Personality evolution

“The author argues that each of the Big Five dimensions of human personality can be seen as the result of a trade-off between different fitness costs and benefits. As there is no unconditionally optimal value of these trade-offs, it is to be expected that genetic diversity will be retained in the population.” in Nettle, D. ‘The Evolution of Personality Variation in Humans and Other Animals.’ American Psychologist. 61(6), Sep 2006, 622-631.

Bioengineering social entities

Social entities evolve like living organisms, melting its cells in the heat of the internal dynamic coming from diverse sources. This opens the way to the possibility of social bioengineering processes, which might lead to more resistant and more flexible new entities.

Coning perception

The coning vision from the angular perception characterizes the majority of opinions conducing to extreme social behavior. From this perception, subliminal masses move like an attractor towards the own corner, in a lateral enforced dynamics.

Auto-justification

“The authors propose that people use 2 routes in justifying self-gratification: 1st through hard work or excellence (entitlement) and the 2nd through the attainment of vices without depleting income. … The results indicate that (a) higher effort and (bogus) excellence feedback increase preferences for vice rewards, but these effects are reversed or attenuated when the interchangeability of effort and income is implied; (b) willingness to pay in effort is greater for vices than virtues, but willingness to pay in income is higher for virtues; and (c) these effects are magnified among individuals with stronger (chronic or manipulated) guilt.” In Kivetz, R. and Zheng, Y. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2006 Nov Vol 135(4) 572-587.

Intuitive wire mesh

From the dippiest of being emerge the conforming cables of intuitive rationing, as electrical impulses, overpassing the most sensorial subliminal rooting up sensation. The mesh form wraps the inscrutable process of decision based on the intuitive connection, which can lead to biases, but also to unprecedented accuracy.

Unified fragmentation

“Humans see whole objects from input fragmented in space and time, yet spatiotemporal object perception is poorly understood. The authors propose the theory of spatiotemporal relatability (STR), which describes the visual information and processes that allow visible fragments revealed at different times and places, due to motion and occlusion, to be assembled into unitary perceived objects … STR postulates a mental representation, the dynamic visual icon, that briefly maintains shapes and updates positions of occluded fragments to connect them with visible regions. The theory offers a unified account of interpolation processes for static, dynamic, occluded, and illusory objects.” In Palmer, E. M. et al. ‘A Theory of Dynamic Occluded and Illusory Object Perception.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2006 Nov Vol 135(4) 513-541.

Human ballons

Humans have lived in a spurious balloon characterized by the belief in material happiness and increasing over consumption, without regard for the environmental surrounding. The result emulates a social configuration characterized by the individualized and self-sufficient emotional expression provided by the attachment to things and others. This is a quite autonomous individual entity within the mixing plasma of the fluid of the social network.

Intuitive vision

“People often choose intuitive rather than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. The authors suggest that these intuitive biases arise because intuitions often spring to mind with subjective ease, and the subjective ease leads people to hold their intuitions with high confidence … the authors found that decreasing intuitive confidence reduced or eliminated intuitive biases. These findings indicate that intuitive biases are not inevitable but rather predictably determined by contextual variables that affect intuitive confidence.” In Simmons, J. P. and Nelson, L. D. ‘Intuitive Confidence: Choosing Between Intuitive and Nonintuitive Alternatives.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 135(3), Aug 2006, 409-428.

Cue learning

“In multiple-cue learning (also known as probabilistic category learning) people acquire information about cue-outcome relations and combine these into predictions or judgments. Previous researchers claimed that people can achieve high levels of performance without explicit knowledge of the task structure or insight into their own judgment policies … Learning analyses suggested that the apparent use of suboptimal strategies emerges from the incremental tracking of statistical contingencies in the environment.” In Lagnado, D. A. et al. ‘Insight and Strategy in Multiple-Cue Learning.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 135(2), May 2006, 162-183.

The door

The door gives the way to many other things and ideas. Behind the door there is expectation of the unknown. Sometimes the impenetrable obscurity of being is closed behind doors. Internally wired circuits are full of doors, but modern culture might be about abolishing inscrutable doors.

Hirarchical cognition

“Hierarchical control of cognitive processes was studied by examining the relationship between sequence- and task-level processing in the performance of explicit, memorized task sequences … Hierarchical control was inferred from these sequence initiation time effects and the recurrent finding of no switch cost at the first serial position across sequences, the point at which sequence-level processes are likely active in maintaining or instantiating a hierarchical control structure in working memory.” Schneider, D. W. and Logan, G. D. ‘Hierarchical Control of Cognitive Processes: Switching Tasks in Sequences Hierarchical Control of Cognitive Processes: Switching Tasks in Sequences’. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2006 Nov Vol 135(4) 623-640

Simple mind probability

“It is sometimes necessary to guess which probability distribution governs random sampling over a given event space. When the correct guess cannot be deduced from information available about the space, the problem is said to require ampliative inference. The most familiar form of ampliative inference is represented in the principle of maximum entropy.” In Myers, T.S. and Osherson, N. ‘On the Psychology of Ampliative Inference, Psychological Sciecnce, 3 (2), 1992.

Distance future

“These studies found that in predicting their more distant future performance, participants disregarded the format of the questions (e.g., multiple choice vs. open ended) and relied, instead, on their perceived general knowledge (e.g., history knowledge) … Individuals feel more confident in predicting the distant future than the near future when the predictions concern outcomes that are implied by relatively abstract information.” In Siri et al. ‘Predicting the Near and Distant Future.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 135(2), May 2006, 152-161.

The formation of probability judgements

“This article introduces 2 new sources of bias in probability judgment, discrimination failure and inhibition failure, which are conceptualized as arising from an interaction between error prone memory processes and a support theory like comparison process. Both sources of bias stem from the influence of irrelevant information on participants' probability judgments, but they postulate different mechanisms for how irrelevant information affects judgment. In Dougherty, M. R. and Sprenger, A. ‘The Influence of Improper Sets of Information on Judgment: How Irrelevant Information Can Bias Judged Probability.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2007 Feb Vol 92(2) 179-190.

Desire key

“Humans, as discriminately social creatures, make frequent judgments about others' suitability for interdependent social relations … On the basis of a sociofunctional analysis of human sociality, the authors hypothesized that people highly value trustworthiness and (to a lesser extent) cooperativeness in others with whom they may be interdependent, regardless of the specific tasks, goals, or functions of the group or relationship, but value other favorable characteristics (e.g., intelligence) differentially across such tasks, goals, or functions … people valued other characteristics primarily as they were relevant to the specific nature of the interdependent group or relationship.” In Cottrell, C. A. et al. ‘What Do People Desire in Others? A Sociofunctional Perspective on the Importance of Different Valued Characteristics.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2007 Feb Vol 92(2) 208-231.

Biface

“This paper explores the relationship between personal evaluations of attachment and personal evaluations of social rank, in relationship to mood variation in bipolar disorder … elevated mood was associated with feeling superior, while depression was associated with feeling inferior. Attachment also varied with mood but appeared to be less related to mood in this group.” In Gilbert et al. ‘Social Rank and Attachment in People with a Bipolar Disorder’ Clinical-Psychology-and-Psychotherapy. Vol 14(1) Jan-Feb 2007, 48-53.

Choosing strategy

“The assumption that people possess a repertoire of strategies to solve the inference problems they face has been raised repeatedly. However, a computational model specifying how people select strategies from their repertoire is still lacking. The proposed strategy selection learning (SSL) theory predicts a strategy selection process on the basis of reinforcement learning. The theory assumes that individuals develop subjective expectations for the strategies they have and select strategies proportional to their expectations, which are then updated on the basis of subsequent experience. In Rieskamp, J. and Otto, P. E. ‘SSL: A Theory of How People Learn to Select Strategies”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 135(2), May 2006, 207-236.

Dreaming love

“Recently, a journalist in analysis had a dream that stimulated the writing of a poem, the two psychic products occurring no more than a few hours apart. Since the analysand had copious free associations to both products, believing both to be culled from the same unconscious raw material, an interesting study of an act of aesthetic creation almost in statu nascendi became possible.” In Mahon, E. ‘A Poem and a Dream’, Psychoanalytic-Quarterly. Vol 76(1) Jan 2007, 237-255.

The fear group

“Facial expressions of fear are universally recognized signals of potential threat. Humans may have evolved specialized neural systems for responding to fear in the absence of conscious stimulus detection. We used functional neuroimaging to establish whether the amygdala and the medial prefrontal regions to which it projects are engaged by subliminal fearful faces and whether responses to subliminal fear are distinguished from those to supraliminal fear.”

Antiperspective

“A central problem for psychology is vision's reaction to perspective. In the present studies, observers looked at perspective pictures projected by square tiles on a ground plane. They judged the tile dimensions while positioned at the correct distance, farther or nearer. In some pictures, many tiles appeared too short to be squares, many too long, and many just right. The judgments were strongly affected by viewing from the wrong distance, eye height, and object orientation.” In Juricevic, Igor; Kennedy, John M. ‘Looking at Perspective Pictures From Too Far, Too Close, and Just Right.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 135(3), Aug 2006, 448-461.

Ascending eye neuron

“Decreasing an event's probability leads individuals to represent the event by its central, abstract, general features (high-level construal) rather than by its peripheral, concrete, specific features (low-level construal).” Wakslak, C J et al. ‘Seeing the Forest When Entry Is Unlikely: Probability and the Mental Representation of Events’. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2006 Nov Vol 135(4) 641-653.

Circular impulse

The dynamic impulse of most living creatures is predominantly characterized by circular motions with backwards and forward feedbacks. No regularity is appreciated, and no forms are present in these motions.