individuals to represent moral violations, and rated their degree of moral violation severity. Consistent with predictions, a regression analysis revealed a positive correlation between age and hemodynamic activity in the temporo-parietal junction when participants made decisions regarding moral severity.This region is known to contribute to mentalizing processes during moral judgment in adults and suggests that adolescents use these types of inferences less during moral judgment than do adults. A positive correlation with age was also present in the posterior cingulate. Overall, the results suggest that the brain regions utilized in moral judgment change over development.

A judgment and decision-making model for plant behavior.

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Karban, Richard; Orrock, John L

2018-06-12

Recently plant biologists have documented that plants, like animals, engage in many activities that can be considered as behaviors, although plant biologists currently lack a conceptual framework to understand these processes. Borrowing the well-established framework developed by psychologists, we propose that plant behaviors can be constructively modeled by identifying four distinct components: 1) a cue or stimulus that provides information, 2) a judgment whereby the plant perceives and processes this informative cue, 3) a decision whereby the plant chooses among several options based on their relative costs and benefits, and 4) action. Judgment for plants can be determined empirically by monitoring signaling associated with electrical, calcium, or hormonal fluxes. Decision-making can be evaluated empirically by monitoring gene expression or differential allocation of resources. We provide examples of the utility of this judgment and decision-making framework by considering cases in which plants either successfully or unsuccessfully induced resistance against attacking herbivores. Separating judgment from decision-making suggests new analytical paradigms (i.e., Bayesian methods for judgment and economic utility models for decision-making). Following this framework, we propose an experimental approach to plant behavior that explicitly manipulates the stimuli provided to plants, uses plants that vary in sensory abilities, and examines how environmental context affects plant responses. The concepts and approaches that follow from the judgment and decision-making framework can shape how we study and understand plant-herbivore interactions, biological invasions, plant responses to climate change, and the susceptibility of plants to evolutionary traps. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Indoor Spatial Updating with Reduced Visual Information.

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Legge, Gordon E; Gage, Rachel; Baek, Yihwa; Bochsler, Tiana M

2016-01-01

Spatial updating refers to the ability to keep track of position and orientation while moving through an environment. People with impaired vision may be less accurate in spatial updating with adverse consequences for indoor navigation. In this study, we asked how artificial restrictions on visual acuity and field size affect spatial updating, and also judgments of the size of rooms. Normally sighted young adults were tested with artificial restriction of acuity in Mild Blur (Snellen 20/135) and Severe Blur (Snellen 20/900) conditions, and a Narrow Field (8°) condition. The subjects estimated the dimensions of seven rectangular rooms with and without these visual restrictions. They were also guided along three-segment paths in the rooms. At the end of each path, they were asked to estimate the distance and direction to the starting location. In Experiment 1, the subjects walked along the path. In Experiment 2, they were pushed in a wheelchair to determine if reduced proprioceptive input would result in poorer spatial updating. With unrestricted vision, mean Weber fractions for room-size estimates were near 20%. Severe Blur but not Mild Blur yielded larger errors in room-size judgments. The Narrow Field was associated with increased error, but less than with Severe Blur. There was no effect of visual restriction on estimates of distance back to the starting location, and only Severe Blur yielded larger errors in the direction estimates. Contrary to expectation, the wheelchair subjects did not exhibit poorer updating performance than the walking subjects, nor did they show greater dependence on visual condition. If our results generalize to people with low vision, severe deficits in acuity or field will adversely affect the ability to judge the size of indoor spaces, but updating of position and orientation may be less affected by visual impairment.

Indoor Spatial Updating with Reduced Visual Information.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gordon E Legge

Full Text Available Spatial updating refers to the ability to keep track of position and orientation while moving through an environment. People with impaired vision may be less accurate in spatial updating with adverse consequences for indoor navigation. In this study, we asked how artificial restrictions on visual acuity and field size affect spatial updating, and also judgments of the size of rooms.Normally sighted young adults were tested with artificial restriction of acuity in Mild Blur (Snellen 20/135 and Severe Blur (Snellen 20/900 conditions, and a Narrow Field (8° condition. The subjects estimated the dimensions of seven rectangular rooms with and without these visual restrictions. They were also guided along three-segment paths in the rooms. At the end of each path, they were asked to estimate the distance and direction to the starting location. In Experiment 1, the subjects walked along the path. In Experiment 2, they were pushed in a wheelchair to determine if reduced proprioceptive input would result in poorer spatial updating.With unrestricted vision, mean Weber fractions for room-size estimates were near 20%. Severe Blur but not Mild Blur yielded larger errors in room-size judgments. The Narrow Field was associated with increased error, but less than with Severe Blur. There was no effect of visual restriction on estimates of distance back to the starting location, and only Severe Blur yielded larger errors in the direction estimates. Contrary to expectation, the wheelchair subjects did not exhibit poorer updating performance than the walking subjects, nor did they show greater dependence on visual condition.If our results generalize to people with low vision, severe deficits in acuity or field will adversely affect the ability to judge the size of indoor spaces, but updating of position and orientation may be less affected by visual impairment.

[Temporal and spatial heterogeneity analysis of optimal value of sensitive parameters in ecological process model: The BIOME-BGC model as an example.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Yi Zhe; Zhang, Ting Long; Liu, Qiu Yu; Li, Ying

2018-01-01

The ecological process models are powerful tools for studying terrestrial ecosystem water and carbon cycle at present. However, there are many parameters for these models, and weather the reasonable values of these parameters were taken, have important impact on the models simulation results. In the past, the sensitivity and the optimization of model parameters were analyzed and discussed in many researches. But the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of the optimal parameters is less concerned. In this paper, the BIOME-BGC model was used as an example. In the evergreen broad-leaved forest, deciduous broad-leaved forest and C3 grassland, the sensitive parameters of the model were selected by constructing the sensitivity judgment index with two experimental sites selected under each vegetation type. The objective function was constructed by using the simulated annealing algorithm combined with the flux data to obtain the monthly optimal values of the sensitive parameters at each site. Then we constructed the temporal heterogeneity judgment index, the spatial heterogeneity judgment index and the temporal and spatial heterogeneity judgment index to quantitatively analyze the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of the optimal values of the model sensitive parameters. The results showed that the sensitivity of BIOME-BGC model parameters was different under different vegetation types, but the selected sensitive parameters were mostly consistent. The optimal values of the sensitive parameters of BIOME-BGC model mostly presented time-space heterogeneity to different degrees which varied with vegetation types. The sensitive parameters related to vegetation physiology and ecology had relatively little temporal and spatial heterogeneity while those related to environment and phenology had generally larger temporal and spatial heterogeneity. In addition, the temporal heterogeneity of the optimal values of the model sensitive parameters showed a significant linear correlation

The Effect of Information Analysis Automation Display Content on Human Judgment Performance in Noisy Environments

Science.gov (United States)

Bass, Ellen J.; Baumgart, Leigh A.; Shepley, Kathryn Klein

2014-01-01

Displaying both the strategy that information analysis automation employs to makes its judgments and variability in the task environment may improve human judgment performance, especially in cases where this variability impacts the judgment performance of the information analysis automation. This work investigated the contribution of providing either information analysis automation strategy information, task environment information, or both, on human judgment performance in a domain where noisy sensor data are used by both the human and the information analysis automation to make judgments. In a simplified air traffic conflict prediction experiment, 32 participants made probability of horizontal conflict judgments under different display content conditions. After being exposed to the information analysis automation, judgment achievement significantly improved for all participants as compared to judgments without any of the automation's information. Participants provided with additional display content pertaining to cue variability in the task environment had significantly higher aided judgment achievement compared to those provided with only the automation's judgment of a probability of conflict. When designing information analysis automation for environments where the automation's judgment achievement is impacted by noisy environmental data, it may be beneficial to show additional task environment information to the human judge in order to improve judgment performance. PMID:24847184

The Effect of Information Analysis Automation Display Content on Human Judgment Performance in Noisy Environments.

Science.gov (United States)

Bass, Ellen J; Baumgart, Leigh A; Shepley, Kathryn Klein

2013-03-01

Displaying both the strategy that information analysis automation employs to makes its judgments and variability in the task environment may improve human judgment performance, especially in cases where this variability impacts the judgment performance of the information analysis automation. This work investigated the contribution of providing either information analysis automation strategy information, task environment information, or both, on human judgment performance in a domain where noisy sensor data are used by both the human and the information analysis automation to make judgments. In a simplified air traffic conflict prediction experiment, 32 participants made probability of horizontal conflict judgments under different display content conditions. After being exposed to the information analysis automation, judgment achievement significantly improved for all participants as compared to judgments without any of the automation's information. Participants provided with additional display content pertaining to cue variability in the task environment had significantly higher aided judgment achievement compared to those provided with only the automation's judgment of a probability of conflict. When designing information analysis automation for environments where the automation's judgment achievement is impacted by noisy environmental data, it may be beneficial to show additional task environment information to the human judge in order to improve judgment performance.

True and False Memories, Parietal Cortex, and Confidence Judgments

Science.gov (United States)

Urgolites, Zhisen J.; Smith, Christine N.; Squire, Larry R.

2015-01-01

Recent studies have asked whether activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and the neocortex can distinguish true memory from false memory. A frequent complication has been that the confidence associated with correct memory judgments (true memory) is typically higher than the confidence associated with incorrect memory judgments (false memory).…

Simultaneous perceptual and response biases on sequential face attractiveness judgments

Science.gov (United States)

Pegors, Teresa K.; Mattar, Marcelo G.; Bryan, Peter B.; Epstein, Russell A.

2015-01-01

Face attractiveness is a social characteristic that we often use to make first-pass judgments about the people around us. However, these judgments are highly influenced by our surrounding social world, and researchers still understand little about the mechanisms underlying these influences. In a series of three experiments, we used a novel sequential rating paradigm that enabled us to measure biases on attractiveness judgments from the previous face and the previous rating. Our results revealed two simultaneous and opposing influences on face attractiveness judgments that arise from our past experience of faces: a response bias in which attractiveness ratings shift towards a previously given rating, and a stimulus bias in which attractiveness ratings shift away from the mean attractiveness of the previous face. Furthermore, we provide evidence that the contrastive stimulus bias (but not the assimilative response bias) is strengthened by increasing the duration of the previous stimulus, suggesting an underlying perceptual mechanism. These results demonstrate that judgments of face attractiveness are influenced by information from our evaluative and perceptual history and that these influences have measurable behavioral effects over the course of just a few seconds. PMID:25867223

Surprisingly rational: probability theory plus noise explains biases in judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Costello, Fintan; Watts, Paul

2014-07-01

The systematic biases seen in people's probability judgments are typically taken as evidence that people do not use the rules of probability theory when reasoning about probability but instead use heuristics, which sometimes yield reasonable judgments and sometimes yield systematic biases. This view has had a major impact in economics, law, medicine, and other fields; indeed, the idea that people cannot reason with probabilities has become a truism. We present a simple alternative to this view, where people reason about probability according to probability theory but are subject to random variation or noise in the reasoning process. In this account the effect of noise is canceled for some probabilistic expressions. Analyzing data from 2 experiments, we find that, for these expressions, people's probability judgments are strikingly close to those required by probability theory. For other expressions, this account produces systematic deviations in probability estimates. These deviations explain 4 reliable biases in human probabilistic reasoning (conservatism, subadditivity, conjunction, and disjunction fallacies). These results suggest that people's probability judgments embody the rules of probability theory and that biases in those judgments are due to the effects of random noise. (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Relationship between ethical ideology and moral judgment: Academic nurse educators' perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Abou Hashish, Ebtsam Aly; Ali Awad, Nadia Hassan

2017-01-01

Ascertaining the relationship between ethical ideology, moral judgment, and ethical decision among academic nurse educators at work appears to be a challenge particularly in situations when they are faced with a need to solve an ethical problem and make a moral decision. This study aims to investigate the relationship between ethical ideology, moral judgment, and ethical decision as perceived by academic nurse educators. A descriptive correlational research design was conducted at Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University. All academic nurse educators were included in the study (N = 220). Ethical Position Questionnaire and Questionnaire of Moral Judgment and Ethical Decisions were proved reliable to measure study variables. Ethical considerations: Approval was obtained from Ethics Committee at Faculty of Nursing, Alexandria University. Privacy and confidentiality of data were maintained and assured by obtaining subjects' informed consent. This study reveals a significant positive moderate correlation between idealism construct of ethical ideology and moral judgment in terms of recognition of the behavior as an ethical issue and the magnitude of emotional consequences of the ethical situation (p relativism construct of ethical ideology and overall moral judgment (p = 0.010). Approximately 3.5% of the explained variance of overall moral judgment is predicted by idealism together with relativism. The findings suggest that variations in ethical position and ideology are associated with moral judgment and ethical decision. Organizations of academic nursing education should provide a supportive work environment to help their academic staff to develop their self-awareness and knowledge of their ethical position and promoting their ethical ideologies and, in turn, enhance their moral judgment as well as develop ethical reasoning and decision-making capability of nursing students. More emphasis in nursing curricula is needed on ethical concepts for developing nursing

[Clinical judgment is a schema. Conceptual proposals and training perspectives.

Science.gov (United States)

Nagels, Marc

2017-06-01

Clinical judgment is a critical concept for the development of nursing and nursing education. Its theoretical origins are multiple and its definition is not yet consensus. The analysis of the scientific and professional literature shows heterogeneous and dispersed points of views, notably on the role of intuition, on its cognitive and metacognitive dimensions, and on its proximity to other concepts. Between professional stakes and epistemological constructions, clinical judgment is still an emerging concept.To overcome the obstacle and contribute to the theoretical effort, we will argue that clinical judgment must be analyzed as a schema. It presents all the characteristics : diagnosis and information necessary for reasoning, rational decision-making process, metacognitive control and evaluation of decision-making. Perspectives then open to better understand the nursing activity.In conclusion, recommendations for developing clinical judgment in training will be presented.

40 CFR 94.221 - Application of good engineering judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... judgment in making all decisions called for under this part, including but not limited to selections... was not made in good faith, or that the decision was not made with a rational basis, the Administrator... Administrator may reject any such decision by a manufacturer if it is not based on good engineering judgment or...

Vision-based judgment of tomato maturity under growth conditions ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

To determine the picking time of tomato and design the control strategy for the harvesting robot, the judgment of tomato maturity under natural conditions is ... Hue-mean and red-green color-difference image mean can be used as a criterion for the judgment of tomato maturity, and the tests indicated that the redgreen mean ...

The Effect of Sad Facial Expressions on Weight Judgment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Trent D Weston

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Although the body weight evaluation (e.g., normal or overweight of others relies on perceptual impressions, it also can be influenced by other psychosocial factors. In this study, we explored the effect of task-irrelevant emotional facial expressions on judgments of body weight and the relationship between emotion-induced weight judgment bias and other psychosocial variables including attitudes towards obese person. Forty-four participants were asked to quickly make binary body weight decisions for 960 randomized sad and neutral faces of varying weight levels presented on a computer screen. The results showed that sad facial expressions systematically decreased the decision threshold of overweight judgments for male faces. This perceptual decision bias by emotional expressions was positively correlated with the belief that being overweight is not under the control of obese persons. Our results provide experimental evidence that task-irrelevant emotional expressions can systematically change the decision threshold for weight judgments, demonstrating that sad expressions can make faces appear more overweight than they would otherwise be judged.

THE MEMORY OF JUDGMENT:

African Journals Online (AJOL)

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Lawrence Douglas' book1, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History ... film that is not amenable to cross-examination— in a manner that advances his ... willed by more, and tolerated by all”.7 Although the height of the war .... forum that assists in the assessment of the question of guilt or innocence in an.

The impact of autism spectrum disorder and alexithymia on judgments of moral acceptability.

Science.gov (United States)

Brewer, Rebecca; Marsh, Abigail A; Catmur, Caroline; Cardinale, Elise M; Stoycos, Sarah; Cook, Richard; Bird, Geoffrey

2015-08-01

One's own emotional response toward a hypothetical action can influence judgments of its moral acceptability. Some individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit atypical emotional processing, and moral judgments. Research suggests, however, that emotional deficits in ASD are due to co-occurring alexithymia, meaning atypical moral judgments in ASD may be due to alexithymia also. Individuals with and without ASD (matched for alexithymia) judged the moral acceptability of emotion-evoking statements and identified the emotion evoked. Moral acceptability judgments were predicted by alexithymia. Crucially, however, this relationship held only for individuals without ASD. While ASD diagnostic status did not directly predict either judgment, those with ASD did not base their moral acceptability judgments on emotional information. Findings are consistent with evidence demonstrating that decision-making is less subject to emotional biases in those with ASD. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Impact of Psychopathy on Moral Judgments about Causing Fear and Physical Harm.

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Elise M Cardinale

Full Text Available Psychopathy is a personality variable associated with persistent immoral behaviors. Despite this, attempts to link moral reasoning deficits to psychopathic traits have yielded mixed results with many findings supporting intact moral reasoning in individuals with psychopathic traits. Abundant evidence shows that psychopathy impairs responses to others' emotional distress. However, most studies of morality and psychopathy focus on judgments about causing others physical harm. Results of such studies may be inconsistent because physical harm is an imperfect proxy for emotional distress. No previous paradigm has explicitly separated judgments about physical harm and emotional distress and assessed how psychopathy affects each type of judgment. In three studies we found that psychopathy impairs judgments about causing others emotional distress (specifically fear but minimally affects judgments about causing physical harm and that judgments about causing fear predict instrumental aggression in psychopathy. These findings are consistent with reports linking psychopathy to insensitivity to others' fear, and suggest that sensitivity to others' fear may play a fundamental role in the types of moral decision-making impaired by psychopathy.

The Influence of Self-Ratings versus Peer Ratings on Supervisors' Performance Judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Makiney; Levy

1998-06-01

This study investigated the extent to which supervisors use feedback from outside sources in making performance judgments. A simulation was conducted in which participants with organizational supervisory experience made an initial performance judgment about a profiled employee. Participants then received additional information that was discrepant from their initial judgment (positive or negative) from one of two sources (the profiled employee himself or one of his peers). The direction of the discrepant information and its source interacted in determining final ratings, such that, participants were more likely to use discrepant information to alter their performance judgments in a consistent direction when the source was a peer than when the source was the employee himself. Furthermore, participants' opinions about the usefulness of peer information for performance judgments moderated this interaction. Specifically, participants who believed that information from an employee's peers was useful, were more likely to use discrepant information provided by a peer when making final performance judgments than were participants who did not believe that information from an employee's peers was useful. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

Liberating reason from the passions: overriding intuitionist moral judgments through emotion reappraisal.

Science.gov (United States)

Feinberg, Matthew; Willer, Robb; Antonenko, Olga; John, Oliver P

2012-07-01

A classic problem in moral psychology concerns whether and when moral judgments are driven by intuition versus deliberate reasoning. In this investigation, we explored the role of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that involves construing an emotion-eliciting situation in a way that diminishes the intensity of the emotional experience. We hypothesized that although emotional reactions evoke initial moral intuitions, reappraisal weakens the influence of these intuitions, leading to more deliberative moral judgments. Three studies of moral judgments in emotionally evocative, disgust-eliciting moral dilemmas supported our hypothesis. A greater tendency to reappraise was related to fewer intuition-based judgments (Study 1). Content analysis of open-ended descriptions of moral-reasoning processes revealed that reappraisal was associated with longer time spent in deliberation and with fewer intuitionist moral judgments (Study 2). Finally, in comparison with participants who simply watched an emotion-inducing film, participants who had been instructed to reappraise their reactions while watching the film subsequently reported less intense emotional reactions to moral dilemmas, and these dampened reactions led, in turn, to fewer intuitionist moral judgments (Study 3).

Are normative probabilty judgments a "system two"-operation?

OpenAIRE

Carlberg, Joakim

2017-01-01

Previous research on human judgment and decision making has demonstrated systematic and predictable biases of judgment in experimental settings. One example of this is the tendency to intuitively violate the conjunction rule - a simple rule of probability. This was well illustrated in the famous Linda-problem. (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983). According to the dual-process theory of reasoning, (Kahneman, 2011) reasoning fallacies such as the conjunction fallacy occurs when people fail to use an...

The Memory State Heuristic: A Formal Model Based on Repeated Recognition Judgments

Science.gov (United States)

Castela, Marta; Erdfelder, Edgar

2017-01-01

The recognition heuristic (RH) theory predicts that, in comparative judgment tasks, if one object is recognized and the other is not, the recognized one is chosen. The memory-state heuristic (MSH) extends the RH by assuming that choices are not affected by recognition judgments per se, but by the memory states underlying these judgments (i.e.,…

Disgust sensitivity is primarily associated with purity-based moral judgments

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wagemans, F.M.A.; Brandt, M.J.; Zeelenberg, M.

2018-01-01

Individual differences in disgust sensitivity are associated with a range of judgments and attitudes related to the moral domain. Some perspectives suggest that the association between disgust sensitivity and moral judgments will be equally strong across all moral domains (i.e., purity, authority,

Hermeneutics, evidence ad judgment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Michele Taruffo

2018-03-01

Full Text Available The text analyzes several topics of the judicial process from the point of view of the important contributions offered by the hermeneutical philosophy. It deals mainly with the construction of factual narratives, the presentation of evidence and the discovery of truth made by the judge in his final judgment based upon the evidence.

What are judgment skills in health literacy? A psycho-cognitive perspective of judgment and decision-making research.

Science.gov (United States)

Riva, Silvia; Antonietti, Alessandro; Iannello, Paola; Pravettoni, Gabriella

2015-01-01

The aim of this review is to summarize current research relating to psychological processes involved in judgment and decision-making (JDM) and identify which processes can be incorporated and used in the construct of health literacy (HL) in order to enrich its conceptualization and to provide more information about people's preferences. The literature review was aimed at identifying comprehensive research in the field; therefore appropriate databases were searched for English language articles dated from 1998 to 2015. Several psychological processes have been found to be constituents of JDM and potentially incorporated in the definition of HL: cognition, self-regulation, emotion, reasoning-thinking, and social perception. HL research can benefit from this JDM literature overview, first, by elaborating on the idea that judgment is multidimensional and constituted by several specific processes, and second, by using the results to implement the definition of "judgment skills". Moreover, this review can favor the development of new instruments that can measure HL. Future researchers in HL should work together with researchers in psychological sciences not only to investigate the processes behind JDM in-depth but also to create effective opportunities to improve HL in all patients, to promote good decisions, and orient patients' preferences in all health contexts.

What are judgment skills in health literacy? A psycho-cognitive perspective of judgment and decision-making research

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Riva S

2015-11-01

Full Text Available Silvia Riva,1 Alessandro Antonietti,2 Paola Iannello,2 Gabriella Pravettoni1–3 1Department of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Milan, Milan, Italy; 2Department of Psychology, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy; 3Applied Research Division for Cognitive and Psychological Science, European Institute of Oncology, Milan, Italy Objective: The aim of this review is to summarize current research relating to psychological processes involved in judgment and decision-making (JDM and identify which processes can be incorporated and used in the construct of health literacy (HL in order to enrich its conceptualization and to provide more information about people’s preferences.Methods: The literature review was aimed at identifying comprehensive research in the field; therefore appropriate databases were searched for English language articles dated from 1998 to 2015. Results: Several psychological processes have been found to be constituents of JDM and potentially incorporated in the definition of HL: cognition, self-regulation, emotion, reasoning-thinking, and social perception. Conclusion: HL research can benefit from this JDM literature overview, first, by elaborating on the idea that judgment is multidimensional and constituted by several specific processes, and second, by using the results to implement the definition of “judgment skills”. Moreover, this review can favor the development of new instruments that can measure HL. Practical implications: Future researchers in HL should work together with researchers in psychological sciences not only to investigate the processes behind JDM in-depth but also to create effective opportunities to improve HL in all patients, to promote good decisions, and orient patients’ preferences in all health contexts. Keywords: health literacy, judgment, decision-making, psychological processes, skills, cognitive factors

A bunswik lens model of consumer health judgments of packaged foods

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Orquin, Jacob Lund

2014-01-01

Consumer health judgments of packaged food were compared with an objective healthfulness criterion using a Brunswik lens model. Consumer judgments were obtained from a representative consumer sample (N= 1329) who evaluated the healthfulness of 198 packaged food products. The objective healthfulne...... on the food category and to a lesser extent on the brand and consumer familiarity with the product. The results are in conflict with consumers’ self-reported use of nutrition information but are in accordance with findings from studies using implicit methods.......Consumer health judgments of packaged food were compared with an objective healthfulness criterion using a Brunswik lens model. Consumer judgments were obtained from a representative consumer sample (N= 1329) who evaluated the healthfulness of 198 packaged food products. The objective healthfulness...... representativeness. The study revealed that the objective healthfulness criterion is highly predictable on the basis of cues such as the food category, brand, carbohydrate content, and whether the food is a typical “light” product. However, consumer judgments of food healthfulness are based almost entirely...

Music for a Brighter World: Brightness Judgment Bias by Musical Emotion.

Science.gov (United States)

Bhattacharya, Joydeep; Lindsen, Job P

2016-01-01

A prevalent conceptual metaphor is the association of the concepts of good and evil with brightness and darkness, respectively. Music cognition, like metaphor, is possibly embodied, yet no study has addressed the question whether musical emotion can modulate brightness judgment in a metaphor consistent fashion. In three separate experiments, participants judged the brightness of a grey square that was presented after a short excerpt of emotional music. The results of Experiment 1 showed that short musical excerpts are effective emotional primes that cross-modally influence brightness judgment of visual stimuli. Grey squares were consistently judged as brighter after listening to music with a positive valence, as compared to music with a negative valence. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that the bias in brightness judgment does not require an active evaluation of the emotional content of the music. By applying a different experimental procedure in Experiment 3, we showed that this brightness judgment bias is indeed a robust effect. Altogether, our findings demonstrate a powerful role of musical emotion in biasing brightness judgment and that this bias is aligned with the metaphor viewpoint.

Elicitation and use of expert judgment in performance assessment for high-level radioactive waste repositories

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bonano, E.J.; Hora, S.C.; Keeney, R.L.; von Winterfeldt, D.

1990-05-01

This report presents the concept of formalizing the elicitation and use of expert judgment in the performance assessment of high-level radioactive waste (HLW) repositories in deep geologic formations. The report begins with a discussion of characteristics (advantages and disadvantages) of formalizing expert judgment examples of previous uses of expert judgment in radioactive waste programs, criteria that can assist in deciding when to formalize expert judgment, and the relationship of formal use of expert judgment to data collection and modeling. The current state of the art with respect to the elicitation, use, and communication of formal expert judgment is presented. The report concludes with a discussion on potential applications of formal expert judgment in performance assessment of HLW repositories. 93 refs

An Experimental Research on the pCI Rule and Causal Judgment (in Chinese)

OpenAIRE

Shao, Z. F.; Wang, J.

2005-01-01

This research examined the precision of the pCI rule through three experiments. The results show that first , the tendency of the subjects’ casual judgments was basically similar to the pCI rule. But (a + d) / n predicted human’s casual judgments were even better; second, the increase of subjects’ casual judgments was milder than the pCI rule, and the subjects needed time to construct their own way of judging relationship; finally, different people had different ways of causal judgments, and ...

Effects of Behavioral and Social Class Information on Social Judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Baron, Reuben M.; And Others

1995-01-01

Investigated the role of disconfirming behavioral information and the limits on social class schema effects. Using a Bayesian model of social perception, it was found that unambiguous, relevant stimulus information influenced judgments. Although social class information did not affect relevant stimulus information, it did sway judgments in…

Culture and Probability Judgment Accuracy: The Influence of Holistic Reasoning.

Science.gov (United States)

Lechuga, Julia; Wiebe, John S

2011-08-01

A well-established phenomenon in the judgment and decision-making tradition is the overconfidence one places in the amount of knowledge that one possesses. Overconfidence or probability judgment accuracy varies not only individually but also across cultures. However, research efforts to explain cross-cultural variations in the overconfidence phenomenon have seldom been made. In Study 1, the authors compared the probability judgment accuracy of U.S. Americans (N = 108) and Mexican participants (N = 100). In Study 2, they experimentally primed culture by randomly assigning English/Spanish bilingual Mexican Americans (N = 195) to response language. Results of both studies replicated the cross-cultural variation of probability judgment accuracy previously observed in other cultural groups. U.S. Americans displayed less overconfidence when compared to Mexicans. These results were then replicated in bilingual participants, when culture was experimentally manipulated with language priming. Holistic reasoning did not account for the cross-cultural variation of overconfidence. Suggestions for future studies are discussed.

Public judgments of information in a diazepam patient package insert.

Science.gov (United States)

Fisher, S; Mansbridge, B; Lankford, D A

1982-06-01

As part of a larger study of the effects of giving patients written take-home information with prescription medications, a "patient package insert" (PPI) for diazepam was prepared based on content determined by "experts." This report compares the experts' judgments of what information should be included with judgments obtained from the public. Information judged to be most important for inclusion in a PPI was identified by having subjects sort cards containing facts about diazepam. Subjects who had previously used diazepam were no different in their judgments than inexperienced subjects. In general, there was a high degree of concordance between public and expert judgments and also a remarkably strong consensus across very different demographic samples. In those few instances of disagreement, the public attached even greater importance to warnings and "bad news" about diazepam than to information providing reassurances, benign general education, and "good news." To what extent patients would effectively use this information--whether conveyed by PPIs or alternative educational routes--must await empirical evaluation.

Time takes space: selective effects of multitasking on concurrent spatial processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Mäntylä, Timo; Coni, Valentina; Kubik, Veit; Todorov, Ivo; Del Missier, Fabio

2017-08-01

Many everyday activities require coordination and monitoring of complex relations of future goals and deadlines. Cognitive offloading may provide an efficient strategy for reducing control demands by representing future goals and deadlines as a pattern of spatial relations. We tested the hypothesis that multiple-task monitoring involves time-to-space transformational processes, and that these spatial effects are selective with greater demands on coordinate (metric) than categorical (nonmetric) spatial relation processing. Participants completed a multitasking session in which they monitored four series of deadlines, running on different time scales, while making concurrent coordinate or categorical spatial judgments. We expected and found that multitasking taxes concurrent coordinate, but not categorical, spatial processing. Furthermore, males showed a better multitasking performance than females. These findings provide novel experimental evidence for the hypothesis that efficient multitasking involves metric relational processing.

Concurrent Dynamics of Category Learning and Metacognitive Judgments

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Valnea Žauhar

2016-09-01

Full Text Available In two experiments, we examined the correspondence between the dynamics of metacognitive judgments and classification accuracy when participants were asked to learn category structures of different levels of complexity, i.e., to learn tasks of types I, II and III according to Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961. The stimuli were simple geometrical figures varying in the following three dimensions: color, shape, and size. In Experiment 1, we found moderate positive correlations between confidence and accuracy in task type II and weaker correlation in task type I and III. Moreover, the trend analysis in the backward learning curves revealed that there is a non-linear trend in accuracy for all three task types, but the same trend was observed in confidence for the task type I and II but not for task type III. In Experiment 2, we found that the feeling-of-warmth judgments (FOWs showed moderate positive correlation with accuracy in all task types. Trend analysis revealed a similar non-linear component in accuracy and metacognitive judgments in task type II and III but not in task type I. Our results suggest that FOWs are a more sensitive measure of the progress of learning than confidence because FOWs capture global knowledge about the category structure, while confidence judgments are given at the level of an individual exemplar.

The Influence of Contextual Cues in Judgment Formation: An Ecologically Valid Test.

Science.gov (United States)

Jacoby, Jacob; Galak, Jeff

2016-01-01

An ecologically valid experiment investigated the propositions that (a) people's judgments are influenced by contextual cues, (b) that they are often unaware that those cues influenced them, and (c) that even when they know the cues should influence them, they do not readily incorporate those cues into their judgment formation. After participating in a realistic simulation of a shopping experience, 405 consumers made judgments about whether the product they examined contained fresh or preserved grapefruit sections. Our findings show that despite being aware that contextual cues (such as the location within a store where the product is sold, the type of container it is sold in, and whether the container is chilled or not) generally influence the judgment at hand, people generally fail to realize that their specific judgments were influenced at all. These findings replicate prior studies, thereby extending the generalizability and robustness of prior research.

CONCEPTUAL AND REGULATORY DELIMITATIONS OF THE PROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT WITHIN AN ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Viorica Mirela ȘTEFAN-DUICU

2017-05-01

Full Text Available The professional judgment is a base concept “sine-qua-non” within a company because it displays the intrinsic attribute for performing the activity. In our accepting, bringing together the determinant factors of the professional judgment and also the universality of the component parts and the influences oriented on the professional judgment we obtain an ample professional characterial result for which we propose the title of “spectral value of the professional judgment”. Through this paper we aim to describe the classical component of the professional judgment and also the secondary elements that we have built at a conceptual and original level starting from the base notions presented.

Audiovisual Simultaneity Judgment and Rapid Recalibration throughout the Lifespan.

Science.gov (United States)

Noel, Jean-Paul; De Niear, Matthew; Van der Burg, Erik; Wallace, Mark T

2016-01-01

Multisensory interactions are well established to convey an array of perceptual and behavioral benefits. One of the key features of multisensory interactions is the temporal structure of the stimuli combined. In an effort to better characterize how temporal factors influence multisensory interactions across the lifespan, we examined audiovisual simultaneity judgment and the degree of rapid recalibration to paired audiovisual stimuli (Flash-Beep and Speech) in a sample of 220 participants ranging from 7 to 86 years of age. Results demonstrate a surprisingly protracted developmental time-course for both audiovisual simultaneity judgment and rapid recalibration, with neither reaching maturity until well into adolescence. Interestingly, correlational analyses revealed that audiovisual simultaneity judgments (i.e., the size of the audiovisual temporal window of simultaneity) and rapid recalibration significantly co-varied as a function of age. Together, our results represent the most complete description of age-related changes in audiovisual simultaneity judgments to date, as well as being the first to describe changes in the degree of rapid recalibration as a function of age. We propose that the developmental time-course of rapid recalibration scaffolds the maturation of more durable audiovisual temporal representations.

Rotation and direction judgment from visual images head-slaved in two and three degrees-of-freedom.

Science.gov (United States)

Adelstein, B D; Ellis, S R

2000-03-01

The contribution to spatial awareness of adding a roll degree-of-freedom (DOF) to telepresence camera platform yaw and pitch was examined in an experiment where subjects judged direction and rotation of stationary target markers in a remote scene. Subjects viewed the scene via head-slaved camera images in a head-mounted display. Elimination of the roll DOF affected rotation judgment, but only at extreme yaw and pitch combinations, and did not affect azimuth and elevation judgement. Systematic azimuth overshoot occurred regardless of roll condition. Observed rotation misjudgments are explained by kinematic models for eye-head direction of gaze.

Perception through a Perspective-Taking Lens: Differential Effects on Judgment and Behavior

OpenAIRE

Ku , Gillian; Wang , Cynthia S.; Galinsky , Adam D.

2010-01-01

International audience; In contrast to the view that social perception has symmetric effects on judgments and behavior, the current research explored whether perspective-taking leads stereotypes to differentially affect judgments and behavior. Across three studies, perspective-takers consistently used stereotypes more in their own behavior while simultaneously using them less in their judgments of others. After writing about an African American, perspective-taking tendencies were positively c...

The Effects Of Feedback And Selected Personality Variables On Aesthetic Judgment

Science.gov (United States)

Stallings, William M.; And Others

1973-01-01

This present study is an attempt to investigate the extent to which knowledge of results in various forms (true, none, and false) may modify aesthetic judgment in "typical" (with respect to aesthetic judgment) students. (Author)

Incorporating sustainable development principles in the governance of Dutch domestic tourism. The relevance of boundary judgments

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bressers, H.; Dinica, V.

2008-08-14

strong link between the growth or protection orientations of respondents and the nature of the organizations they work for (making it difficult to change them), their boundary judgments seem to be spread almost randomly, making this factor a much more promising 'point of action'.

Stability in the metamemory realism of eyewitness confidence judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Buratti, Sandra; Allwood, Carl Martin; Johansson, Marcus

2014-02-01

The stability of eyewitness confidence judgments over time in regard to their reported memory and accuracy of these judgments is of interest in forensic contexts because witnesses are often interviewed many times. The present study investigated the stability of the confidence judgments of memory reports of a witnessed event and of the accuracy of these judgments over three occasions, each separated by 1 week. Three age groups were studied: younger children (8-9 years), older children (10-11 years), and adults (19-31 years). A total of 93 participants viewed a short film clip and were asked to answer directed two-alternative forced-choice questions about the film clip and to confidence judge each answer. Different questions about details in the film clip were used on each of the three test occasions. Confidence as such did not exhibit stability over time on an individual basis. However, the difference between confidence and proportion correct did exhibit stability across time, in terms of both over/underconfidence and calibration. With respect to age, the adults and older children exhibited more stability than the younger children for calibration. Furthermore, some support for instability was found with respect to the difference between the average confidence level for correct and incorrect answers (slope). Unexpectedly, however, the younger children's slope was found to be more stable than the adults. Compared to the previous research, the present study's use of more advanced statistical methods provides a more nuanced understanding of the stability of confidence judgments in the eyewitness reports of children and adults.

Judgments of and by Representativeness

Science.gov (United States)

1981-05-15

p. 4i). This hy- pothesis was studied in several contexts, including intuitive statisti- cal judgments and the prediction of professional choice (Kahneman... professional choice . Here, X is representative of M either because it is frequently associated with M (e.g., high fever commonly accompanies pneumonia

Functional equivalence of spatial images from touch and vision: evidence from spatial updating in blind and sighted individuals.

Science.gov (United States)

Giudice, Nicholas A; Betty, Maryann R; Loomis, Jack M

2011-05-01

This research examined whether visual and haptic map learning yield functionally equivalent spatial images in working memory, as evidenced by similar encoding bias and updating performance. In 3 experiments, participants learned 4-point routes either by seeing or feeling the maps. At test, blindfolded participants made spatial judgments about the maps from imagined perspectives that were either aligned or misaligned with the maps as represented in working memory. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 revealed a highly similar pattern of latencies and errors between visual and haptic conditions. These findings extend the well-known alignment biases for visual map learning to haptic map learning, provide further evidence of haptic updating, and most important, show that learning from the 2 modalities yields very similar performance across all conditions. Experiment 3 found the same encoding biases and updating performance with blind individuals, demonstrating that functional equivalence cannot be due to visual recoding and is consistent with an amodal hypothesis of spatial images.

Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans.

Science.gov (United States)

Youyou, Wu; Kosinski, Michal; Stillwell, David

2015-01-27

Judging others' personalities is an essential skill in successful social living, as personality is a key driver behind people's interactions, behaviors, and emotions. Although accurate personality judgments stem from social-cognitive skills, developments in machine learning show that computer models can also make valid judgments. This study compares the accuracy of human and computer-based personality judgments, using a sample of 86,220 volunteers who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire. We show that (i) computer predictions based on a generic digital footprint (Facebook Likes) are more accurate (r = 0.56) than those made by the participants' Facebook friends using a personality questionnaire (r = 0.49); (ii) computer models show higher interjudge agreement; and (iii) computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores. Computers outpacing humans in personality judgment presents significant opportunities and challenges in the areas of psychological assessment, marketing, and privacy.

Children's developing metaethical judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Schmidt, Marco F H; Gonzalez-Cabrera, Ivan; Tomasello, Michael

2017-12-01

Human adults incline toward moral objectivism but may approach things more relativistically if different cultures are involved. In this study, 4-, 6-, and 9-year-old children (N=136) witnessed two parties who disagreed about moral matters: a normative judge (e.g., judging that it is wrong to do X) and an antinormative judge (e.g., judging that it is okay to do X). We assessed children's metaethical judgment, that is, whether they judged that only one party (objectivism) or both parties (relativism) could be right. We found that 9-year-olds, but not younger children, were more likely to judge that both parties could be right when a normative ingroup judge disagreed with an antinormative extraterrestrial judge (with different preferences and background) than when the antinormative judge was another ingroup individual. This effect was not found in a comparison case where parties disagreed about the possibility of different physical laws. These findings suggest that although young children often exhibit moral objectivism, by early school age they begin to temper their objectivism with culturally relative metaethical judgments. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

'Utilitarian' judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good.

Science.gov (United States)

Kahane, Guy; Everett, Jim A C; Earp, Brian D; Farias, Miguel; Savulescu, Julian

2015-01-01

A growing body of research has focused on so-called 'utilitarian' judgments in moral dilemmas in which participants have to choose whether to sacrifice one person in order to save the lives of a greater number. However, the relation between such 'utilitarian' judgments and genuine utilitarian impartial concern for the greater good remains unclear. Across four studies, we investigated the relationship between 'utilitarian' judgment in such sacrificial dilemmas and a range of traits, attitudes, judgments and behaviors that either reflect or reject an impartial concern for the greater good of all. In Study 1, we found that rates of 'utilitarian' judgment were associated with a broadly immoral outlook concerning clear ethical transgressions in a business context, as well as with sub-clinical psychopathy. In Study 2, we found that 'utilitarian' judgment was associated with greater endorsement of rational egoism, less donation of money to a charity, and less identification with the whole of humanity, a core feature of classical utilitarianism. In Studies 3 and 4, we found no association between 'utilitarian' judgments in sacrificial dilemmas and characteristic utilitarian judgments relating to assistance to distant people in need, self-sacrifice and impartiality, even when the utilitarian justification for these judgments was made explicit and unequivocal. This lack of association remained even when we controlled for the antisocial element in 'utilitarian' judgment. Taken together, these results suggest that there is very little relation between sacrificial judgments in the hypothetical dilemmas that dominate current research, and a genuine utilitarian approach to ethics. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Eliciting and communicating expert judgments: methodology and application to nuclear safety

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Winterfeldt, D. von; Commission of the European Communities, Ispra

1989-01-01

Expert judgment has always been used informally in the analysis of complex engineering problems. Increasingly, however, the use of expert judgment has been formalized by eliciting judgments in an explicit, documented and often quantitative way. In nuclear safety studies the need for formal elicitation of expert judgments arises because of the lack of data and experiences, the need to adapt model results to the specific circumstances of a plant, and the large uncertainties surrounding the events and quantities that characterize an accident sequence. The recognition of the need for a formal elicitation of expert judgments has led to one of the most extensive expert elicitation processes to date in the context of the NUREG 1150 study. About 30 safety issues were quantified using expert judgments about probabilities of various uncertain events and quantities, ranging from the failure of a check valve in the cooling system to the pressure built up due to hydrogen production to release fractions of various radionuclides. In total, some 1000 probability distributions were elicited from some 50 experts. This paper first motivates the use of formal expert elicitation in complex engineering studies and describes the methodology of formal expert elicitation. Subsequently, it describes the overall approach of NUREG 1150 and provides an example of the elicitation of the probability of a bypass failure in a pressurized water reactor. The paper ends by discussing some lessons learned, problems encountered and by providing some recommendations

Cold-Hearted or Cool-Headed: Physical Coldness Promotes Utilitarian Moral Judgment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hiroko eNakamura

2014-10-01

Full Text Available In the current study, we examine the effect of physical coldness on personal moral dilemma judgment. Previous studies have indicated that utilitarian moral judgment—sacrificing a few people to achieve the greater good for others—was facilitated when: (1 participants suppressed an initial emotional response and deliberately thought about the utility of outcomes; (2 participants had a high-level construal mindset and focused on abstract goals (e.g., save many; or (3 there was a decreasing emotional response to sacrificing a few. In two experiments, we exposed participants to extreme cold or typical room temperature and then asked them to make personal moral dilemma judgments. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that coldness prompted utilitarian judgment, but the effect of coldness was independent from deliberate thought or abstract high-level construal mindset. As Experiment 2 revealed, coldness facilitated utilitarian judgment via reduced empathic feelings. Therefore, physical coldness did not affect the cool-headed deliberate process or the abstract high-level construal mindset. Rather, coldness biased people toward being cold-hearted, reduced empathetic concern about a sacrificed victim, and facilitated utilitarian moral judgments.

Music for a Brighter World: Brightness Judgment Bias by Musical Emotion.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joydeep Bhattacharya

Full Text Available A prevalent conceptual metaphor is the association of the concepts of good and evil with brightness and darkness, respectively. Music cognition, like metaphor, is possibly embodied, yet no study has addressed the question whether musical emotion can modulate brightness judgment in a metaphor consistent fashion. In three separate experiments, participants judged the brightness of a grey square that was presented after a short excerpt of emotional music. The results of Experiment 1 showed that short musical excerpts are effective emotional primes that cross-modally influence brightness judgment of visual stimuli. Grey squares were consistently judged as brighter after listening to music with a positive valence, as compared to music with a negative valence. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that the bias in brightness judgment does not require an active evaluation of the emotional content of the music. By applying a different experimental procedure in Experiment 3, we showed that this brightness judgment bias is indeed a robust effect. Altogether, our findings demonstrate a powerful role of musical emotion in biasing brightness judgment and that this bias is aligned with the metaphor viewpoint.

Attitude of Nigerian courts to the enforcement of foreign judgments ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

... serious need of reform. The study therefore called on the Nigerian Minister of Justice to do the needful so that the position of the law as it pertains to the enforcement of foreign judgment in Nigeria will be well settled and devoid of ambiguity. Keywords: Foreign Judgment, Enforcement, Registration, Recognition, Commerce ...

Language as Context Modulates Social Judgments

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

Shan Gao; Zhao Gao; Ting Gou

2017-01-01

Social judgments are usually made in the context of complex information including verbal cues. Here we investigated the impact of verbal statements on social judgments by biasing male and female neutral faces with descriptives of differentially-valenced behaviour (criticizing or praising) targeting others or objects. Results showed significant main effects of valence and target, such that critical individuals were rated lower in likeability than praising ones and those targeting others relative to objects were valued less. In particular, those who criticized others were the most unlikeable. Among critical individuals, men were less likeable than women. Similarly, men became less valued while targeting others. Overall these findings suggest that the negative impact of critical attributes may trigger avoidance in social interaction while the positive impact of praise may trigger approach.

The curious anomaly of skewed judgment distributions and systematic error in the wisdom of crowds.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ulrik W Nash

Full Text Available Judgment distributions are often skewed and we know little about why. This paper explains the phenomenon of skewed judgment distributions by introducing the augmented quincunx (AQ model of sequential and probabilistic cue categorization by neurons of judges. In the process of developing inferences about true values, when neurons categorize cues better than chance, and when the particular true value is extreme compared to what is typical and anchored upon, then populations of judges form skewed judgment distributions with high probability. Moreover, the collective error made by these people can be inferred from how skewed their judgment distributions are, and in what direction they tilt. This implies not just that judgment distributions are shaped by cues, but that judgment distributions are cues themselves for the wisdom of crowds. The AQ model also predicts that judgment variance correlates positively with collective error, thereby challenging what is commonly believed about how diversity and collective intelligence relate. Data from 3053 judgment surveys about US macroeconomic variables obtained from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Wall Street Journal provide strong support, and implications are discussed with reference to three central ideas on collective intelligence, these being Galton's conjecture on the distribution of judgments, Muth's rational expectations hypothesis, and Page's diversity prediction theorem.

How Large Is the Role of Emotion in Judgments of Moral Dilemmas?

OpenAIRE

Horne, Zachary; Powell, Derek

2016-01-01

Moral dilemmas often pose dramatic and gut-wrenching emotional choices. It is now widely accepted that emotions are not simply experienced alongside people's judgments about moral dilemmas, but that our affective processes play a central role in determining those judgments. However, much of the evidence purporting to demonstrate the connection between people's emotional responses and their judgments about moral dilemmas has recently been called into question. In the present studies, we reexam...

Assessing Veterinary and Animal Science Students' Moral Judgment Development on Animal Ethics Issues.

Science.gov (United States)

Verrinder, Joy M; Phillips, Clive J C

2015-01-01

Little has been done to assess veterinarians' moral judgment in relation to animal ethics issues. Following development of the VetDIT, a new moral judgment measure for animal ethics issues, this study aimed to refine and further validate the VetDIT, and to identify effects of teaching interventions on moral judgment and changes in moral judgment over time. VetDIT-V1 was refined into VetDIT-V2, and V3 was developed as a post-intervention test to prevent repetition. To test these versions for comparability, veterinary and animal science students (n=271) were randomly assigned to complete different versions. The VetDIT discriminates between stages of moral judgment, condensed into three schemas: Personal Interest (PI), Maintaining Norms (MN), and Universal Principles (UP). There were no differences in the scores for MN and UP between the versions, and we equated PI scores to account for differences between versions. Veterinary science students (n=130) who completed a three-hour small-group workshop on moral development theory and ethical decision making increased their use of UP in moral reasoning, whereas students (n=271) who received similar information in a 50-minute lecture did not. A longitudinal comparison of matched first- and third-year students (n=39) revealed no moral judgment development toward greater use of UP. The VetDIT is therefore useful for assessing moral judgment of animal and human ethics issues in veterinary and other animal-related professions. Intensive small-group workshops using moral development knowledge and skills, rather than lectures, are conducive to developing veterinary students' moral judgment.

'Errors of Judgment': The Case of Pain Sensations | Loonat | South ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Hill, in his paper 'Introspective Awareness of Sensations', argues that we do sometimes commit 'errors of judgment' and he draws on an example that involves the perception of pain to illustrate his point. I analyze Hill's example and draw on other examples of pain sensations to show how errors of judgment are not possible.

Swiss identity smells like chocolate: Social identity shapes olfactory judgments

Science.gov (United States)

Coppin, Géraldine; Pool, Eva; Delplanque, Sylvain; Oud, Bastiaan; Margot, Christian; Sander, David; Van Bavel, Jay J.

2016-01-01

There is extensive evidence that social identities can shape people’s attitudes and behavior, but what about sensory judgments? We examined the possibility that social identity concerns may also shape the judgment of non-social properties—namely, olfactory judgment. In two experiments, we presented Swiss and non-Swiss participants with the odor of chocolate, for which Switzerland is world-famous, and a control odor (popcorn). Swiss participants primed with Swiss identity reported the odor of chocolate (but not popcorn) as more intense than non-Swiss participants (Experiments 1 and 2) and than Swiss participants primed with individual identity or not primed (Experiment 2). The self-reported intensity of chocolate smell tended to increase as identity accessibility increased—but only among Swiss participants (Experiment 1). These results suggest that identity priming can counter-act classic sensory habituation effects, allowing identity-relevant smells to maintain their intensity after repeated presentations. This suggests that social identity dynamically influences sensory judgment. We discuss the potential implications for models of social identity and chemosensory perception. PMID:27725715

Generating human reliability estimates using expert judgment. Volume 2. Appendices

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Comer, M.K.; Seaver, D.A.; Stillwell, W.G.; Gaddy, C.D.

1984-11-01

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is conducting a research program to determine the practicality, acceptability, and usefulness of several different methods for obtaining human reliability data and estimates that can be used in nuclear power plant probabilistic risk assessments (PRA). One method, investigated as part of this overall research program, uses expert judgment to generate human error probability (HEP) estimates and associated uncertainty bounds. The project described in this document evaluated two techniques for using expert judgment: paired comparisons and direct numerical estimation. Volume 2 provides detailed procedures for using the techniques, detailed descriptions of the analyses performed to evaluate the techniques, and HEP estimates generated as part of this project. The results of the evaluation indicate that techniques using expert judgment should be given strong consideration for use in developing HEP estimates. Judgments were shown to be consistent and to provide HEP estimates with a good degree of convergent validity. Of the two techniques tested, direct numerical estimation appears to be preferable in terms of ease of application and quality of results

Swiss identity smells like chocolate: Social identity shapes olfactory judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Coppin, Géraldine; Pool, Eva; Delplanque, Sylvain; Oud, Bastiaan; Margot, Christian; Sander, David; Van Bavel, Jay J

2016-10-11

There is extensive evidence that social identities can shape people's attitudes and behavior, but what about sensory judgments? We examined the possibility that social identity concerns may also shape the judgment of non-social properties-namely, olfactory judgment. In two experiments, we presented Swiss and non-Swiss participants with the odor of chocolate, for which Switzerland is world-famous, and a control odor (popcorn). Swiss participants primed with Swiss identity reported the odor of chocolate (but not popcorn) as more intense than non-Swiss participants (Experiments 1 and 2) and than Swiss participants primed with individual identity or not primed (Experiment 2). The self-reported intensity of chocolate smell tended to increase as identity accessibility increased-but only among Swiss participants (Experiment 1). These results suggest that identity priming can counter-act classic sensory habituation effects, allowing identity-relevant smells to maintain their intensity after repeated presentations. This suggests that social identity dynamically influences sensory judgment. We discuss the potential implications for models of social identity and chemosensory perception.

Discrepancies between judgment and choice of action in moral dilemmas

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sébastien eTassy

2013-05-01

Full Text Available Everyone has experienced the potential discrepancy between what one judges as morally acceptable and what one actually does when a choice between alternative behaviors is to be made. The present study explores empirically whether judgment and choice of action differ when people make decisions on dilemmas involving moral issues. 240 participants evaluated 24 moral and non-moral dilemmas either by judging (Is it acceptable to… or reporting the choice of action they would make (Would you do…. We also investigated the influence of varying the number of people benefiting from the decision and the closeness of relationship of the decision maker with the potential victim on these two types of decision. Variations in the number of beneficiaries from the decision did not influence judgment nor choice of action. By contrast, closeness of relationship with the victim had a greater influence on the choice of action than on judgment. This differentiation between evaluative judgments and choices of action argues in favor of each of them being supported by (at least partially different psychological processes.

[Implicit value judgments in the measurement of health inequalities].

Science.gov (United States)

Harper, Sam; King, Nicholas B; Meersman, Stephen C; E Reichman, Marsha; Breen, Nancy; Lynch, John

2014-04-01

Quantitative estimates of the magnitude, direction, and rate of change of health inequalities play a crucial role in creating and assessing policies aimed at eliminating the disproportionate burden of disease in disadvantaged populations. It is generally assumed that the measurement of health inequalities is a value-neutral process, providing objective data that are then interpreted using normative judgments about whether a particular distribution of health is just, fair, or socially acceptable. We discuss five examples in which normative judgments play a role in the measurement process itself, through either the selection of one measurement strategy to the exclusion of others or the selection of the type, significance, or weight assigned to the variables being measured. Overall, we find that many commonly used measures of inequality are value laden and that the normative judgments implicit in these measures have important consequences for interpreting and responding to health inequalities. Because values implicit in the generation of health inequality measures may lead to radically different interpretations of the same underlying data,we urge researchers to explicitly consider and transparently discuss the normative judgments underlying their measures. We also urge policymakers and other consumers of health inequalities data to pay close attention to the measures on which they base their assessments of current and future health policies.

Implicit value judgments in the measurement of health inequalities.

Science.gov (United States)

Harper, Sam; King, Nicholas B; Meersman, Stephen C; Reichman, Marsha E; Breen, Nancy; Lynch, John

2010-03-01

Quantitative estimates of the magnitude, direction, and rate of change of health inequalities play a crucial role in creating and assessing policies aimed at eliminating the disproportionate burden of disease in disadvantaged populations. It is generally assumed that the measurement of health inequalities is a value-neutral process, providing objective data that are then interpreted using normative judgments about whether a particular distribution of health is just, fair, or socially acceptable. We discuss five examples in which normative judgments play a role in the measurement process itself, through either the selection of one measurement strategy to the exclusion of others or the selection of the type, significance, or weight assigned to the variables being measured. Overall, we find that many commonly used measures of inequality are value laden and that the normative judgments implicit in these measures have important consequences for interpreting and responding to health inequalities. Because values implicit in the generation of health inequality measures may lead to radically different interpretations of the same underlying data, we urge researchers to explicitly consider and transparently discuss the normative judgments underlying their measures. We also urge policymakers and other consumers of health inequalities data to pay close attention to the measures on which they base their assessments of current and future health policies.

Perceptual Computing Aiding People in Making Subjective Judgments

CERN Document Server

Mendel, Jerry

2010-01-01

Explains for the first time how "computing with words" can aid in making subjective judgments. Lotfi Zadeh, the father of fuzzy logic, coined the phrase "computing with words" (CWW) to describe a methodology in which the objects of computation are words and propositions drawn from a natural language. Perceptual Computing explains how to implement CWW to aid in the important area of making subjective judgments, using a methodology that leads to an interactive device—a "Perceptual Computer"—that propagates random and linguistic uncertainties into the subjective judg

Self-Reflection of Video-Recorded High-Fidelity Simulations and Development of Clinical Judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Bussard, Michelle E

2016-09-01

Nurse educators are increasingly using high-fidelity simulators to improve prelicensure nursing students' ability to develop clinical judgment. Traditionally, oral debriefing sessions have immediately followed the simulation scenarios as a method for students to connect theory to practice and therefore develop clinical judgment. Recently, video recording of the simulation scenarios is being incorporated. This qualitative, interpretive description study was conducted to identify whether self-reflection on video-recorded high-fidelity simulation (HFS) scenarios helped prelicensure nursing students to develop clinical judgment. Tanner's clinical judgment model was the framework for this study. Four themes emerged from this study: Confidence, Communication, Decision Making, and Change in Clinical Practice. This study indicated that self-reflection of video-recorded HFS scenarios is beneficial for prelicensure nursing students to develop clinical judgment. [J Nurs Educ. 2016;55(9):522-527.]. Copyright 2016, SLACK Incorporated.

Relativism, Objectivity and Moral Judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Partington, Geoffrey

1979-01-01

Reaction against the naive moral absolutism of past historical writing has frequently led to unconditional moral and cultural relativism which is equally dangerous. A viable solution is contingent relativism in historical judgments, combining explicit and examinable criteria of human values and concern for contexts of time and place. (Author/SJL)

The effect of attribute order on judgment in Chinese and English.

Science.gov (United States)

Tavassoli, Nader T; Lee, Yih Hwai

2004-12-01

The authors found that the order of attribute presentation had a stronger effect on judgment in English than in Chinese. In Experiment 1, with a sample of 102 female and 63 male bilingual Singaporeans, the authors found that participants' memory-based judgments showed a stronger primacy effect in English than in Chinese that was mediated by recall from long-term memory. In contrast, participants' online (immediate) judgments showed a primacy effect in both languages that was unmediated by recall from short-term memory. In Experiment 2, with a sample of 67 female and 53 male bilingual Singaporeans, the authors found that participants' online judgments were more influenced by the attribute order of a previously seen competitive advertisement in English than in Chinese. A cross-cultural field study in Mainland China and the United Kingdom provided external validity for the experimental results. copyright (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved.

Do Ethical Judgments Depend on the Type of Response Scale? Comparing Acceptability versus Unacceptability Judgments in the Case of Life-Ending Procedures

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Etienne Mullet

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Using Functional Measurement (Anderson, 2008, Frileux, Lelièvre, Muñoz Sastre, Mullet, and Sorum (2003 examined the joint impact of several key factors on lay people's judgments of the acceptability of physicians' interventions to end patients' lives. The level of acceptability was high, and the information integration rule that best described the participants' judgments was Acceptability = Patient's Request + Patient's Age + Residual Suffering + Incurability. Critics suggested, however, that acceptability was high because the ethical problem was framed in terms of acceptability (Murphy, 2007. Presenting participants with acceptability scales may have caused the life-ending procedure to be represented in participants' mind as basically "acceptable". By contrast, presenting participants with unacceptability scales might cause the procedure to be represented as basically "unacceptable". In the present study, therefore, we directly compared lay people's judgments of the acceptability of life-ending procedures under two opposite conditions - an acceptability condition, and an unacceptability condition. The life-ending procedure did not appear as more acceptable to participants responding in terms of acceptability than to those responding in terms of unacceptability. In addition, the impacts of the factors describing the end-of-life situations were not affected by the type of judgment scale that was used. Functional Measurement seems to be resistant to goal-framing effects; the findings that have been observed using acceptability scales can be considered as robust.

Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans

Science.gov (United States)

Youyou, Wu; Kosinski, Michal; Stillwell, David

2015-01-01

Judging others’ personalities is an essential skill in successful social living, as personality is a key driver behind people’s interactions, behaviors, and emotions. Although accurate personality judgments stem from social-cognitive skills, developments in machine learning show that computer models can also make valid judgments. This study compares the accuracy of human and computer-based personality judgments, using a sample of 86,220 volunteers who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire. We show that (i) computer predictions based on a generic digital footprint (Facebook Likes) are more accurate (r = 0.56) than those made by the participants’ Facebook friends using a personality questionnaire (r = 0.49); (ii) computer models show higher interjudge agreement; and (iii) computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores. Computers outpacing humans in personality judgment presents significant opportunities and challenges in the areas of psychological assessment, marketing, and privacy. PMID:25583507

40 CFR 59.603 - How must manufacturers apply good engineering judgment?

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... engineering judgment? 59.603 Section 59.603 Protection of Environment ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY... COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS Control of Evaporative Emissions From New and In-Use Portable Fuel Containers Overview and Applicability § 59.603 How must manufacturers apply good engineering judgment? (a) In addition to...

Improving Adolescent Judgment and Decision Making

Science.gov (United States)

Dansereau, Donald F.; Knight, Danica K.; Flynn, Patrick M.

2013-01-01

Human judgment and decision making (JDM) has substantial room for improvement, especially among adolescents. Increased technological and social complexity “ups the ante” for developing impactful JDM interventions and aids. Current explanatory advances in this field emphasize dual processing models that incorporate both experiential and analytic processing systems. According to these models, judgment and decisions based on the experiential system are rapid and stem from automatic reference to previously stored episodes. Those based on the analytic system are viewed as slower and consciously developed. These models also hypothesize that metacognitive (self-monitoring) activities embedded in the analytic system influence how and when the two systems are used. What is not included in these models is the development of an intersection between the two systems. Because such an intersection is strongly suggested by memory and educational research as the basis of wisdom/expertise, the present paper describes an Integrated Judgment and Decision-Making Model (IJDM) that incorporates this component. Wisdom/expertise is hypothesized to contain a collection of schematic structures that can emerge from the accumulation of similar episodes or repeated analytic practice. As will be argued, in comparisons to dual system models, the addition of this component provides a broader basis for selecting and designing interventions to improve adolescent JDM. Its development also has implications for generally enhancing cognitive interventions by adopting principles from athletic training to create automated, expert behaviors. PMID:24391350

The Effect of Information Analysis Automation Display Content on Human Judgment Performance in Noisy Environments

OpenAIRE

Bass, Ellen J.; Baumgart, Leigh A.; Shepley, Kathryn Klein

2012-01-01

Displaying both the strategy that information analysis automation employs to makes its judgments and variability in the task environment may improve human judgment performance, especially in cases where this variability impacts the judgment performance of the information analysis automation. This work investigated the contribution of providing either information analysis automation strategy information, task environment information, or both, on human judgment performance in a domain where noi...

Risk Emotions and Risk Judgments: Passive Bodily Experience and Active Moral Reasoning in Judgmental Constellations

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Coeckelbergh, Mark

2007-01-01

Experts typically accuse lay people of ‘emotional’ responses to technological risk as opposed to their own ‘rational’ judgment. This attitude is in tune with risk perception research that qualifies lay people’s responses in terms of bias (e.g. Slovic et. al. 2004), and with the Kantian view of

Self-Judgments of Word Production Accuracy in Acquired Apraxia of Speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Wambaugh, Julie; Shuster, Linda; Bailey, Dallin J; Mauszycki, Shannon; Kean, Jacob; Nessler, Christina; Wright, Sandra; Brunsvold, Jessica

2016-12-01

The ability to recognize one's own speech errors has long been considered a clinical feature of acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) despite limited empirical data supporting this notion. This study was designed to (a) investigate the ability of speakers with AOS to self-judge the accuracy of their own word productions and (b) examine the test-retest stability of a measure to quantify the self-judgments of speakers with AOS. Twenty-four speakers with AOS and aphasia repeated mono- and multisyllabic words. After each word, they indicated whether their production was correct or incorrect. This procedure was repeated 1 week later to examine performance stability. Percentage of incorrect word productions was stable for the group across times. Accuracy of judgments ranged from 64% to 100% at Time 1 and from 56% to 100% at Time 2. Inaccurate judgments of error productions (false positives) occurred much more frequently than inaccurate judgments of correct productions (false negatives). Error production was remarkably stable in our participants. As a group, the participants failed to detect almost one third of words produced erroneously. However, accuracy and stability of judgments over sampling times varied across participants. Findings suggest that error awareness might be a worthwhile target for treatment in some individuals with AOS.

Topics in Probabilistic Judgment Aggregation

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Guanchun

2011-01-01

This dissertation is a compilation of several studies that are united by their relevance to probabilistic judgment aggregation. In the face of complex and uncertain events, panels of judges are frequently consulted to provide probabilistic forecasts, and aggregation of such estimates in groups often yield better results than could have been made…

Human object-similarity judgments reflect and transcend the primate-IT object representation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marieke eMur

2013-03-01

Full Text Available Primate inferior temporal (IT cortex is thought to contain a high-level representation of objects at the interface between vision and semantics. This suggests that the perceived similarity of real-world objects might be predicted from the IT representation. Here we show that objects that elicit similar activity patterns in human IT tend to be judged as similar by humans. The IT representation explained the human judgments better than early visual cortex, other ventral stream regions, and a range of computational models. Human similarity judgments exhibited category clusters that reflected several categorical divisions that are prevalent in the IT representation of both human and monkey, including the animate/inanimate and the face/body division. Human judgments also reflected the within-category representation of IT. However, the judgments transcended the IT representation in that they introduced additional categorical divisions. In particular, human judgments emphasized human-related additional divisions between human and nonhuman animals and between man-made and natural objects. Human IT was more similar to monkey IT than to human judgments. One interpretation is that IT has evolved visual feature detectors that distinguish between animates and inanimates and between faces and bodies because these divisions are fundamental to survival and reproduction for all primate species, and that other brain systems serve to more flexibly introduce species-dependent and evolutionarily more recent divisions.

Thinking like a nurse: a research-based model of clinical judgment in nursing.

Science.gov (United States)

Tanner, Christine A

2006-06-01

This article reviews the growing body of research on clinical judgment in nursing and presents an alternative model of clinical judgment based on these studies. Based on a review of nearly 200 studies, five conclusions can be drawn: (1) Clinical judgments are more influenced by what nurses bring to the situation than the objective data about the situation at hand; (2) Sound clinical judgment rests to some degree on knowing the patient and his or her typical pattern of responses, as well as an engagement with the patient and his or her concerns; (3) Clinical judgments are influenced by the context in which the situation occurs and the culture of the nursing care unit; (4) Nurses use a variety of reasoning patterns alone or in combination; and (5) Reflection on practice is often triggered by a breakdown in clinical judgment and is critical for the development of clinical knowledge and improvement in clinical reasoning. A model based on these general conclusions emphasizes the role of nurses' background, the context of the situation, and nurses' relationship with their patients as central to what nurses notice and how they interpret findings, respond, and reflect on their response.

Toward a Return to Plurality in Arendtian Judgment

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Jack E. Marsh Jr.

2008-12-01

Full Text Available Without further ado: the perplexities surrounding the relation of Arendt’s early and late theories of judgment are rooted in her singular commitment to the abiding yet fragile possibility of human freedom. These perplexities are not a function of the theoretical faux paux conventionally ascribed to her by well meaning interpreters and sympathetic critics. Indeed, her work exhibits an admirable, if scandalous, refusal to be reduced to the imperatives of an overdetermined moral-theoretical field, an impertinence I hope to honor in this essay. For example, Seyla Benhabib seek to “resolve” Arendtian “puzzles” through reinscribing them within the neo-Kantian architectonics of discourse ethics. Ronald Beiner, by contrast, wonders why Arendt didn’t further mine Aristotelian wells in elaborating her own account(s of judgment.2 Herein I will take up these putative ambiguities. Interpreters are undoubtedly correct that decisive ambiguities remain between Arendt’s early and late accounts of judgment, but these ambiguities issue from Arendt’s own problems, concerns, and project.

Religious Roots: A Prolegomenon to Moral Judgment in American Policy

Science.gov (United States)

2012-03-15

Bethany House Publishers, 1998), 71. For a very good commentary on this subject, read the chapters entitled, “The Absolutism of Moral Relativism ...Religious Roots: A Prolegomenon to Moral Judgment in American Policy by Lieutenant Colonel Greg Johnson Oregon Air...COVERED (From - To) 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Religious Roots: A Prolegomenon to Moral Judgment in American Policy Policy 5a. CONTRACT

Children's Judgments and Reasoning About Same-Sex Romantic Relationships.

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Spence, Sarah; Helwig, Charles C; Cosentino, Nicole

2018-05-01

Children's (5-, 7- to 8-, and 10- to 11-year-olds), and adolescents' (13- to 14-year-olds) judgments and reasoning about same-sex romantic relationships were examined (N = 128). Participants' beliefs about the acceptability and legal regulation of these relationships were assessed, along with their judgments and beliefs about excluding someone because of his or her sexual orientation and the origins of same-sex attraction. Older participants evaluated same-sex romantic relationships more positively and used more references to personal choice and justice/discrimination reasoning to support their judgments. Younger participants were less critical of a law prohibiting same-sex relationships and were more likely to believe it was not acceptable to violate this law. Beliefs about origins of same-sex attraction showed age-specific patterns in their associations with evaluations. © 2017 The Authors. Child Development © 2017 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

Crime and Punishment: Distinguishing the Roles of Causal and Intentional Analyses in Moral Judgment

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Cushman, Fiery

2008-01-01

Recent research in moral psychology has attempted to characterize patterns of moral judgments of actions in terms of the causal and intentional properties of those actions. The present study directly compares the roles of consequence, causation, belief and desire in determining moral judgments. Judgments of the wrongness or permissibility of…

Experiential Social Justice Judgment Processes

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Maas, M.

2008-01-01

Social justice can be thought of as an idea that exists within the minds of individuals and that concerns issues like what is right and wrong, what ought to be or not to be, and what is fair or unfair. This subjective quality of the justice judgment process makes it rather unpredictable how people

‘Utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good

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Kahane, Guy; Everett, Jim A.C.; Earp, Brian D.; Farias, Miguel; Savulescu, Julian

2015-01-01

A growing body of research has focused on so-called ‘utilitarian’ judgments in moral dilemmas in which participants have to choose whether to sacrifice one person in order to save the lives of a greater number. However, the relation between such ‘utilitarian’ judgments and genuine utilitarian impartial concern for the greater good remains unclear. Across four studies, we investigated the relationship between ‘utilitarian’ judgment in such sacrificial dilemmas and a range of traits, attitudes, judgments and behaviors that either reflect or reject an impartial concern for the greater good of all. In Study 1, we found that rates of ‘utilitarian’ judgment were associated with a broadly immoral outlook concerning clear ethical transgressions in a business context, as well as with sub-clinical psychopathy. In Study 2, we found that ‘utilitarian’ judgment was associated with greater endorsement of rational egoism, less donation of money to a charity, and less identification with the whole of humanity, a core feature of classical utilitarianism. In Studies 3 and 4, we found no association between ‘utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial dilemmas and characteristic utilitarian judgments relating to assistance to distant people in need, self-sacrifice and impartiality, even when the utilitarian justification for these judgments was made explicit and unequivocal. This lack of association remained even when we controlled for the antisocial element in ‘utilitarian’ judgment. Taken together, these results suggest that there is very little relation between sacrificial judgments in the hypothetical dilemmas that dominate current research, and a genuine utilitarian approach to ethics. PMID:25460392

Statistical methods in spatial genetics

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Guillot, Gilles; Leblois, Raphael; Coulon, Aurelie

2009-01-01

The joint analysis of spatial and genetic data is rapidly becoming the norm in population genetics. More and more studies explicitly describe and quantify the spatial organization of genetic variation and try to relate it to underlying ecological processes. As it has become increasingly difficult...... to keep abreast with the latest methodological developments, we review the statistical toolbox available to analyse population genetic data in a spatially explicit framework. We mostly focus on statistical concepts but also discuss practical aspects of the analytical methods, highlighting not only...

Victimological aspects of court judgments

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Bačanović Oliver

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The subject of this paper is the review of the results of the research: „Analysis of judgments form the victimological aspect“ of the Basic court Skopje I in Skopje. It is the first research of it’s kind in the Republic of Macedonia, conducted by the project team of the Faculty of Security in Skopje in the period from January to April 2011. By using the content analysis (for this purpose a special instrument was developed 172 irrevocable court judgment brought in the period 2005-2010 were analyzed, for the following criminal offences: murder, crimes against sexual freedom and sexual morality (sexual assault, severe bodily injuries and insult. The aim of the research was to highlight the victimological dimensions of mentioned criminal offences, while special attention was paid to the role of a victim in a crime, victim‘ s interaction with the perpetrator, individual characteristics of the victim, as well as the characteristics of the time when and the space where the crime occurred.

Conflict Management: Difficult Conversations with Difficult People

OpenAIRE

Overton, Amy R.; Lowry, Ann C.

2013-01-01

Conflict occurs frequently in any workplace; health care is not an exception. The negative consequences include dysfunctional team work, decreased patient satisfaction, and increased employee turnover. Research demonstrates that training in conflict resolution skills can result in improved teamwork, productivity, and patient and employee satisfaction. Strategies to address a disruptive physician, a particularly difficult conflict situation in healthcare, are addressed.

Conflict management: difficult conversations with difficult people.

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Overton, Amy R; Lowry, Ann C

2013-12-01

Conflict occurs frequently in any workplace; health care is not an exception. The negative consequences include dysfunctional team work, decreased patient satisfaction, and increased employee turnover. Research demonstrates that training in conflict resolution skills can result in improved teamwork, productivity, and patient and employee satisfaction. Strategies to address a disruptive physician, a particularly difficult conflict situation in healthcare, are addressed.

The Basis of Feeling-of-Knowing Judgments in Patients with Schizophrenia

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Bacon, Elisabeth; Pillot, Mathieu; Izaute, Marie; Schwartz, Bennett L.

2018-01-01

We examined the basis of feeling-of-knowing judgments (FOK) in patients with schizophrenia. Such patients typically have impaired memory and awareness, but not metamemory-accuracy deficits. The magnitude of FOKs are lower for patients with schizophrenia than for healthy participants, but judgments equally predict memory performance. In healthy…

Bible Knowledge and Moral Judgment: Knowing Scripture and Using Ethical Reasoning

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Nelson, Daniel

2004-01-01

The relationship between moral judgment and religious knowledge was investigated, with an analysis of the impact of academic skill on both domains. Fifty-six Bible college seniors completed measures of moral judgment (Defining Issues Test), Bible knowledge (Standardized Bible Content Test), and academic skill (Academic Profile). Results indicate…

Does ADHD in Adults Affect the Relative Accuracy of Metamemory Judgments?

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Knouse, Laura E.; Paradise, Matthew J.; Dunlosky, John

2006-01-01

Objective: Prior research suggests that individuals with ADHD overestimate their performance across domains despite performing more poorly in these domains. The authors introduce measures of accuracy from the larger realm of judgment and decision making--namely, relative accuracy and calibration--to the study of self-evaluative judgment accuracy…

Application and Evaluation of an Expert Judgment Elicitation Procedure for Correlations.

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Zondervan-Zwijnenburg, Mariëlle; van de Schoot-Hubeek, Wenneke; Lek, Kimberley; Hoijtink, Herbert; van de Schoot, Rens

2017-01-01

The purpose of the current study was to apply and evaluate a procedure to elicit expert judgments about correlations, and to update this information with empirical data. The result is a face-to-face group elicitation procedure with as its central element a trial roulette question that elicits experts' judgments expressed as distributions. During the elicitation procedure, a concordance probability question was used to provide feedback to the experts on their judgments. We evaluated the elicitation procedure in terms of validity and reliability by means of an application with a small sample of experts. Validity means that the elicited distributions accurately represent the experts' judgments. Reliability concerns the consistency of the elicited judgments over time. Four behavioral scientists provided their judgments with respect to the correlation between cognitive potential and academic performance for two separate populations enrolled at a specific school in the Netherlands that provides special education to youth with severe behavioral problems: youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and youth with diagnoses other than ASD. Measures of face-validity, feasibility, convergent validity, coherence, and intra-rater reliability showed promising results. Furthermore, the current study illustrates the use of the elicitation procedure and elicited distributions in a social science application. The elicited distributions were used as a prior for the correlation, and updated with data for both populations collected at the school of interest. The current study shows that the newly developed elicitation procedure combining the trial roulette method with the elicitation of correlations is a promising tool, and that the results of the procedure are useful as prior information in a Bayesian analysis.

Children's judgments about ownership rights and body rights: Evidence for a common basis.

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Van de Vondervoort, Julia W; Meinz, Paul; Friedman, Ori

2017-03-01

We report two experiments supporting the theory that children's understanding of ownership rights is related to their notions of body rights. Experiment 1 investigated 4- to 7-year-olds' (N=123) developing sensitivity to physical contact in their judgments about the acceptability of behaving in relation to owned objects and body parts. Experiment 2 used a simpler design to investigate this in 3- and 4-year-olds (N=112). Findings confirmed two predictions of the theory. First, in both experiments, children's judgments about ownership and body rights were similarly affected by physical contact. Second, judgments about both kinds of rights were yoked in development; age-related changes in judgments about ownership rights were paralleled by changes in judgments about body rights. Our findings have additional import for theories of ownership rights because they suggest that physical contact may be a crucial factor in whether behaviors targeting property are judged to be permissible. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Do changes in the pace of events affect one-off judgments of duration?

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Darlow, Hannah M; Dylman, Alexandra S; Gheorghiu, Ana I; Matthews, William J

2013-01-01

Five experiments examined whether changes in the pace of external events influence people's judgments of duration. In Experiments 1a-1c, participants heard pieces of music whose tempo accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 2, participants completed a visuo-motor task in which the rate of stimulus presentation accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 3, participants completed a reading task in which facts appeared on-screen at accelerating, decelerating, or constant rates. In all experiments, the physical duration of the to-be-judged interval was the same across conditions. We found no significant effects of temporal structure on duration judgments in any of the experiments, either when participants knew that a time estimate would be required (prospective judgments) or when they did not (retrospective judgments). These results provide a starting point for the investigation of how temporal structure affects one-off judgments of duration like those typically made in natural settings.

Do changes in the pace of events affect one-off judgments of duration?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hannah M Darlow

Full Text Available Five experiments examined whether changes in the pace of external events influence people's judgments of duration. In Experiments 1a-1c, participants heard pieces of music whose tempo accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 2, participants completed a visuo-motor task in which the rate of stimulus presentation accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 3, participants completed a reading task in which facts appeared on-screen at accelerating, decelerating, or constant rates. In all experiments, the physical duration of the to-be-judged interval was the same across conditions. We found no significant effects of temporal structure on duration judgments in any of the experiments, either when participants knew that a time estimate would be required (prospective judgments or when they did not (retrospective judgments. These results provide a starting point for the investigation of how temporal structure affects one-off judgments of duration like those typically made in natural settings.

Examining recent expert elicitation, judgment guidelines: Value assumptions and the prospects for rationality

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Fleming, P.A. [Creighton Univ., Omaha, NE (United States). Dept. of Philosophy

1999-12-01

Any examination of the role of values in decisions on risk must take into consideration the increasing reliance on the expert judgment method. Today, reliance on expert judgment is conspicuously present in the documents and work associated with site characterization of Yucca Mountain as a host for the United States' first high level nuclear waste repository. The NRC encourages the use of probabilistic risk assessment's state of the art technology as a complement to deterministic approaches to nuclear regulatory activities. It considers expert judgment as one of those technologies. At the last International Conference on High-Level Nuclear Waste Development several presentations report on the use of expert elicitation sessions held during 1997 at Yucca Mountain. Over a decade ago, few guidelines existed for Department of Energy work in expert judgment. In an analysis of these guidelines, I described the author-advocate's view of the role of values in this method of risk assessment. I suggested that the guidelines assume naive positivism. I noted that the creators of these guidelines also tend toward scientific realism in their apologetic tone that expert judgment falls short of representing the way nature is. I also pointed to a tendency toward what I call a heightened or super-realism. Normal science represents the way the world is and for expert judgment this is only likely so. Expert judgment method, however, is capable of truly capturing expertise in a representative sense. The purpose of this paper is to examine new guidelines from the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with a view to eliciting the epistemological assumptions about the role of values and the status of objectivity claimed for this method. Do these new guidelines also adopt naive positivism? Does the inability to encounter raw, pure, value-neutral expert judgment, reveal itself in these guidelines? Or do these guidelines adopt the belief that values are not

Examining recent expert elicitation, judgment guidelines: Value assumptions and the prospects for rationality

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fleming, P.A.

1999-01-01

Any examination of the role of values in decisions on risk must take into consideration the increasing reliance on the expert judgment method. Today, reliance on expert judgment is conspicuously present in the documents and work associated with site characterization of Yucca Mountain as a host for the United States' first high level nuclear waste repository. The NRC encourages the use of probabilistic risk assessment's state of the art technology as a complement to deterministic approaches to nuclear regulatory activities. It considers expert judgment as one of those technologies. At the last International Conference on High-Level Nuclear Waste Development several presentations report on the use of expert elicitation sessions held during 1997 at Yucca Mountain. Over a decade ago, few guidelines existed for Department of Energy work in expert judgment. In an analysis of these guidelines, I described the author-advocate's view of the role of values in this method of risk assessment. I suggested that the guidelines assume naive positivism. I noted that the creators of these guidelines also tend toward scientific realism in their apologetic tone that expert judgment falls short of representing the way nature is. I also pointed to a tendency toward what I call a heightened or super-realism. Normal science represents the way the world is and for expert judgment this is only likely so. Expert judgment method, however, is capable of truly capturing expertise in a representative sense. The purpose of this paper is to examine new guidelines from the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with a view to eliciting the epistemological assumptions about the role of values and the status of objectivity claimed for this method. Do these new guidelines also adopt naive positivism? Does the inability to encounter raw, pure, value-neutral expert judgment, reveal itself in these guidelines? Or do these guidelines adopt the belief that values are not (and should

The impact of attention on judgments of frequency and duration.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Isabell Winkler

Full Text Available Previous studies that examined human judgments of frequency and duration found an asymmetrical relationship: While frequency judgments were quite accurate and independent of stimulus duration, duration judgments were highly dependent upon stimulus frequency. A potential explanation for these findings is that the asymmetry is moderated by the amount of attention directed to the stimuli. In the current experiment, participants' attention was manipulated in two ways: (a intrinsically, by varying the type and arousal potential of the stimuli (names, low-arousal and high-arousal pictures, and (b extrinsically, by varying the physical effort participants expended during the stimulus presentation (by lifting a dumbbell vs. relaxing the arm. Participants processed stimuli with varying presentation frequencies and durations and were subsequently asked to estimate the frequency and duration of each stimulus. Sensitivity to duration increased for pictures in general, especially when processed under physical effort. A large effect of stimulus frequency on duration judgments was obtained for all experimental conditions, but a similar large effect of presentation duration on frequency judgments emerged only in the conditions that could be expected to draw high amounts of attention to the stimuli: when pictures were judged under high physical effort. Almost no difference in the mutual impact of frequency and duration was obtained for low-arousal or high-arousal pictures. The mechanisms underlying the simultaneous processing of frequency and duration are discussed with respect to existing models derived from animal research. Options for the extension of such models to human processing of frequency and duration are suggested.

The impact of attention on judgments of frequency and duration.

Science.gov (United States)

Winkler, Isabell; Glauer, Madlen; Betsch, Tilmann; Sedlmeier, Peter

2015-01-01

Previous studies that examined human judgments of frequency and duration found an asymmetrical relationship: While frequency judgments were quite accurate and independent of stimulus duration, duration judgments were highly dependent upon stimulus frequency. A potential explanation for these findings is that the asymmetry is moderated by the amount of attention directed to the stimuli. In the current experiment, participants' attention was manipulated in two ways: (a) intrinsically, by varying the type and arousal potential of the stimuli (names, low-arousal and high-arousal pictures), and (b) extrinsically, by varying the physical effort participants expended during the stimulus presentation (by lifting a dumbbell vs. relaxing the arm). Participants processed stimuli with varying presentation frequencies and durations and were subsequently asked to estimate the frequency and duration of each stimulus. Sensitivity to duration increased for pictures in general, especially when processed under physical effort. A large effect of stimulus frequency on duration judgments was obtained for all experimental conditions, but a similar large effect of presentation duration on frequency judgments emerged only in the conditions that could be expected to draw high amounts of attention to the stimuli: when pictures were judged under high physical effort. Almost no difference in the mutual impact of frequency and duration was obtained for low-arousal or high-arousal pictures. The mechanisms underlying the simultaneous processing of frequency and duration are discussed with respect to existing models derived from animal research. Options for the extension of such models to human processing of frequency and duration are suggested.

The Effect of Listener Experience and Anchors on Judgments of Dysphonia

Science.gov (United States)

Eadie, Tanya L.; Kapsner-Smith, Mara

2011-01-01

Purpose: To determine the effect of auditory anchors on judgments of overall severity (OS) and vocal effort (VE) in dysphonic speech when judgments are made by experienced and inexperienced listeners, and when self-rated by individuals with dysphonia (speaker-listeners). Method: Twenty individuals with dysphonia and 4 normal controls provided…

The role of emotions for moral judgments depends on the type of emotion and moral scenario.

Science.gov (United States)

Ugazio, Giuseppe; Lamm, Claus; Singer, Tania

2012-06-01

Emotions seem to play a critical role in moral judgment. However, the way in which emotions exert their influence on moral judgments is still poorly understood. This study proposes a novel theoretical approach suggesting that emotions influence moral judgments based on their motivational dimension. We tested the effects of two types of induced emotions with equal valence but with different motivational implications (anger and disgust), and four types of moral scenarios (disgust-related, impersonal, personal, and beliefs) on moral judgments. We hypothesized and found that approach motivation associated with anger would make moral judgments more permissible, while disgust, associated with withdrawal motivation, would make them less permissible. Moreover, these effects varied as a function of the type of scenario: the induced emotions only affected moral judgments concerning impersonal and personal scenarios, while we observed no effects for the other scenarios. These findings suggest that emotions can play an important role in moral judgment, but that their specific effects depend upon the type of emotion induced. Furthermore, induced emotion effects were more prevalent for moral decisions in personal and impersonal scenarios, possibly because these require the performance of an action rather than making an abstract judgment. We conclude that the effects of induced emotions on moral judgments can be predicted by taking their motivational dimension into account. This finding has important implications for moral psychology, as it points toward a previously overlooked mechanism linking emotions to moral judgments.

Serotonin selectively influences moral judgment and behavior through effects on harm aversion.

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Crockett, Molly J; Clark, Luke; Hauser, Marc D; Robbins, Trevor W

2010-10-05

Aversive emotional reactions to real or imagined social harms infuse moral judgment and motivate prosocial behavior. Here, we show that the neurotransmitter serotonin directly alters both moral judgment and behavior through increasing subjects' aversion to personally harming others. We enhanced serotonin in healthy volunteers with citalopram (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) and contrasted its effects with both a pharmacological control treatment and a placebo on tests of moral judgment and behavior. We measured the drugs' effects on moral judgment in a set of moral 'dilemmas' pitting utilitarian outcomes (e.g., saving five lives) against highly aversive harmful actions (e.g., killing an innocent person). Enhancing serotonin made subjects more likely to judge harmful actions as forbidden, but only in cases where harms were emotionally salient. This harm-avoidant bias after citalopram was also evident in behavior during the ultimatum game, in which subjects decide to accept or reject fair or unfair monetary offers from another player. Rejecting unfair offers enforces a fairness norm but also harms the other player financially. Enhancing serotonin made subjects less likely to reject unfair offers. Furthermore, the prosocial effects of citalopram varied as a function of trait empathy. Individuals high in trait empathy showed stronger effects of citalopram on moral judgment and behavior than individuals low in trait empathy. Together, these findings provide unique evidence that serotonin could promote prosocial behavior by enhancing harm aversion, a prosocial sentiment that directly affects both moral judgment and moral behavior.

Parallels in preschoolers' and adults' judgments about ownership rights and bodily rights.

Science.gov (United States)

Van de Vondervoort, Julia W; Friedman, Ori

2015-01-01

Understanding ownership rights is necessary for socially appropriate behavior. We provide evidence that preschoolers' and adults' judgments of ownership rights are related to their judgments of bodily rights. Four-year-olds (n = 70) and adults (n = 89) evaluated the acceptability of harmless actions targeting owned property and body parts. At both ages, evaluations did not vary for owned property or body parts. Instead, evaluations were influenced by two other manipulations-whether the target belonged to the agent or another person, and whether that other person approved of the action. Moreover, these manipulations influenced judgments for owned objects and body parts in the same way: When the other person approved of the action, participants' judgments were positive regardless of who the target belonged to. In contrast, when that person disapproved, judgments depended on who the target belonged to. These findings show that young children grasp the importance of approval or consent for ownership rights and bodily rights, and likewise suggest that people's notions of ownership rights are related to their appreciation of bodily rights. Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Measurement of turbulent spatial structure and kinetic energy spectrum by exact temporal-to-spatial mapping

Science.gov (United States)

Buchhave, Preben; Velte, Clara M.

2017-08-01

We present a method for converting a time record of turbulent velocity measured at a point in a flow to a spatial velocity record consisting of consecutive convection elements. The spatial record allows computation of dynamic statistical moments such as turbulent kinetic wavenumber spectra and spatial structure functions in a way that completely bypasses the need for Taylor's hypothesis. The spatial statistics agree with the classical counterparts, such as the total kinetic energy spectrum, at least for spatial extents up to the Taylor microscale. The requirements for applying the method are access to the instantaneous velocity magnitude, in addition to the desired flow quantity, and a high temporal resolution in comparison to the relevant time scales of the flow. We map, without distortion and bias, notoriously difficult developing turbulent high intensity flows using three main aspects that distinguish these measurements from previous work in the field: (1) The measurements are conducted using laser Doppler anemometry and are therefore not contaminated by directional ambiguity (in contrast to, e.g., frequently employed hot-wire anemometers); (2) the measurement data are extracted using a correctly and transparently functioning processor and are analysed using methods derived from first principles to provide unbiased estimates of the velocity statistics; (3) the exact mapping proposed herein has been applied to the high turbulence intensity flows investigated to avoid the significant distortions caused by Taylor's hypothesis. The method is first confirmed to produce the correct statistics using computer simulations and later applied to measurements in some of the most difficult regions of a round turbulent jet—the non-equilibrium developing region and the outermost parts of the developed jet. The proposed mapping is successfully validated using corresponding directly measured spatial statistics in the fully developed jet, even in the difficult outer regions of

Perceptual fluency and judgments of vocal aesthetics and stereotypicality.

Science.gov (United States)

Babel, Molly; McGuire, Grant

2015-05-01

Research has shown that processing dynamics on the perceiver's end determine aesthetic pleasure. Specifically, typical objects, which are processed more fluently, are perceived as more attractive. We extend this notion of perceptual fluency to judgments of vocal aesthetics. Vocal attractiveness has traditionally been examined with respect to sexual dimorphism and the apparent size of a talker, as reconstructed from the acoustic signal, despite evidence that gender-specific speech patterns are learned social behaviors. In this study, we report on a series of three experiments using 60 voices (30 females) to compare the relationship between judgments of vocal attractiveness, stereotypicality, and gender categorization fluency. Our results indicate that attractiveness and stereotypicality are highly correlated for female and male voices. Stereotypicality and categorization fluency were also correlated for male voices, but not female voices. Crucially, stereotypicality and categorization fluency interacted to predict attractiveness, suggesting the role of perceptual fluency is present, but nuanced, in judgments of human voices. © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Alexithymia tendencies and mere exposure alter social approachability judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Campbell, Darren W; McKeen, Nancy A

2011-04-01

People have a fundamental motivation for social connection and social engagement, but how do they decide whom to approach in ambiguous social situations? Subjective feelings often influence such decisions, but people vary in awareness of their feelings. We evaluated two opposing hypotheses based on visual familiarity effects and emotional awareness on social approachability judgments. These hypotheses differ in their interpretation of the familiarity or mere exposure effect with either an affective or cognitive interpretation. The responses of our 128-student sample supported the cognitive interpretation. Lower emotional awareness or higher alexithymia was associated with higher approachability judgments to familiarized faces and lower approachability judgments to novel faces. These findings were independent of the Big Five personality factors. The results indicate that individual differences in emotional awareness should be integrated into social decision-making models. The results also suggest that cognitive-perceptual alterations may underlie the poorer social outcomes associated with alexithymia. © 2011 The Authors. Journal of Personality © 2011, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Automatic and controlled components of judgment and decision making.

Science.gov (United States)

Ferreira, Mario B; Garcia-Marques, Leonel; Sherman, Steven J; Sherman, Jeffrey W

2006-11-01

The categorization of inductive reasoning into largely automatic processes (heuristic reasoning) and controlled analytical processes (rule-based reasoning) put forward by dual-process approaches of judgment under uncertainty (e.g., K. E. Stanovich & R. F. West, 2000) has been primarily a matter of assumption with a scarcity of direct empirical findings supporting it. The present authors use the process dissociation procedure (L. L. Jacoby, 1991) to provide convergent evidence validating a dual-process perspective to judgment under uncertainty based on the independent contributions of heuristic and rule-based reasoning. Process dissociations based on experimental manipulation of variables were derived from the most relevant theoretical properties typically used to contrast the two forms of reasoning. These include processing goals (Experiment 1), cognitive resources (Experiment 2), priming (Experiment 3), and formal training (Experiment 4); the results consistently support the author's perspective. They conclude that judgment under uncertainty is neither an automatic nor a controlled process but that it reflects both processes, with each making independent contributions.

Are emotions necessary and sufficient for making moral judgments?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marco Aurélio Sousa Alves

2013-07-01

Full Text Available http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1677-2954.2013v12n1p113 Jesse Prinz (2006, 2007 claimed that emotions are necessary and sufficient for moral judgments. First of all, I clarify what this claim amounts to. The view that he labels emotionism will then be critically assessed. Prinz marshals empirical findings to defend a series of increasingly strong theses about how emotions are essential for moral judgments. I argue that the empirical support upon which his arguments are based is not only insufficient, but it even suggests otherwise, if properly interpreted. My criticism is then extended to his sentimentalist theory, that accounts for how emotions are integrated into moral judgments. The central problem is that Prinz’s view fails to capture the rational aspect of moral evaluation. I make this failure explicit and defend that some version or other of neosentimentalism is a more promising route.

Factors Influencing Mini-CEX Rater Judgments and Their Practical Implications: A Systematic Literature Review.

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Victor; Brain, Keira; Martin, Jenepher

2017-06-01

At present, little is known about how mini-clinical evaluation exercise (mini-CEX) raters translate their observations into judgments and ratings. The authors of this systematic literature review aim both to identify the factors influencing mini-CEX rater judgments in the medical education setting and to translate these findings into practical implications for clinician assessors. The authors searched for internal and external factors influencing mini-CEX rater judgments in the medical education setting from 1980 to 2015 using the Ovid MEDLINE, PsycINFO, ERIC, PubMed, and Scopus databases. They extracted the following information from each study: country of origin, educational level, study design and setting, type of observation, occurrence of rater training, provision of feedback to the trainee, research question, and identified factors influencing rater judgments. The authors also conducted a quality assessment for each study. Seventeen articles met the inclusion criteria. The authors identified both internal and external factors that influence mini-CEX rater judgments. They subcategorized the internal factors into intrinsic rater factors, judgment-making factors (conceptualization, interpretation, attention, and impressions), and scoring factors (scoring integration and domain differentiation). The current theories of rater-based judgment have not helped clinicians resolve the issues of rater idiosyncrasy, bias, gestalt, and conflicting contextual factors; therefore, the authors believe the most important solution is to increase the justification of rater judgments through the use of specific narrative and contextual comments, which are more informative for trainees. Finally, more real-world research is required to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of rater cognition.

Brief Contemplation as a Factor in the Accuracy of Perceptual Judgments.

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Rollman, Steven A.; Gabbard-Alley, Anne

A study investigated the importance of brief contemplation as a factor in the accuracy of judgments about other people, based on their nonverbal appearance. The following questions were addressed: (1) Are observers who are given time to contemplate the significance of nonverbal cues more accurate in their perceptual judgments than observers who…

The Influence of Negligence, Intention, and Outcome on Children's Moral Judgments

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Nobes, Gavin; Panagiotaki, Georgia.; Pawson, Chris

2009-01-01

Piaget (1932) and subsequent researchers have reported that young children's moral judgments are based more on the outcomes of actions than on the agents' intentions. The current study investigated whether negligence might also influence these judgments and explain children's apparent focus on outcome. Children (3-8 years of age) and adults (N =…

The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.

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Haidt, J

2001-10-01

Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent that rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology.

Clinical versus actuarial judgment.

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Dawes, R M; Faust, D; Meehl, P E

1989-03-31

Professionals are frequently consulted to diagnose and predict human behavior; optimal treatment and planning often hinge on the consultant's judgmental accuracy. The consultant may rely on one of two contrasting approaches to decision-making--the clinical and actuarial methods. Research comparing these two approaches shows the actuarial method to be superior. Factors underlying the greater accuracy of actuarial methods, sources of resistance to the scientific findings, and the benefits of increased reliance on actuarial approaches are discussed.

Effects of Meaning and Symmetry on Judgments of Size

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Reber, Rolf; Christensen, Bo T.; Meier, Beat

2014-01-01

to be judged as larger than asymmetric numbers (e.g., 43). However, recent research found that symmetric numbers were judged to be smaller than asymmetric numbers. This finding suggests that the mechanisms underlying size judgments may differ in meaningful and meaningless materials. Supporting this notion, we...... showed in Experiment 1 that meaning increased judged size, whereas symmetry decreased judged size. In the next two experiments, we excluded several alternative explanations for the differences in size judgments between meaningful and meaningless materials in earlier studies. This finding contradicts...

Critical thinking versus clinical reasoning versus clinical judgment: differential diagnosis.

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Victor-Chmil, Joyce

2013-01-01

Concepts of critical thinking, clinical reasoning, and clinical judgment are often used interchangeably. However, they are not one and the same, and understanding subtle difference among them is important. Following a review of the literature for definitions and uses of the terms, the author provides a summary focused on similarities and differences in the processes of critical thinking, clinical reasoning, and clinical judgment and notes suggested methods of measuring each.

Judgments of Learning in Collaborative Learning Environments

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Helsdingen, Anne

2010-01-01

Helsdingen, A. S. (2010, March). Judgments of Learning in Collaborative Learning Environments. Poster presented at the 1st International Air Transport and Operations Symposium (ATOS 2010), Delft, The Netherlands: Delft University of Technology.

Recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in the Law of Iran and England: a comparative study

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Abasat Pour Mohammad

2017-07-01

Full Text Available The aim of this study was to Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in the Law of Iran and England: A Comparative Study. There are a lot of similarities and commonalities between the legal system of Iran and England in the field of recognition and enforcement of the foreign judgments including public discipline and conflicting judgments. Public discipline in England Law is more specific than that of Iran. Being a civil case of the judgment, impossibility of recognition, enforcement of tax and criminal judgments are among the similarities of the two systems. On the other hand, reciprocity, precise of the foreign court, and the jurisdiction governing the nature of the claim are among instances which are different in Iran and England legal systems on the recognizing of the enforcement of foreign judgments.

Spatial Congruity Effects Reveal Metaphorical Thinking, not Polarity Correspondence.

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Dolscheid, Sarah; Casasanto, Daniel

2015-01-01

Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an alternative account based on polarity correspondence (a.k.a. markedness) has challenged this view. Here we compared metaphor- and polarity-correspondence-based explanations for spatial congruity effects, using musical pitch as a testbed. In one experiment, English speakers classified high- and low-frequency pitches as "high" and "low," or as "front" and "back," to determine whether space-pitch congruity effects could be elicited by any marked spatial continuum. Although both pairs of terms describe bipolar spatial continuums, we found congruity effects only for high/low judgments, indicating that markedness is not sufficient to produce space-pitch congruity effects. A second experiment confirmed that there were no space-pitch congruity effects for another pair of terms that have clear markedness (big/small), but which do not denote spatial height. By contrast, this experiment showed congruity effects for words that cued an appropriate vertical spatial schema (tall/short), even though these words are not used conventionally in English to describe pitches, ruling out explanations for the observed pattern of results based on verbal polysemy. Together, results suggest that space-pitch congruity effects reveal metaphorical uses of spatial schemas, not polarity correspondence effects.

Spatial congruity effects reveal metaphorical thinking, not polarity correspondence

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sarah eDolscheid

2015-11-01

Full Text Available Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an alternative account based on polarity correspondence (a.k.a. markedness has challenged this view. Here we compared metaphor- and polarity-correspondence-based explanations for spatial congruity effects, using musical pitch as a testbed. In one experiment, English speakers classified high- and low-frequency pitches as high and low, or as front and back, to determine whether space-pitch congruity effects could be elicited by any marked spatial continuum. Although both pairs of terms describe bipolar spatial continuums, we found congruity effects only for high/low judgments, indicating that markedness is not sufficient to produce space-pitch congruity effects. A second experiment confirmed that there were no space-pitch congruity effects for another pair of terms that have clear markedness (big/small, but which do not denote spatial height. By contrast, this experiment showed congruity effects for words that cued an appropriate vertical spatial schema (tall/short, even though these words are not used conventionally in English to describe pitches, ruling out explanations for the observed pattern of results based on verbal polysemy. Together, results suggest that space-pitch congruity effects reveal metaphorical uses of spatial schemas, not polarity correspondence effects.

Context effects on tempo and pleasantness judgments for Beatles songs.

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Rashotte, Matthew A; Wedell, Douglas H

2012-04-01

Context effects on tempo and pleasantness judgments of different tempos were demonstrated in three experiments using Beatles songs. In Experiments 1 and 2, we explored how listening to versions of the same song that were played at different tempos affected tempo and pleasantness ratings. In both experiments, contrast effects were found on judgments of tempo, with target tempos rated faster when context tempos were slow than when they were fast. In both experiments, we also showed that the peak of the pleasantness rating function shifted toward the values of the context tempos, reflecting disordinal context effects on pleasantness relationships. Familiarity with the songs did not moderate these effects, and shifts in tempo ratings did not correlate with shifts in most pleasant target tempos when context was manipulated within subjects. In Experiment 3, we examined how manipulations of context tempos for one song affected judgments of the same song as compared with judgments of other more or less similar songs. For tempo ratings, contrast effects transferred to ratings of a similar song, but for pleasantness ratings, assimilative shifts of ideals were found only for the same song and not for similar songs. This pattern of results was supportive of independent bases for the two context effects.

Moral Judgment, Sensitivity To Reasons, and the Multi-system View

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Francesco Orsi

2012-11-01

Full Text Available In this paper I attempt a critical examination of the multi-system or dual-process view of moral judgment. This view aims to provide a psychological explanation of moral sensitivity, and in particular an explanation of conflicting moral sensitivities in dilemma cases such as the crying baby scenario. I argue that proponents of the multi-system view owe us a satisfactory account of the mechanisms underlying “consequentialist” responses to such scenarios. For one thing, the “cognitive” processes involved in consequentialist reasoning only seem to play a subserving role with respect to the final judgment (providing non-moral inputs to judgment, or exerting additional strength to override the immediate “deontological” response. In this sense, Greene and colleagues fail to identify a peculiar system of moral judgment specularly opposed to the affective “deontological” one. For another, Greene and colleagues’ work on the emotion-cognition dichotomy and the distinction between alarm-bell and currency emotions, though promising, still falls short of providing an adequate and consistent picture of the psychological mechanisms underlying “cognitive” evaluations and verdicts in dilemma scenarios. It is suggested that alongside further experimental work, proponents of this view should pay more attention to the conceptual underpinnings of their distinctions.

Not that neglected! Base rates influence related and unrelated judgments.

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Białek, Michał

2017-06-01

It is claimed that people are unable (or unwilling) to incorporate prior probabilities into posterior assessments, such as their estimation of the likelihood of a person with characteristics typical of an engineer actually being an engineer given that they are drawn from a sample including a very small number of engineers. This paper shows that base rates are incorporated in classifications (Experiment 1) and, moreover, that base rates also affect unrelated judgments, such as how well a provided description of a person fits a stereotypical engineer (Experiment 2). Finally, Experiment 3 shows that individuals who make both types of assessments - though using base rates to the same extent in the former judgments - are able to decrease the extent to which they incorporate base rates in the latter judgments. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Some problems in use of the moral judgment test.

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Villegas de Posada, Cristina

2005-06-01

The Moral Judgment Test has been widely used in evaluation of moral development; however, it presents some problems related to the trait measured, reliability, and validity of its summary score (C-index). This index reflects consistency in moral judgment, but this construct is different from moral development as stated by Kohlberg. Therefore, users interested in the latter evaluation should refer to other indexes derived from the test. Some of the analyzed problems could be partially corrected with more theory and research on moral consistency as a component of moral competence.

Moral judgment modulation by disgust is bi-directionally moderated by individual sensitivity

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How Hwee eOng

2014-03-01

Full Text Available Modern theories of moral judgment predict that both conscious reasoning and unconscious emotional influences affect the way people decide about right and wrong. In a series of experiments, we tested the effect of subliminal and conscious priming of disgust facial expressions on moral dilemmas. Trolley-car-type scenarios were used, with subjects rating how acceptable they found the utilitarian course of action to be. On average, subliminal priming of disgust facial expressions resulted in higher rates of utilitarian judgments compared to neutral facial expressions. Further, in replication, we found that individual change in moral acceptability ratings due to disgust priming was modulated by individual sensitivity to disgust, revealing a bi-directional function. Our second replication extended this result to show that the function held for both subliminally and consciously presented stimuli. Combined across these experiments, we show a reliable bi-directional function, with presentation of disgust expression primes to individuals with higher disgust sensitivity resulting in more utilitarian judgments (i.e., number-based and presentations to individuals with lower sensitivity resulting in more deontological judgments (i.e., rules-based. Our results may reconcile previous conflicting reports of disgust modulation of moral judgment by modeling how individual sensitivity to disgust determines the direction and degree of this effect.

Moral judgment modulation by disgust is bi-directionally moderated by individual sensitivity

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Ong, How Hwee; Mullette-Gillman, O’Dhaniel A.; Kwok, Kenneth; Lim, Julian

2014-01-01

Modern theories of moral judgment predict that both conscious reasoning and unconscious emotional influences affect the way people decide about right and wrong. In a series of experiments, we tested the effect of subliminal and conscious priming of disgust facial expressions on moral dilemmas. “Trolley-car”-type scenarios were used, with subjects rating how acceptable they found the utilitarian course of action to be. On average, subliminal priming of disgust facial expressions resulted in higher rates of utilitarian judgments compared to neutral facial expressions. Further, in replication, we found that individual change in moral acceptability ratings due to disgust priming was modulated by individual sensitivity to disgust, revealing a bi-directional function. Our second replication extended this result to show that the function held for both subliminally and consciously presented stimuli. Combined across these experiments, we show a reliable bi-directional function, with presentation of disgust expression primes to individuals with higher disgust sensitivity resulting in more utilitarian judgments (i.e., number-based) and presentations to individuals with lower sensitivity resulting in more deontological judgments (i.e., rules-based). Our results may reconcile previous conflicting reports of disgust modulation of moral judgment by modeling how individual sensitivity to disgust determines the direction and degree of this effect. PMID:24639665

Can I trust you? Negative affective priming influences social judgments in schizophrenia

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Hooker, Christine I.; Tully, Laura M.; Verosky, Sara C.; Fisher, Melissa; Holland, Christine; Vinogradov, Sophia

2010-01-01

Successful social interactions rely on the ability to make accurate judgments based on social cues as well as the ability to control the influence of internal or external affective information on those judgments. Prior research suggests that individuals with schizophrenia misinterpret social stimuli and this misinterpretation contributes to impaired social functioning. We tested the hypothesis that for people with schizophrenia social judgments are abnormally influenced by affective information. 23 schizophrenia and 35 healthy control participants rated the trustworthiness of faces following the presentation of neutral, negative (threat-related), or positive affective primes. Results showed that all participants rated faces as less trustworthy following negative affective primes compared to faces that followed neutral or positive primes. Importantly, this effect was significantly more pronounced for schizophrenia participants, suggesting that schizophrenia may be characterised by an exaggerated influence of negative affective information on social judgment. Furthermore, the extent that the negative affective prime influenced trustworthiness judgments was significantly associated with patients’ severity of positive symptoms, particularly feelings of persecution. These findings suggest that for people with schizophrenia negative affective information contributes to an interpretive bias, consistent with paranoid ideation, when judging the trustworthiness of others. This bias may contribute to social impairments in schizophrenia. PMID:20919787

Integrative moral judgment: dissociating the roles of the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

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Shenhav, Amitai; Greene, Joshua D

2014-03-26

A decade's research highlights a critical dissociation between automatic and controlled influences on moral judgment, which is subserved by distinct neural structures. Specifically, negative automatic emotional responses to prototypically harmful actions (e.g., pushing someone off of a footbridge) compete with controlled responses favoring the best consequences (e.g., saving five lives instead of one). It is unknown how such competitions are resolved to yield "all things considered" judgments. Here, we examine such integrative moral judgments. Drawing on insights from research on self-interested, value-based decision-making in humans and animals, we test a theory concerning the respective contributions of the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) to moral judgment. Participants undergoing fMRI responded to moral dilemmas, separately evaluating options for their utility (Which does the most good?), emotional aversiveness (Which feels worse?), and overall moral acceptability. Behavioral data indicate that emotional aversiveness and utility jointly predict "all things considered" integrative judgments. Amygdala response tracks the emotional aversiveness of harmful utilitarian actions and overall disapproval of such actions. During such integrative moral judgments, the vmPFC is preferentially engaged relative to utilitarian and emotional assessments. Amygdala-vmPFC connectivity varies with the role played by emotional input in the task, being the lowest for pure utilitarian assessments and the highest for pure emotional assessments. These findings, which parallel those of research on self-interested economic decision-making, support the hypothesis that the amygdala provides an affective assessment of the action in question, whereas the vmPFC integrates that signal with a utilitarian assessment of expected outcomes to yield "all things considered" moral judgments.

Pragmatic inferences and self-relevant judgments

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Puente-Diaz, Rogelio; Cavazos Arroyo, Judith; Brem, Alexander

2016-01-01

Three studies examined the influence of type of scale on self-relevant judgments and the moderating role of age, prevention, focus, and need for cogni- tion. Participants were randomly assigned to a bipolar or a unipolar scale condition in all three studies. Results from study 1 with a representa...

The Foreign Language Effect on Moral Judgment: The Role of Emotions and Norms.

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Geipel, Janet; Hadjichristidis, Constantinos; Surian, Luca

2015-01-01

We investigated whether and why the use of a foreign language influences moral judgment. We studied the trolley and footbridge dilemmas, which propose an action that involves killing one individual to save five. In line with prior work, the use of a foreign language increased the endorsement of such consequentialist actions for the footbridge dilemma, but not for the trolley dilemma. But contrary to recent theorizing, this effect was not driven by an attenuation of emotions. An attenuation of emotions was found in both dilemmas, and it did not mediate the foreign language effect on moral judgment. An examination of additional scenarios revealed that foreign language influenced moral judgment when the proposed action involved a social or moral norm violation. We propose that foreign language influences moral judgment by reducing access to normative knowledge.

Learning and judgment can be affected by predisposed fearfulness in laying hens

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Haas, de Elske N.; Lee, Caroline; Rodenburg, Bas

2017-01-01

High fearfulness could disrupt learning and likely affects judgment in animals, especially when it is part of an animals' personality, i.e., trait anxiety. Here, we tested whether high fearfulness affects discrimination learning and judgment bias (JB) in laying hens. Based on the response to an open

The relationship between perceived gender judgment and well-being among surgical residents.

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Salles, Arghavan; Milam, Laurel; Cohen, Geoffrey; Mueller, Claudia

2018-02-01

Physician well-being is a significant problem. Here we explore whether one factor, a resident's concern for being judged by one's gender, influences well-being. Over two years at one institution, we surveyed surgical residents on validated measures of well-being as well as the extent to which they felt they were judged because of their gender (gender judgment). We used correlations and linear regression to investigate the relationships between gender judgment and well-being. There were 193 unique respondents (87% response rate). Women had significantly more concerns about gender judgment than men (M = 2.39, SD = 0.73 vs. M = 1.46, SD = 0.62, t = -9.47, p gender judgment concerns were significantly associated with all three well-being outcomes (Bs -0.34, 0.50, and 0.39, respectively for well-being, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization, all p gender is significantly associated with worse well-being. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The effect of analytic and experiential modes of thought on moral judgment.

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Kvaran, Trevor; Nichols, Shaun; Sanfey, Alan

2013-01-01

According to dual-process theories, moral judgments are the result of two competing processes: a fast, automatic, affect-driven process and a slow, deliberative, reason-based process. Accordingly, these models make clear and testable predictions about the influence of each system. Although a small number of studies have attempted to examine each process independently in the context of moral judgment, no study has yet tried to experimentally manipulate both processes within a single study. In this chapter, a well-established "mode-of-thought" priming technique was used to place participants in either an experiential/emotional or analytic mode while completing a task in which participants provide judgments about a series of moral dilemmas. We predicted that individuals primed analytically would make more utilitarian responses than control participants, while emotional priming would lead to less utilitarian responses. Support was found for both of these predictions. Implications of these findings for dual-process theories of moral judgment will be discussed. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Moral Judgment and Its Relation to Second-Order Theory of Mind

Science.gov (United States)

Fu, Genyue; Xiao, Wen S.; Killen, Melanie; Lee, Kang

2014-01-01

Recent research indicates that moral judgment and 1st-order theory of mind abilities are related. What is not known, however, is how 2nd-order theory of mind is related to moral judgment. In the present study, we extended previous findings by administering a morally relevant theory of mind task (an accidental transgressor) to 4- to 7-year-old…

First- and Second-Order Metacognitive Judgments of Semantic Memory Reports: The Influence of Personality Traits and Cognitive Styles

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Buratti, Sandra; Allwood, Carl Martin; Kleitman, Sabina

2013-01-01

In learning contexts, people need to make realistic confidence judgments about their memory performance. The present study investigated whether second-order judgments of first-order confidence judgments could help people improve their confidence judgments of semantic memory information. Furthermore, we assessed whether different personality and…

Enough Skill to Kill: Intentionality Judgments and the Moral Valence of Action

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Guglielmo, Steve; Malle, Bertram F.

2010-01-01

Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action's intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people's intentionality judgments. His and other researchers' studies suggested that blameworthy…

Reflection and Reasoning in Moral Judgment

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Paxton, Joseph M.; Ungar, Leo; Greene, Joshua D.

2012-01-01

While there is much evidence for the influence of automatic emotional responses on moral judgment, the roles of reflection and reasoning remain uncertain. In Experiment 1, we induced subjects to be more reflective by completing the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) prior to responding to moral dilemmas. This manipulation increased utilitarian…

Exemplary Goods: Exemplars as Judgment Devices

NARCIS (Netherlands)

E. Dekker (Erwin)

2016-01-01

textabstractIn this article the notion of exemplars is developed to study valuation processes. It argues that exemplary goods are an important ‘judgment device’ on markets of singular goods, which has so far been ignored in the literature. The article draws on Hannah Arendt’s theory of exemplars, as

Variation in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) is associated with differences in moral judgment.

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Bernhard, Regan M; Chaponis, Jonathan; Siburian, Richie; Gallagher, Patience; Ransohoff, Katherine; Wikler, Daniel; Perlis, Roy H; Greene, Joshua D

2016-12-01

Moral judgments are produced through the coordinated interaction of multiple neural systems, each of which relies on a characteristic set of neurotransmitters. Genes that produce or regulate these neurotransmitters may have distinctive influences on moral judgment. Two studies examined potential genetic influences on moral judgment using dilemmas that reliably elicit competing automatic and controlled responses, generated by dissociable neural systems. Study 1 (N = 228) examined 49 common variants (SNPs) within 10 candidate genes and identified a nominal association between a polymorphism (rs237889) of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) and variation in deontological vs utilitarian moral judgment (that is, judgments favoring individual rights vs the greater good). An association was likewise observed for rs1042615 of the arginine vasopressin receptor gene (AVPR1A). Study 2 (N = 322) aimed to replicate these findings using the aforementioned dilemmas as well as a new set of structurally similar medical dilemmas. Study 2 failed to replicate the association with AVPR1A, but replicated the OXTR finding using both the original and new dilemmas. Together, these findings suggest that moral judgment is influenced by variation in the oxytocin receptor gene and, more generally, that single genetic polymorphisms can have a detectable effect on complex decision processes. © The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press.

Discrimination performance in aging is vulnerable to interference and dissociable from spatial memory

Science.gov (United States)

Johnson, Sarah A.; Sacks, Patricia K.; Turner, Sean M.; Gaynor, Leslie S.; Ormerod, Brandi K.; Maurer, Andrew P.; Bizon, Jennifer L.

2016-01-01

Hippocampal-dependent episodic memory and stimulus discrimination abilities are both compromised in the elderly. The reduced capacity to discriminate between similar stimuli likely contributes to multiple aspects of age-related cognitive impairment; however, the association of these behaviors within individuals has never been examined in an animal model. In the present study, young and aged F344×BN F1 hybrid rats were cross-characterized on the Morris water maze test of spatial memory and a dentate gyrus-dependent match-to-position test of spatial discrimination ability. Aged rats showed overall impairments relative to young in spatial learning and memory on the water maze task. Although young and aged learned to apply a match-to-position response strategy in performing easy spatial discriminations within a similar number of trials, a majority of aged rats were impaired relative to young in performing difficult spatial discriminations on subsequent tests. Moreover, all aged rats were susceptible to cumulative interference during spatial discrimination tests, such that error rate increased on later trials of test sessions. These data suggest that when faced with difficult discriminations, the aged rats were less able to distinguish current goal locations from those of previous trials. Increasing acetylcholine levels with donepezil did not improve aged rats’ abilities to accurately perform difficult spatial discriminations or reduce their susceptibility to interference. Interestingly, better spatial memory abilities were not significantly associated with higher performance on difficult spatial discriminations. This observation, along with the finding that aged rats made more errors under conditions in which interference was high, suggests that match-to-position spatial discrimination performance may rely on extra-hippocampal structures such as the prefrontal cortex, in addition to the dentate gyrus. PMID:27317194

Advances on the Measure of Judgment and Meaning of the Product for Brazil

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Solange Alfinito

2012-09-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this paper was the development a measure of judgment and meaning of the product valid for Brazilian consumers. It consisted in a two-stage study including both qualitative and quantitative approaches. In the qualitative stage, focus groups with 16 Brazilian participants allowed the generation of 40 items for a new scale of judgment and meaning of the product. After semantic validation and expert analysis, the found items composed a questionnaire administered to 684 participants in a paper-and-pencil survey. Results suggest that the items performed considerably better when compared to the previous version, indicating their potential of usage not only in Brazil, but also in other countries. The final measure remained with 20 items that were distributed in four factors, as pointed by the literature review. Two factors are related to judgment types (piecemeal and affective, whilst the other two are related to meaning types (utilitarian and symbolic. Additional results, as expected, showed that product's utilitarian meaning is positively correlated to a piecemeal judgment, whereas symbolic meaning is positively related to affective judgment. Managerial implications for marketing, and future research directions are proposed.

The Influence of Language Form and Conventional Wording on Judgments of Illness

Science.gov (United States)

Reynaert, Cristine C.; Gelman, Susan A.

2007-01-01

Prior research indicates that category labels influence category judgments, but little is known regarding the effects for familiar categories with significant social consequences. The present studies address this issue by examining the effect of linguistic form on judgments of illnesses. Both mental and physical illnesses were presented in each of…

Moral Overtones of Food: Judgments of Others Based on What They Eat.

Science.gov (United States)

Stein, Richard I.; Nemeroff, Carol J.

1995-01-01

Investigated whether eating healthy or unhealthy foods gives rise to moral judgments about the consumer. Subjects were presented one of four bogus profiles of a person, differing only in gender and foods consumed, and rated the target on morality. Results confirmed that food choices influenced the raters' moral judgments. (RJM)

Children's Interpretive Understanding, Moral Judgments, and Emotion Attributions: Relations to Social Behaviour

Science.gov (United States)

Malti, Tina; Gasser, Luciano; Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, Eveline

2010-01-01

The study investigated interpretive understanding, moral judgments, and emotion attributions in relation to social behaviour in a sample of 59 5-year-old, 123 7-year-old, and 130 9-year-old children. Interpretive understanding was assessed by two tasks measuring children's understanding of ambiguous situations. Moral judgments and emotion…

Impaired theory of mind for moral judgment in high-functioning autism.

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Moran, Joseph M; Young, Liane L; Saxe, Rebecca; Lee, Su Mei; O'Young, Daniel; Mavros, Penelope L; Gabrieli, John D

2011-02-15

High-functioning autism (ASD) is characterized by real-life difficulties in social interaction; however, these individuals often succeed on laboratory tests that require an understanding of another person's beliefs and intentions. This paradox suggests a theory of mind (ToM) deficit in adults with ASD that has yet to be demonstrated in an experimental task eliciting ToM judgments. We tested whether ASD adults would show atypical moral judgments when they need to consider both the intentions (based on ToM) and outcomes of a person's actions. In experiment 1, ASD and neurotypical (NT) participants performed a ToM task designed to test false belief understanding. In experiment 2, the same ASD participants and a new group of NT participants judged the moral permissibility of actions, in a 2 (intention: neutral/negative) × 2 (outcome: neutral/negative) design. Though there was no difference between groups on the false belief task, there was a selective difference in the moral judgment task for judgments of accidental harms, but not neutral acts, attempted harms, or intentional harms. Unlike the NT group, which judged accidental harms less morally wrong than attempted harms, the ASD group did not reliably judge accidental and attempted harms as morally different. In judging accidental harms, ASD participants appeared to show an underreliance on information about a person's innocent intention and, as a direct result, an overreliance on the action's negative outcome. These findings reveal impairments in integrating mental state information (e.g., beliefs, intentions) for moral judgment.

Time perception and depressive realism: judgment type, psychophysical functions and bias.

Science.gov (United States)

Kornbrot, Diana E; Msetfi, Rachel M; Grimwood, Melvyn J

2013-01-01

The effect of mild depression on time estimation and production was investigated. Participants made both magnitude estimation and magnitude production judgments for five time intervals (specified in seconds) from 3 sec to 65 sec. The parameters of the best fitting psychophysical function (power law exponent, intercept, and threshold) were determined individually for each participant in every condition. There were no significant effects of mood (high BDI, low BDI) or judgment (estimation, production) on the mean exponent, n = .98, 95% confidence interval (.96-1.04) or on the threshold. However, the intercept showed a 'depressive realism' effect, where high BDI participants had a smaller deviation from accuracy and a smaller difference between estimation and judgment than low BDI participants. Accuracy bias was assessed using three measures of accuracy: difference, defined as psychological time minus physical time, ratio, defined as psychological time divided by physical time, and a new logarithmic accuracy measure defined as ln (ratio). The ln (ratio) measure was shown to have approximately normal residuals when subjected to a mixed ANOVA with mood as a between groups explanatory factor and judgment and time category as repeated measures explanatory factors. The residuals of the other two accuracy measures flagrantly violated normality. The mixed ANOVAs of accuracy also showed a strong depressive realism effect, just like the intercepts of the psychophysical functions. There was also a strong negative correlation between estimation and production judgments. Taken together these findings support a clock model of time estimation, combined with additional cognitive mechanisms to account for the depressive realism effect. The findings also suggest strong methodological recommendations.

Effective communication during difficult conversations.

Science.gov (United States)

Polito, Jacquelyn M

2013-06-01

A strong interest and need exist in the workplace today to master the skills of conducting difficult conversations. Theories and strategies abound, yet none seem to have found the magic formula with universal appeal and success. If it is such an uncomfortable skill to master is it better to avoid or initiate such conversations with employees? Best practices and evidence-based management guide us to the decision that quality improvement dictates effective communication, even when difficult. This brief paper will offer some suggestions for strategies to manage difficult conversations with employees. Mastering the skills of conducting difficult conversations is clearly important to keeping lines of communication open and productive. Successful communication skills may actually help to avert confrontation through employee engagement, commitment and appropriate corresponding behavior

On the use of data and judgment in probabilistic risk and safety analysis

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kaplan, S.

1986-01-01

This paper reviews the line of thought of a nuclear plant probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) identifying the points where data and judgement enter. At the ''bottom'' of the process, data and judgment are combined, using one and two stage Bayesian methods, to express what is known about the element of variables. Higher in the process, we see the use of judgment in identifying scenarios and developing almost models and specifying initiating event categories. Finally, we discuss the judgments involved in deciding to do a PRA and in applying the results. (orig.)

Strategic environmental assessment quality assurance: evaluating and improving the consistency of judgments in assessment panels

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Noble, Bram F.

2004-01-01

Assessment panels and expert judgment are playing increasing roles in the practice of strategic environmental assessment (SEA). Thus, the quality of an SEA decision rests considerably on the quality of the judgments of the assessment panel. However, there exists very little guidance in the SEA literature for practitioners concerning the treatment and integration of expert judgment into SEA decision-making processes. Subsequently, the performance of SEAs based on expert judgment is often less than satisfactory, and quality improvements are required in the SEA process. Based on the lessons learned from strategic- and project-level impact assessment practices, this paper outlines a number of principles concerning the use of assessment panels in SEA decision-making, and attempts to provide some guidance for SEA practitioners in this regard. Particular attention is given to the notion and value of consistency in assessment panel judgments

Why People with More Emotion Regulation Difficulties Made a More Deontological Judgment: The Role of Deontological Inclinations

OpenAIRE

Zhang, Lisong; Li, Zhongquan; Wu, Xiaoyuan; Zhang, Ziyuan

2017-01-01

Previous studies have demonstrated the key role of emotion in moral judgment, and explored the relationship between emotion regulation and moral judgment. The present study investigated the influence of individual differences in emotion regulation difficulties on moral judgment. Study 1 examined whether individuals with high emotion regulation difficulties made a more deontological judgment. Study 2 explored the underlying mechanism using a process-dissociation approach, examining whether deo...

Introduction to a Forum on the Judgment-based Approach to Entrepreneurship

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Foss, Nicolai Juul; Klein, Peter G.

2015-01-01

Over the last three decades entrepreneurship has become a hot topic in economics and management. Much of the entrepreneurship research literature has built upon insights of economists such as Schumpeter, Knight, and Kirzner, each of whom has inspired a distinct strand of entrepreneurship theory...... and application. Schumpeterian innovation and Kirznerian alertness are the best-known concepts of entrepreneurship, but a newer research stream is building on Knight's idea of entrepreneurship as judgmental decision-making under uncertainty. What we call the judgment-based view models entrepreneurs as owning......, controlling, and combining heterogeneous assets, which differ in their attributes, and deploying these assets within a firm to produce goods and services in anticipation of economic profit. This Forum presents three papers that develop, extend, and challenge the judgment-based view of entrepreneurship...

Spatial Keyword Query Processing

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Chen, Lisi; Jensen, Christian S.; Wu, Dingming

2013-01-01

Geo-textual indices play an important role in spatial keyword query- ing. The existing geo-textual indices have not been compared sys- tematically under the same experimental framework. This makes it difficult to determine which indexing technique best supports specific functionality. We provide...... an all-around survey of 12 state- of-the-art geo-textual indices. We propose a benchmark that en- ables the comparison of the spatial keyword query performance. We also report on the findings obtained when applying the bench- mark to the indices, thus uncovering new insights that may guide index...

Instruction in Information Structuring Improves Bayesian Judgment in Intelligence Analysts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

David R. Mandel

2015-04-01

Full Text Available An experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of brief instruction in information structuring (i.e., representing and integrating information for improving the coherence of probability judgments and binary choices among intelligence analysts. Forty-three analysts were presented with comparable sets of Bayesian judgment problems before and immediately after instruction. After instruction, analysts’ probability judgments were more coherent (i.e., more additive and compliant with Bayes theorem. Instruction also improved the coherence of binary choices regarding category membership: after instruction, subjects were more likely to invariably choose the category to which they assigned the higher probability of a target’s membership. The research provides a rare example of evidence-based validation of effectiveness in instruction to improve the statistical assessment skills of intelligence analysts. Such instruction could also be used to improve the assessment quality of other types of experts who are required to integrate statistical information or make probabilistic assessments.

Reducing the impact bias in judgments of post-decisional affect

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nick Sevdalis

2009-06-01

Full Text Available People overestimate their affective reactions to future events and decisions --- a phenomenon that has been termed ``impact bias.'' Evidence suggests that completing a diary detailing events contemporaneous with the focal one de-biases judgments of affect. It is generally assumed that this is because diary completion helps people to realize that they will be distracted from the focal event. However, there is another possibility: de-biasing may occur because diary completion interferes with the processing responsible for the bias. In a first experiment, we showed that diary completion also lowers affect associated with past decisions. In a second experiment, we showed that solving anagrams has the same effect. A third experiment demonstrates that this is not because affect judgments are influenced by mood changes brought about by solving anagrams. Indeed, monitoring moods lowered affect in the same way as diary completion. It appears that cognitive tasks of any sort interfere with the processing required by judgments of affect.

Self-esteem and outcome fairness judgments: Differential use of procedural and outcome information

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Vermunt, R; van Knippenberg, D.; van Knippenberg, B.M.; Blaauw, E.

2001-01-01

Results of a survey of 222 detainees in Dutch jails and police stations showed that outcome-fairness judgments of individuals with high self-esteem were more strongly related to outcome considerations than to procedural considerations, whereas outcome-fairness judgments of individuals with low

Reciprocal Associations between Young Children's Developing Moral Judgments and Theory of Mind

Science.gov (United States)

Smetana, Judith G.; Jambon, Marc; Conry-Murray, Clare; Sturge-Apple, Melissa L.

2012-01-01

Associations between young children's developing theory of mind (ToM) and judgments of prototypical moral transgressions were examined 3 times across 1 year in 70 American middle class 2.5- to 4-year-olds. Separate path models controlling for cross-time stability in judgments, within-time associations, and children's age at Wave 1 indicated that…

Normative Judgments and Individual Essence.

Science.gov (United States)

De Freitas, Julian; Tobia, Kevin P; Newman, George E; Knobe, Joshua

2017-04-01

A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over time-that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types of features that people typically consider when making such judgments, to date, existing work has not explored how these judgments may be shaped by normative considerations. The present studies demonstrate that normative beliefs do appear to play an important role in people's beliefs about persistence. Specifically, people are more likely to judge that the identity of a given entity (e.g., a hypothetical nation) remains the same when its features improve (e.g., the nation becomes more egalitarian) than when its features deteriorate (e.g., the nation becomes more discriminatory). Study 1 provides a basic demonstration of this effect. Study 2 shows that this effect is moderated by individual differences in normative beliefs. Study 3 examines the underlying mechanism, which is the belief that, in general, various entities are essentially good. Study 4 directly manipulates beliefs about essence to show that the positivity bias regarding essences is causally responsible for the effect. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Judgment of facial expressions and depression persistence

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hale, WW

1998-01-01

In research it has been demonstrated that cognitive and interpersonal processes play significant roles in depression development and persistence. The judgment of emotions displayed in facial expressions by depressed patients allows for a better understanding of these processes. In this study, 48

Why People with More Emotion Regulation Difficulties Made a More Deontological Judgment: The Role of Deontological Inclinations.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Lisong; Li, Zhongquan; Wu, Xiaoyuan; Zhang, Ziyuan

2017-01-01

Previous studies have demonstrated the key role of emotion in moral judgment, and explored the relationship between emotion regulation and moral judgment. The present study investigated the influence of individual differences in emotion regulation difficulties on moral judgment. Study 1 examined whether individuals with high emotion regulation difficulties made a more deontological judgment. Study 2 explored the underlying mechanism using a process-dissociation approach, examining whether deontological inclinations and utilitarian inclinations separately or jointly accounted for the association. The results indicated that individuals with high emotion regulation difficulties rated the utilitarian actions less morally appropriate, and one's deontological inclinations mediated the association between emotion regulation difficulties and moral judgment.

Public's perception and judgment on nuclear power

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Choi, Young Sung; Kim, Jong Seok; Lee, Byung Wook

2000-01-01

A public's perception and judgment model on nuclear power is developed to reveal the structure of public acceptance toward nuclear power in Korea. This is somewhat a verification of an earlier study by the author using two independent sets of survey data. A perception model makes it possible to construct two major exploratory variables, perceived risk and perceived benefit. The difference of perception is analyzed for different groups such as gender, education difference, and different information channels. A judgment model helps identify influential factors that improve the acceptance of nuclear energy. Estimates of model parameters from independent data sets were not significantly different, which implies the validity of the model. Methodologies of this study can be used as the basis for investigating the structure of public perception of technological risks and benefits, designing a public information and risk communication program, and developing remedial policy actions to improve public acceptance

Judgment and Decision Making in Outdoor Adventure Leadership: A Dual-Process Model

Science.gov (United States)

Culp, Clinton A.

2016-01-01

From an examination of the current textbooks and literature concerning judgment and decision-making models used in outdoor adventure leadership, it is easy to see that they are still deeply rooted in the classical decision-making theory. In this article, I will (a) outline the importance of good judgment and decision making in an outdoor adventure…

Expert judgment in assessing radwaste risks: What Nevadans should know about Yucca Mountain

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Shrader-Frechette, K.

1992-06-01

For phenomena characterized by accurate and largely complete data, quantitative risk assessment (QRA) provides extraordinarily valuable and objective information. However, with phenomena for which the data, models, or probabilities are incomplete or uncertain, QRA may be less useful and more questionable, because its conclusions are typically empirically and theoretically underdetermined. In the face of empirical or theoretical underdetermination, scientists often are forced to make a number of methodological value judgments and inferences about how to estimate and evaluate the associated risks. The purpose of this project is to evaluate instances of methodological value judgments and invalid or imprecise inferences that have occurred in the QRA done for the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste facility. We shall show (1) that questionable methodological value judgments and inferences have occurred in some Yucca Mountain QRA'S; (2) that questionable judgments and inferences, similar to those in the Yucca Mountain studies, have occurred in previous QRA's done for other radiation-related facilities and have likely caused earlier QRA's to err in specific ways; and (3) that, because the value judgments and problems associated with some Yucca Mountain QRA's include repetitions of similar difficulties in earlier studies, therefore the QRA conclusions of some Yucca Mountain analyses are, at best, uncertain

Equality judgments cannot distinguish between attention effects on appearance and criterion: a reply to Schneider (2011).

Science.gov (United States)

Anton-Erxleben, Katharina; Abrams, Jared; Carrasco, Marisa

2011-01-01

Whether attention modulates the appearance of stimulus features is debated. Whereas many previous studies using a comparative judgment have found evidence for such an effect, two recent studies using an equality judgment have not. Critically, these studies have relied on the assumption that the equality paradigm yields bias-free PSE estimates and is as sensitive as the comparative judgment, without testing these assumptions. Anton-Erxleben, Abrams, and Carrasco (2010) compared comparative judgments and equality judgments with and without the manipulation of attention. They demonstrated that the equality paradigm is less sensitive than the comparative judgment and also bias-prone. Furthermore, they reported an effect of attention on the PSE using both paradigms. Schneider (2011) questions the validity of the latter finding, stating that the data in the equality experiment are corrupted because of skew in the response distributions. Notably, this argument supports the original conclusion by Anton-Erxleben et al.: that the equality paradigm is bias-prone. Additionally, the necessary analyses to show that the attention effect observed in Anton-Erxleben et al. was due to skew in the data were not conducted. Here, we provide these analyses and show that although the equality judgment is bias-prone, the effects we observe are consistent with an increase of apparent contrast by attention.

Time perception and depressive realism: judgment type, psychophysical functions and bias.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Diana E Kornbrot

Full Text Available The effect of mild depression on time estimation and production was investigated. Participants made both magnitude estimation and magnitude production judgments for five time intervals (specified in seconds from 3 sec to 65 sec. The parameters of the best fitting psychophysical function (power law exponent, intercept, and threshold were determined individually for each participant in every condition. There were no significant effects of mood (high BDI, low BDI or judgment (estimation, production on the mean exponent, n = .98, 95% confidence interval (.96-1.04 or on the threshold. However, the intercept showed a 'depressive realism' effect, where high BDI participants had a smaller deviation from accuracy and a smaller difference between estimation and judgment than low BDI participants. Accuracy bias was assessed using three measures of accuracy: difference, defined as psychological time minus physical time, ratio, defined as psychological time divided by physical time, and a new logarithmic accuracy measure defined as ln (ratio. The ln (ratio measure was shown to have approximately normal residuals when subjected to a mixed ANOVA with mood as a between groups explanatory factor and judgment and time category as repeated measures explanatory factors. The residuals of the other two accuracy measures flagrantly violated normality. The mixed ANOVAs of accuracy also showed a strong depressive realism effect, just like the intercepts of the psychophysical functions. There was also a strong negative correlation between estimation and production judgments. Taken together these findings support a clock model of time estimation, combined with additional cognitive mechanisms to account for the depressive realism effect. The findings also suggest strong methodological recommendations.

Evaluating comparative and equality judgments in contrast perception: attention alters appearance.

Science.gov (United States)

Anton-Erxleben, Katharina; Abrams, Jared; Carrasco, Marisa

2010-09-09

Covert attention not only improves performance in many visual tasks but also modulates the appearance of several visual features. Studies on attention and appearance have assessed subjective appearance using a task contingent upon a comparative judgment (e.g., M. Carrasco, S. Ling, & S. Read, 2004). Recently, K. A. Schneider and M. Komlos (2008) questioned the validity of those results because they did not find a significant effect of attention on contrast appearance using an equality task. They claim that such equality judgments are bias-free whereas comparative judgments are bias-prone and propose an alternative interpretation of the previous findings based on a decision bias. However, to date there is no empirical support for the superiority of the equality procedure. Here, we compare biases and sensitivity to shifts in perceived contrast of both paradigms. We measured contrast appearance using both a comparative and an equality judgment. Observers judged the contrasts of two simultaneously presented stimuli, while either the contrast of one stimulus was physically incremented (Experiments 1 and 2) or exogenous attention was drawn to it (Experiments 3 and 4). We demonstrate several methodological limitations of the equality paradigm. Nevertheless, both paradigms capture shifts in PSE due to physical and perceived changes in contrast and show that attention enhances apparent contrast.

Correlates of Prescription Opioid Legitimacy Judgments Among Community Pharmacists.

Science.gov (United States)

Hagemeier, Nicholas E; Alamian, Arsham; Murawski, Matthew M; Flippin, Heather; Hagy, Elizabeth J; Pack, Robert P

2016-05-11

Community pharmacists are legally required to evaluate and confirm the legitimacy of prescription opioids (POs) prior to dispensing. Yet, previous research has indicated community pharmacists perceive nearly 50% of dispensed POs to be issued lacking a legitimate medical purpose. To analyze correlates of PO legitimacy judgments across pharmacist and pharmacy setting characteristics. A cross-sectional study of 2000 Tennessee pharmacists was conducted during October and November of 2012. Community pharmacists' self-reported attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors specific to PO legitimacy were elicited. Step-wise multinomial logistic regression techniques were used to model correlates of PO legitimacy across low, moderate and high PO legitimacy estimations. Being female, practicing in a chain or independent practice setting, fear of employer disciplinary action if PO legitimacy is questioned, and self-confidence in one's ability to detect PO abuse increased the odds of low (vs. high) PO legitimacy estimation (p legitimacy estimation (p legitimacy judgments. Distinct correlates were noted across low and moderate as compared to high estimations of PO legitimacy. Legitimacy judgments can inform theoretical exploration of PO dispensing behaviors and inform intervention development targeted at reducing and preventing prescription drug abuse.

Large sexual-orientation-related differences in performance on mental rotation and judgment of line orientation tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Rahman, Qazi; Wilson, Glenn D

2003-01-01

This study examined the performance of heterosexual and homosexual men and women on 2 tests of spatial processing, mental rotation (MR) and Benton Judgment of Line Orientation (JLO). The sample comprised 60 heterosexual men, 60 heterosexual women, 60 homosexual men, and 60 homosexual women. There were significant main effects of gender (men achieving higher scores overall) and Gender x Sexual Orientation interactions. Decomposing these interactions revealed large differences between the male groups in favor of heterosexual men on JLO and MR performance. There was a modest difference between the female groups on MR total correct scores in favor of homosexual women but no differences in MR percentage correct. The evidence suggests possible variations in the parietal cortex between homosexual and heterosexual persons.

Creation of reliable relevance judgments in information retrieval systems evaluation experimentation through crowdsourcing: a review.

Science.gov (United States)

Samimi, Parnia; Ravana, Sri Devi

2014-01-01

Test collection is used to evaluate the information retrieval systems in laboratory-based evaluation experimentation. In a classic setting, generating relevance judgments involves human assessors and is a costly and time consuming task. Researchers and practitioners are still being challenged in performing reliable and low-cost evaluation of retrieval systems. Crowdsourcing as a novel method of data acquisition is broadly used in many research fields. It has been proven that crowdsourcing is an inexpensive and quick solution as well as a reliable alternative for creating relevance judgments. One of the crowdsourcing applications in IR is to judge relevancy of query document pair. In order to have a successful crowdsourcing experiment, the relevance judgment tasks should be designed precisely to emphasize quality control. This paper is intended to explore different factors that have an influence on the accuracy of relevance judgments accomplished by workers and how to intensify the reliability of judgments in crowdsourcing experiment.

Dissociation between judgments and outcome-expectancy measures in covariation learning: a signal detection theory approach.

Science.gov (United States)

Perales, José C; Catena, Andrés; Shanks, David R; González, José A

2005-09-01

A number of studies using trial-by-trial learning tasks have shown that judgments of covariation between a cue c and an outcome o deviate from normative metrics. Parameters based on trial-by-trial predictions were estimated from signal detection theory (SDT) in a standard causal learning task. Results showed that manipulations of P(c) when contingency (deltaP) was held constant did not affect participants' ability to predict the appearance of the outcome (d') but had a significant effect on response criterion (c) and numerical causal judgments. The association between criterion c and judgment was further demonstrated in 2 experiments in which the criterion was directly manipulated by linking payoffs to the predictive responses made by learners. In all cases, the more liberal the criterion c was, the higher judgments were. The results imply that the mechanisms underlying the elaboration of judgments and those involved in the elaboration of predictive responses are partially dissociable.

Time Perception and Depressive Realism: Judgment Type, Psychophysical Functions and Bias

OpenAIRE

Kornbrot, Diana E.; Msetfi, Rachel M.; Grimwood, Melvyn J.

2013-01-01

peer-reviewed The effect of mild depression on time estimation and production was investigated. Participants made both magnitude estimation and magnitude production judgments for five time intervals (specified in seconds) from 3 sec to 65 sec. The parameters of the best fitting psychophysical function (power law exponent, intercept, and threshold) were determined individually for each participant in every condition. There were no significant effects of mood (high BDI, low BDI) or judgment ...

Measurement of turbulent spatial structure and kinetic energy spectrum by exact temporal-to-spatial mapping

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Buchhave, Preben; Velte, Clara Marika

2017-01-01

distortions caused by Taylor’s hypothesis. The method is first confirmed to produce the correct statistics using computer simulations and later applied to measurements in some of the most difficult regions of a round turbulent jet—the non-equilibrium developing region and the outermost parts of the developed......We present a method for converting a time record of turbulent velocity measured at a point in a flow to a spatial velocity record consisting of consecutive convection elements. The spatial record allows computation of dynamic statistical moments such as turbulent kinetic wavenumber spectra...... and spatial structure functions in a way that completely bypasses the need for Taylor’s hypothesis. The spatial statistics agree with the classical counterparts, such as the total kinetic energy spectrum, at least for spatial extents up to the Taylor microscale. The requirements for applying the method...

Assessment of lexical semantic judgment abilities in alcohol ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

2013-11-06

Nov 6, 2013 ... Keywords. Alcoholism; brain; fMRI; language processing; lexical; semantic judgment .... (English for all subjects) and hours spent reading one/both languages. ..... and alcoholism on verbal and visuospatial learning. J. Nerv.

A note on the statistical analysis of point judgment matrices

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

MG Kabera

2013-06-01

Full Text Available The Analytic Hierarchy Process is a multicriteria decision making technique developed by Saaty in the 1970s. The core of the approach is the pairwise comparison of objects according to a single criterion using a 9-point ratio scale and the estimation of weights associated with these objects based on the resultant judgment matrix. In the present paper some statistical approaches to extracting the weights of objects from a judgment matrix are reviewed and new ideas which are rooted in the traditional method of paired comparisons are introduced.

Knowing right from wrong in mental arithmetic judgments: calibration of confidence predicts the development of accuracy.

Science.gov (United States)

Rinne, Luke F; Mazzocco, Michèle M M

2014-01-01

Does knowing when mental arithmetic judgments are right--and when they are wrong--lead to more accurate judgments over time? We hypothesize that the successful detection of errors (and avoidance of false alarms) may contribute to the development of mental arithmetic performance. Insight into error detection abilities can be gained by examining the "calibration" of mental arithmetic judgments-that is, the alignment between confidence in judgments and the accuracy of those judgments. Calibration may be viewed as a measure of metacognitive monitoring ability. We conducted a developmental longitudinal investigation of the relationship between the calibration of children's mental arithmetic judgments and their performance on a mental arithmetic task. Annually between Grades 5 and 8, children completed a problem verification task in which they rapidly judged the accuracy of arithmetic expressions (e.g., 25 + 50 = 75) and rated their confidence in each judgment. Results showed that calibration was strongly related to concurrent mental arithmetic performance, that calibration continued to develop even as mental arithmetic accuracy approached ceiling, that poor calibration distinguished children with mathematics learning disability from both low and typically achieving children, and that better calibration in Grade 5 predicted larger gains in mental arithmetic accuracy between Grades 5 and 8. We propose that good calibration supports the implementation of cognitive control, leading to long-term improvement in mental arithmetic accuracy. Because mental arithmetic "fluency" is critical for higher-level mathematics competence, calibration of confidence in mental arithmetic judgments may represent a novel and important developmental predictor of future mathematics performance.

Using expert judgments to explore robust alternatives for forest management under climate change.

Science.gov (United States)

McDaniels, Timothy; Mills, Tamsin; Gregory, Robin; Ohlson, Dan

2012-12-01

We develop and apply a judgment-based approach to selecting robust alternatives, which are defined here as reasonably likely to achieve objectives, over a range of uncertainties. The intent is to develop an approach that is more practical in terms of data and analysis requirements than current approaches, informed by the literature and experience with probability elicitation and judgmental forecasting. The context involves decisions about managing forest lands that have been severely affected by mountain pine beetles in British Columbia, a pest infestation that is climate-exacerbated. A forest management decision was developed as the basis for the context, objectives, and alternatives for land management actions, to frame and condition the judgments. A wide range of climate forecasts, taken to represent the 10-90% levels on cumulative distributions for future climate, were developed to condition judgments. An elicitation instrument was developed, tested, and revised to serve as the basis for eliciting probabilistic three-point distributions regarding the performance of selected alternatives, over a set of relevant objectives, in the short and long term. The elicitations were conducted in a workshop comprising 14 regional forest management specialists. We employed the concept of stochastic dominance to help identify robust alternatives. We used extensive sensitivity analysis to explore the patterns in the judgments, and also considered the preferred alternatives for each individual expert. The results show that two alternatives that are more flexible than the current policies are judged more likely to perform better than the current alternatives on average in terms of stochastic dominance. The results suggest judgmental approaches to robust decision making deserve greater attention and testing. © 2012 Society for Risk Analysis.

At the heart of morality lies neuro-visceral integration: lower cardiac vagal tone predicts utilitarian moral judgment

Science.gov (United States)

Kappes, Andreas; Rho, Yeojin; Van Bavel, Jay J.

2016-01-01

To not harm others is widely considered the most basic element of human morality. The aversion to harm others can be either rooted in the outcomes of an action (utilitarianism) or reactions to the action itself (deontology). We speculated that the human moral judgments rely on the integration of neural computations of harm and visceral reactions. The present research examined whether utilitarian or deontological aspects of moral judgment are associated with cardiac vagal tone, a physiological proxy for neuro-visceral integration. We investigated the relationship between cardiac vagal tone and moral judgment by using a mix of moral dilemmas, mathematical modeling and psychophysiological measures. An index of bipolar deontology-utilitarianism was correlated with resting heart rate variability (HRV)—an index of cardiac vagal tone—such that more utilitarian judgments were associated with lower HRV. Follow-up analyses using process dissociation, which independently quantifies utilitarian and deontological moral inclinations, provided further evidence that utilitarian (but not deontological) judgments were associated with lower HRV. Our results suggest that the functional integration of neural and visceral systems during moral judgments can restrict outcome-based, utilitarian moral preferences. Implications for theories of moral judgment are discussed. PMID:27317926

What makes moral dilemma judgments "utilitarian" or "deontological"?

Science.gov (United States)

Gawronski, Bertram; Beer, Jennifer S

2017-12-01

The distinction between utilitarianism and deontology has become a prevailing framework for conceptualizing moral judgment. According to the principle of utilitarianism, the morality of an action depends on its outcomes. In contrast, the principle of deontology states that the morality of an action depends on its consistency with moral norms. To identify the processes underlying utilitarian and deontological judgments, research in psychology and neuroscience has investigated responses to moral dilemmas that pit one principle against the other (e.g., trolley dilemma). However, the interpretation of responses in this paradigm is ambiguous, because the defining aspects of utilitarianism and deontology, outcomes and norms, are not manipulated. We illustrate how this shortcoming distorts interpretations of empirical findings and describe an alternative approach that overcomes the limitations of the traditional paradigm.

Associative Processes in Intuitive Judgment

OpenAIRE

Morewedge, Carey K.; Kahneman, Daniel

2010-01-01

Dual-system models of reasoning attribute errors of judgment to two failures. The automatic operations of a ?System 1? generate a faulty intuition, which the controlled operations of a ?System 2? fail to detect and correct. We identify System 1 with the automatic operations of associative memory and draw on research in the priming paradigm to describe how it operates. We explain how three features of associative memory?associative coherence, attribute substitution, and processing fluency?give...

Weighting Mean and Variability during Confidence Judgments

Science.gov (United States)

de Gardelle, Vincent; Mamassian, Pascal

2015-01-01

Humans can not only perform some visual tasks with great precision, they can also judge how good they are in these tasks. However, it remains unclear how observers produce such metacognitive evaluations, and how these evaluations might be dissociated from the performance in the visual task. Here, we hypothesized that some stimulus variables could affect confidence judgments above and beyond their impact on performance. In a motion categorization task on moving dots, we manipulated the mean and the variance of the motion directions, to obtain a low-mean low-variance condition and a high-mean high-variance condition with matched performances. Critically, in terms of confidence, observers were not indifferent between these two conditions. Observers exhibited marked preferences, which were heterogeneous across individuals, but stable within each observer when assessed one week later. Thus, confidence and performance are dissociable and observers’ confidence judgments put different weights on the stimulus variables that limit performance. PMID:25793275

Decisional Bias as Implicit Moral Judgment

Science.gov (United States)

Spring, Toni; Saltzstein, Herbert D.

2017-01-01

Decisional bias (false alarm rate) when judging the guilt/innocence of a suspect is offered as an implicit measure of moral judgment. Combining two data sets, 215 participants, ages 10-12, 13-15, and 16-18 watched the visually identical film involving a person setting a fire, framed either as (1) intentional but not resulting in a fire (BI-NF),…

Clinical judgment research on economic topics: Role of congruence of tasks in clinical practice.

Science.gov (United States)

Huttin, Christine C

2017-01-01

This paper discusses what can ensure the performance of judgment studies with an information design that integrates economics of medical systems, in the context of digitalization of healthcare. It is part of a series of 5 methodological papers on statistical procedures and problems to implement judgment research designs and decision models, especially to address cost of care, and ways to measure conversation on cost of care between physicians and patients, with unstructured data such as economic narratives to complement billing and financial information (e.g. cost cognitive cues in conjoint or reversed conjoint designs). The paper discusses how congruence of tasks can increase the reliability of data. It uses some results of two Meta reviews of judgment studies in different fields of applications: psychology, business, medical sciences and education. It compares tests for congruence in judgment studies and efficiency tests in econometric studies.

40 CFR 86.1851-01 - Application of good engineering judgment to manufacturers' decisions.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... engineering judgment in making all decisions called for under this subpart, including but not limited to... overlooked, that the decision was not made in good faith, or that the decision was not made with a rational... judgment to manufacturers' decisions. 86.1851-01 Section 86.1851-01 Protection of Environment ENVIRONMENTAL...

Disentangling the Effect of Valence and Arousal on Judgments Concerning Moral Transgressions.

Science.gov (United States)

de la Viña, Luis; Garcia-Burgos, David; Okan, Yasmina; Cándido, Antonio; González, Felisa

2015-08-10

An increasing body of research has investigated the effect of emotions on judgments concerning moral transgressions. Yet, few studies have controlled for arousal levels associated with the emotions. High arousal may affect moral processing by triggering attention to salient features of transgressions, independently of valence. Therefore previously documented differences in effects of negative and positive emotions may have been confounded by differences in arousal. We conducted two studies to shed light on this issue. In Study 1 we developed a questionnaire including vignettes selected on the basis of psychometrical properties (i.e., mean ratings of the actions and variability). This questionnaire was administered to participants in Study 2, after presenting them with selected pictures inducing different valence but equivalent levels of arousal. Negative pictures led to more severe moral judgments than neutral (p = .054, d = 0.60) and positive pictures (p = .002, d = 1.02), for vignettes that were not associated with extreme judgments. In contrast, positive pictures did not reliably affect judgments concerning such vignettes. These findings suggest that the observed effects of emotions cannot be accounted for by an increase in attention linked to the arousal which accompanies these emotions.

The impact of social roles on trait judgments: a critical reexamination.

Science.gov (United States)

Bosak, Janine; Sczesny, Sabine; Eagly, Alice H

2012-04-01

Consistent with social role theory's assumption that the role behavior of men and women shapes gender stereotypes, earlier experiments have found that men's and women's occupancy of the same role eliminated gender-stereotypical judgments of greater agency and lower communion in men than women. The shifting standards model raises the question of whether a shift to within-sex standards in judgments of men and women in roles could have masked underlying gender stereotypes. To examine this possibility, two experiments obtained judgments of men and women using measures that do or do not restrain shifts to within-sex standards. This measure variation did not affect the social role pattern of smaller perceived sex differences in the presence of role information. These findings thus support the social role theory claim that designations of identical roles for subgroups of men and women eliminate or reduce perceived sex differences.

An Experimental Test of How Selfies Change Social Judgments on Facebook.

Science.gov (United States)

Taylor, Samuel Hardman; Hinck, Alexandra S; Lim, Hajin

2017-10-01

Selfies are everywhere on social media. Research has focused only on who is posting selfies and has not addressed the audience members viewing selfies. This study aims to fill this gap by analyzing the judgments people make of selfies posted on Facebook. Using an online experiment, we test how including a selfie on a Facebook status update changes people's appraisals of narcissism, message appropriateness, and social attraction. We also consider how the valence and intimacy of the status update text interplay with the selfie to change social judgments. Participants rated posts with selfies as more narcissistic and inappropriate, and less socially attractive. Selfie evaluations also depended upon the valence and intimacy of the status update text. Gender of the selfie poster did not influence evaluation of posts. One implication from these results is that posting selfies on social media may lead to negative judgments about the poster.

Prejudice and the Plate: Effects of Weight Bias in Nutrition Judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Schuldt, Jonathon P; Guillory, Jamie E; Gay, Geri K

2016-01-01

As millions of people turn to social media for health information, better understanding the factors that guide health-related judgments and perceptions in this context is imperative. We report on two Web experiments (n>400 total) examining the power of society's widespread weight bias and related stereotypes to influence nutrition judgments in social media spaces. In Experiment 1, meals were judged as lower in nutritional quality when the person who recommended them (the source) was depicted as obese rather than of normal weight, an effect mediated by stereotypic beliefs about the source as a generally unhealthy person. Experiment 2 replicated this effect, which--notably--remained significant when controlling for objective nutritional information (calories and fat content). Results highlight spillover effects of weight bias that extend beyond person perception to color impressions of objects (here, food) that are associated with stigmatized attributes. Implications for everyday nutrition judgments and public health are considered.

Self-serving bias in attitude judgments : The use of person versus issue implicated language

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Martijn, C; van der Pligt, J; Spears, R

1996-01-01

This study examines participants' perceptions of the appropriateness of judgmental language to describe own, similar, and dissimilar attitudes. The judgmental language consisted of pre-tested adjectives that varied in terms of their descriptive content, evaluative connotation and type of

The memory state heuristic: A formal model based on repeated recognition judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Castela, Marta; Erdfelder, Edgar

2017-02-01

The recognition heuristic (RH) theory predicts that, in comparative judgment tasks, if one object is recognized and the other is not, the recognized one is chosen. The memory-state heuristic (MSH) extends the RH by assuming that choices are not affected by recognition judgments per se, but by the memory states underlying these judgments (i.e., recognition certainty, uncertainty, or rejection certainty). Specifically, the larger the discrepancy between memory states, the larger the probability of choosing the object in the higher state. The typical RH paradigm does not allow estimation of the underlying memory states because it is unknown whether the objects were previously experienced or not. Therefore, we extended the paradigm by repeating the recognition task twice. In line with high threshold models of recognition, we assumed that inconsistent recognition judgments result from uncertainty whereas consistent judgments most likely result from memory certainty. In Experiment 1, we fitted 2 nested multinomial models to the data: an MSH model that formalizes the relation between memory states and binary choices explicitly and an approximate model that ignores the (unlikely) possibility of consistent guesses. Both models provided converging results. As predicted, reliance on recognition increased with the discrepancy in the underlying memory states. In Experiment 2, we replicated these results and found support for choice consistency predictions of the MSH. Additionally, recognition and choice latencies were in agreement with the MSH in both experiments. Finally, we validated critical parameters of our MSH model through a cross-validation method and a third experiment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Norm Acquisition, Rational Judgment and Moral Particularism

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Westphal, Kenneth R.

2012-01-01

Moral particularism, defined as the view that moral judgment does not require moral principles, has become prominent both in moral philosophy and in philosophy of education. This article re-examines Nussbaum's case for particularism, based on Sophocles' "Antigone", because her stress on sensitive appreciation of circumstantial specifics is…

Exposure influences expressive timing judgments in music

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Honing, H.; Ladinig, O.

2009-01-01

This study is concerned with the question whether, and to what extent, listeners' previous exposure to music in everyday life, and expertise as a result of formal musical training, play a role in making expressive timing judgments in music. This was investigated by using a Web-based listening

A Study on the Link between Moral Judgment Competences and Critical Thinking Skills

Science.gov (United States)

Samanci, Nilay Keskin

2015-01-01

Although many studies have established a direct link between moral judgment competences and critical thinking skills, none has been found to reveal the nature of the link between these two skills in the national and international literature. The present study looked at biology and primary education teacher candidates' moral judgment and critical…

Respecting an Individual's Privacy Critical in Making Difficult Journalistic Judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Adams, Julian

1984-01-01

Discusses the criteria of "newsworthy" regarding news reporting and the right to privacy. Examines the thin line between what is legal and what is ethical to print and some components of the law to consider when making such decisions. (HTH)

Gender and Ethnic Stereotypes in Student Teachers' Judgments: A New Look from a Shifting Standards Perspective

Science.gov (United States)

Holder, Katharina; Kessels, Ursula

2017-01-01

Teacher judgments of student performance might be biased by stereotypes, which can result in disadvantages for members of negatively stereotyped social groups. On the basis of the shifting standards theory, we examined gender and ethnic biases in student teachers' judgments. According to this theory, whether such judgment biases are masked or…

Factors Influencing Nursing Students' Clinical Judgment: A Qualitative Directed Content Analysis in an Iranian Context.

Science.gov (United States)

Pouralizadeh, Moluk; Khankeh, Hamidreza; Ebadi, Abbas; Dalvandi, Asghar

2017-05-01

Clinical judgment is necessary for clinical decision making and enhancing it in nursing students improves health care quality. Since clinical judgment is an interactive phenomenon and dependent on context and culture, it can be affected by many different factors. To understand the experiences of Iranian nursing students and teachers about the factors influencing nursing students' clinical judgment. A qualitative study was conducted using a directed content analysis approach. In this study, purposive sampling and semi-structured interviews were applied with seven nursing students, six faculty member teachers and four clinical instructors from Guilan University of Medical Sciences, Gilan, Iran. The factors influencing nursing students' clinical judgment consisted of five main categories including thoughtful behaviour, professional ethics, use of evidence based care, the context of learning environment and individual and professional features of clinical teachers. Relying on the results of this research, teachers can create an appropriate educational condition and a safe psychological atmosphere, use instructional strategies strengthening deep thought processes, applying professional ethics and scientific evidence and principles to establish clinical judgment in nursing students.

A Three Step B2B Sales Model Based on Satisfaction Judgments

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Grünbaum, Niels Nolsøe

2015-01-01

. The insights produces can be applied for selling companies to craft close collaborative customer relationships in a systematic a d efficient way. The process of building customer relationships will be guided through actions that yields higher satisfaction judgments leading to loyal customers and finally......This paper aims to provide a coherent, detailed and integrative understanding of the mental processes (i.e. dimensions) that industrial buyers apply when forming satisfaction judgments in adjacent to new task buying situations. A qualitative inductive research strategy is utilized in this study...... companies’ perspective. The buying center members applied satisfaction dimension when forming satisfaction judgments. Moreover, the focus and importance of the identified satisfaction dimensions fluctuated pending on the phase of the buying process. Based on the findings a three step sales model is proposed...

A Three Step B2B Sales Model Based on Satisfaction Judgments

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Grünbaum, Niels Nolsøe

2015-01-01

. The insights produces can be applied for selling companies to craft close collaborative customer relationships in a systematic ad efficient way. The process of building customer relationships will be guided through actions that yields higher satisfaction judgments leading to loyal customers and finally......This paper aims to provide a coherent, detailed and integrative understanding of the mental processes (i.e. dimensions) that industrial buyers apply when forming satisfaction judgments in adjacent to new task buying situations. A qualitative inductive research strategy is utilized in this study...... companies‘ perspective. The buying center members applied satisfaction dimension when forming satisfaction judgments. Moreover, the focus and importance of the identified satisfaction dimensions fluctuated pending on the phase of the buying process. Based on the findings a three step sales model is proposed...

Emerging Technologies for Environmental Remediation: Integrating Data and Judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Bates, Matthew E; Grieger, Khara D; Trump, Benjamin D; Keisler, Jeffrey M; Plourde, Kenton J; Linkov, Igor

2016-01-05

Emerging technologies present significant challenges to researchers, decision-makers, industry professionals, and other stakeholder groups due to the lack of quantitative risk, benefit, and cost data associated with their use. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) can support early decisions for emerging technologies when data is too sparse or uncertain for traditional risk assessment. It does this by integrating expert judgment with available quantitative and qualitative inputs across multiple criteria to provide relative technology scores. Here, an MCDA framework provides preliminary insights on the suitability of emerging technologies for environmental remediation by comparing nanotechnology and synthetic biology to conventional remediation methods. Subject matter experts provided judgments regarding the importance of criteria used in the evaluations and scored the technologies with respect to those criteria. The results indicate that synthetic biology may be preferred over nanotechnology and conventional methods for high expected benefits and low deployment costs but that conventional technology may be preferred over emerging technologies for reduced risks and development costs. In the absence of field data regarding the risks, benefits, and costs of emerging technologies, structuring evidence-based expert judgment through a weighted hierarchy of topical questions may be helpful to inform preliminary risk governance and guide emerging technology development and policy.

Punishment and Sympathy Judgments: Is the Quality of Mercy Strained in Asperger's Syndrome?

Science.gov (United States)

Channon, Shelley; Fitzpatrick, Sian; Drury, Helena; Taylor, Isabelle; Lagnado, David

2010-01-01

This study examined reasoning about wrongdoing in people with Asperger's syndrome (AS) and matched healthy controls in relation to car accident scenarios. The two groups made similar judgments with respect to degree of driver negligence for both fines imposed and sympathy ratings. They also made similar judgments of fines in relation to the type…

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Judgment, but Were Afraid to Ask!

Science.gov (United States)

Priest, Simon

1990-01-01

Outdoor leaders with sound judgment can gather many specific experiences, induce them into a collection of general concepts, store these as memory maps in the mind, later recall the general concepts as needed, and deduce a specific prediction from them. Proposes that evaluative reflection after a judgment is made is the component missing from most…

THE FREE MOVEMENT OF JUDGMENTS AND JUDICIAL DECISIONS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gheorghe BOCSAN

2018-05-01

Full Text Available EU substantive law is based on a system of circulation freedoms which encompasses the idea that the Union, its internal market or other areas of legal rule, such as the area of freedom, security and justice are, above all, spaces of liberty, which rejects the limits represented before by internal borders. So, the essential EU integrative concepts could be formulated as free circulation principles or instruments aiming to such freedoms. The free movement of judgments and judicial decisions represents concomitantly the consequence and the expression formulated through freedom of circulation, which is specific to EU law, of the principle of mutual recognition of judgments and judicial decisions between member states in both civil and criminal matters. This principle is based upon the mutual trust that member states owes to each other. Finally, the study analyses the principle of mutual recognition in EU law as a transplant from the internal market in the judicial cooperation in criminal matters, which produces numerous application instruments, among them the first and most productive is the European Arrest Warrant. This paper studies also the common standard and paradigm that all instruments based upon the free movement of judgments and judicial decision have, amongst others: the warrant/order typology, direct communication between the competent authorities of Member States, elimination of the recognition procedure, the express mentioning of the mandatory and optional grounds of refusal, the partial removal of double criminality requirement etc.

A Mind-Reader Does Not Always Have Deontological Moral Judgments and Prosocial Behavior: A Developmental Perspective.

Science.gov (United States)

Hao, Jian; Liu, Yanchun

2016-01-01

The rationalistic theories of morality emphasize that reasoning plays an important role in moral judgments and prosocial behavior. Theory of mind as a reasoning ability in the mental domain has been considered a facilitator of moral development. The present study examined whether theory of mind was consistently positively associated with morality from middle childhood to late adulthood. Two hundred and four participants, including 48 elementary school children, 45 adolescents, 62 younger adults, and 49 older adults, completed theory of mind, moral judgment and prosocial behavior tasks. Theory of mind was measured with strange stories that tapped into an understanding of lies, white lies, double bluffs, irony, and persuasion. Moral judgments were measured with variants of the trolley dilemma. Prosocial behavior was measured through participants' performance in an interactive situation in which a helping request was made. The results indicated specific rather than similar developmental trajectories of theory of mind, moral judgments, and prosocial behavior. There was a quadratic trend in theory of mind, a combination of quadratic and cubic trends in deontological moral judgments and a linear decline in helping behavior. It is thus suggested that theory of mind may not be associated with morality in an unchanging way during development. Further results indicated that theory of mind and deontological moral judgments were negatively correlated for children, adolescents, and older adults but positively correlated for younger adults. Theory of mind and helping behavior were positively correlated for children but negatively correlated for adolescents. However, the relationships disappeared in adulthood. In sum, the present study reveals that theory of mind may be a nice tool for its facilitation of deontological moral judgments and prosocial behavior, but it may also be a nasty tool for its blocking of deontological moral judgments and prosocial behavior. Moreover, theory

At the heart of morality lies neuro-visceral integration: lower cardiac vagal tone predicts utilitarian moral judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Park, Gewnhi; Kappes, Andreas; Rho, Yeojin; Van Bavel, Jay J

2016-10-01

To not harm others is widely considered the most basic element of human morality. The aversion to harm others can be either rooted in the outcomes of an action (utilitarianism) or reactions to the action itself (deontology). We speculated that the human moral judgments rely on the integration of neural computations of harm and visceral reactions. The present research examined whether utilitarian or deontological aspects of moral judgment are associated with cardiac vagal tone, a physiological proxy for neuro-visceral integration. We investigated the relationship between cardiac vagal tone and moral judgment by using a mix of moral dilemmas, mathematical modeling and psychophysiological measures. An index of bipolar deontology-utilitarianism was correlated with resting heart rate variability (HRV)-an index of cardiac vagal tone-such that more utilitarian judgments were associated with lower HRV. Follow-up analyses using process dissociation, which independently quantifies utilitarian and deontological moral inclinations, provided further evidence that utilitarian (but not deontological) judgments were associated with lower HRV. Our results suggest that the functional integration of neural and visceral systems during moral judgments can restrict outcome-based, utilitarian moral preferences. Implications for theories of moral judgment are discussed. © The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Effects of Suboptimally Presented Erotic Pictures on Moral Judgments: A Cross-Cultural Comparison.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Antonio Olivera-La Rosa

Full Text Available Previous research has identified a set of core factors that influence moral judgments. The present study addresses the interplay between moral judgments and four factors: (a incidental affects, (b sociocultural context, (c type of dilemma, and (d participant's sex. We asked participants in two different countries (Colombia and Spain to judge the acceptability of actions in response to personal and impersonal moral dilemmas. Before each dilemma an affective prime (erotic, pleasant or neutral pictures was presented suboptimally. Our results show that: a relative to neutral priming, erotic primes increase the acceptance of harm for a greater good (i.e., more utilitarian judgments, b relative to Colombians, Spanish participants rated causing harm as less acceptable, c relative to impersonal dilemmas, personal dilemmas reduced the acceptance of harm, and d relative to men, women were less likely to consider harm acceptable. Our results are congruent with findings showing that sex is a crucial factor in moral cognition, and they extend previous research by showing the interaction between culture and incidental factors in the making of moral judgments.

Effects of Suboptimally Presented Erotic Pictures on Moral Judgments: A Cross-Cultural Comparison.

Science.gov (United States)

Olivera-La Rosa, Antonio; Corradi, Guido; Villacampa, Javier; Martí-Vilar, Manuel; Arango, Olber Eduardo; Rosselló, Jaume

2016-01-01

Previous research has identified a set of core factors that influence moral judgments. The present study addresses the interplay between moral judgments and four factors: (a) incidental affects, (b) sociocultural context, (c) type of dilemma, and (d) participant's sex. We asked participants in two different countries (Colombia and Spain) to judge the acceptability of actions in response to personal and impersonal moral dilemmas. Before each dilemma an affective prime (erotic, pleasant or neutral pictures) was presented suboptimally. Our results show that: a) relative to neutral priming, erotic primes increase the acceptance of harm for a greater good (i.e., more utilitarian judgments), b) relative to Colombians, Spanish participants rated causing harm as less acceptable, c) relative to impersonal dilemmas, personal dilemmas reduced the acceptance of harm, and d) relative to men, women were less likely to consider harm acceptable. Our results are congruent with findings showing that sex is a crucial factor in moral cognition, and they extend previous research by showing the interaction between culture and incidental factors in the making of moral judgments.

Generating human reliability estimates using expert judgment. Volume 1. Main report

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Comer, M.K.; Seaver, D.A.; Stillwell, W.G.; Gaddy, C.D.

1984-11-01

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is conducting a research program to determine the practicality, acceptability, and usefulness of several different methods for obtaining human reliability data and estimates that can be used in nuclear power plant probabilistic risk assessment (PRA). One method, investigated as part of this overall research program, uses expert judgment to generate human error probability (HEP) estimates and associated uncertainty bounds. The project described in this document evaluated two techniques for using expert judgment: paired comparisons and direct numerical estimation. Volume 1 of this report provides a brief overview of the background of the project, the procedure for using psychological scaling techniques to generate HEP estimates and conclusions from evaluation of the techniques. Results of the evaluation indicate that techniques using expert judgment should be given strong consideration for use in developing HEP estimates. In addition, HEP estimates for 35 tasks related to boiling water reactors (BMRs) were obtained as part of the evaluation. These HEP estimates are also included in the report

Moral judgment and its relation to second-order theory of mind.

Science.gov (United States)

Fu, Genyue; Xiao, Wen S; Killen, Melanie; Lee, Kang

2014-08-01

Recent research indicates that moral judgment and 1st-order theory of mind abilities are related. What is not known, however, is how 2nd-order theory of mind is related to moral judgment. In the present study, we extended previous findings by administering a morally relevant theory of mind task (an accidental transgressor) to 4- to 7-year-old Chinese children (N = 79) and analyzing connections with 2nd-order theory of mind understanding. Using hierarchical multiple regression analyses, we found that above and beyond age, children's 1st-order theory of mind and 2nd-order theory of mind each significantly and uniquely contributed to children's moral evaluations of the intention in the accidental transgression. These findings highlight the important roles that 1st- and 2nd-order theory of mind play in leading children to make appropriate moral judgments based on an actor's intention in a social situation. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Assisting the High Administrative Court in Restricting Too Broad a Concept of Academic Judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Cardao-Pito, Tiago

2016-01-01

I have received substantial monetary compensation and a formal apology from my first doctoral school, and a Ph.D. from another university. This essay describes my personal view on discussing the boundaries of academic judgment and research supervision with the ombudsman agency for higher education, and at the High Administrative Court of England and Wales. The Court's judicial doctrine addresses substantial research accountability matters. It clarifies that although the Court and ombudsman agency must not interfere with academic judgment, not everything done by an academic can be considered as academic judgment. A Ph.D. supervisor can seriously fail to perform his/her duties.

Selective impairment of cognitive empathy for moral judgment in adults with high functioning autism.

Science.gov (United States)

Gleichgerrcht, Ezequiel; Torralva, Teresa; Rattazzi, Alexia; Marenco, Victoria; Roca, María; Manes, Facundo

2013-10-01

Faced with a moral dilemma, conflict arises between a cognitive controlled response aimed at maximizing welfare, i.e. the utilitarian judgment, and an emotional aversion to harm, i.e. the deontological judgment. In the present study, we investigated moral judgment in adult individuals with high functioning autism/Asperger syndrome (HFA/AS), a clinical population characterized by impairments in prosocial emotions and social cognition. In Experiment 1, we compared the response patterns of HFA/AS participants and neurotypical controls to moral dilemmas with low and high emotional saliency. We found that HFA/AS participants more frequently delivered the utilitarian judgment. Their perception of appropriateness of moral transgression was similar to that of controls, but HFA/AS participants reported decreased levels of emotional reaction to the dilemma. In Experiment 2, we explored the way in which demographic, clinical and social cognition variables including emotional and cognitive aspects of empathy and theory of mind influenced moral judgment. We found that utilitarian HFA/AS participants showed a decreased ability to infer other people's thoughts and to understand their intentions, as measured both by performance on neuropsychological tests and through dispositional measures. We conclude that greater prevalence of utilitarianism in HFA/AS is associated with difficulties in specific aspects of social cognition.

Effects of Incidental Emotions on Moral Dilemma Judgments: An Analysis Using the CNI Model.

Science.gov (United States)

Gawronski, Bertram; Conway, Paul; Armstrong, Joel; Friesdorf, Rebecca; Hütter, Mandy

2018-02-01

Effects of incidental emotions on moral dilemma judgments have garnered interest because they demonstrate the context-dependent nature of moral decision-making. Six experiments (N = 727) investigated the effects of incidental happiness, sadness, and anger on responses in moral dilemmas that pit the consequences of a given action for the greater good (i.e., utilitarianism) against the consistency of that action with moral norms (i.e., deontology). Using the CNI model of moral decision-making, we further tested whether the three kinds of emotions shape moral dilemma judgments by influencing (a) sensitivity to consequences, (b) sensitivity to moral norms, or (c) general preference for inaction versus action regardless of consequences and moral norms (or some combination of the three). Incidental happiness reduced sensitivity to moral norms without affecting sensitivity to consequences or general preference for inaction versus action. Incidental sadness and incidental anger did not show any significant effects on moral dilemma judgments. The findings suggest a central role of moral norms in the contribution of emotional responses to moral dilemma judgments, requiring refinements of dominant theoretical accounts and supporting the value of formal modeling approaches in providing more nuanced insights into the determinants of moral dilemma judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Expert judgment in analysis of human and organizational behaviour at nuclear power plants

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Reiman, L [Finnish Centre for Radiation and Nuclear Safety, Helsinki (Finland). Dept. of Nuclear Safety

1994-12-01

Probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) of a nuclear power plant includes an assessment of the probability of each event sequence that can lead to a reactor core damage and of their consequences. Despite increasing maturity of PSA methods, there are still several problems in their use. These include the assessment of human reliability and the impact of organizational factors on plant safety. The assessment of both these issues is based on expert judgment. Therefore, the use of expert judgment in analysis of human and organizational behaviour was studied theoretically and in practical case studies in this thesis. Human errors were analysed in two case studies. In the first study cognitive actions of control room operators were analysed. For this purpose methods were developed for the qualitative and quantitative phases of the analysis. Errors of test and maintenance personnel were analysed in the second case study. Especially the dependence of errors between sequential tasks performed in redundant subsystems of a safety system was studied. A method to assess organizational behaviour was developed and applied in the third case study. The three case studies demonstrated that expert judgment can be used in the analysis of human reliability and organizational behaviour taking into account the observations made and the remarks presented in the study. However, significant uncertainties are related with expert judgment. Recommendations are presented concerning the use of different methods. Also, some insights are presented into how reliance on expert judgment could be reduced. (241 refs., 20 figs., 36 tabs.).

Expert judgment in analysis of human and organizational behaviour at nuclear power plants

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Reiman, L.

1994-12-01

Probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) of a nuclear power plant includes an assessment of the probability of each event sequence that can lead to a reactor core damage and of their consequences. Despite increasing maturity of PSA methods, there are still several problems in their use. These include the assessment of human reliability and the impact of organizational factors on plant safety. The assessment of both these issues is based on expert judgment. Therefore, the use of expert judgment in analysis of human and organizational behaviour was studied theoretically and in practical case studies in this thesis. Human errors were analysed in two case studies. In the first study cognitive actions of control room operators were analysed. For this purpose methods were developed for the qualitative and quantitative phases of the analysis. Errors of test and maintenance personnel were analysed in the second case study. Especially the dependence of errors between sequential tasks performed in redundant subsystems of a safety system was studied. A method to assess organizational behaviour was developed and applied in the third case study. The three case studies demonstrated that expert judgment can be used in the analysis of human reliability and organizational behaviour taking into account the observations made and the remarks presented in the study. However, significant uncertainties are related with expert judgment. Recommendations are presented concerning the use of different methods. Also, some insights are presented into how reliance on expert judgment could be reduced. (241 refs., 20 figs., 36 tabs.)

[Effects of mere subliminal exposure on trait judgments and the role of stereotyped knowledge].

Science.gov (United States)

Yamada, Ayumi

2004-06-01

This study investigated the effects of repeated exposures to male and female targets on trait impressions and the role of stereotyped knowledge for the target's social category in impression formation process. The participants were repeatedly exposed to slides of male and female faces for subliminal durations. For each of 12 pairs containing both previously presented slide and newly presented slide, the participants made forced-choice liking judgments (Experiment 1), trait judgments (Experiment 2) and recognition judgments (Experiments 1 and 2). It was found that participants' attitude toward the targets became more positive, even though target recognition was not significantly greater than the chance level. Yet, when the dimension of judgment was stereotypically associated with the target's social category, exposure effects were obtained for the targets whose social category and its dimension were inferentially matched, but not obtained for the targets whose social category and its dimension were not inferentially matched. Some theoretical implications of the role of social category information in the mere exposure phenomenon are discussed.

Reflections on Self-Reflection: Contemplating Flawed Self-Judgments in the Clinic, Classroom, and Office Cubicle.

Science.gov (United States)

Dunning, David; Heath, Chip; Suls, Jerry M

2018-03-01

We reflect back on our 2004 monograph reviewing the implications of faulty self-judgment for health, education, and the workplace. The review proved popular, no doubt because the importance of accurate self-assessment is best reflected in just how broad the literature is that touches on this topic. We discuss opportunities and challenges to be found in the future study of self-judgment accuracy and error, and suggest that designing interventions aimed at improving self-judgments may prove to be a worthwhile but complex and nuanced task.

On the role of attention and emotion in morality: attentional control modulates unrelated disgust in moral judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Van Dillen, Lotte F; van der Wal, Reine C; van den Bos, Kees

2012-09-01

The emotion of disgust can influence people's moral judgments, even if this emotion objectively is unrelated to the moral judgment in question. The present work demonstrates that attentional control regulates this effect. In three studies, disgust was induced. In an unrelated part of the studies, participants then judged a moral transgression. Disgust resulted in more severe moral judgments when attentional control (either measured by means of individual predisposition or manipulated with experimental control) was weak as opposed to strong (Studies 1-3). Findings further showed that attentional control mediated the positive relation between the intensity of participants' disgust responses and the severity of their moral judgments (Study 2). Moreover, attentional control has its effects through the regulation of affective processing (Study 3). Taken together, the findings suggest that unrelated influences of disgust on moral judgments are contingent on the attention system.

Perception versus reality: a comparative study of the clinical judgment skills of nurses during a simulated activity.

Science.gov (United States)

Fenske, Cynthia L; Harris, Margaret A; Aebersold, Michelle L; Hartman, Laurie S

2013-09-01

This study was conducted to determine how closely nurses' perceptions of their clinical judgment abilities matched their demonstrated clinical judgment skills during a simulation. Seventy-four registered nurses participated in a simulation using a video format. After the simulation, the nurses self-assessed their performance using the Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric. This rubric was then used to rate the nurses' actual performance in the simulation activity. The study results showed a significant discrepancy between nurses' perceptions of their own clinical judgment abilities and their demonstrated clinical judgment skills. Age and length of nursing experience enhanced the difference between the findings of self-assessment and actual performance. Younger nurses and those with 1 year or less of nursing experience were significantly more likely to have self-assessed their abilities at a much higher level compared with their actual skills. Copyright 2013, SLACK Incorporated.

Explaining sexual harassment judgments: looking beyond gender of the rater.

Science.gov (United States)

O'Connor, Maureen; Gutek, Barbara A; Stockdale, Margaret; Geer, Tracey M; Melançon, Renée

2004-02-01

In two decades of research on sexual harassment, one finding that appears repeatedly is that gender of the rater influences judgments about sexual harassment such that women are more likely than men to label behavior as sexual harassment. Yet, sexual harassment judgments are complex, particularly in situations that culminate in legal proceedings. And, this one variable, gender, may have been overemphasized to the exclusion of other situational and rater characteristic variables. Moreover, why do gender differences appear? As work by Wiener and his colleagues have done (R. L. Wiener et al., 2002; R. L. Wiener & L. Hurt, 2000; R. L. Wiener, L. Hurt, B. Russell, K. Mannen, & C. Gasper, 1997), this study attempts to look beyond gender to answer this question. In the studies reported here, raters (undergraduates and community adults), either read a written scenario or viewed a videotaped reenactment of a sexual harassment trial. The nature of the work environment was manipulated to see what, if any, effect the context would have on gender effects. Additionally, a number of rater characteristics beyond gender were measured, including ambivalent sexism attitudes of the raters, their judgments of complainant credibility, and self-referencing that might help explain rater judgments. Respondent gender, work environment, and community vs. student sample differences produced reliable differences in sexual harassment ratings in both the written and video trial versions of the study. The gender and sample differences in the sexual harassment ratings, however, are explained by a model which incorporates hostile sexism, perceptions of the complainants credibility, and raters' own ability to put themselves in the complainant's position (self-referencing).

Judgments of Sexism: A Comparison of the Subtlety of Sexism Measures and Sources of Variability in Judgments of Sexism

Science.gov (United States)

Swim, Janet K.; Mallett, Robyn; Russo-Devosa, Yvonne; Stangor, Charles

2005-01-01

We compared the subtlety of four measures of sexism and sources of variation in male and female psychology students' judgments that beliefs from these scales and everyday behaviors were sexist. Participants judged traditional gender role and hostile sexist beliefs as more sexist than benevolent and modern sexist beliefs, indicating the latter were…

On Standard and Taste. Wittgenstein and Aesthetic Judgment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jean-Pierre Cometti

2013-05-01

Full Text Available The question of aesthetic judgment is related to a lot of paradoxes that have marked sustainably the reflection on arts, and even arts as such during their modern history. These paradoxes have found a first formulation, apparently clear, in the very famous Hume's essay: "On the standard of taste", but without to lead to a real resolution. In this paper, I would like to approach the question of Hume by starting from what Wittgenstein suggested about aesthetic judgment in his Cambridge lectures. To this end, I will try to give a wittgensteinian reading of Hume's essay, in order to show that though the question of aesthetic judgment makes certainly sense, the way of considering it - like the way Kant shall consider it later - can be regarded as typical of difficulties Wittgenstein tried to overcome in his investigations on rules. By giving an alternative formulation to this question, we should be able to examine differently the problems of the aesthetic judgment, to underline more precisely the originality of Wittgenstein's approach, and perhaps to better grasp what are its consequences, not only for a better comprehension of the relationship between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and art, but for the type of perplexity to which we must face everytime we meet the paradox inherent to the question of aesthetic appreciation as such: how can we conceive the very idea of a standard involving a normative meaning without making to faint what gives to a work of art its value. We shall see that Wittgenstein’s suggestions, though their contribution to a better understanding of this question is still affected by some ambiguities, are to be reconsidered under the light of his anti-essentialism, and that these ambiguities can be dissipated by dissociating, on one hand, what belongs to his own tastes or to his related thoughts and on the other hand what we can conceive through the ways which were opened by his philosophy beyond his personal inclinations. Despite

‘Utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good

OpenAIRE

Kahane, Guy; Everett, Jim A.C.; Earp, Brian D.; Farias, Miguel; Savulescu, Julian

2015-01-01

A growing body of research has focused on so-called ?utilitarian? judgments in moral dilemmas in which participants have to choose whether to sacrifice one person in order to save the lives of a greater number. However, the relation between such ?utilitarian? judgments and genuine utilitarian impartial concern for the greater good remains unclear. Across four studies, we investigated the relationship between ?utilitarian? judgment in such sacrificial dilemmas and a range of traits, attitudes,...

Job Status Differences In Employees' Judgment Of Organisational ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The study was designed to examine employees' status differences on their judgment of organizational restructuring policy effectiveness. The survey research was carried out in three companies in Lagos Metropolis, Nigeria. The companies were restructuring their operations by adopting a Total Quality Management Policy.

Judgments of widely held beliefs about psychological phenomena ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Lay understandings of human cognition, affect, and behaviour often diverge from the findings of scientific investigations. The present study examined South African fourth year psychology students' judgments about the factual correctness of statements of psychological phenomena that have been demonstrated to be ...

Authority dependence and judgments of utilitarian harm.

Science.gov (United States)

Piazza, Jared; Sousa, Paulo; Holbrook, Colin

2013-09-01

Three studies tested the conditions under which people judge utilitarian harm to be authority dependent (i.e., whether its right or wrongness depends on the ruling of an authority). In Study 1, participants judged the right or wrongness of physical abuse when used as an interrogation method anticipated to yield useful information for preventing future terrorist attacks. The ruling of the military authority towards the harm was manipulated (prohibited vs. prescribed) and found to significantly influence judgments of the right or wrongness of inflicting harm. Study 2 established a boundary condition with regards to the influence of authority, which was eliminated when the utility of the harm was definitely obtained rather than forecasted. Finally, Study 3 replicated the findings of Studies 1-2 in a completely different context-an expert committee's ruling about the harming of chimpanzees for biomedical research. These results are discussed as they inform ongoing debates regarding the role of authority in moderating judgments of complex and simple harm. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Procedures for using expert judgment to estimate human-error probabilities in nuclear power plant operations

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Seaver, D.A.; Stillwell, W.G.

1983-03-01

This report describes and evaluates several procedures for using expert judgment to estimate human-error probabilities (HEPs) in nuclear power plant operations. These HEPs are currently needed for several purposes, particularly for probabilistic risk assessments. Data do not exist for estimating these HEPs, so expert judgment can provide these estimates in a timely manner. Five judgmental procedures are described here: paired comparisons, ranking and rating, direct numerical estimation, indirect numerical estimation and multiattribute utility measurement. These procedures are evaluated in terms of several criteria: quality of judgments, difficulty of data collection, empirical support, acceptability, theoretical justification, and data processing. Situational constraints such as the number of experts available, the number of HEPs to be estimated, the time available, the location of the experts, and the resources available are discussed in regard to their implications for selecting a procedure for use

The development of intention-based sociomoral judgment and distribution behavior from a third-party stance.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Jing; Tomasello, Michael

2018-03-01

The current study investigated children's intention-based sociomoral judgments and distribution behavior from a third-party stance. An actor puppet showed either positive or negative intention toward a target puppet, which had previously performed a prosocial or antisocial action toward others (i.e., children witnessed various types of indirect reciprocity). Children (3- and 5-year-olds) were asked to make sociomoral judgments and to distribute resources to the actor puppet. Results showed that 5-year-olds were more likely than 3-year-olds to be influenced by intention when they made their judgment and distributed resources. The target's previous actions affected only 5-year-olds' intent-based social preference. These results suggest that children's judgments about intent-based indirect reciprocity develop from ages 3 to 5 years. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Are happier people less judgmental of other people's selfish behaviors? Experimental survey evidence from trust and gift exchange games.

Science.gov (United States)

Drouvelis, Michalis; Powdthavee, Nattavudh

2015-10-01

What determines people's moral judgments of selfish behaviors? Here we study whether people's normative views in trust and gift exchange games, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance, are themselves functions of positive emotions. We use experimental survey methods to investigate the moral judgments of impartial observers empirically, and explore whether we could influence subsequent judgments by deliberately making some individuals happier. We find that moral judgments of selfish behaviors in the economic context depend strongly on the behavior of the interaction partner of the judged person, but their relationships are significantly moderated by an increase in happiness for the person making the judgment.

A coordination class analysis of college students' judgments about animated motion

Science.gov (United States)

Thaden-Koch, Thomas Christian

The coordination class construct was invented by di5essa and Sherin to clarify what it means to learn and use scientific concepts. A coordination class is defined to consist of readout strategies, which guide observation, and the causal net, which contains knowledge necessary for making inferences from observations. A coordination class, as originally specified, reliably extracts a certain class of information from a variety of situations. The coordination class construct is relatively new. To examine its utility, transcripts of interviews with college students were analyzed in terms of the coordination class construct. In the interviews, students judged the realism of several computer animations depicting balls rolling on a pair of tracks. When shown animations with only one ball, students made judgments consistent with focusing on the ball's speed changes. Adding a second ball to each animation strongly affected judgments made by students taking introductory physics courses, but had a smaller effect on judgments made by students taking a psychology course. Reasoning was described in this analysis as the coordination of readouts about animations with causal net elements related to realistic motion. Decision-making was characterized both for individual students and for groups by the causal net elements expressed, by the types of readouts reported, and by the coordination processes involved. The coordination class construct was found useful for describing the elements and processes of student decision-making, but little evidence was found to suggest that the students studied possessed reliable coordination classes. Students' causal nets were found to include several appropriate expectations about realistic motion. Several students reached judgments that appeared contrary to their expectations and reported mutually incompatible expectations. Descriptions of students' decision-making processes often included faulty readouts, or feedback loops in which causal net

Overcoming difficult conversations in clinical supervision

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Williams B

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Brett Williams,1 Christine King,1 Tanya Edlington,21Department of Community Emergency Health and Paramedic Practice, Monash University, Franskton, VIC, 2The Conversation Clinic Pty Ltd, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Background: Clinical supervisors are responsible for managing many facets of clinical learning and face a range of challenges when the need for "difficult" conversations arises, including the need to manage conflict and relationships. Methods: Spotlight on Conversations Workshop was developed to improve the capacity of clinical supervisors to engage in difficult conversations. They were designed to challenge the mindset of clinical supervisors about difficult conversations with students, the consequences of avoiding difficult conversations, and to offer activities for practicing difficult conversations. Preworkshop, postworkshop, and 4-month follow-up evaluations assessed improvements in knowledge, intent to improve, and confidence along with workshop satisfaction. Results: Nine workshops were delivered in a range of locations across Victoria, Australia, involving a total of 117 clinical supervisors. Preworkshop evaluations illustrated that more than half of the participants had avoided up to two difficult conversations in the last month in their workplace. Postworkshop evaluation at 4 months showed very high levels of satisfaction with the workshop's relevancy, content, and training, as well as participants' intention to apply knowledge and skills. Also shown were significant changes in participants' confidence to have difficult conversations not only with students but also with other peers and colleagues. In follow-up in-depth interviews with 20 of the 117 participants, 75% said they had made definite changes in their practice because of what they learned in the workshop and another 10% said they would make changes to their practice, but had not had the opportunity yet to do so. Conclusion: We conclude that the Spotlight on

A Mind-Reader Does Not Always Have Deontological Moral Judgments and Prosocial Behavior: A Developmental Perspective

Science.gov (United States)

Hao, Jian; Liu, Yanchun

2016-01-01

The rationalistic theories of morality emphasize that reasoning plays an important role in moral judgments and prosocial behavior. Theory of mind as a reasoning ability in the mental domain has been considered a facilitator of moral development. The present study examined whether theory of mind was consistently positively associated with morality from middle childhood to late adulthood. Two hundred and four participants, including 48 elementary school children, 45 adolescents, 62 younger adults, and 49 older adults, completed theory of mind, moral judgment and prosocial behavior tasks. Theory of mind was measured with strange stories that tapped into an understanding of lies, white lies, double bluffs, irony, and persuasion. Moral judgments were measured with variants of the trolley dilemma. Prosocial behavior was measured through participants' performance in an interactive situation in which a helping request was made. The results indicated specific rather than similar developmental trajectories of theory of mind, moral judgments, and prosocial behavior. There was a quadratic trend in theory of mind, a combination of quadratic and cubic trends in deontological moral judgments and a linear decline in helping behavior. It is thus suggested that theory of mind may not be associated with morality in an unchanging way during development. Further results indicated that theory of mind and deontological moral judgments were negatively correlated for children, adolescents, and older adults but positively correlated for younger adults. Theory of mind and helping behavior were positively correlated for children but negatively correlated for adolescents. However, the relationships disappeared in adulthood. In sum, the present study reveals that theory of mind may be a nice tool for its facilitation of deontological moral judgments and prosocial behavior, but it may also be a nasty tool for its blocking of deontological moral judgments and prosocial behavior. Moreover, theory

Once a Utilitarian, Consistently a Utilitarian? Examining Principledness in Moral Judgment via the Robustness of Individual Differences.

Science.gov (United States)

Helzer, Erik G; Fleeson, William; Furr, R Michael; Meindl, Peter; Barranti, Maxwell

2017-08-01

Although individual differences in the application of moral principles, such as utilitarianism, have been documented, so too have powerful context effects-effects that raise doubts about the durability of people's moral principles. In this article, we examine the robustness of individual differences in moral judgment by examining them across time and across different decision contexts. In Study 1, consistency in utilitarian judgment of 122 adult participants was examined over two different survey sessions. In Studies 2A and 2B, large samples (Ns = 130 and 327, respectively) of adult participants made a series of 32 moral judgments across eight different contexts that are known to affect utilitarian endorsement. Contrary to some contemporary theorizing, our results reveal a strong degree of consistency in moral judgment. Across time and experimental manipulations of context, individuals maintained their relative standing on utilitarianism, and aggregated moral decisions reached levels of near-perfect consistency. Results support the view that on at least one dimension (utilitarianism), people's moral judgments are robustly consistent, with context effects tailoring the application of principles to the particulars of any given moral judgment. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

How clinicians make (or avoid) moral judgments of patients: implications of the evidence for relationships and research

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

Physicians, nurses, and other clinicians readily acknowledge being troubled by encounters with patients who trigger moral judgments. For decades social scientists have noted that moral judgment of patients is pervasive, occurring not only in egregious and criminal cases but also in everyday situations in which appraisals of patients' social worth and culpability are routine. There is scant literature, however, on the actual prevalence and dynamics of moral judgment in healthcare. The indirect evidence available suggests that moral appraisals function via a complex calculus that reflects variation in patient characteristics, clinician characteristics, task, and organizational factors. The full impact of moral judgment on healthcare relationships, patient outcomes, and clinicians' own well-being is yet unknown. The paucity of attention to moral judgment, despite its significance for patient-centered care, communication, empathy, professionalism, healthcare education, stereotyping, and outcome disparities, represents a blind spot that merits explanation and repair. New methodologies in social psychology and neuroscience have yielded models for how moral judgment operates in healthcare and how research in this area should proceed. Clinicians, educators, and researchers would do well to recognize both the legitimate and illegitimate moral appraisals that are apt to occur in healthcare settings. PMID:20618947

Visual Landmarks Facilitate Rodent Spatial Navigation in Virtual Reality Environments

Science.gov (United States)

Youngstrom, Isaac A.; Strowbridge, Ben W.

2012-01-01

Because many different sensory modalities contribute to spatial learning in rodents, it has been difficult to determine whether spatial navigation can be guided solely by visual cues. Rodents moving within physical environments with visual cues engage a variety of nonvisual sensory systems that cannot be easily inhibited without lesioning brain…

ASL or Contact Signing: Issues of Judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Lucas, Ceil; Valli, Clayton

1991-01-01

Reports on one aspect of an ongoing study of language contact in the American deaf community. The ultimate goal of the study is a linguistic description of contact signing and a reexamination of claims that it is a pidgin. Patterns of language use are reviewed and the role of demographic information in judgments is examined. (29 references) (GLR)

Exposure Influences Expressive Timing Judgments in Music

Science.gov (United States)

Honing, Henkjan; Ladinig, Olivia

2009-01-01

This study is concerned with the question whether, and to what extent, listeners' previous exposure to music in everyday life, and expertise as a result of formal musical training, play a role in making expressive timing judgments in music. This was investigated by using a Web-based listening experiment in which listeners with a wide range of…

Judgmental Forecasting of Operational Capabilities

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hallin, Carina Antonia; Tveterås, Sigbjørn; Andersen, Torben Juul

This paper explores a new judgmental forecasting indicator, the Employee Sensed Operational Capabilities (ESOC). The purpose of the ESOC is to establish a practical prediction tool that can provide early signals about changes in financial performance by gauging frontline employees’ sensing...... of changes in the firm’s operational capabilities. We present the first stage of the development of ESOC by applying a formative measurement approach to test the index in relation to financial performance and against an organizational commitment scale. We use distributed lag models to test whether the ESOC...

Manipulating Morality: Third-Party Intentions Alter Moral Judgments by Changing Causal Reasoning.

Science.gov (United States)

Phillips, Jonathan; Shaw, Alex

2015-08-01

The present studies investigate how the intentions of third parties influence judgments of moral responsibility for other agents who commit immoral acts. Using cases in which an agent acts under some situational constraint brought about by a third party, we ask whether the agent is blamed less for the immoral act when the third party intended for that act to occur. Study 1 demonstrates that third-party intentions do influence judgments of blame. Study 2 finds that third-party intentions only influence moral judgments when the agent's actions precisely match the third party's intention. Study 3 shows that this effect arises from changes in participants' causal perception that the third party was controlling the agent. Studies 4 and 5, respectively, show that the effect cannot be explained by changes in the distribution of blame or perceived differences in situational constraint faced by the agent. © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Impact of patients' judgment skills on asthma self-management: a pilot study.

Science.gov (United States)

Londoño, Ana Maria Moreno; Schulz, Peter J

2014-12-02

The majority of current health literacy tools assess functional skills including reading, writing, and numeracy. Although these tools have been able to underline the impact of such skills on individuals' health behaviour, there is a need for comprehensive measures to examine more advanced skills. The individual's ability to use health-related information considering his/her own health context, and judging positive and negative consequences of their decisions has been conceptualized as judgment skills. The present study used a newly developed judgment skills tool to explore asthma self-management practices. Eighty asthma patients were recruited from medical offices during the year 2013. The questionnaire was self-administered and contained health literacy questions, the judgment skill tool, the Asthma Control Test, and several self-management questions. Sixty-nine percent of participants had adequate health literacy, while 24% and 5% had marginal and inadequate levels, respectively. The high-judgment group referred more to their doctor when experiencing asthma problems t(76)=-2.18, Pskills tool can help identify asthma patients' health information use and reveal how this use may affect some self-management practices. Significance for public healthPatients' health literacy has a great impact on their health behaviours and their health outcomes. Therefore, it has become more and more common to measure health literacy within the healthcare setting to determine the most effective approach to target patients. The measurement of asthma judgment skills contribute to a deeper understanding of patients' asthma self-management in crucial topics for asthma control, and have the advantage of assessing the specific abilities needed for this particular condition, which in turn benefits the translation of the findings from the use of this tool into strategies that directly tackle the needs of asthma patients.

Tactus ≠ Tempo: Some Dissociations Between Attentional Focus, Motor Behavior, and Tempo Judgment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Justin London

2011-08-01

Full Text Available Three experiments explored the relationships between surface rhythmic activity, tactus or beat rate, attentional focus, sensorimotor synchronization (tapping, and tempo perception. All involved a rhythmic standard followed by a comparison; the experimental task was a judgment of “slower, same, or faster.” In Experiment 1 participants simply judged relative speed; they focused on the beat level in Experiment 2, and they tapped along as they made their judgments in Experiment 3. In all three experiments judgments were highly accurate (89-97% correct, relative to beat-level inter-onset interval when the standard-comparison involved the same pattern/same tempo, and performed similarly for the same pattern at different tempos (80-83% correct. Performance degraded significantly in other contexts, especially for different patterns at the same tempo. A main effect for pattern (two levels: same vs. different and a pattern x tempo interaction were observed in all three experiments; a main effect for tempo (collapsed to two levels: same vs. different occurred only in Experiment 1. Analysis of a subset of the experimental conditions indicated that surface activity was of greater salience than the beat level in some contexts. Tapping along (Experiment 3 did not improve overall performance any more than simply focusing on the tactus level (Experiment 2, and a possible biasing effect of tapping rate on tempo judgment was observed. Thus there is an apparent dissociation between tactus rate, attentional focus, tapping behavior and tempo judgment. This suggests that our perception of musical speed or tempo is more than simple apprehension of the tactus rate.

Normative Value Conceptions of Modern Parents, Teachers, and Educators (Analysis of Moral Value Judgments)

Science.gov (United States)

Shelina, S. L.; Mitina, O. V.

2015-01-01

The article presents the results of an analysis of the moral value judgments of adults (parents, teachers, educators) that directly concern the socialization process of the young generation in the modern metropolis. This paper follows the model study by Jean Piaget that investigated the moral value judgments of children. A comparative analysis of…

The Influence of Mass Media and Interpersonal Communication on Societal and Personal Risk Judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Coleman, Cynthia-Lou.

1993-01-01

Examines the influence of mass media, interpersonal channels, and self-efficacy on risk judgment. Confirms that mass media channels influence social-level risk judgments. Finds that personal-level risk was influenced to some degree by mass media channels and that interpersonal channels and self-efficacy account for some variance on social-level…

Predicting Raters’ Transparency Judgments of English and Chinese Morphological Constituents using Latent Semantic Analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Hsueh-Cheng; Hsu, Li-Chuan; Tien, Yi-Min; Pomplun, Marc

2013-01-01

The morphological constituents of English compounds (e.g., “butter” and “fly” for “butterfly”) and two-character Chinese compounds may differ in meaning from the whole word. Subjective differences and ambiguity of transparency make the judgments difficult, and a computational alternative based on a general model may be a way to average across subjective differences. The current study proposes two approaches based on Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997): Model 1 compares the semantic similarity between a compound word and each of its constituents, and Model 2 derives the dominant meaning of a constituent based on a clustering analysis of morphological family members (e.g., “butterfingers” or “buttermilk” for “butter”). The proposed models successfully predicted participants’ transparency ratings, and we recommend that experimenters use Model 1 for English compounds and Model 2 for Chinese compounds, due to raters’ morphological processing in different writing systems. The dominance of lexical meaning, semantic transparency, and the average similarity between all pairs within a morphological family are provided, and practical applications for future studies are discussed. PMID:23784009

An investigation of spatial representation of pitch in individuals with congenital amusia.

Science.gov (United States)

Lu, Xuejing; Sun, Yanan; Thompson, William Forde

2017-09-01

Spatial representation of pitch plays a central role in auditory processing. However, it is unknown whether impaired auditory processing is associated with impaired pitch-space mapping. Experiment 1 examined spatial representation of pitch in individuals with congenital amusia using a stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) task. For amusic and non-amusic participants, pitch classification was faster and more accurate when correct responses involved a physical action that was spatially congruent with the pitch height of the stimulus than when it was incongruent. However, this spatial representation of pitch was not as stable in amusic individuals, revealed by slower response times when compared with control individuals. One explanation is that the SRC effect in amusics reflects a linguistic association, requiring additional time to link pitch height and spatial location. To test this possibility, Experiment 2 employed a colour-classification task. Participants judged colour while ignoring a concurrent pitch by pressing one of two response keys positioned vertically to be congruent or incongruent with the pitch. The association between pitch and space was found in both groups, with comparable response times in the two groups, suggesting that amusic individuals are only slower to respond to tasks involving explicit judgments of pitch.

Contingent capture effects in temporal order judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Born, Sabine; Kerzel, Dirk; Pratt, Jay

2015-08-01

The contingent attentional capture hypothesis proposes that visual stimuli that do not possess characteristics relevant for the current task will not capture attention, irrespective of their bottom-up saliency. Typically, contingent capture is tested in a spatial cuing paradigm, comparing manual reaction times (RTs) across different conditions. However, attention may act through several mechanisms and RTs may not be ideal to disentangle those different components. In 3 experiments, we examined whether color singleton cues provoke cuing effects in temporal order judgments (TOJs) and whether they would be contingent on attentional control sets. Experiment 1 showed that color singleton cues indeed produce cuing effects in TOJs, even in a cluttered and dynamic target display containing multiple heterogeneous distractors. In Experiment 2, consistent with contingent capture, we observed reliable cuing effects only when the singleton cue matched participants' current attentional control set. Experiment 3 suggests that a sensory interaction account of the differences found in Experiment 2 is unlikely. Our results help to discern the attentional components that may play a role in contingent capture. Further, we discuss a number of other effects (e.g., reversed cuing effects) that are found in RTs, but so far have not been reported in TOJs. Those differences suggest that RTs are influenced by a multitude of mechanisms; however, not all of these mechanisms may affect TOJs. We conclude by highlighting how the study of attentional capture in TOJs provides valuable insights for the attention literature, but also for studies concerned with the perceived timing between stimuli. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Does Ethnicity Matter? The Impact of Stereotypical Expectations on In-Service Teachers' Judgments of Students

Science.gov (United States)

Glock, Sabine

2016-01-01

Ethnic minority students face many disadvantages in school, which might be due in part to teachers' stereotypical expectations and attitudes. Dual process theories of impression and judgment formation specify person information that confirms or disconfirms stereotypical expectations as determinants of how judgments are formed. While…

Expert judgment in assessing radwaste risks: What Nevadans should know about Yucca Mountain; [Final report

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Shrader-Frechette, K. [University of South Florida, Tampa, FL (United States)

1992-06-01

For phenomena characterized by accurate and largely complete data, quantitative risk assessment (QRA) provides extraordinarily valuable and objective information. However, with phenomena for which the data, models, or probabilities are incomplete or uncertain, QRA may be less useful and more questionable, because its conclusions are typically empirically and theoretically underdetermined. In the face of empirical or theoretical underdetermination, scientists often are forced to make a number of methodological value judgments and inferences about how to estimate and evaluate the associated risks. The purpose of this project is to evaluate instances of methodological value judgments and invalid or imprecise inferences that have occurred in the QRA done for the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste facility. We shall show (1) that questionable methodological value judgments and inferences have occurred in some Yucca Mountain QRA`S; (2) that questionable judgments and inferences, similar to those in the Yucca Mountain studies, have occurred in previous QRA`s done for other radiation-related facilities and have likely caused earlier QRA`s to err in specific ways; and (3) that, because the value judgments and problems associated with some Yucca Mountain QRA`s include repetitions of similar difficulties in earlier studies, therefore the QRA conclusions of some Yucca Mountain analyses are, at best, uncertain.

The Contrabassist and the CEO: Moral Judgment and Collective Identity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alessandro Pinzani

2003-01-01

Full Text Available How much is a moral judgment on a single act influenced by circumstances which have little to do with the nature of the act itself? How much have certain moral judgments to do with the common history and shared experience of a certain group of individuals? Using two cases taken from life (a German musician and a German CEO behaving both in a morally wrong way but with very different consequences from the point of view of moral judgement and with very different reactions from the German public, the article tries to give an answer to these questions, touching issues like: guilt, moral responsibility, collective responsibility, and collective identity.

The Implications of Arendt's Concept of Judgment for Humanistic Teaching in a Postmetaphysical Age

Science.gov (United States)

Kwak, Duck-Joo

2015-01-01

In this essay, Duck-Joo Kwak draws on Hannah Arendt's concept of judgment in exploring what it means to teach the humanities as a form of values education in a postmetaphysical age. Arendt's concept of judgment is closely related to Ciceronian humanism, which is concerned with the wisdom to choose one's company while appreciating this pursuit…

Switching Away from Utilitarianism: The Limited Role of Utility Calculations in Moral Judgment

OpenAIRE

Sheskin, Mark; Baumard, Nicolas

2016-01-01

Our moral motivations might include a drive towards maximizing overall welfare, consistent with an ethical theory called "utilitarianism." However, people show non-utilitarian judgments in domains as diverse as healthcare decisions, income distributions, and penal laws. Rather than these being deviations from a fundamentally utilitarian psychology, we suggest that our moral judgments are generally non-utilitarian, even for cases that are typically seen as prototypically utilitarian. We show t...

Accessibility versus accuracy in retrieving spatial memory: evidence for suboptimal assumed headings.

Science.gov (United States)

Yerramsetti, Ashok; Marchette, Steven A; Shelton, Amy L

2013-07-01

Orientation dependence in spatial memory has often been interpreted in terms of accessibility: Object locations are encoded relative to a reference orientation that affords the most accurate access to spatial memory. An open question, however, is whether people naturally use this "preferred" orientation whenever recalling the space. We tested this question by asking participants to locate buildings on a familiar campus from various imagined locations, without specifying the heading to be assumed. We then used these pointing judgments to infer the approximate heading participants assumed at each location. Surprisingly, each location showed a unique assumed heading that was consistent across participants and seemed to reflect episodic or visual properties of the space. This result suggests that although locations are encoded relative to a reference orientation, other factors may influence how people choose to access the stored information and whether they appeal to long-term spatial memory or other more sensory-based stores. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Sex differences on the judgment of line orientation task: a function of landmark presence and hormonal status.

Science.gov (United States)

Goyette, Sharon Ramos; McCoy, John G; Kennedy, Ashley; Sullivan, Meghan

2012-02-28

It has been well-established that men outperform women on some spatial tasks. The tools commonly used to demonstrate this difference (e.g. The Mental Rotations Task) typically involve problems and solutions that are presented in a context devoid of referents. The study presented here assessed whether the addition of referents (or "landmarks") would attenuate the well-established sex difference on the judgment of line orientation task (JLOT). Three versions of the JLOT were presented in a within design. The first iteration contained the original JLOT (JLOT 1). JLOT 2 contained three "landmarks" or referents and JLOT 3 contained only one landmark. The sex difference on JLOT 1 was completely negated by the addition of three landmarks on JLOT 2 or the addition of one landmark on JLOT3. In addition, salivary testosterone was measured. In men, gains in performance on the JLOT due to the addition of landmarks were positively correlated with testosterone levels. This suggests that men with the highest testosterone levels benefited the most from the addition of landmarks. These data help to highlight different strategies used by men and women to solve spatial tasks. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Emotional Value Judgment and Achievement in Basic Science ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The study sought to examine emotional value judgment on student achievement in Basic Science. The study was carried out in Ijebu-North Local Government Area of Ogun State. Data were collected through valid questionnaire sent to five secondary schools within the local Government. One Hundred Junior Secondary II ...

Psychopathic traits linked to alterations in neural activity during personality judgments of self and others.

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Deming, Philip; Philippi, Carissa L; Wolf, Richard C; Dargis, Monika; Kiehl, Kent A; Koenigs, Michael

2018-01-01

Psychopathic individuals are notorious for their grandiose sense of self-worth and disregard for the welfare of others. One potential psychological mechanism underlying these traits is the relative consideration of "self" versus "others". Here we used task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify neural responses during personality trait judgments about oneself and a familiar other in a sample of adult male incarcerated offenders ( n  = 57). Neural activity was regressed on two clusters of psychopathic traits: Factor 1 (e.g., egocentricity and lack of empathy) and Factor 2 (e.g., impulsivity and irresponsibility). Contrary to our hypotheses, Factor 1 scores were not significantly related to neural activity during self- or other-judgments. However, Factor 2 traits were associated with diminished activation to self-judgments, in relation to other-judgments, in bilateral posterior cingulate cortex and right temporoparietal junction. These findings highlight cortical regions associated with a dimension of social-affective cognition that may underlie psychopathic individuals' impulsive traits.

Making Decisions under Ambiguity: Judgment Bias Tasks for Assessing Emotional State in Animals

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Roelofs, Sanne; Boleij, Hetty; Nordquist, Rebecca E.; van der Staay, Franz Josef

2016-01-01

Judgment bias tasks (JBTs) are considered as a family of promising tools in the assessment of emotional states of animals. JBTs provide a cognitive measure of optimism and/or pessimism by recording behavioral responses to ambiguous stimuli. For instance, a negative emotional state is expected to produce a negative or pessimistic judgment of an ambiguous stimulus, whereas a positive emotional state produces a positive or optimistic judgment of the same ambiguous stimulus. Measuring an animal’s emotional state or mood is relevant in both animal welfare research and biomedical research. This is reflected in the increasing use of JBTs in both research areas. We discuss the different implementations of JBTs with animals, with a focus on their potential as an accurate measure of emotional state. JBTs have been successfully applied to a very broad range of species, using many different types of testing equipment and experimental protocols. However, further validation of this test is deemed necessary. For example, the often extensive training period required for successful judgment bias testing remains a possible factor confounding results. Also, the issue of ambiguous stimuli losing their ambiguity with repeated testing requires additional attention. Possible improvements are suggested to further develop the JBTs in both animal welfare and biomedical research. PMID:27375454

Does Incidental Disgust Amplify Moral Judgment? A Meta-Analytic Review of Experimental Evidence.

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Landy, Justin F; Goodwin, Geoffrey P

2015-07-01

The role of emotion in moral judgment is currently a topic of much debate in moral psychology. One specific claim made by many researchers is that irrelevant feelings of disgust can amplify the severity of moral condemnation. Numerous researchers have found this effect, but there have also been several published failures to replicate it. Clarifying this issue would inform important theoretical debates among rival accounts of moral judgment. We meta-analyzed all available studies--published and unpublished--in which incidental disgust was manipulated prior to or concurrent with a moral judgment task (k = 50). We found evidence for a small amplification effect of disgust (d = 0.11), which is strongest for gustatory/olfactory modes of disgust induction. However, there is also some suggestion of publication bias in this literature, and when this is accounted for, the effect disappears entirely (d = -0.01). Moreover, prevalent confounds mean that the effect size that we estimate is best interpreted as an upper bound on the size of the amplification effect. On the basis of the results of this meta-analysis, we argue against strong claims about the causal role of affect in moral judgment and suggest a need for new, more rigorous research on this topic. © The Author(s) 2015.

Motivation and Affective Judgments Differentially Recruit Neurons in the Primate Dorsolateral Prefrontal and Anterior Cingulate Cortex

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Amemori, Ken-ichi; Amemori, Satoko

2015-01-01

The judgment of whether to accept or to reject an offer is determined by positive and negative affect related to the offer, but affect also induces motivational responses. Rewarding and aversive cues influence the firing rates of many neurons in primate prefrontal and cingulate neocortical regions, but it still is unclear whether neurons in these regions are related to affective judgment or to motivation. To address this issue, we recorded simultaneously the neuronal spike activities of single units in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of macaque monkeys as they performed approach–avoidance (Ap–Av) and approach–approach (Ap–Ap) decision-making tasks that can behaviorally dissociate affective judgment and motivation. Notably, neurons having activity correlated with motivational condition could be distinguished from neurons having activity related to affective judgment, especially in the Ap–Av task. Although many neurons in both regions exhibited similar, selective patterns of task-related activity, we found a larger proportion of neurons activated in low motivational conditions in the dlPFC than in the ACC, and the onset of this activity was significantly earlier in the dlPFC than in the ACC. Furthermore, the temporal onsets of affective judgment represented by neuronal activities were significantly slower in the low motivational conditions than in the other conditions. These findings suggest that motivation and affective judgment both recruit dlPFC and ACC neurons but with differential degrees of involvement and timing. PMID:25653353

Asymmetric coding of categorical spatial relations in both language and vision.

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Roth, J C; Franconeri, S L

2012-01-01

Describing certain types of spatial relationships between a pair of objects requires that the objects are assigned different "roles" in the relation, e.g., "A is above B" is different than "B is above A." This asymmetric representation places one object in the "target" or "figure" role and the other in the "reference" or "ground" role. Here we provide evidence that this asymmetry may be present not just in spatial language, but also in perceptual representations. More specifically, we describe a model of visual spatial relationship judgment where the designation of the target object within such a spatial relationship is guided by the location of the "spotlight" of attention. To demonstrate the existence of this perceptual asymmetry, we cued attention to one object within a pair by briefly previewing it, and showed that participants were faster to verify the depicted relation when that object was the linguistic target. Experiment 1 demonstrated this effect for left-right relations, and Experiment 2 for above-below relations. These results join several other types of demonstrations in suggesting that perceptual representations of some spatial relations may be asymmetrically coded, and further suggest that the location of selective attention may serve as the mechanism that guides this asymmetry.

Asymmetric coding of categorical spatial relations in both language and vision.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jessica eRoth

2012-11-01

Full Text Available Describing certain types of spatial relationships between a pair of objects requires that the objects are assigned different ‘roles’ in the relation, e.g. ‘A is above B’ is different than ‘B is above A’. This asymmetric representation places one object in the ‘target’ or ‘figure’ role and the other in the ‘reference’ or ‘ground’ role. Here we provide evidence that this asymmetry may be present not just in spatial language, but also in perceptual representations. More specifically, we describe a model of visual spatial relationship judgment where the designation of the target object within such a spatial relationship is guided by the location of the ‘spotlight’ of attention. To demonstrate the existence of this perceptual asymmetry, we cued attention to one object within a pair by briefly previewing it, and showed that participants were faster to verify the depicted relation when that object was the linguistic target. Experiment 1 demonstrated this effect for left-right relations, and Experiment 2 for above-below relations. These results join several other types of demonstrations in suggesting that perceptual representations of some spatial relations may be asymmetrically coded, and further suggest that the location of selective attention may serve as the mechanism that guides this asymmetry.

A framework to support preceptors' evaluation and development of new nurses' clinical judgment.

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Nielsen, Ann; Lasater, Kathie; Stock, Mary

2016-07-01

In today's complex, fast-paced world of hospital nursing, new graduate nurses do not have well-developed clinical judgment skills. Nurse preceptors are charged with bridging the gap between new graduates' learning in school and their autonomous practice as RNs. In one large, urban medical center in the U.S., a clinical judgment model and rubric were used as a framework for a new evaluation and orientation process. Preceptors of new graduate nurses who had used the former and new processes described their experiences using the framework. The findings indicated that having a structured framework provided objective ways to evaluate and help develop new graduate nurses' clinical judgment. It is hypothesized that academic clinical supervisors may find such a framework useful to prepare students for transition to practice. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Agreement in personality judgments within and between nonoverlapping social groups in collectivist cultures.

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Malloy, Thomas E; Albright, Linda; Diaz-Loving, Rolando; Dong, Qi; Lee, Yueh Ting

2004-01-01

The social context hypothesis states that people behave differently in different social groups because group norms and context-specific interpersonal relationships uniquely affect behavior. Consequently, a person who is a member of different, nonoverlapping social groups (i. e., the members of different groups are unacquainted) should be judged consensually on personality traits within each group; however, between groups there should be less agreement in judgments. This research focused on cultural moderation of the social context effect in two collective cultures (China and Mexico) with different norms for interpersonal relationships. Among Chinese, there was greater consensus in trait judgments within groups than between groups, whereas in Mexico, agreement within and between groups was equivalent. Culturally based relationship norms that affect cross-context consistency of behavior and, in turn, the consistency of trait judgments across groups were described.

Culture shapes efficiency of facial age judgments.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gizelle Anzures

2010-07-01

Full Text Available Cultural differences in socialization can lead to characteristic differences in how we perceive the world. Consistent with this influence of differential experience, our perception of faces (e.g., preference, recognition ability is shaped by our previous experience with different groups of individuals.Here, we examined whether cultural differences in social practices influence our perception of faces. Japanese, Chinese, and Asian-Canadian young adults made relative age judgments (i.e., which of these two faces is older? for East Asian faces. Cross-cultural differences in the emphasis on respect for older individuals was reflected in participants' latency in facial age judgments for middle-age adult faces--with the Japanese young adults performing the fastest, followed by the Chinese, then the Asian-Canadians. In addition, consistent with the differential behavioural and linguistic markers used in the Japanese culture when interacting with individuals younger than oneself, only the Japanese young adults showed an advantage in judging the relative age of children's faces.Our results show that different sociocultural practices shape our efficiency in processing facial age information. The impact of culture may potentially calibrate other aspects of face processing.

Clinical review: Management of difficult airways

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Langeron, Olivier; Amour, Julien; Vivien, Benoît; Aubrun, Frédéric

2006-01-01

Difficulties or failure in airway management are still important factors in morbidity and mortality related to anesthesia and intensive care. A patent and secure airway is essential to manage anesthetized or critically ill patients. Oxygenation maintenance during tracheal intubation is the cornerstone of difficult airway management and is always emphasized in guidelines. The occurrence of respiratory adverse events has decreased in claims for injuries due to inadequate airway management mainly at induction of anesthesia. Nevertheless, claim reports emphasize that airway emergencies, tracheal extubation and/or recovery of anesthesia phases are still associated with death or brain damage, indicating that additional educational support and management strategies to improve patient safety are required. The present brief review analyses specific problems of airway management related to difficult tracheal intubation and to difficult mask ventilation prediction. The review will focus on basic airway management including preoxygenation, and on some oxygenation and tracheal intubation techniques that may be performed to solve a difficult airway. PMID:17184555

Clinical review: management of difficult airways.

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Langeron, Olivier; Amour, Julien; Vivien, Benoît; Aubrun, Frédéric

2006-01-01

Difficulties or failure in airway management are still important factors in morbidity and mortality related to anesthesia and intensive care. A patent and secure airway is essential to manage anesthetized or critically ill patients. Oxygenation maintenance during tracheal intubation is the cornerstone of difficult airway management and is always emphasized in guidelines. The occurrence of respiratory adverse events has decreased in claims for injuries due to inadequate airway management mainly at induction of anesthesia. Nevertheless, claim reports emphasize that airway emergencies, tracheal extubation and/or recovery of anesthesia phases are still associated with death or brain damage, indicating that additional educational support and management strategies to improve patient safety are required. The present brief review analyses specific problems of airway management related to difficult tracheal intubation and to difficult mask ventilation prediction. The review will focus on basic airway management including preoxygenation, and on some oxygenation and tracheal intubation techniques that may be performed to solve a difficult airway.

A Quantum Theoretical Explanation for Probability Judgment Errors

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Busemeyer, Jerome R.; Pothos, Emmanuel M.; Franco, Riccardo; Trueblood, Jennifer S.

2011-01-01

A quantum probability model is introduced and used to explain human probability judgment errors including the conjunction and disjunction fallacies, averaging effects, unpacking effects, and order effects on inference. On the one hand, quantum theory is similar to other categorization and memory models of cognition in that it relies on vector…

Twenty Years of Constitutional Court Judgments: What Lessons are ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

MJM Venter

2017-12-05

Dec 5, 2017 ... about sentencing from its judgments during this time?2. 2 Overview of ... In short succession the Court declared unconstitutional the death penalty, in S v. Makwanyane,3 and corporal punishment for juvenile offenders, in S v.

A formal expert judgment procedure for performance assessments of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Trauth, K.M.; Guzowski, R.V.; Hora, S.C.

1994-09-01

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is an experimental facility located in southeastern New Mexico. It has been designed to determine the feasibility of the geologic disposal of defense-generated transuranic waste in a deep bedded-salt formation. The WIPP was also designed for disposal and will operate in that capacity if approved. The WIPP Performance Assessment Department at Sandia National Laboratories has been conducting analyses to assess the long-term performance of the WIPP. These analyses sometimes require the use of expert judgment. This Department has convened several expert-judgment panels and from that experience has developed an internal quality-assurance procedure to guide the formal elicitation of expert judgment. This protocol is based on the principles found in the decision-analysis literature

A formal expert judgment procedure for performance assessments of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Trauth, K.M. [Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM (United States); Guzowski, R.V. [Science Applications International Corp., Albuquerque, NM (United States); Hora, S.C. [Univ. of Hawaii, Hilo, HI (United States). Business Administration & Economics Div.

1994-09-01

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is an experimental facility located in southeastern New Mexico. It has been designed to determine the feasibility of the geologic disposal of defense-generated transuranic waste in a deep bedded-salt formation. The WIPP was also designed for disposal and will operate in that capacity if approved. The WIPP Performance Assessment Department at Sandia National Laboratories has been conducting analyses to assess the long-term performance of the WIPP. These analyses sometimes require the use of expert judgment. This Department has convened several expert-judgment panels and from that experience has developed an internal quality-assurance procedure to guide the formal elicitation of expert judgment. This protocol is based on the principles found in the decision-analysis literature.

A formal expert judgment procedure for performance assessments of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Trauth, K.M.; Guzowski, R.V.; Hora, S.C.

1993-01-01

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is an experimental facility located in southeastern New Mexico. It has been designed to determine the feasibility of the geologic disposal of defense-generated transuranic waste in a deep bedded-salt formation. The WIPP was also designed for disposal and will operate in that capacity if approved. The WIPP Performance Assessment Department at Sandia National Laboratories has been conducting analyses to assess the long-term performance of the WIPP. These analyses sometimes require the use of expert judgment. This Department has convened several expert-judgment panels and from that experience has developed an internal quality-assurance procedure to guide the formal elicitation of expert judgment. This protocol is based on the principles found in the decision-analysis literature

The Effect of Signal-to-Noise Ratio on Linguistic Processing in a Semantic Judgment Task: An Aging Study.

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Stanley, Nicholas; Davis, Tara; Estis, Julie

2017-03-01

Aging effects on speech understanding in noise have primarily been assessed through speech recognition tasks. Recognition tasks, which focus on bottom-up, perceptual aspects of speech understanding, intentionally limit linguistic and cognitive factors by asking participants to only repeat what they have heard. On the other hand, linguistic processing tasks require bottom-up and top-down (linguistic, cognitive) processing skills and are, therefore, more reflective of speech understanding abilities used in everyday communication. The effect of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on linguistic processing ability is relatively unknown for either young (YAs) or older adults (OAs). To determine if reduced SNRs would be more deleterious to the linguistic processing of OAs than YAs, as measured by accuracy and reaction time in a semantic judgment task in competing speech. In the semantic judgment task, participants indicated via button press whether word pairs were a semantic Match or No Match. This task was performed in quiet, as well as, +3, 0, -3, and -6 dB SNR with two-talker speech competition. Seventeen YAs (20-30 yr) with normal hearing sensitivity and 17 OAs (60-68 yr) with normal hearing sensitivity or mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss within age-appropriate norms. Accuracy, reaction time, and false alarm rate were measured and analyzed using a mixed design analysis of variance. A decrease in SNR level significantly reduced accuracy and increased reaction time in both YAs and OAs. However, poor SNRs affected accuracy and reaction time of Match and No Match word pairs differently. Accuracy for Match pairs declined at a steeper rate than No Match pairs in both groups as SNR decreased. In addition, reaction time for No Match pairs increased at a greater rate than Match pairs in more difficult SNRs, particularly at -3 and -6 dB SNR. False-alarm rates indicated that participants had a response bias to No Match pairs as the SNR decreased. Age-related differences were

Collision judgment when using an augmented-vision head-mounted display device.

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Luo, Gang; Woods, Russell L; Peli, Eli

2009-09-01

A device was developed to provide an expanded visual field to patients with tunnel vision by superimposing minified edge images of the wide scene, in which objects appear closer to the heading direction than they really are. Experiments were conducted in a virtual environment to determine whether users would overestimate collision risks. Given simulated scenes of walking or standing with intention to walk toward a given direction (intended walking) in a shopping mall corridor, participants (12 normally sighted and 7 with tunnel vision) reported whether they would collide with obstacles appearing at different offsets from variable walking paths (or intended directions), with and without the device. The collision envelope (CE), a personal space based on perceived collision judgments, and judgment uncertainty (variability of response) were measured. When the device was used, combinations of two image scales (5x minified and 1:1) and two image types (grayscale or edge images) were tested. Image type did not significantly alter collision judgment (P > 0.7). Compared to the without-device baseline, minification did not significantly change the CE of normally sighted subjects for simulated walking (P = 0.12), but increased CE by 30% for intended walking (P 0.25). For the patients, neither CE nor uncertainty was affected by minification (P > 0.13) in both walking conditions. Baseline CE and uncertainty were greater for patients than normally sighted subjects in simulated walking (P = 0.03), but the two groups were not significantly different in all other conditions. Users did not substantially overestimate collision risk, as the x5 minified images had only limited impact on collision judgments either during walking or before starting to walk.

Beyond "utilitarianism": maximizing the clinical impact of moral judgment research.

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Rosas, Alejandro; Koenigs, Michael

2014-01-01

The use of hypothetical moral dilemmas--which pit utilitarian considerations of welfare maximization against emotionally aversive "personal" harms--has become a widespread approach for studying the neuropsychological correlates of moral judgment in healthy subjects, as well as in clinical populations with social, cognitive, and affective deficits. In this article, we propose that a refinement of the standard stimulus set could provide an opportunity to more precisely identify the psychological factors underlying performance on this task, and thereby enhance the utility of this paradigm for clinical research. To test this proposal, we performed a re-analysis of previously published moral judgment data from two clinical populations: neurological patients with prefrontal brain damage and psychopathic criminals. The results provide intriguing preliminary support for further development of this assessment paradigm.

Disentangling the effects of alternation rate and maximum run length on judgments of randomness

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Sabine G. Scholl

2011-08-01

Full Text Available Binary sequences are characterized by various features. Two of these characteristics---alternation rate and run length---have repeatedly been shown to influence judgments of randomness. The two characteristics, however, have usually been investigated separately, without controlling for the other feature. Because the two features are correlated but not identical, it seems critical to analyze their unique impact, as well as their interaction, so as to understand more clearly what influences judgments of randomness. To this end, two experiments on the perception of binary sequences orthogonally manipulated alternation rate and maximum run length (i.e., length of the longest run within the sequence. Results show that alternation rate consistently exerts a unique effect on judgments of randomness, but that the effect of alternation rate is contingent on the length of the longest run within the sequence. The effect of maximum run length was found to be small and less consistent. Together, these findings extend prior randomness research by integrating literature from the realms of perception, categorization, and prediction, as well as by showing the unique and joint effects of alternation rate and maximum run length on judgments of randomness.

Association between Ability Emotional Intelligence and Left Insula during Social Judgment of Facial Emotions.

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Quarto, Tiziana; Blasi, Giuseppe; Maddalena, Chiara; Viscanti, Giovanna; Lanciano, Tiziana; Soleti, Emanuela; Mangiulli, Ivan; Taurisano, Paolo; Fazio, Leonardo; Bertolino, Alessandro; Curci, Antonietta

2016-01-01

The human ability of identifying, processing and regulating emotions from social stimuli is generally referred as Emotional Intelligence (EI). Within EI, Ability EI identifies a performance measure assessing individual skills at perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions. Previous models suggest that a brain "somatic marker circuitry" (SMC) sustains emotional sub-processes included in EI. Three primary brain regions are included: the amygdala, the insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Here, our aim was to investigate the relationship between Ability EI scores and SMC activity during social judgment of emotional faces. Sixty-three healthy subjects completed a test measuring Ability EI and underwent fMRI during a social decision task (i.e. approach or avoid) about emotional faces with different facial expressions. Imaging data revealed that EI scores are associated with left insula activity during social judgment of emotional faces as a function of facial expression. Specifically, higher EI scores are associated with greater left insula activity during social judgment of fearful faces but also with lower activity of this region during social judgment of angry faces. These findings indicate that the association between Ability EI and the SMC activity during social behavior is region- and emotion-specific.

25 CFR 75.19 - Distribution of judgment funds.

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2010-04-01

... ROLL OF THE EASTERN BAND OF CHEROKEE INDIANS, NORTH CAROLINA § 75.19 Distribution of judgment funds. The membership roll of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of North Carolina will be brought up to... shall be in accordance with regulations in this part 75, except as otherwise provided in paragraphs (b...

The Source of Competitive Advantage and Entrepreneurial Judgment in the RBV

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ishikawa, Ibuki

The purpose of this paper is to identify the source of competitive advantage in the resource based view of strategic management literature. In particular, it is argued that the source of competitive advantage is rooted in entrepreneur judgment. In this argument, this paper consists largely of three...... on Lachmann (1947,1956), Mises (1946) and Knight (1921) to improve the RBV framework; thirdly, to apply the Austrian perspective to the RBV and demonstrate that the source of competitive advantage is derived from entrepreneurial judgment per se, not the resource per se, and to discuss some possible future...... the source of competitive advantage.Jel Code: B25, D21, D81, M13...

An Integrative Model of Scholastic Judgments: Pupils' Characteristics, Class Context, Halo Effect and Internal Attributions

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Dompnier, Benoit; Pansu, Pascal; Bressoux, Pascal

2006-01-01

This article proposes a model that integrates some of the determinants of scholastic judgment. The model is based on the assumption that a teacher's judgment in a particular discipline is influenced by different variables: the pupil's actual performance in the discipline, his/her actual performance in other disciplines (halo effect), the average…

Pupils' Self-Perceptions: The Role of Teachers' Judgment Controlling for Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect

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Bressoux, Pascal; Pansu, Pascal

2016-01-01

This article aims to study the relationship between teachers' judgment and pupils' self-perceptions controlling for the big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE). Three studies were conducted among third-grade pupils. Study 1 (n = 585) focused on pupils' perceptions of their scholastic competence. Teachers' judgment and BFLPE were found to have an…

No Absolutism Here: Harm Predicts Moral Judgment 30× Better Than Disgust-Commentary on Scott, Inbar, & Rozin (2016).

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Gray, Kurt; Schein, Chelsea

2016-05-01

Moral absolutism is the idea that people's moral judgments are insensitive to considerations of harm. Scott, Inbar, and Rozin (2016, this issue) claim that most moral opponents to genetically modified organisms are absolutely opposed-motivated by disgust and not harm. Yet there is no evidence for moral absolutism in their data. Perceived risk/harm is the most significant predictor of moral judgments for "absolutists," accounting for 30 times more variance than disgust. Reanalyses suggest that disgust is not even a significant predictor of the moral judgments of absolutists once accounting for perceived harm and anger. Instead of revealing actual moral absolutism, Scott et al. find only empty absolutism: hypothetical, forecasted, self-reported moral absolutism. Strikingly, the moral judgments of so-called absolutists are somewhat more sensitive to consequentialist concerns than those of nonabsolutists. Mediation reanalyses reveal that moral judgments are most proximally predicted by harm and not disgust, consistent with dyadic morality. © The Author(s) 2016.

tDCS Over DLPFC Leads to Less Utilitarian Response in Moral-Personal Judgment.

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Zheng, Haoli; Lu, Xinbo; Huang, Daqiang

2018-01-01

The profound nature of moral judgment has been discussed and debated for centuries. When facing the trade-off between pursuing moral rights and seeking better consequences, most people make different moral choices between two kinds of dilemmas. Such differences were explained by the dual-process theory involving an automatic emotional response and a controlled application of utilitarian decision-rules. In neurocognitive studies, the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been demonstrated to play an important role in cognitive "rational" control processes in moral dilemmas. However, the profile of results across studies is not entirely consistent. Although one transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) study revealed that disrupting the right DLPFC led to less utilitarian responses, other TMS studies indicated that inhibition of the right DLPFC led to more utilitarian choices. Moreover, the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is essential for its function of integrating belief and intention in moral judgment, which is related to the emotional process according to the dual-process theory. Relatively few studies have reported the causal relationship between TPJ and participants' moral responses, especially in moral dilemmas. In the present study, we aimed to demonstrate a direct link between the neural and behavioral results by application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in the bilateral DLPFC or TPJ of our participants. We observed that activating the right DLPFC as well as inhibiting the left DLPFC led to less utilitarian judgments, especially in moral-personal conditions, indicating that the right DLPFC plays an essential role, not only through its function of moral reasoning but also through its information integrating process in moral judgments. It was also revealed that altering the excitability of the bilateral TPJ using tDCS negligibly altered the moral response in non-moral, moral-impersonal and moral-personal dilemmas

tDCS Over DLPFC Leads to Less Utilitarian Response in Moral-Personal Judgment

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Haoli Zheng

2018-03-01

Full Text Available The profound nature of moral judgment has been discussed and debated for centuries. When facing the trade-off between pursuing moral rights and seeking better consequences, most people make different moral choices between two kinds of dilemmas. Such differences were explained by the dual-process theory involving an automatic emotional response and a controlled application of utilitarian decision-rules. In neurocognitive studies, the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC has been demonstrated to play an important role in cognitive “rational” control processes in moral dilemmas. However, the profile of results across studies is not entirely consistent. Although one transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS study revealed that disrupting the right DLPFC led to less utilitarian responses, other TMS studies indicated that inhibition of the right DLPFC led to more utilitarian choices. Moreover, the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ is essential for its function of integrating belief and intention in moral judgment, which is related to the emotional process according to the dual-process theory. Relatively few studies have reported the causal relationship between TPJ and participants' moral responses, especially in moral dilemmas. In the present study, we aimed to demonstrate a direct link between the neural and behavioral results by application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS in the bilateral DLPFC or TPJ of our participants. We observed that activating the right DLPFC as well as inhibiting the left DLPFC led to less utilitarian judgments, especially in moral-personal conditions, indicating that the right DLPFC plays an essential role, not only through its function of moral reasoning but also through its information integrating process in moral judgments. It was also revealed that altering the excitability of the bilateral TPJ using tDCS negligibly altered the moral response in non-moral, moral-impersonal and moral

The impact of configural superiority on the processing of spatial information.

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Bratch, Alexander; Barr, Shawn; Bromfield, W Drew; Srinath, Aparna; Zhang, Jack; Gold, Jason M

2016-09-01

The impact of context on perception has been well documented for over a century. In some cases, the introduction of context to a set of target features may produce a unified percept, leading to a quicker and more accurate classification; a configural superiority effect (Pomerantz, Sager, & Stoever, 1977). Although this effect has been well characterized in terms of the stimulus features that produce the effect, the specific impact context has on the spatial strategies adopted by observers when making perceptual judgments remains unclear. Here, we sought to address this question by using the methods of response classification and ideal observer analysis. In our main experiment, we used a stimulus set known to produce the configural superiority effect and found that although observers were faster in the presence of context, they were actually less efficient at extracting stimulus information. This surprising result was attributable to the use of a spatial strategy in which observers relied on redundant, noninformative features in the presence of context. A control experiment ruled out the possibility that the mere presence of added context led to these strategic shifts. Our results support previous notions about the nature of the perceptual shifts that are induced by the configural superiority effect. However, they also show that configural processing is more nuanced than originally thought: Although observers may be faster at making judgments when context induces the percept of a configural whole, there appears to be a hidden cost in terms of the efficiency with which information is used. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

a Novel Approach of Indexing and Retrieving Spatial Polygons for Efficient Spatial Region Queries

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Zhao, J. H.; Wang, X. Z.; Wang, F. Y.; Shen, Z. H.; Zhou, Y. C.; Wang, Y. L.

2017-10-01

Spatial region queries are more and more widely used in web-based applications. Mechanisms to provide efficient query processing over geospatial data are essential. However, due to the massive geospatial data volume, heavy geometric computation, and high access concurrency, it is difficult to get response in real time. Spatial indexes are usually used in this situation. In this paper, based on k-d tree, we introduce a distributed KD-Tree (DKD-Tree) suitbable for polygon data, and a two-step query algorithm. The spatial index construction is recursive and iterative, and the query is an in memory process. Both the index and query methods can be processed in parallel, and are implemented based on HDFS, Spark and Redis. Experiments on a large volume of Remote Sensing images metadata have been carried out, and the advantages of our method are investigated by comparing with spatial region queries executed on PostgreSQL and PostGIS. Results show that our approach not only greatly improves the efficiency of spatial region query, but also has good scalability, Moreover, the two-step spatial range query algorithm can also save cluster resources to support a large number of concurrent queries. Therefore, this method is very useful when building large geographic information systems.

A NOVEL APPROACH OF INDEXING AND RETRIEVING SPATIAL POLYGONS FOR EFFICIENT SPATIAL REGION QUERIES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

J. H. Zhao

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Spatial region queries are more and more widely used in web-based applications. Mechanisms to provide efficient query processing over geospatial data are essential. However, due to the massive geospatial data volume, heavy geometric computation, and high access concurrency, it is difficult to get response in real time. Spatial indexes are usually used in this situation. In this paper, based on k-d tree, we introduce a distributed KD-Tree (DKD-Tree suitbable for polygon data, and a two-step query algorithm. The spatial index construction is recursive and iterative, and the query is an in memory process. Both the index and query methods can be processed in parallel, and are implemented based on HDFS, Spark and Redis. Experiments on a large volume of Remote Sensing images metadata have been carried out, and the advantages of our method are investigated by comparing with spatial region queries executed on PostgreSQL and PostGIS. Results show that our approach not only greatly improves the efficiency of spatial region query, but also has good scalability, Moreover, the two-step spatial range query algorithm can also save cluster resources to support a large number of concurrent queries. Therefore, this method is very useful when building large geographic information systems.

Reward-allocation judgments in Romania : A factorial survey approach

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Buzea, C.; Meseşan-Schmitz, L.; van de Vijver, F.J.R.

2013-01-01

We investigated reward-allocation judgments when positive outcomes (monetary rewards) were distributed and the allocator was not a co-recipient, in a sample of 200 Romanian students. Within a full factorial survey design, seven factors, selected to affect the allocation decision, were orthogonally

Psychopathic traits linked to alterations in neural activity during personality judgments of self and others

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Philip Deming

Full Text Available Psychopathic individuals are notorious for their grandiose sense of self-worth and disregard for the welfare of others. One potential psychological mechanism underlying these traits is the relative consideration of “self” versus “others”. Here we used task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI to identify neural responses during personality trait judgments about oneself and a familiar other in a sample of adult male incarcerated offenders (n = 57. Neural activity was regressed on two clusters of psychopathic traits: Factor 1 (e.g., egocentricity and lack of empathy and Factor 2 (e.g., impulsivity and irresponsibility. Contrary to our hypotheses, Factor 1 scores were not significantly related to neural activity during self- or other-judgments. However, Factor 2 traits were associated with diminished activation to self-judgments, in relation to other-judgments, in bilateral posterior cingulate cortex and right temporoparietal junction. These findings highlight cortical regions associated with a dimension of social-affective cognition that may underlie psychopathic individuals' impulsive traits. Keywords: Psychopathy, fMRI, Social cognition, Self-referential processing, Emotion, Psychopathology

Culture and Negotiator Cognition: Judgment Accuracy and Negotiation Processes in Individualistic and Collectivistic Cultures.

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Gelfand; Christakopoulou

1999-09-01

In this paper, we argue that judgment biases in negotiation are perpetuated by underlying cultural values and ideals, and therefore, certain judgment biases will be more prevalent in certain cultural contexts. Based on theory in cultural psychology (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989), we considered the notion that fixed pie error, a judgment bias in which negotiators fail to accurately understand their counterparts' interests (Pruitt & Lewis, 1975; Thompson & Hastie, 1990), would be more prevalent at the end of negotiations in the United States, an individualistic culture, than Greece, a collectivistic culture. The results of a 2-week computer-mediated intercultural negotiation experiment, which took place between American students in Illinois and Greek students in Athens, supported this view. Theoretical implications of culture and cognition in negotiation are also discussed. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.

Strategy modulates spatial perspective-taking: evidence for dissociable disembodied and embodied routes

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Gardner, Mark R.; Brazier, Mark; Edmonds, Caroline J.; Gronholm, Petra C.

2013-01-01

Previous research provides evidence for a dissociable embodied route to spatial perspective-taking that is under strategic control. The present experiment investigated further the influence of strategy on spatial perspective-taking by assessing whether participants may also elect to employ a separable “disembodied” route loading on inhibitory control mechanisms. Participants (N = 92) undertook both the “own body transformation” (OBT) perspective-taking task, requiring speeded spatial judgments made from the perspective of an observed figure, and a control task measuring ability to inhibit spatially compatible responses in the absence of a figure. Perspective-taking performance was found to be related to performance on the response inhibition control task, in that participants who tended to take longer to adopt a new perspective also tended to show a greater elevation in response times when inhibiting spatially compatible responses. This relationship was restricted to those participants reporting that they adopted the perspective of another by reversing left and right whenever confronted with a front-view figure; it was absent in those participants who reported perspective-taking by mentally transforming their spatial orientation to align with that of the figure. Combined with previously published results, these findings complete a double dissociation between embodied and disembodied routes to spatial perspective-taking, implying that spatial perspective-taking is subject to modulation by strategy, and suggesting that embodied routes to perspective-taking may place minimal demands on domain general executive functions. PMID:23964229

Visual Aids Improve Diagnostic Inferences and Metacognitive Judgment Calibration

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Rocio eGarcia-Retamero

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Visual aids can improve comprehension of risks associated with medical treatments, screenings, and lifestyles. Do visual aids also help decision makers accurately assess their risk comprehension? That is, do visual aids help them become well calibrated? To address these questions, we investigated the benefits of visual aids displaying numerical information and measured accuracy of self-assessment of diagnostic inferences (i.e., metacognitive judgment calibration controlling for individual differences in numeracy. Participants included 108 patients who made diagnostic inferences about three medical tests on the basis of information about the sensitivity and false-positive rate of the tests and disease prevalence. Half of the patients received the information in numbers without a visual aid, while the other half received numbers along with a grid representing the numerical information. In the numerical condition, many patients --especially those with low numeracy-- misinterpreted the predictive value of the tests and profoundly overestimated the accuracy of their inferences. Metacognitive judgment calibration mediated the relationship between numeracy and accuracy of diagnostic inferences. In contrast, in the visual aid condition, patients at all levels of numeracy showed high-levels of inferential accuracy and metacognitive judgment calibration. Results indicate that accurate metacognitive assessment may explain the beneficial effects of visual aids and numeracy --a result that accords with theory suggesting that metacognition is an essential part of risk literacy. We conclude that well-designed risk communications can inform patients about health-relevant numerical information while helping them assess the quality of their own risk comprehension.

The role of the right superior temporal gyrus in stimulus-centered spatial processing.

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Shah-Basak, Priyanka P; Chen, Peii; Caulfield, Kevin; Medina, Jared; Hamilton, Roy H

2018-05-01

Although emerging neuropsychological evidence supports the involvement of temporal areas, and in particular the right superior temporal gyrus (STG), in allocentric neglect deficits, the role of STG in healthy spatial processing remains elusive. While several functional brain imaging studies have demonstrated involvement of the STG in tasks involving explicit stimulus-centered judgments, prior rTMS studies targeting the right STG did not find the expected neglect-like rightward bias in size judgments using the conventional landmark task. The objective of the current study was to investigate whether disruption of the right STG using inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) could impact stimulus-centered, allocentric spatial processing in healthy individuals. A lateralized version of the landmark task was developed to accentuate the dissociation between viewer-centered and stimulus-centered reference frames. We predicted that inhibiting activity in the right STG would decrease accuracy because of induced rightward bias centered on the line stimulus irrespective of its viewer-centered or egocentric locations. Eleven healthy, right-handed adults underwent the lateralized landmark task. After viewing each stimulus, participants had to judge whether the line was bisected, or whether the left (left-long trials) or the right segment (right-long trials) of the line was longer. Participants repeated the task before (pre-rTMS) and after (post-rTMS) receiving 20 min of 1 Hz rTMS over the right STG, the right supramarginal gyrus (SMG), and the vertex (a control site) during three separate visits. Linear mixed models for binomial data were generated with either accuracy or judgment errors as dependent variables, to compare 1) performance across trial types (bisection, non-bisection), and 2) pre- vs. post-rTMS performance between the vertex and the STG and the vertex and the SMG. Line eccentricity (z = 4.31, p right-long type by 10.7% on bisection

Teleological judgment and instrumental reason in Kant and Horkheimer

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Petersen, Lars Axel

2006-01-01

Early in his career, Max Horkheimer occupied himself twice with Kant's "Critique of judgment". In both cases he focussed on Kant's teleology, not his aesthetics. The article takes at the question, whether there is a connection between Horkheimer's early occupation with "the critique of teleological...

Source v. Content Effects of Judgments of News Believability.

Science.gov (United States)

Austin, Erica Weintraub; Dong, Qingwen

1994-01-01

Finds that three indices combining measures of source credibility and message apparent reality emerge from a factor analysis, comprising undergraduate students' judgments of source truthfulness and message accuracy; source expertise and message representativeness; and source bias and personal perspective. Concludes that some publics base judgments…

Moral Judgment Development across Cultures: Revisiting Kohlberg's Universality Claims

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Gibbs, John C.; Basinger, Karen S.; Grime, Rebecca L.; Snarey, John R.

2007-01-01

This article revisits Kohlberg's cognitive developmental claims that stages of moral judgment, facilitative processes of social perspective-taking, and moral values are commonly identifiable across cultures. Snarey [Snarey, J. (1985). "The cross-cultural universality of social-moral development: A critical review of Kohlbergian research."…

Surprising judgments about robot drivers: Experiments on rising expectations and blaming humans

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Peter Danielson

2015-05-01

Full Text Available N-Reasons is an experimental Internet survey platform designed to enhance public participation in applied ethics and policy. N-Reasons encourages individuals to generate reasons to support their judgments, and groups to converge on a common set of reasons pro and con various issues.  In the Robot Ethics Survey some of the reasons contributed surprising judgments about autonomous machines. Presented with a version of the trolley problem with an autonomous train as the agent, participants gave unexpected answers, revealing high expectations for the autonomous machine and shifting blame from the automated device to the humans in the scenario. Further experiments with a standard pair of human-only trolley problems refine these results. While showing the high expectations even when no autonomous machine is involved, human bystanders are only blamed in the machine case. A third experiment explicitly aimed at responsibility for driverless cars confirms our findings about shifting blame in the case of autonomous machine agents. We conclude methodologically that both results point to the power of an experimental survey based approach to public participation to explore surprising assumptions and judgments in applied ethics. However, both results also support using caution when interpreting survey results in ethics, demonstrating the importance of qualitative data to provide further context for evaluating judgments revealed by surveys. On the ethics side, the result about shifting blame to humans interacting with autonomous machines suggests caution about the unintended consequences of intuitive principles requiring human responsibility.http://dx.doi.org/10.5324/eip.v9i1.1727

Confidence judgment in depression and dysphoria: the depressive realism vs. negativity hypotheses.

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Szu-Ting Fu, Tiffany; Koutstaal, Wilma; Poon, Lucia; Cleare, Anthony J

2012-06-01

According to the negativity hypothesis, depressed individuals are over-pessimistic due to negative self-concepts. In contrast, depressive realism suggests that depressed persons are realistic compared to their nondepressed controls. However, evidence supporting depressive realism predominantly comes from judgment comparisons between controls and nonclinical dysphoric samples when the controls showed overconfident bias. This study aimed to test the validity of the two accounts in clinical depression and dysphoria. Sixty-eight participants, including healthy controls (n = 32), patients with DSM-IV major depression (n = 20), and dysphoric participants with CDC-defined chronic fatigue syndrome (n = 16) performed an adjective recognition task and reported their item-by-item confidence judgments and post-test performance estimate (PTPE). Compared to realistic PTPE made by the controls, patients with major depression showed significant underconfidence. The PTPE of the dysphoric participants was relatively accurate. Both the depressed and dysphoric participants displayed less item-by-item overconfidence as opposed to significant item-by-item overconfidence shown by the controls. The judgment-accuracy patterns of the three groups need to be replicated with larger samples using non-memory task domains. The present study confirms depressive realism in dysphoric individuals. However, toward a more severe depressive emotional state, the findings did not support depressive realism but are in line with the prediction of the negativity hypothesis. It is not possible to determine the validity of the two hypotheses when the controls are overconfident. Dissociation between item-by-item and retrospective confidence judgments is discussed. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Spatial context driven manifold learning for hyperspectral image classification

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Zhang, Y

2014-06-01

Full Text Available spatially induced disjoint classes whose neighborhood relations are difficult to capture using traditional graph based embedding techniques. Robust parameter estimation is a challenge in traditional kernel functions that compute neighborhood graphs e...

Instructional Storytelling: Application of the Clinical Judgment Model in Nursing.

Science.gov (United States)

Timbrell, Jessica

2017-05-01

Little is known about the teaching and learning implications of instructional storytelling (IST) in nursing education or its potential connection to nursing theory. The literature establishes storytelling as a powerful teaching-learning method in the educational, business, humanities, and health sectors, but little exploration exists that is specific to nursing. An example of a story demonstrating application of the domains of Tanner's clinical judgment model links storytelling with learning outcomes appropriate for the novice nursing student. Application of Tanner's clinical judgment model offers consistency of learning experience while preserving the creativity inherent in IST. Further research into student learning outcomes achievement using IST is warranted as a step toward establishing best practices with IST in nursing education. [J Nurs Educ. 2017;56(5):305-308.]. Copyright 2017, SLACK Incorporated.

TESTING MASTER STUDENTS PERCEPTION REGARDING JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING IN ACCOUNTING

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2015-07-01

Full Text Available The human mind is amazing. Judgment and reasoning is also a fascinating and complex world. The purpose of this paper is to link the perception of master students to professional judgment and decision making in accounting and to analyze and test some correlations between endogenous human variables and the act of reasoning. The variables were selected after studying psychology cognition literature based on works conducted by researchers interested in matters like economics or financial reporting. Our research was carried out based on a questionnaire and the investigation was conducted in October-November 2014, being elected economics master students from University of Oradea, Faculty of Economics, majors AABM and FBI. These majors were chosen because their academic curricula contain accounting disciplines. We have received answers from 106 students. Intentionally, the study was conducted on economic master students rather than on professional accountants because for the former making logical judgments for assigning an appropriate accounting treatment of an event requires more effort, more attention. Taking into account works done by previous researchers interested in the topic of heuristics for making accounting judgments we have statistically tested our research hypotheses. The obtained results showed that there is a weak influence between the master students’ age and the way they make decisions and their perception on the necessity of existence of a theoretical conceptual framework for professional JDM in accounting and there is a correlation between master students’ ability to assume risks and their opinion on the choice of accounting handling. The main finding of this empirical study is that such research topic is worth to be continued to investigate and develop other possible links between psychological triggers and JDM in accounting.

Management of the difficult airway.

Science.gov (United States)

Schwartz, D E; Wiener-Kronish, J P

1991-09-01

For clinicians involved in airway management, a plan of action for dealing with the difficult airway or a failed intubation should be developed well in advance of encountering a patient in whom intubation is not routine. When difficulty is anticipated, the equipment necessary for performing a difficult intubation should be immediately available. It also is prudent to have a surgeon skilled in performing a tracheotomy and a criothyroidotomy stand by. The intubation should be attempted in the awake state, preferably using the fiberoptic bronchoscope. The more challenging situation is when the difficult airway is confronted unexpectedly. After the first failed attempt at laryngoscopy, head position should be checked and the patient ventilated with oxygen by mask. A smaller styletted tube and possibly a different laryngoscope blade should be selected for a second attempt at intubation. The fiberoptic bronchoscope and other equipment for difficult intubation should be obtained. A second attempt should then be made. If this is unsuccessful, the patient should be reoxygenated, and assistance including a skilled anesthesiologist and surgeon should be summoned. On a third attempt, traction to the tongue can be applied by an assistant, a tube changer could be used to enter the larynx, or one of the other special techniques previously described can be used. If this third attempt fails, it may be helpful to have a physician more experienced in airway management attempt intubation after oxygen has been administered to the patient. If all attempts are unsuccessful, then invasive techniques to secure the airway will have to be performed.

Comprehension as a Basis for Metacognitive Judgments: Effects of Effort after Meaning on Recall and Metacognition

Science.gov (United States)

Zaromb, Franklin M.; Karpicke, Jeffrey D.; Roediger, Henry L., III

2010-01-01

We examined free recall and metacognitive judgments of ambiguous sentences studied with and without clues to facilitate their comprehension. Sentences were either studied without clues, with clues meaningfully embedded, or with clues following a 10-s interval delay. After presentation, subjects made judgments of comprehension (JCOMPs) or judgments…

Chemosignals of stress influence social judgments.

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Pamela Dalton

Full Text Available Human body odors have important communicative functions regarding genetic identity, immune fitness and general health, but an expanding body of research suggests they can also communicate information about an individual's emotional state. In the current study, we tested whether axillary odors obtained from women experiencing psychosocial stress could negatively influence personality judgments of warmth and competence made about other women depicted in video scenarios. 44 female donors provided three types of sweat samples: untreated exercise sweat, untreated stress sweat and treated stress sweat. After a 'washout' period, a commercial unscented anti-perspirant product was applied to the left axilla only to evaluate whether 'blocking' the stress signal would improve the social evaluations. A separate group of male and female evaluators (n = 120 rated the women in the videos while smelling one of the three types of sweat samples. Women in the video scenes were rated as being more stressed by both men and women when smelling the untreated vs. treated stress sweat. For men only, the women in the videos were rated as less confident, trustworthy and competent when smelling both the untreated stress and exercise sweat in contrast to the treated stress sweat. Women's social judgments were unaffected by sniffing the pads. The results have implications for influencing multiple types of professional and personal social interactions and impression management and extend our understanding of the social communicative function of body odors.

Chemosignals of stress influence social judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Dalton, Pamela; Mauté, Christopher; Jaén, Cristina; Wilson, Tamika

2013-01-01

Human body odors have important communicative functions regarding genetic identity, immune fitness and general health, but an expanding body of research suggests they can also communicate information about an individual's emotional state. In the current study, we tested whether axillary odors obtained from women experiencing psychosocial stress could negatively influence personality judgments of warmth and competence made about other women depicted in video scenarios. 44 female donors provided three types of sweat samples: untreated exercise sweat, untreated stress sweat and treated stress sweat. After a 'washout' period, a commercial unscented anti-perspirant product was applied to the left axilla only to evaluate whether 'blocking' the stress signal would improve the social evaluations. A separate group of male and female evaluators (n = 120) rated the women in the videos while smelling one of the three types of sweat samples. Women in the video scenes were rated as being more stressed by both men and women when smelling the untreated vs. treated stress sweat. For men only, the women in the videos were rated as less confident, trustworthy and competent when smelling both the untreated stress and exercise sweat in contrast to the treated stress sweat. Women's social judgments were unaffected by sniffing the pads. The results have implications for influencing multiple types of professional and personal social interactions and impression management and extend our understanding of the social communicative function of body odors.