Testing the role of patch openness as a causal mechanism for apparent area sensitivity in a grassland specialist

Oecologia ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 169 (2) ◽  
pp. 407-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander C. Keyel ◽  
Carolyn M. Bauer ◽  
Christine R. Lattin ◽  
L. Michael Romero ◽  
J. Michael Reed
Keyword(s):  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Apparent Area ◽  
Area Sensitivity

scholarly journals Induced Empathy Moderates Emotional Responses to Expressive Qualities in Music

2020 ◽  
pp. 102986492097472
Author(s):  
Katherine O’Neill ◽  
Hauke Egermann
Keyword(s):  
Ecological Validity ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Music Listening ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Priming Paradigm ◽  
Valence And Arousal ◽  
Experimental Group

Recent research has explored the role of empathy in the context of music listening. Here, through an empathy priming paradigm, situational empathy was shown to act as a causal mechanism in inducing emotion, although the way empathy was primed had low levels of ecological validity. We therefore conducted an online experiment to explore the extent to which information about a composer’s expressive intentions when writing a piece of music would significantly affect the degree to which participants reportedly empathise with the composer and in turn influence emotional responses to expressive music. A total of 229 participants were randomly assigned to three groups. The experimental group read short texts describing the emotions felt by the composer during the process of composition. To control for the effect of text regardless of its content, one control group read texts describing the characteristics of the music they were to hear, and a second control group was not given any textual information. Participants listened to 30-second excerpts of four pieces of music, selected to express emotions from the four quadrants of the circumplex theory of emotion. Having heard each music excerpt, participants rated the valence and arousal they experienced and completed a measure of situational empathy. Results show that situational empathy in response to music is significantly associated with trait empathy. As opposed to those in the control conditions, participants in the experimental group responded with significantly higher levels of situational empathy. Receiving this text significantly moderated the effect of the expressiveness of stimuli on induced emotion, indicating that it induced empathy. We conclude that empathy can be induced during music listening through the provision of information about the specific emotions of a person relating to the music. These findings contribute to an understanding of the psychological mechanisms that underlie emotional responses to music.

The role of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and ocean-atmosphere interactions in driving United States heatwaves

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sem Vijverberg ◽  
Dim Coumou
Keyword(s):  
Rossby Wave ◽  
Rossby Waves ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Temperature Forecast ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Ocean Atmosphere ◽  
The Waves

<p>Heatwaves can have devastating impact on society and reliable early warnings at several weeks lead time are needed. Heatwaves are often associated with quasi-stationary Rossby waves, which interact with sea surface temperature (SST). Previous studies showed that north-Pacific SST can provide long-lead predictability for eastern U.S. temperature, moderated by an atmospheric Rossby wave. The exact mechanisms, however, are not well understood. Here we analyze Rossby waves associated with heatwaves in western and eastern US. Causal inference analyses reveal that both waves are characterized by positive ocean-atmosphere feedbacks at synoptic timescales, amplifying the waves. However, this positive feedback on short timescales is not the causal mechanism that leads to a long-lead SST signal. Only the eastern US shows a long-lead causal link from SSTs to the Rossby wave. We show that the long-lead SST signal derives from low-frequency PDO variability, providing the source of eastern US temperature predictability. We use this improved physical understanding to identify more reliable long-lead predictions. When, at the onset of summer, the Pacific is in a pronounced PDO phase, the SST signal is expected to persist throughout summer. These summers are characterized by a stronger ocean-boundary forcing, thereby more than doubling the eastern US temperature forecast skill, providing a temporary window of enhanced predictability.</p>

Causal Invariance as an Essential Constraint for Creating a Causal Representation of the World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia W. Cheng ◽  
Hongjing Lu
Keyword(s):  
Search Space ◽  
Causal Learning ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Intuitive Reasoning ◽  
Causal Relations ◽  
Causal Understanding ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Specific Description ◽  
The World

This chapter illustrates the representational nature of causal understanding of the world and examines its implications for causal learning. The vastness of the search space of causal relations, given the representational aspect of the problem, implies that powerful constraints are essential for arriving at adaptive causal relations. The chapter reviews (1) why causal invariance—the sameness of how a causal mechanism operates across contexts—is an essential constraint for causal learning in intuitive reasoning, (2) a psychological causal-learning theory that assumes causal invariance as a defeasible default, (3) some ways in which the computational role of causal invariance in causal learning can become obscured, and (4) the roles of causal invariance as a general aspiration, a default assumption, a criterion for hypothesis revision, and a domain-specific description. The chapter also reviews a puzzling discrepancy in the human and non-human causal and associative learning literatures and offers a potential explanation.

Not Only Individualism: The Effects of Long-Term Orientation and Other Cultural Variables on National Innovation Success

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrzej Bukowski ◽  
Seweryn Rudnicki
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Support ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Cultural Predictors ◽  
Cultural Variables ◽  
Single Pattern ◽  
The Impact

This article re-examines the effects of culture on national innovation rates. Pointing to the innovation success of some East Asian countries, it argues that the cultural dimension of individualism is not able to fully account for the role of culture in national innovativeness, and there is a need to include a wider set of cultural factors in the analysis. Several competing measures of national innovation performance over the last decade and Hofstede’s measures of culture, as well as their recently revised versions proposed by Minkov and collaborators, are employed to test the hypotheses. The findings show that, apart from individualism, long-term orientation, and flexibility, the dimensions omitted in the prior studies are positive and strong cultural predictors of national innovation intensity, whereas the role of other cultural factors finds little empirical support. The study suggests that there is no single pattern for the impact of culture on national innovation rates that should be taken into account in seeking effective innovation strategies and policies. It also highlights the need to advance the understanding of the causal mechanism between culture and innovativeness to guide further theoretical and empirical analysis.

From Mistrust to Understanding: Inclusive Constitution-Making Design and Agreement in Tunisia

2020 ◽  
pp. 106591292096710
Author(s):  
Tereza Jermanová
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Process Tracing ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Inclusive Processes ◽  
Democratic Constitution ◽  
The Way ◽  
Constitution Making

In 2014, Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly (NCA) almost unanimously approved the country’s first democratic constitution despite significant identity-based divisions. Drawing on the Tunisian case, the article explores the role of an inclusive constitution-making process in fostering constitutional agreement during democratization. Emerging studies that link different process modalities to democracy have so far brought only limited illumination to how inclusive processes matter, nor were these propositions systematically tested. Using process tracing, and building on original interviews gathered in Tunisia between 2014 and 2020, this article traces a causal mechanism whereby an inclusive constitution-making process allowed for a transformation of interpersonal relationships between political rivals. It demonstrates that more than two years of regular interactions allowed NCA deputies to shatter some of the prejudices that initially separated especially Islamist and non-Islamist partisans and develop cross-partisan ties, thus facilitating constitutional negotiations. However, I argue that the way these transformations contributed to constitutional settlement is more subtle than existing theories envisaged, and suggest alternative explanations. The article contributes to the debate about constitution-making processes by unpacking the understudied concept of partisan inclusion and applying it empirically to trace its effects on constitutional agreement, bringing precision and nuance to current assumptions about its benefits.

Democratization and Conflict

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ömer Faruk Örsün ◽  
Reşat Bayer ◽  
Michael Bernhard
Keyword(s):  
Research Design ◽  
Model Specification ◽  
Democratic Peace ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Conflict Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Strength ◽  
Good For ◽  
Foundational Work

Is democratization good for peace? The question of whether democratization results in violence has led to a spirited and productive debate in empirical conflict studies over the past two decades. The debate, sparked by Mansfield and Snyder’s foundational work, raised a challenge to the notion of a universal democratic peace and elicited numerous critical responses within the literature. One set of such responses has emphasized issues of replicability, mismatches between the research design and directionality of the proposed causal mechanism, the role of outliers, and model specification. In addition, two issues have not been discussed sufficiently in the existing literature. First, conceptually, is the issue of concept stretching, specifically the form Sartori labeled the “cat-dog” problem. While past criticisms were mainly about model specification, we debate whether Mansfield and Snyder’s findings can be seen as a product of concept misformation. Second, quantitatively, are conceptual and empirical issues that Mansfield and Snyder use to capture state strength in their most recent attempts to provide ongoing evidence for their theory. The most optimistic estimates show that even when democratization has a statistically significant association with war onset at lower levels of institutional strength, the effect is substantively insignificant.

The Meaning of Cause and Prevent: The Role of Causal Mechanism

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLARE R. WALSH ◽  
STEVEN A. SLOMAN
Keyword(s):  
Causal Mechanism

scholarly journals RADICAL ENACTIVISM AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (141) ◽  
pp. 723-743
Author(s):  
Giovanni Rolla
Keyword(s):  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Privileged Access ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Radical Enactivism ◽  
Perceptual Model ◽  
Self Knowledge

ABSTRACT I propose a middle-ground between a perceptual model of self-knowledge, according to which the objects of self-awareness (one's beliefs, desires, intentions and so on) are accessed through some kind of causal mechanism, and a rationalist model, according to which self-knowledge is constituted by one's rational agency. Through an analogy with the role of the exercises of sensorimotor abilities in rationally grounded perceptual knowledge, self-knowledge is construed as an exercise of action-oriented and action-orienting abilities. This view satisfies the privileged access condition usually associated with self-knowledge without entailing an insurmountable gap between self- knowledge and knowledge of other minds.

scholarly journals Using three indirect measures to assess the role of sexuality-related associations and interpretations for women’s sexual desire: An Internet-based experimental study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Zahler ◽  
Milena Meyers ◽  
Marcella Woud ◽  
Simon Edward Blackwell ◽  
Jürgen Margraf ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Sexual Distress ◽  
Indirect Measures ◽  
Single Target ◽  
Relevant Variables ◽  
Scenario Task

Theoretical models of sexual desire emphasize the role of cognitive processes. Empirical results, however, are mostly based on self-report measures. This study used three indirect measures to assess sexuality-related associations (via a Single Target Implicit Association Test; STIAT), and sexuality-related interpretations (via a Scrambled Sentences Task, SST; and a scenario task) in 263 women (Mage = 27.90, SD = 8.27) with varying levels of sexual desire. Correlational analyses revealed that the STIAT did not correlate with sexual desire, whereas the SST and the scenario task were significantly associated with sexual desire. Further, the SST and the scenario task, but not the STIAT, explained additional variance in sexual desire above other relevant variables (i.e., age, depressive symptoms, and sexual distress measured via self-report). To conclude, indirect measures can provide additional and unique information on sexuality-related associations and interpretations above self-report measures. Specifically, we found evidence for the predictive validity of the newly established SST, and can further validate the scenario task. Future studies should assess the causal mechanism underlying sexuality-related interpretations, e.g., by evaluating whether these can be changed via cognitive bias modification techniques or psychological treatments.

scholarly journals Mitigating the Gender Gap in the Willingness to Compete: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 1147-1185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sule Alan ◽  
Seda Ertac
Keyword(s):  
Elementary Schools ◽  
Gender Gap ◽  
Performance Feedback ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Future Performance ◽  
Randomized Field Experiment ◽  
Willingness To Compete ◽  
The Impact

Abstract We evaluate the impact on competitiveness of a randomized educational intervention that aims to foster grit, a skill that is highly predictive of achievement. The intervention is implemented in elementary schools, and we measure its impact using a dynamic competition task with interim performance feedback. We find that when children are exposed to a worldview that emphasizes the role of effort in achievement and encourages perseverance, the gender gap in the willingness to compete disappears. We show that the elimination of this gap implies significant efficiency gains. We also provide suggestive evidence on a plausible causal mechanism that runs through the positive impact of enhanced grit on girls' optimism about their future performance.

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