A bias generating temporal distortions in serial perception

A precise estimation of event timing is essential for survival. Yet, temporal distortions are ubiquitous in our daily sensory experience. A specific type of temporal distortion is the time order error (TOE), which occurs when estimating the duration of events organized in a series. TOEs shrink or dilate objective event duration. Understanding the mechanics of subjective time distortions is fundamental since we perceive events in a series, not in isolation. In previous work, we showed that TOEs appear when discriminating small duration differences (20 or 60 ms) between two short events (Standard, S and Comparison, C), but only if the interval between events is shorter than 1 second. TOEs have been variously attributed to sensory desensitization, reduced temporal attention, poor sensory weighting of C relative to S, or idiosyncratic response bias. Surprisingly, the serial dynamics of relative event duration were never considered as a factor generating TOEs. In two experiments we tested them by swapping the order of presentation of S and C. Bayesian hierarchical modelling showed that TOEs emerge when the first event in a series is shorter than the second event, independently of event type (S or C), sensory precision or individual response bias. Participants disproportionately expanded first-position shorter events. Significantly fewer errors were made when the first event was objectively longer, confirming the inference of a strong bias in perceiving ordered event durations. Our finding identifies a hitherto unknown duration-dependent encoding inefficiency in human serial perception.

Could the sheep-goat effect be the manifestation of attentional-phase dependent mind-matter modulation?

The sheep-goat effect of psi cannot be explained without considering mind of specific states. This work speculates mind-matter interaction, as was inferred by many including Erwin Schrödinger, for entertaining an analytically flavored “phenomenological” interpretation of the sheep-goat effect. A fundamental construct of this theory is the operation of mind-matter events in a spatial-temporal-attentional domain, which relaxes to the spatial-temporal domain wherein purely objective events are registered, when the effect of attention vanishes. Attention is quantitated as a nonuniformly interspaced discrete index that depends solely on the number of viable neurons that function in a coherent state for a purpose of the mind. A spatial-attentional “information” domain is assumed to be operable by hinging it with the spatial-temporal “energy” domain along the spatial dimension to form a so-called vivo-dynamic complex. Operations of an event function with respect to the attentional dimension are assigned to assimilate those with respect to the temporal dimension. Domain operators are introduced to specify the domain of temporal or attentional attribution as needed to assess an event and identify the outcome of domain-coupling on the registration of an event. Time-dependent Schrodinger’s equation is then, imperatively, treated as a lower-dimensional case of a higher-dimensional mind-matter-event equation elaborated in the spatial-temporal-attentional complex. The resulted mind-matter-event function defined in the vivo-dynamic complex relaxes to an objective-event function in the spatial-temporal domain at either zeroing of the attention or vanishing of the first-order derivative of the function with respect to the attentional index. The mind-matter-event equation leads to simple traveling-wave-type solutions that are formed by combining the temporal presentation and attentional perception. The auto or cross interaction of the mind-matter event functions then creates “information-energy” coupling terms presumed to be amenable to instrument probing in the spatial-temporal domain as is the objective-event term. The domain-coupling when modulated by the phase difference between the temporal and attentional dimensions is seen to enhance or inhibit the deviation of the event registration in the spatial-temporal domain from its baseline probability. The outcome is thus akin to the sheep-goat effect. The phase-dependency of the event-coupling also elicits why it may be difficult to replicate psi. Such a theoretical manipulation offers novel insights to phenomena that manifest mind-matter interaction.

Leadership styles determine proactivity of employees - A vessel’s exampl

A crisis event is out of the incidence that is stressful to many people. Stressor as an objective event causes stress in an individual however the level of stress is differently experienced. The affected individuals feel that they cannot fight a crisis event with common mechanisms of dealing. Leadership styles of managers in a large degree determine the proactivity of employees in the crisis events. There can be differentiated transactional, transformational and transcendental leadership. Historically, transactional leadership had been dominated over the years on board. Nowadays, there are more accents on transformational, or even transcendental leadership. Thus, different types of check-lists are introduced to increase situational awareness amongst employees especially in emergency situations. There are also different training and drills scenarios that cover different types of crisis events where employee affected learn how to react well trained and routinely. Familiarization with the anticipated situation, and “know what to do” in the real one, decreases the level of stress among individuals, and helps to react much calmer and focused. In this paper it was analyzed what is increasing individual resources to deal with stressful situation. In addition, individual reaction depends on the hierarchy’s structure aboard; concretely leadership styles determine the proactivity of employees, which can be crucial in emergency situations. Research should be continued in the more practical examples from different types of vessels (eg through polls among seamen who are experienced in various emergencies) where it would be possible to find what is increasing individual resources to deal with stressful situations, and what kind of leadership is preferred by crewmembers, traditional or neoteric ones?

Gündelik Hayatın Dini Açıdan Tahlili / Examination of Daily Life from Religious Point of View

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>The examination of daily life presents us the most objective information from point of sociology. Therefore, a general outlook on social relationship in life from religious point of view can contribute us to understand Islam accurately. Objectivity is basic principle in scientific method. In order to obtain theoretical generalizations, we should act from one by one objective event or fact. It can be claimed that obtaining any theory through generalizing is a safer way. There are some approaches that advice us to follow the same way to create sociological theories. They are called as “small scale approaches.” Rather than analyzing sociological theories, this article examines the possibility of adaptation of sociological approaches, regarding evaluation of daily life, to religious aspects. Eventually, it was concluded that it is possible to compare our daily life activities with those of Prophet Muhammad’s time. Shortly, the sociological examination of daily life from point of religion indicates that the main reason of collapse of the world of Turk-Islam even the whole humanity is the lack of faith-practice or essence-function in terms of educating people. The examination of daily life from point of religion can contribute to this matter of obtaining more sound mentality.</p><p><strong>Öz</strong></p><p>Gündelik hayatın tahlili bize sosyolojik açıdan birçok nesnel veri sunmaktadır. Bu sebeple, gündelik hayattaki sosyal ilişkilere dini perspektiften yaklaşmak, İslam’ın da daha doğru anlaşılması noktasında katkı sağlayabilir. Bilimsel yöntemde nesnellik esastır. Yani kuramsal genellemelere varmak için tek tek nesnel olay ve olgulardan hareket etmek gerekmektedir. Tek tek nesnel verilerin benzer sonuçlarını genelleştirerek kuramlara varmak daha isabetli bir yol olmaktadır. Sosyolojik kuramları da oluştururken benzer yolu izlemeyi tavsiye eden yaklaşımlar vardır. Bunlara küçük ölçekli yaklaşımlar adı verilmektedir. Bu yaklaşımlar gündelik hayattaki insanlar arası etkileşimden hareketle sosyolojik kuram oluşturmanın daha bilimsel bir tutum olacağını iddia etmektedirler. Makalede sosyolojik kuramların değerlendirilmesi üzerinde değil; gündelik hayatın sosyolojik tahlilinde başvurulan kategorik yöntemin dini hayata uyarlanmasının imkânı üzerinde durulmaya gayret edilmiştir. Neticede, günümüzdeki gündelik etkileşimlerimizin, Hz. Peygamber dönemindeki gündelik etkileşimlerle kıyaslanmasının mümkün olduğu kanaatine varılmıştır. Bu bağlamda makalemiz, sözel ve sözel olmayan iletişim kanalları üzerinden günlük hayattaki iletişimleri Hz. Peygamberin hadisleri doğrultusunda incelemektedir. Kısaca, gündelik hayatın dini açıdan sosyolojik tahlili bize, Türk-İslam dünyasının ve hatta tüm insanlığın çöküşünün esas nedeninin iman-amel veya öz-işlev arasındaki ilişkinin tamamlamacı niteliğinin bireylere benimsetilememesi olduğunu göstermektedir. Gündelik hayatın dini açıdan tahlili bu konuda daha sağlam bir zihniyete kavuşma zemininin oluşumunda önemli katkılar sunabilir.</p>

Lecture of the cycle of specialization in reflexology "Theoretical and methodological bases of reflexotherapy"

When conducting the lecture course in the field of reflexology, the mandatory direction is the development of the theory of "INN-YAN", which considers the question of a concrete objective event: IN and YN carries the conditional division of all phenomena of nature into two opposite principles, which are opposed to each other, and at the same time, unite, create each other conditions for existence, within one phenomenon. The notions of IN and YN express the duality of all natural phenomena: rhythm and chaos, energy and matter, day and night, light and darkness, motion and peace, top and bottom, heat and cold. The normal state of the human body, in relation to the physiological balance, is maintained through the change of opposites IN and YN (the change of the phases of active labor and sleep, the transference of mental and physical activity). If the interaction of opposites is destroyed as a result of the completeness or insufficiency of the INN or the YN relative to the physiological balance of the organism, there may be a disease.

Problemi mjerenja posttraumatskih poremećaja

The available literature dealing with the measurement of post- traumatic disorders leads one to conclude that there are at least three large clusters of problems: 1) the problem of unequivocally determining the stressor and/or the stress-producing experience, 2) the problem of measuring the symptoms of the stress disorder, 3) the identification of pre-traumatic features and experiences which could have been significant mediators in causing stress. The DSM-III-R diagnostic classification (American Psychiatric Association), although the best mans for determining post-traumatic stress disorder, represents an ideal example for examining these problems while being, at the same time, a useful model for more exact classifications. In addition, by tackling the problems in this manner one gets a better understanding of the entire model for the occurrence of stress disorders: starting from the objective event, the traumatic experiences, the mediational factors to the appearance of acute and chronic after-effects of stress disorders.

On The Carlos Castilla Del Pino “Axiom of Behavioral Significance” and Its Relevance in Philosophy of Psychiatry: The Unification of Clinical Neuroscience

Carlos Castilla del Pino (1922-2009) was a Spanish psychiatrist and essayist with a wide work ranging from neuropsychiatry to social psychiatry. His essays include interesting psychopathological, anthropological and semiotic ideas.The “axiom of behavioural significance” proposes that human behaviour is not an objective event but a meaningful act. As the objective of human behaviour is relation between human beings, it must be studied only under this communicative perspective.Based in this axiomatic approach of Castilla del Pino, some arguments of interest to philosophy of psychiatry will be exposed:– Mind is based in language and language is a communicative acts system in need of a dialogic community, namely, in need of a group of interacting brains. So, referring to the “brains-mind problem” is proposed to be preferred instead of referring to the “brain-mind problem”. Mind is a language-based emergent property of the social group, not a property of a single brain.– The intention of human behaviour and the content of mental subjective phenomena should not be taken as a sign of any brain disease. Human behavior and mental representations always refers to a social group and a social context, not to a single brain. The only disease indicators we can take as disease signs are the formal aspects of behaviour and mind contents, as disexecutive syndrome or mental automatism are.– As a corollary, it is proposed that neurology and psychiatry do not have any epistemic difference, leading to defence the unification of clinical neuroscience.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Dependent-Chance Goal Programming for Water Resources Management under Uncertainty

Without sufficient data, consulting experts is a good way to quantify unknown parameters in water resources management which will result in human uncertainty. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new tool-uncertainty theory to deal with such uncertainty which is treated as uncertain variable with uncertainty distribution. And a dependent-chance goal programming (DCGP) model is provided for water resources management under such circumstance. In the model uncertain measure is used to measure possibility that an event will occur which is maximized by minimizing the deviation (positive or negative deviation) from target of objective event under a given priority structure. In the end, the developed model is applied to a numerical example to illustrate the effectiveness of the model. The result obtained contributes to the desired water-allocation schemes for decision-markers.

Reação do Mercado à Deliberação de Planos de Opção de Compra de Ações: Um Estudo de Eventos para as Empresas Negociadas na Bovespa

This paper aims to verify market reactions to Employee Stock Options Plans (ESOP) proposals and awards in the Brazilian Stock Exchange from July 1994 to March 2007. In order to achieve such objective, event studies methodology was applied and the original sample (comprised by all companies that adopted ESOP during the survey period) was divided according to employees’ eligibility to ESOP and CEOs bargain power. Using non-parametric tests (Sign Test e Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test), we could verify that announcements of ESOP proposals and ESOP awards were not related to positive abnormal returns. As the opposite, returns around those announcements dates were negatives, in general. Such pattern could be explained by some theoretical consequences of ESOP plans: increase in the CEOs risky behavior, constrains in the dividend policy and CEOs opportunistic behavior by managing the timing of their voluntary disclosures around stock option awards. We also found evidences suggesting that employees´ eligibility is related to abnormal returns. When all employees are awarded, returns are even more negative. Possible explanations are indirect costs of capital pulverization and increase in the companies cost of capital due to the ESOP. Our findings suggest that an ESOP adoption in a poor governance environment can increase agency problems, instead of aligning CEOs and shareholders interests.

Accounting for Variations in Acculturative Stress: Coping and Appraisal

Acculturative stress is increasingly understood to mediate the relationship between immigration and mental health. The bullk of research in this area, however, has not addressed psychological factors that affect the degree to which the migratory process is experienced as stressful nor what sorts of strategies are used to manage stressors related to migration. The appraisal of a situation as stressful is related to the material, social and psychological resources. Coping style can mediate the psychological impact of the stressor. It would appear that the relationship between stress and coping is complex and multifaceted, and not amenable to a simple path analysis. To better understand how the migratory experience is related to mental health requires elucidating the relationship between the objective event, how it is appraised, and the coping response used. A further confounding issue is that the bulk of theorizing and instrumentation in coping and stress research is predicated on a Euro-American paradigm, and thus not necessarily appropriate for use with other cultures. In addition, it would appear that coping style not only mediates the relationship between stress and psychopathology, but is also related to the appraisal process. This paper will provide a critical analysis of conceptual and measurement issues related to stress, appraisal, and coping as applied to the migratory experience. The paper will conclude with an outline a research study currently underway that may provide insight into some of these issues.