Expectations Of Future Events Research Articles

Scenario forecasting for students’ professional future

Introduction. In a situation of instability and uncertainty around the world, ambiguity of information about the expectation of future events, it is very important to equip a young person with the skills of seeing his/her future, qualitatively new characteristics, demanded competencies that meet the needs of society and today’s students as the future employees. The solution of the tasks facing vocational education is seen in a new architecture of education, the main tool of which is construction of clear trajectory of learning and development. Such a trajectory is implemented in professional future scenarios, which represent forecasting student’s activity unfolding in time and space. Professional future forecasting scenarios are designed to regulate the choice of strategies and tactics of behaviour in accordance with personal meanings and goals that determine the direction of the student’s activities, taking into account factors affecting their alignment. Forecasting the professional future, which determines the socio-professional success of participants of educational and professional activity, is an actual scientific and practical task facing education today. Aim. The present research aimed to develop scenarios for the professional future as a fundamental basis for students to build their personal trajectory of professional development both in the process of studying in an educational organisation and at the workplace. Methodology and research methods. The leading idea of the research is the concept of forecasting the professional future, which is based on the correlation of knowledge and ideas about future professional activity with the reflection of one’s own professionally significant qualities, attitudes and value orientations. The basic idea of the current study is the concept of personalised education, it provides vectors for the development of the student activity and his/her transition from the current state to the desired by designing the logic of advancement along its own trajectory of professional development. As a leading approach to forecasting the professional future, the author applied the cognitive approach as a process in a person’s mind about future professional activity, which is inextricably linked with cognitive categories: interests, attitudes, knowledge, beliefs, and value orientations of a person. Self-awareness of the future is based on the correlation of knowledge about a person’s future professional activity with the reflection of one’s personal meanings, significant qualities, attitudes and value orientations, which are the essence of a person’s cognitive activity. Scenario planning was employed as the main research method. The scenario as a method and as an effective tool for planning a personal trajectory of professional development fixes a standard set of knowledge about the object, determines the direction and time perspective of life plans, and thereby ensures predictability and meaningfulness of actions in preparation for an uncertain future. When developing a structure of a typical forecasting scenario for the professional future of a student, the methods of design, modelling, forecasting, generalisation and classification were applied. Results. The author has developed the structure of a typical forecasting scenario for the professional future of a student. It is established that this structure consists of four content blocks: 1) the desired image of the professional future of the student; 2) analysis of the student potential in accordance with the desired image; 3) the process of transition of the person from the current state to the desired (implementation of the trajectory of development, control); 4) evaluation of results (analysis of achievements, causes and consequences of changes; correction of the vector of development). Each block is represented by scenario structures and the results that need to be obtained in the process of its implementation. Scientific novelty of the conducted research lies in development and arrangement of personal professional programmes of the student, taking into account such parameters that reflect the connection of mental representations about the future with the form available for direct observation. Practical significance. The proposed structure of the forecasting scenario for the professional future is intended for students, who have a meaningful approach to their future and want to purposefully move towards achieving it. The obtained results will contribute to the personalisation of training through building by students their own development scenario, self-realisation, which will increase educational and professional success. The study sets specific tasks for educational organisations, and employers, who are really interested in the professional training of successful specialists and are focused on long-term cooperation.

Expectation violations enhance neuronal encoding of sensory information in mouse primary visual cortex

The response of cortical neurons to sensory stimuli is shaped both by past events (adaptation) and the expectation of future events (prediction). Here we employed a visual stimulus paradigm with different levels of predictability to characterise how expectation influences orientation selectivity in the primary visual cortex (V1) of male mice. We recorded neuronal activity using two-photon calcium imaging (GCaMP6f) while animals viewed sequences of grating stimuli which either varied randomly in their orientations or rotated predictably with occasional transitions to an unexpected orientation. For single neurons and the population, there was significant enhancement in the gain of orientation-selective responses to unexpected gratings. This gain-enhancement for unexpected stimuli was prominent in both awake and anaesthetised mice. We implemented a computational model to demonstrate how trial-to-trial variability in neuronal responses were best characterised when adaptation and expectation effects were combined.

Anhedonia symptom of depressive disorder in adolescents

Major Depressive Disorder is a mental disorder that’s common among adolescents, while anhedonia, characterized by the diminish in ability to enjoy pleasurable activities and loss of interest. The essay is written to examine factors that can contribute to onset of adolescent anhedonia in the context of MDD and its impacts on adolescents. The author read and analyze scientific studies pulished in National Library of Medicine, then combine her personal observation and experience with knowledge she had gained online. Past studies concluded that adolescent anhedonia is a result of a combination of varying factors such as reduced activities in the reward system, emotional neglect in childhood, social pressure. Adolescents who have anhedonia tend to be less motivated and have less expectation of future events, which will hinder their performance in school or outside of school. Despite of past studies that are conducted to help finding a cure for adolescent anhedonia, more research is needed to be conducted concentrating on adolescent with anehdonia as an individual.

Are Analyst Short‐Term Trade Ideas Valuable?

ABSTRACTShort‐term trade ideas are a component of analyst research highly valued by institutional investors. Using a novel and comprehensive database, we find that trade ideas have a stock price impact at least as large as recommendation and target price changes. Trade ideas based on expectations of future events are more informative than those identifying incomplete incorporation of past information in stock prices. Analysts with better access to a firm's management produce better trade ideas. Institutional investors trade in the direction of trade ideas. Investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns, consistent with analysts possessing valuable short‐term stock‐picking skills.

Combination of Backward and Forward Approaches for Future Prediction by Business Intelligence Tools

Business intelligence tools now play an important role in data collection, processing and analyses of organizations. Managers may use outputs of such tools and make improved decisions. To provide an even better situation for managers, business intelligence tools may be used to predict future and display present and past statuses of the organization. Available business intelligence tools predict future based on historical data, i.e., they are said to enjoy backward approaches. In this study, it was tried to change extrapolation of historical trends according to our expectations of future events so that forward approaches could be employed for prediction purposes.

When I Grow Up: Exploring the Link Between Future Expectations and Criminal Trajectories

There are several noteworthy cognitive and identity-based theories of desistance. Yet, there is little understanding about the role of one’s expectations of future events, which are tied to one’s sense of self, as they ultimately inform actions regarding offending. In this study, we test the extent to which optimistic and fatalistic expectations are related to desistance. We rely on negative binomial regression analyses and group-based trajectory modeling of data drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to determine the relationship between future event expectations and criminal engagement. We assess continued criminal involvement through self-reported arrests and offending variety. We find that future expectations regarding negative events (arrest, victimization, and drunkenness) are associated with future self-reported arrest while future positive expectations (parenthood, education, and employment) are unrelated to future offending behavior. Higher expectations of being arrested and getting drunk in the following year were associated with a greater likelihood of being classified as a persister relative to a nonoffender. We also find that Blacks are more likely to be classified as persisters. Yet, future expectations in late adolescence appear to be poor predictors of whether an individual will desist from offending over the long term. Our results suggest that future fatalistic expectations of a ‘feared self’ are generally associated with short-term offending. Future studies should explore the degree to which expectations and the development of a future self may vary by race and gender and alternative interpretations of the NLSY97 expectation questions.

Are Analyst Trade Ideas Valuable?

Short-term trade ideas are a component of analyst research highly valued by institutional investors. Using a novel and comprehensive database, we find trade ideas have a stock-price impact at least as large as recommendation and target price changes. Trade ideas based on expectations of future events are more informative than those identifying incomplete incorporation of past information in stock prices. Analysts with better access to a firm’s management produce better trade ideas. Institutional investors trade in the direction of trade ideas. Investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns, consistent with analysts possessing valuable short-term stock picking skills.

The softwood lumber dispute: Is a solution possible?

Canadian exports of softwood lumber to the USA have long been a source of conflict. As the last Softwood Lumber Agreement expired, we examined this issue as a University class project in forest policy. This text presents our analysis of the history of this conflict and the positions of various actors, along with our twenty-year plan for resolving this conflict. Our strategy is in three phases, corresponding to our expectations of future events: five years of conflict and negotiation that we should use to prepare certain changes in our forest sector; ten years under a new agreement during which we can implement these changes; followed by another conflict that we hope Canada will win, resulting in lumber becoming just another traded commodity. Our policy has four key elements: a gradual transition to market-price systems for 55% of public forest lumber volume; an expansion of value-added transformation and diversification of products; a reduction of softwood lumber production; and, a coordination role for the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers. We do not believe that our proposition is perfect, but we consider that it offers an option for breaking out of the box that characterises this conflict.

Understanding and treating amotivation in people with psychosis: An experimental study of the role of guided imagery.

Psychological models propose that the amotivational negative symptoms (ANS) of psychosis are influenced by expectations of future events; both anticipatory success (believing one can achieve something, AS) and anticipatory pleasure (mentally pre-creating potential future experiences of enjoyment, AP). Mental imagery manipulations have been shown to change expectations across a range of settings, and may therefore enhance psychological interventions for ANS in people with psychosis. We set out to investigate the impact of a guided imagery manipulation on AS and AP in this group. Forty-two participants with psychosis and ANS completed measures of ANS severity, before random allocation to either a positive or neutral imagery manipulation. AS and AP towards a dart-throwing task were measured before and after the manipulation. Greater ANS severity was associated with lower levels of AS, but not of AP, irrespective of task performance. AS, but not AP, improved during both positive and neutral imagery manipulations, with no effect of imagery type. Anticipatory success is a candidate psychological factor influencing the severity of ANS in psychosis that may be changed by guided imagery manipulation. Imagery interventions are feasible and acceptable for this group: further investigation is needed of their mechanism of action and potential to improve functioning.

Non-Rational Expectations and the Transmission Mechanism

In this paper, we compare two approaches to modelling behaviour under non-rational expectations in a benchmark New Keynesian model. The ‘Euler equation’ approach modifies the equations derived under the assumption of rational expectations by replacing the rational expectations operator with an alternative assumption about expectations formation. The ‘long-horizon’ expectations approach solves the decision rules of households and firms conditional on their expectations for future events that are outside of their control, so that spending and price-setting decisions depend on expectations extending into the distant future. Both approaches can be defended as descriptions of (distinct) forms of boundedly rational behaviour, but have different implications both for the form of the equations that govern the dynamics of the economy and the ease of deriving those equations. In this paper we construct two versions of a benchmark New Keynesian model in which non-rational expectations are modelled using the Euler equation and long-horizon approaches and show that both approaches have very similar implications for macroeconomic dynamics when departures from rational expectations are relatively small. But as expectations depart further from rationality, the two approaches can generate significantly different implications for the behaviour of key variables.

Exploring the role of the realized return distribution in the formation of the implied volatility smile

This article explores the role of the realized return distribution in the formation of the observed implied volatility smile using the framework of an adaptive expectations model. According to this framework investors update their expectations of future events, through which options are priced, by incorporating information from the underlying asset traded in the spot market. Our study is conducted at the level of cumulants which provide a complete description of investors expectations and can be considered as largely non-parametric with a minimal set of assumptions for the stochastic process that drives asset returns. The empirical results, based on the S&P 500 index, support the significance of the realized distribution in the formation of the implied volatility smile.

Managerial reasoning about aspirations and expectations

Managerial reasoning about performance targets and subsequent actions can be influenced by whether they focus their attention on expectations of future events or internal efforts to meet organizational goals. This study explores how managers think about expectations and aspirations by examining the semantic similarities and differences between these concepts for practicing managers and economists, the results suggesting subtle differences in how economists and managers reason about aspirations and expectations. For economists, the concept of expectations played a major role and influenced their subsequent thinking about goals and actions while managers conceptually separated factors that were controllable and uncontrollable, the concept of expectation not playing the central role for them. Implications for descriptive and prescriptive models of decision-making are discussed.

What you expect is not always what you get: The roles of extremity, optimism, and pessimism in the behavioral confirmation process

Do pessimists and optimists elicit the very behavior they expect from others? What if their expectations are fairly extreme? Using a simulated job interview paradigm, evidence was found for behavioral confirmation of generalized future-event expectancies (optimism/pessimism) and for the moderating role of extremity. Interviewers with nonextreme expectancies gathered information in an expectancy-biased fashion and elicited expectancy-confirming behavior from applicants. However, as interviewer expectancies became more extreme, these effects were attenuated. Further evidence suggested that extremity is associated with effortful correction processes and awareness of bias. Interestingly, pessimistic applicants were more strongly influenced by interviewers’ expectancies than were optimistic applicants. The current study extends research on the social-cognitive consequences of generalized future-event expectancies and extremity to the behavioral domain.

Attributional Effects of Conflicting Chronic and Temporary Outcome Expectancies: A Case of Automatic Comparison and Contrast

Two studies examined the notion that perceivers’ chronically accessible, negative future-event expectancies might serve as an important cognitive context for the interpretation of temporarily primed expectancies. Such a cognitive context should activate more extreme event-outcome categories that subsequently should be used as comparison standards in the dispositional inference process. A final study examined the direct effect of chronically accessible, negative expectancies on judgments of the priming stimuli. The results of all three studies support the notion that the contextually produced extremity of momentary event expectancies resulted in an unaware and highly efficient comparison and contrast process. When participants were aware of the activation of extreme event-outcome categories and had the requisite resources, correction of target judgments occurred.

Saccade initiation and accuracy in gaze shifts are affected by visual stimulus significance

The effect of visual stimulus significance on saccade latency and accuracy in gaze shifts was investigated. Stimulus significance refers to the temporal proximity of an imperative stimulus. It was hypothesized that stimulus significance serves as a cue that influences the observer's expectancy for a forthcoming event. Twenty-one undergraduate students participated in two experiments involving monitoring of visual events. Stimuli were a sequence of 1,000 single-digit integers presented one at a time at 9 degrees of visual angle to the left or right of a fixation point in random order. The subject was required to make a manual response after the presentation of a sequence of two odd integers. The probability of the subsequent integer being odd, a "target," after the presentation of an odd integer was 0.75. The integer after a target was always an even integer. When stimulus location was unpredictable (Experiment 1), latency of visually guided saccades to the target was shorter (p < .01) than to the nontarget stimuli. Under the condition of predictable stimulus location (Experiment 2), anticipatory saccades to the target occurred earlier (p < .01), more frequently (p < .01), and more accurately (p < .05). Our results suggest that both timing and accuracy of gaze shift are affected by the observer's expectation of future events.

The Role of Contextual Constraints and Chronic Expectancies on Behavior Categorizations and Dispositional Inferences

The authors examined the roles of chronic expectancies and other contextual information in the dispositional inference process within the domain of ability judgments. Prior to viewing a videotaped performance under either cognitive load or no load, participants in Studies 1 and 2 were given additional information designed to constrain their categorizations of the performance. In Study 2, chronic future-event expectancies also were assessed. Analyses revealed that when under cognitive load, participants’ ability inferences were assimilated to the constraint information (Studies 1 and 2) and to chronic expectancies (Study 2). Furthermore, Study 2 analyses revealed that these effects were mediated by participants’ behavior categorizations. Evidence suggestive of a proceduralized form of correction for task difficulty (Studies 1 and 2) and an effortful, awareness-based correction for the constraint information and for chronic expectancies also was found. Results are examined in light of recent models of the dispositional inference process.

Depressives' future-event schemas and the social inference process.

Two studies examined depressed and nondepressed perceivers' characterizations and thoughtful inferences about the behaviors of another person. In Study 1, depressed and nondepressed participants under a cognitive load or no load were asked to make either dispositional (ability) or situational (task ease) inferences about a target's videotaped performance. When cognitive resources were limited, depressed compared with nondepressed individuals made more pessimistic characterizations. No depression-related differences were found when sufficient cognitive resources were available for inferential correction. Study 2 provided evidence that the depressed-nondepressed differences in characterizations could be accounted for by schema-based future-event expectancies (S. M. Andersen, L. A. Spielman, & J. A. Bargh, 1992). Results are examined in light of previous failures to find consistent differences as a function of level of depression in inferences about others.

Dynamic Policy Simulation of Linear Models with Rational Expectations of Future Events: A Computer Package (PSREM).

Dynamic Policy Simulation of Linear Models with Rational Expectations of Future Events: A Computer Package (PSREM).

THE EXPECTED EXCHANGE RATE AND THE EFFECTS OF INTERVENTION, SENSITIVITY OF SPECULATION, AND CAPITAL MOBILITY

It is widely recognized that expectations of future events have significant impact on exchange rates movements. The role of expectations in exchange rate movements can be considered as a source of exchange rate estimation error. In a sense it is a pity that the majority of empirical evidence on the exchange rate fluctuation clearly negates the validity of such models that are more sophisticated and comprehensive.

A dynamic-optimization model of foreign borrowing: A case study of Thailand

This article assesses alternative foreign-borrowing strategies for Thailand using a medium-term dynamic optimization model. The model has five sectors: rubber, other agriculture, manufacturing, services, and construction. All markets clear with endogenous domestic prices. The model solution is a set of annual borrowing and investment levels, which through a general-equilibrium system determine domestic output, trade flows, and consumption, and that are chosen so as to maximize welfare. This model is applied to an analysis of the historical strategy taken by Thailand between 1975 and 1981. We find that Thailand may indeed have overborrowed toward the end of the 1970s and attribute the divergence of the actual and the optimal borrowing paths partly to inaccurate expectations on the timing and duration of shocks and partly to government policies that distorted market forces. The analysis suggests that robust foreign-borrowing stratergies should be based on an understanding of the structure of the economy, its flexibility in adjusting to shocks, on expectations of future events, and on lender's behavior. The endogenous and simultaneous nature of the interactions of key macrovariables cannot be overemphasized. Thus, the borrowing strategy must be made consistent with fiscal, monetary, and commercial policies.