Attribution Of Intentions Research Articles

Executive function and Theory of Mind in explaining young children’s moral reasoning: A Test of the Hierarchical Competing Systems Model

Children’s moral reasoning in early childhood is dynamic, and requires coordination of multiple social domains. Hierarchical Competing Systems Model (HCSM; Marcovitch & Zelazo, 2009) posits that underlying cognitive mechanisms, namely executive functions (EF), might allow for greater reflection and integration of multiple domains. In the current study, 121 preschool-age children (Mage = 53.24 months) completed an age-appropriate Stroop task, a theory of mind (ToM) battery, and open-ended story-interviews pertaining to intentional and accidental harm. Findings largely support the HCSM in explaining children’s moral reasoning. Stroop performance explained morally-embedded ToM task performance, such that stronger EF corresponded with better ToM performance. ToM performance explained attributions of intentions for events of intentional harm and accidental harm, but did not explain children’s own evaluations of either transgression. Stroop performance also explained discrepant justificatory strategies across harmful events, for instance with faster Stroop performance corresponding with reasoning strategies related to fairness, but only for the accidental event. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.

The effects of the activation of hostile and non-hostile schemas on intent attribution processes in non-aggressive individuals: An ERP study

ABSTRACT We investigated the influences of hostile and non-hostile schemas activations in non-aggressive individuals on their intent attribution processes in various social contexts. 38 non-aggressive participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups, one primed with negative words, to be conditioned as temporarily hostile (TH), and the other with positive words, be conditioned as temporarily non-hostile (TNH). They were asked to read social scenarios composed of positive or negative behaviors of others whose intentions are ambiguous followed by a disambiguation of others’ real intentions (hostile vs non-hostile) behind their behaviors. Neural activity related to spontaneous intent attribution processes was measured using electroencephalography (EEG). The results showed that when non-hostile intentions were revealed following ambiguous-negative behaviors of others, the N400 effect was observed only in the TH group. Similarly, when hostile intentions were revealed following ambiguous-positive behaviors of others, the N400 effect was observed only in the TNH group. In other words, non-aggressive individuals were led to attribute either hostile or non-hostile intentions to the same ambiguous behaviors of others depending on which concepts or thoughts (hostile vs non hostile) were activated and accessible in memory by priming at the time of social interactions.

(I Think) I Know Why You Did That: The Risky Business of Inferring Intentions

Despite the important role that assumptions about intentions play in our judgments of others' actions and how we respond to these actions, most of us haven't thought much about the accuracy of the inferences we make, the ways our decisions about what he meant to do or why she did that might be unintentionally biased, or the potential negative effects that result when inferences about intentions affect how we judge a behavior. Nor have we thought about steps we might take to question or correct our initial inferences, or whether we should aim to set aside inferences altogether in judging and determining the consequences of a behavior. The goal of this note is to help you think about exactly these things. Excerpt UVA-OB-1348 Jan. 27, 2021 (I Think) I Know Why You Did That: The Risky Business of Inferring Intentions We care about what happens in other people's minds. Almost from the moment we are born, we are attempting to infer the goals of and attribute intentionality to others. Some even suggest that the development of civilization was only possible because of this ability to infer correctly at least some of the time why so-and-so did that. The pervasiveness of such attributions of intent (both in our evolutionary history and our own lives) has created a strong tendency for us to trust the judgments we make stemming from such inferences. And indeed, for some goals such as preserving close relationships or fostering smooth coordination in ongoing small groups giving others the benefit of the doubt might still be adaptive some of the time. However, for optimizing on many other important values and goals, relying on our immediate judgments of others' intentions can be quite problematic. Research is now replete with examples of the systematic misjudgments and biases that our imperfect brains make based on inferences about others. These cognitive glitches lead to suboptimal decisions about praise and blame, consequences, and other judgments where fairness and/or effectiveness are important. They also often leave us with a false sense of confidence that our judgments are correct and thus a reduced likelihood of noticing and correcting our errors. . . .

Social reward, punishment, and prosociality in paranoia.

Paranoia is the exaggerated belief that harm will occur and is intended by others. Although commonly framed in terms of attributing malicious intent to others, recent work has explored how paranoia also affects social decision-making, using economic games. Previous work found that paranoia is associated with decreased cooperation and increased punishment in the Dictator Game (where cooperating and punishing involve paying a cost to respectively increase or decrease a partner’s income). These findings suggest that paranoia might be associated with variation in subjective reward from positive and/or negative social decision-making, a possibility we explore using a preregistered experiment with U.S.-based participants (n = 2,004). Paranoia was associated with increased self-reported enjoyment of negative social interactions and decreased self-reported enjoyment of prosocial interactions. More paranoid participants attributed stronger harmful intent to a partner. Harmful intent attributions and the enjoyment of negative social interactions positively predicted the tendency to pay to punish the partner. Cooperation was positively associated with the tendency to enjoy prosocial interactions and increased with participant age. There was no main effect of paranoia on tendency to cooperate in this setting. We discuss these findings in light of previous research.

Texting with Humanlike Conversational Agents: Designing for Anthropomorphism

Conversational agents (CAs) are natural language user interfaces that emulate human-to-human communication. Because of this emulation, research on CAs is inseparably linked to questions about anthropomorphism—the attribution of human qualities, including consciousness, intentions, and emotions, to nonhuman agents. Past research has demonstrated that anthropomorphism affects human perception and behavior in human-computer interactions by, for example, increasing trust and connectedness or stimulating social response behaviors. Based on the psychological theory of anthropomorphism and related research on computer interface design, we develop a theoretical framework for designing anthropomorphic CAs. We identify three groups of factors that stimulate anthropomorphism: technology design-related factors, task-related factors, and individual factors. Our findings from an online experiment support the derived framework but also reveal novel yet counterintuitive insights. In particular, we demonstrate that not all combinations of anthropomorphic technology design cues increase perceived anthropomorphism. For example, we find that using only nonverbal cues harms anthropomorphism; however, this effect becomes positive when nonverbal cues are complemented with verbal or human identity cues. We also find that CAs’ disposition to complete computerlike versus humanlike tasks and individuals’ disposition to anthropomorphize greatly affect perceived anthropomorphism. This work advances our understanding of anthropomorphism and contextualizes the theory of anthropomorphism within the IS discipline. We advise on the directions that research and practice should take to find the sweet spot for anthropomorphic CA design.

The Melodramatic Mode in American Politics and Other Varieties of Narrative Suspicion

The Melodramatic Mode in American Politics and Other Varieties of Narrative Suspicion Timothy Melley (bio) No consideration of paranoia or conspiracy theory can proceed these days without at least a nod to Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter's 1964 "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is among the most influential essays ever on the American political imagination, and it is significantly responsible for much contemporary thinking about conspiracy theory. There is, of course, nothing new about conspiracism, and it was in fact Karl Popper who introduced the contemporary notion of "conspiracy theory" in 1945.1 Yet Hofstadter's essay popularized the idea that conspiracy theory is a distinct, recognizable, and dismissible category of thinking with outsized effects on national political life. The paranoid style, he argued, has a "long and varied history," simmering on the margins of American society from the beginning and occasionally flaring into decisive political movements (1965a, 3). Its core epistemological error is the tendency to see "a 'vast' or 'gigantic' conspiracy as the motive force in historical events" (25, 29). It is also characterized by a sense of persecution, the attribution of malevolent intentions to large organizations, and the deployment of "overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic" rhetoric (4). While the paranoid style is an expression of "distorted judgment" and "political pathology," it is not a symptom of true mental illness. Whereas clinically paranoid individuals fear plots against themselves, practitioners of the paranoid political style descry threats against "a nation, a culture, or a way of life" affecting millions (4). The age of Donald Trump seems an important time to reexamine Hofstadter's concept. Trump has frequently been seen as the avatar of a [End Page 57] new "post-truth era" and a "golden age of conspiracy theory."2 He is a stunning example of the paranoid style. His singular ability to wed the nostalgic politics of national grievance to a narrative of personal suffering at the hands of vicious political enemies, "deep state" traitors, and malevolent journalists propelled his unlikely rise to conspiracy theorist-in-chief. Still, if Trumpism marks a high point in the annals of paranoid politics, it is important to recall that Hofstadter was writing amid his own "post-truth" crisis. After a decade of anti-communist demagoguery from Joseph McCarthy and others, Hofstadter was confronting the disturbing rise of Barry Goldwater. "The Paranoid Style" connected the rhetoric of such Cold War "pseudo-conservatives" to a much older tradition of paranoid politics in order to confront the frustrating persistence and appeal of populist demonology in the U.S. The most important legacy of Hofstadter's essay is the idea that conspiracy theory is an easily recognized and dismissed type of political speech, marked by symptomatic errors of interpretation and understood chiefly as a result of faulty cognition—a "crippled epistemology," to use the term of Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule (2008, 675). This view continues to inform most scholarly and popular thinking about conspiracy theory, but it has also troubled some critics.3 For one thing, "The Paranoid Style" focuses exclusively on conservative and American examples. For another, it paints the paranoid style as a marginal, rather than central, aspect of American politics. Third, and most important, Hofstadter pathologizes the suspicion of conspiracy without acknowledging that something akin to paranoid suspicion might actually help discern the nature of modern political and economic power. Over the past two decades, numerous scholars, including myself, have asked whether the imagination of concealed structures and intentions may be a reasonable, even salutary, response to the conditions of knowledge in contemporary democracy.4 These inquiries have been intensified by the weaponization of the phrase "conspiracy theory," which is often used to dismiss claims as patently absurd and unworthy of serious consideration. The debate over Hofstadter's concept has mostly emphasized its epistemological rather than narratological framework—acknowledging the power of his category while challenging the confident assumption that paranoid interpretation can easily be distinguished from its rational counterparts. But what if Hofstadter's essay is, in the end, not primarily about paranoia? What happens if we take Hofstadter's term "style" more literally and attend to the formal dimensions of his major examples? What happens, in short, if we...

THE KNOBE EFFECT FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THOMISTIC ETHICS: THE PROBLEM OF NORMATIVE ORDERS AND COMPETENCES

This article discusses how to interpret the so-called Knobe effect, which refers to the asymmetry in judgments about the intentionality of the side effects caused by one’s actions. The observed tendency is explained through the “moral undertone” of the actions judged. So far, discussions have mostly been held among philosophers in the analytical tradition, who see the theory of morality largely as an ethics of rules. The analysis developed in this article advances the research carried out so far to include teleological ethics, most notably the tradition of Thomistic ethics. Philosophical discussions address the problem of normative orders, focusing in particular on two types of cognition concerned, respectively, with moral judgments and facts. Investigating this issue proves to be helpful not only to explain the Knobe effect, but also to better understand the very notion of an intentional action as employed in the philosophy of action. As a result of this analysis, the Author explains the existing asymmetry in the attribution of intentionality to actions with the respondents’ confusion between cognitive orders. This problem brings us to the issue of normative competences. In analyzing the Knobe effect, normative competences would be responsible for the classification of the data collected and separation of the “purely informative” order from the order of moral judgments, referring to norms or values.

Perspectives of Family Caregivers Confronted With Care-Resistant Behavior From Persons With Dementia

Problem: Care-resistant behavior is often bundled with other behavioral symptoms of dementia, but it is a unique behavior requiring targeted interventions. Purpose: To describe the experiences of caregivers receiving online coaching to manage care-resistant behaviors exhibited by persons with dementia. Design: Qualitative. Sample & Procedure: 20 caregivers (12 female, 8 male) were recruited from Memory Disorders and Geriatrics clinics to participate in 6 weeks of online coaching sessions delivered by a doctorally prepared nurse practitioner. Coaching sessions were recorded and transcribed. NVivo12 software was used to manage the thematic analyses. Results: Caregivers followed a general trajectory. They initially reported feelings of anger, frustration, and guilt. They believed that the person with dementia was purposefully “being stubborn and mean.” As the coaching sessions progressed, these negative emotions and the attributions of intent altered. By the conclusion of the six weeks, caregivers expressed feelings of success and ingenuity in applying coaching strategies. Conclusion: Online coaching is an effective way to individualize strategies that enable the caregiver to manage and reduce care-resistant behavior. Implications: The use of a doctorally-prepared nurse practitioner to deliver coaching, while effective, is not sustainable. Next steps include developing a coaching training program that could be embedded into existing community resources for community-dwelling caregivers. Limitations: Participants were limited to referrals from two clinics in the same institution.

Morally-relevant theory of mind mediates the relationship between group membership and moral judgments

Children rely on their understanding of others’ mental states to help them navigate complex social contexts involving moral judgments and group membership. This study examined the relationship between mental state understanding, group membership, and moral judgments. Children (4–10 years old, N = 120, MAge = 6.87 years, SDAge = 1.81), were interviewed and told about hypothetical peers who created advantages for their team that varied in the moral status of their intentions. Analyses revealed that morally-relevant Theory of Mind competence mediated the relations between group membership, attribution of intentions, and social exclusion when an advantage had both moral and intentional motives, but not when an advantage was a straightforward moral transgression. Morally-relevant Theory of Mind was predictive of person judgments and varied based on ingroup/outgroup status of the target. Future work should consider how children’s mental state understanding interacts with ingroup biases to affect outcomes in other contexts.

Are They Really Trying to Save Their Buddy? The Anthropomorphism of Animal Epimeletic Behaviours.

Simple SummaryAnthropomorphism, defined as attributing human traits to animals and other entities, seems to have appeared during evolution to improve an individual’s understanding of other species (or indeed the world in general). Yet anthropomorphism can have beneficial or harmful consequences especially for animals, and there seems to be little interest in monitoring the potential danger of this approach. Few studies have focused on the factors affecting how we attribute intentions or beliefs to animals, and more quantitative studies are needed to identify how and why humans attribute mental states and cognitive abilities to other animals. In this study, participants answer questions about three videos in which an individual (a sparrow, an elephant and a macaque, respectively) displayed behaviours towards an inanimate conspecific that suddenly regained consciousness at the end of the footage. A fourth video showed a robot dog being kicked by an engineer to demonstrate its stability. These questions were designed to measure how far participants attribute humanlike intentions, beliefs or mental states to non-human animals and robots. Men and older participants are less likely to attribute humanlike mental states to animals. Similarly, people who work with animals or have at least one pet at home demonstrated less naïve anthropomorphism. Conversely, we found that members of animal protection associations showed more biophilia (affinity for other living organisms), attributed more intentions and mental states to animals and were further from biological reality (current scientific knowledge of each species) than non-members. Understanding the potential usefulness of these factors can lead to better relationships with animals and encourage human-robot interactions.Anthropomorphism is a natural tendency in humans, but it is also influenced by many characteristics of the observer (the human) and the observed entity (here, the animal species). This study asked participants to complete an online questionnaire about three videos showing epimeletic behaviours in three animal species. In the videos, an individual (a sparrow, an elephant and a macaque, respectively) displayed behaviours towards an inanimate conspecific that suddenly regained consciousness at the end of the footage. A fourth video showed a robot dog being kicked by an engineer to demonstrate its stability. Each video was followed by a series of questions designed to evaluate the degree of anthropomorphism of participants, from mentaphobia (no attribution of intentions and beliefs, whatever the animal species) to full anthropomorphism (full attribution of intentions and beliefs by animals, to the same extent as in humans) and to measure how far the participants had correctly assessed each situation in terms of biological reality (current scientific knowledge of each species). There is a negative correlation (about 61%) between the mental states attributed to animals by humans and the real capability of animals. The heterogeneity of responses proved that humans display different forms of anthropomorphism, from rejecting all emotional or intentional states in animals to considering animals to show the same intentions as humans. However, the scores participants attributed to animals differed according to the species shown in the video and to human socio-demographic characteristics. Understanding the potential usefulness of these factors can lead to better relationships with animals and encourage a positive view of human-robot interactions. Indeed, reflective or critical anthropomorphism can increase our humanity.

Unjustifiably Irresponsible: The Effects of Social Roles on Attributions of Intent

How do people’s social roles change others’ perceptions of their intentions to cause harm? Three preregistered vignette-based experiments (N = 788) manipulated the social role of someone causing harm and measured how intentional people thought the harm was. Results indicate that people judge harmful consequences as intentional when they think the actor unjustifiably caused harm. Social roles were shown to alter intention judgments by making people responsible for preventing harm (thereby rendering the harm as an intentional neglect of one’s responsibilities) or for causing the harm (thereby excusing it as an unintentional byproduct of the role). Additionally, Experiment 3 conceptually replicated and moderated the side-effect effect —revealing that people think harmful side effects are intentional when the harm is unjustified but not when a role’s responsibility justifies it. We discuss the importance of social information—including roles—in how people judge others’ intentions.

Repetitive Robot Behavior Impacts Perception of Intentionality and Gaze-Related Attentional Orienting.

Gaze behavior is an important social signal between humans as it communicates locations of interest. People typically orient their attention to where others look as this informs about others' intentions and future actions. Studies have shown that humans can engage in similar gaze behavior with robots but presumably more so when they adopt the intentional stance toward them (i.e., believing robot behaviors are intentional). In laboratory settings, the phenomenon of attending toward the direction of others' gaze has been examined with the use of the gaze-cueing paradigm. While the gaze-cueing paradigm has been successful in investigating the relationship between adopting the intentional stance toward robots and attention orienting to gaze cues, it is unclear if the repetitiveness of the gaze-cueing paradigm influences adopting the intentional stance. Here, we examined if the duration of exposure to repetitive robot gaze behavior in a gaze-cueing task has a negative impact on subjective attribution of intentionality. Participants performed a short, medium, or long face-to-face gaze-cueing paradigm with an embodied robot while subjective ratings were collected pre and post the interaction. Results show that participants in the long exposure condition had the smallest change in their intention attribution scores, if any, while those in the short exposure condition had a positive change in their intention attribution, indicating that participants attributed more intention to the robot after short interactions. The results also show that attention orienting to robot gaze-cues was positively related to how much intention was attributed to the robot, but this relationship became more negative as the length of exposure increased. In contrast to subjective ratings, the gaze-cueing effects (GCEs) increased as a function of the duration of exposure to repetitive behavior. The data suggest a tradeoff between the desired number of trials needed for observing various mechanisms of social cognition, such as GCEs, and the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance toward a robot.

Validation of the Tunisian Social Situation Instrument in the General Pediatric Population

BackgroundIn order to better understand the deployment of the theory of mind (ToM) in Tunisian neurotypical children, we have developed a new tool of assessment of the ToM called the “Tunisian Social Situations Instrument” (TSSI). We opted for the creation of this test in view of the intercultural differences in the development of social skills. Our purpose was to validate this tool in general pediatric population.MethodsIt was a cross-sectional evaluative study that aimed to validate the TSSI in the general pediatric population. We initially conducted a beta test and a pre-validation study before taking the initial version of the TSSI on 123 neurotypical children. Then, we followed the typical validation procedure: appearance validity, content validity, construct validity, and reliability study.ResultsRegarding the validity of appearance, the TSSI was comprehensible and adapted to the Tunisian pediatric population. About content validity, the exploratory factor analysis extracted 6 factors that explain 69.3% of the total variance. These factors were respectively social clumsiness types 1 and 2, intention attribution, emotional ToM, epistemic ToM, and simple comprehension questions. The subdomains of social clumsiness (types 1 and 2) and emotional ToM had a Cronbach alpha higher than 0.8. This factor structure as well as the significant inter-correlation between subdomains and the global score were in favor of a good construct validity. The internal consistency study showed good reliability of the final version of the TSSI (alpha of Cronbach at 0,809). Regarding the performance of children at the TSSI, we have noticed a significant association between the global score, age, and verbal intelligence.ConclusionThis work offers valuable insights about ToM and provides clinicians with a reliable tool to assess social clumsiness and emotional ToM in typically developing children.

Unfair customer reviews: Third-party perceptions and managerial responses

This research examines third-party perceptions of unfair reviews and effects of managerial responses. Using an experimental research design, this research reports the findings of two studies involving 1115 US consumers. Study 1 examines third-party perceptions (i.e., severity of incident, attribution of blame and opportunistic intentions) after reading reviews. Study 2 examines the moderating influence of the managerial response strategies. The findings provide significant insight for service providers in scripting their responses to unfair reviews. To protect their reputation, a defensive managerial response strategy is found to be best when (1) severity of the reported incident is high and (2) review content indicates possible opportunistic intentions of the complainant. Alternatively, when attribution of blame lies strongly with the service provider, then an accommodative strategy is more effective. Our findings contribute to the unfair review and managerial response literature by highlighting the benefits of both the accommodative and the defensive strategies.

Reduction in social learning and increased policy uncertainty about harmful intent is associated with pre-existing paranoid beliefs: Evidence from modelling a modified serial dictator game.

Current computational models suggest that paranoia may be explained by stronger higher-order beliefs about others and increased sensitivity to environments. However, it is unclear whether this applies to social contexts, and whether it is specific to harmful intent attributions, the live expression of paranoia. We sought to fill this gap by fitting a computational model to data (n = 1754) from a modified serial dictator game, to explore whether pre-existing paranoia could be accounted by specific alterations to cognitive parameters characterising harmful intent attributions. We constructed a 'Bayesian brain' model of others' intent, which we fitted to harmful intent and self-interest attributions made over 18 trials, across three different partners. We found that pre-existing paranoia was associated with greater uncertainty about other's actions. It moderated the relationship between learning rates and harmful intent attributions, making harmful intent attributions less reliant on prior interactions. Overall, the magnitude of harmful intent attributions was directly related to their uncertainty, and importantly, the opposite was true for self-interest attributions. Our results explain how pre-existing paranoia may be the result of an increased need to attend to immediate experiences in determining intentional threat, at the expense of what is already known, and more broadly, they suggest that environments that induce greater probabilities of harmful intent attributions may also induce states of uncertainty, potentially as an adaptive mechanism to better detect threatening others. Importantly, we suggest that if paranoia were able to be explained exclusively by core domain-general alterations we would not observe differential parameter estimates underlying harmful-intent and self-interest attributions.

Western Misperception when Deterring Russia: Cultural and Linguistic Factors

Policy-making discourses of both Moscow and the capitals of Western countries are full of mutual misperceptions, mirror imaging, and attribution of non-existent intentions and capabilities. Although the concepts of deterrence of Western countries and Russia partially overlap, there is also a huge area where they operate in “parallel universes.” Furthermore, a lot of strategic culture in association with deterrence is produced not for operational or functional purposes, but to please local political or military elite. To answer the question which improvements are needed in the future to actually deter Russia and to avoid further aggression on the Russian side, first, Russia can be deterred only in the language they understand: Russia needs to understand the threat, and it needs to have meaning for them.

Negative Attribution Bias and Related Risk Factors After Brain Injury.

In participants with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and peer controls, examine (1) differences in negative attributions (interpret ambiguous behaviors negatively); (2) cognitive and emotional factors associated with negative attributions; and (3) negative attribution associations with anger responses, life satisfaction, and participation. Two TBI outpatient rehabilitation centers. Participants with complicated mild to severe TBI (n = 105) and peer controls (n = 105). Cross-sectional survey study. Hypothetical scenarios describing ambiguous behaviors were used to assess situational anger and attributions of intent, hostility, and blame. Executive functioning, perspective taking, emotion perception and social inference, alexithymia, aggression, anxiety, depression, participation, and life satisfaction were also assessed. Compared with peer controls, participants with TBI rated behaviors significantly more intentional, hostile, and blameworthy. Regression models explained a significant amount of attribution variance (25%-43%). Aggression was a significant predictor in all models; social inference was also a significant predictor of intent and hostility attributions. Negative attributions were associated with anger responses and lower life satisfaction. People with TBI who have higher trait aggression and poor social inferencing skills may be prone to negative interpretations of people's ambiguous actions. Negative attributions and social inferencing skills should be considered when treating anger problems after TBI.

Contribution à l’étude clinique des institutions de soins. Le fantasme de l’institution malfaisante

In France, the lens with which clinical psychology gazes through institutional matters seems limited to what happens between patients and professionals. It pays little interest to the interactions between the administration of the institution, i.e. organizational matters, and the daily clinical setting of mental health care. Unconscious institutional dynamics seem to receive much more attention from management sciences, which sometimes use psychoanalytical concepts to shed light on managerial and organizational problems. This article, based on an action-research study in a French university hospital, aims to shed light on one of the unconscious mental constructs which could be at the root of what several authors in psychiatry have identified as “institutional paranoia”: the fantasy of a malicious institution. We hypothesize that this fantasy, which attributes harmful intentions towards its agents to the institution, is a recurrent avatar of the typical problem institutional psychology deals with. It is therefore even more specific to hospitals, due to the abundantly documented tensions which they have been faced during the last two decades. We were initially appointed to conduct a “cooperative action research” project in a French University Hospital Centre between October 2018 and September 2019, in order to write a preliminary research report on the quality of working life as experienced by its personnel. Four ethnographic qualitative research techniques were used to assess the needs of healthcare professionals: individual and group interviews with teams from all departments (health care, administrative, logistical and technical), on formal or informal times, participant observations in services which were later recorded in a written logbook, interprofessional working groups called “thematic commissions” that met for five sessions of 3 hours each and the creation of a digital “suggestion box” accessible on the hospital's intranet. Our results show the fantasy of the malicious institution deserves to be isolated due to its three constitutive elements: 1) a blurry institutional governance and incarnation of the hospital's leadership; 2) the recognition of the symbolic power of the institution, including its coercive power; and 3) the attribution of negative intentions to the institution by aggressive projections, which in turn transform it into a persecuting object. We discuss the link between the feeling of belonging to the institution and the feeling of abandonment as experienced by staff in regards to the religious past of French hospitals, and indicate the necessity but also the caution with which research can and must investigate the weight of the personal history and vulnerability of each individual in his or her sensitivity to the representation of the malicious institution.

Dopamine manipulations modulate paranoid social inferences in healthy people

Altered dopamine transmission is thought to influence the formation of persecutory delusions. However, despite extensive evidence from clinical studies there is little experimental evidence on how modulating the dopamine system changes social attributions related to paranoia, and the salience of beliefs more generally. Twenty seven healthy male participants received 150mg L-DOPA, 3 mg haloperidol, or placebo in a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled study, over three within-subject sessions. Participants completed a multi-round Dictator Game modified to measure social attributions, and a measure of belief salience spanning themes of politics, religion, science, morality, and the paranormal. We preregistered predictions that altering dopamine function would affect (i) attributions of harmful intent and (ii) salience of paranormal beliefs. As predicted, haloperidol reduced attributions of harmful intent across all conditions compared to placebo. L-DOPA reduced attributions of harmful intent in fair conditions compared to placebo. Unexpectedly, haloperidol increased attributions of self-interest about opponents’ decisions. There was no change in belief salience within any theme. These results could not be explained by scepticism or subjective mood. Our findings demonstrate the selective involvement of dopamine in social inferences related to paranoia in healthy individuals.

Elaboration and physical-chemical, microbiological and sensorial characterization of sweet gluten-free cookies prepared with babassu mesocarp flour and rice flour

Cookies, in general, are well accepted by all audiences, and research and investments in this type of product are of great importance to meet market demands. There are few product options for people with gluten intolerance on the market, and rice flour and babassu fruit mesocarp flour are good options for the development of new products for this audience. The objective of the present work was to prepare a gluten-free sweet biscuit with high nutritional value, based on babassu mesocarp flour with partial replacement by rice flour, to carry out the physical-chemical, microbiological characterization, sensory acceptance, and purchase intention of consumers. Three different formulations were studied, with 50, 75 and 100% babassu fruit mesocarp flour. Physical-chemical analyzes of moisture, water activity, ash, lipids, proteins and carbohydrates (by difference) were carried out, the microbiological quality was also evaluated according to the legislation and sensory acceptability through a questionnaire with 80 untrained tasters, as for the appearance, color, aroma, texture, sweetness, flavor, global impression and purchase intention attributes. The results showed that the cookies with variations of babassu fruit mesocarp flour and rice flour are comparable to other studies found in the literature, in terms of physical-chemical and microbiological characteristics. In the sensory evaluation, the cookies received grades in the acceptance range for all formulations, demonstrating that the product has the potential to be in the market.