Mental Frames Research Articles

The Portfolio‐Driven Disposition Effect

ABSTRACTThe disposition effect for a stock significantly weakens if the portfolio is at a gain, but is large when it is at a loss. We find this portfolio‐driven disposition effect (PDDE) in four independent settings: U.S. and Chinese archival data, as well as U.S. and Chinese experiments. The PDDE is robust to a variety of controls in regression specifications and is not explained by extreme returns, portfolio rebalancing, tax considerations, or investor heterogeneity. Our evidence suggests that investors form mental frames at both the stock and the portfolio levels and that these frames combine to generate the PDDE.

What is a farm? Mental framing and reframing as tools in communication between agricultural advisors and farmers

ABSTRACT Purpose To explore how advisors communicate with farmers and the mental frames that they use in their communication. Method A case study in Norway observing meetings between farmers and advisors at 17 farm visits and 43 separate interviews with 26 different informants (advisors and farmers) related to these visits. Empirical analysis is based on theory of framing and categories of frames. Findings There is variation among advisors in how they communicate with the farmers at farm visits, and how they communicate is related to the mental frames that the advisors apply. The frames identified are those of a machine, the brain, an organism, culture, and family. Some advisors are more skilled than others at switching between these various mental frames – reframing. Practical implications The mental frames can be further developed and applied as tools for advisory services to improve communication according to farmers’ needs and thus make advisory services more relevant for farmers. Theoretical implications Mental frames are applied empirically in an advisory context, and the relevance of mental framing is confirmed. Originality Mental frames have not previously been applied in an agricultural advisory context.

Life on the Move

What does the War on Terror have to teach us about the ongoing War on Invasive Species? Rooted in the author's personal experiences as an immigrant on a family farm in Virginia, this essay explores themes of language, mental frames, and violent conflict in novel ways that shed insight into the morality of the struggle to manage unwanted species.

Behavioural Insights in Corporate Sustainability Research: A Review and Future Agenda

As a plethora of sustainability challenges are rooted in human behaviour, the aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework that brings behavioural insights to the forefront in corporate sustainability research. The ABCD (attention, belief formation, choice, determination) approach, which is meant to assist policy-makers in analysing and diagnosing behavioural problems at an individual level, has been adopted into the corporate context. Taking the ABCD approach, this article discusses the main tenets of the prominent organisational theories, such as upper echelons theory, managerial cognition, stakeholder theory, the attention-based view of the firm, transaction cost theory, institutional theory, social network theory, legitimacy theory and signalling theory, and their application into corporate sustainability (CS) research. The paper offers a series of propositions, alternative to theories of structural determinism or theories of rational strategic choice, for specifying the conditions under which firms are likely to engage in sustainable business conduct. They refer among others to: (a) individual factors—characteristics and mental frames of managers in companies, (b) organisational factors—the composition and size of a board, governance mechanisms in a company, such as role models for sustainability issue selling, or the inclusion in decision making of various stakeholders, as well as (c) external factors—social norms or board connections.

Awe in the metaverse: Designing and validating a novel online virtual-reality awe-inspiring training

An increasing number of studies have unveiled the nuanced nature of awe - a complex emotion stemming from stimuli so perceptually and conceptually vast to impact individuals’ current mental frames. Its positive impact on human wellbeing and health have been reported even after a single short exposure to awe-inspiring stimuli. Recently, Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a suitable technique for eliciting brief moments of intense awe. Moreover, nowadays, the Metaverse has increased the opportunity to access even complex experiences, such as awe, for a prolonged period. However, the impact of a prolonged exposure to an awe-inspiring simulated experience still must be investigated. Here, in the first study, we designed and tested usability, user experience and preliminary effectiveness of the first VR awe-inspiring training vs. an equivalent neutral training in VR. We relied on an immersive virtual reality online social platform- Altspace VR - for designing the training. In the second study, we investigated whether a prolonged exposure to awe could hold the same effect on creative thinking as it was demonstrated for brief exposure to awe in VR. Specifically, we tested the impact of a long-lasting exposure to awe on creative thinking in the short and on the long run (after the training and in a one-week follow-up) and vs. an equivalent neutral condition (the same as the first study). Creativity thinking, was assessed through Alternative Uses Task (AUT). Additionally, measures related to the disposition to feel positive emotions, social desirability and level of curiosity were collected. The first study supported the feasibility of the training together with the usability of the platform as well as its effectiveness in eliciting awe (vs. neutral condition). Moreover, for the second study, there was a main effect of time on some of the dimensions of creative thinking. Participants scored higher in fluency, originality, and flexibility one week after the training compared to the pre-training phase. These results suggested preliminary design guidelines for creating awe experiences in the Metaverse, unveiling the role of time exposure and duration of their effects on individuals.

Engaging Conflict History and Memory Across the Taiwan Strait: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Conflict Timelines from Interactive Conflict Resolution (ICR) Dialogues

An analysis of twenty pairs of Taiwanese and mainland Chinese timelines of cross‐Strait relations demonstrates a highly dynamic way in which the two societies' conflict memories have evolved over two decades. These timelines were developed in the context of twenty weeklong Interactive Conflict Resolution (ICR) dialogues that the author facilitated. A cohort of civil society delegates from both sides of the Strait, each with five persons, participated in each of the dialogues and produced the timelines. A longitudinal content analysis of the timelines reveals that the participants' experiences of cross‐Strait relations have continuously altered their mental frames of the conflict. It also reveals distinct patterns of their recollections. These findings challenge the prevailing practices of conflict mapping and analysis that uncritically presume a static nature of conflict parties' goals. Broader implications of the study include the usefulness of action research and applied practice for methodological innovations and theory building.

Сетевой фрейм враждебное столкновение в русскоязычных интернет-комментариях

The article deals with the structure and content of the network frame hostile encounter in the Internet comments to a Russian video that featured the special military operation in Ukraine. The current political situation has turned many Internet resources into a platform of information-psychological warfare. Network discourse is anonymous and moderated by the resource owners. For instance, YouTube videos and comments can have a manipulative effect on Internet users, who develop certain mental frames as a result of interaction of mental and language structures. Charles Fillmore defined frames as structured knowledge that unites elements and associations related to specific cultural realities, situations, and events from human experience. The author believes that Internet comments may shape certain network variants of frames. The analysis of the network frame hostile encounter made it possible to identify the lexical units that make up its core, as well as to analyze the content of its obligatory and non-obligatory elements within the linguistics of information-psychological warfare.

Mental Frames and Textual Strategies in Mid-14thCentury Byzantine-Turkish Sources on the Beginnings of the Anatolian Turks in Europe

Article Mental Frames and Textual Strategies in Mid-14thCentury Byzantine-Turkish Sources on the Beginnings of the Anatolian Turks in Europe was published on December 1, 2021 in the journal Südost-Forschungen (volume 80, issue 1).

The Challenges of Christian–Daoist Dialogue

AbstractThough Daoism is one of the most ancient of Chinese religions, Christian/Catholic–Daoist dialogue is a very recent enterprise whose growth entails managing obstacles inherent to a novel field. This article, based on personal experience, unveils that dialogue with Daoism calls for humility and for a reconsideration of the mental frames that depicted Daoism as a receptacle of exotic and esoteric rituals, luring curious European minds in search of esoteric religious practices. As in other cases of interreligious dialogues, the main challenges to Christian–Daoist dialogue consist of identifying dialogue partners and experientially establishing the contents, modalities, and expectations of a journey that is only at its beginning. With humility, mutual respect, and openness, the journey might be bountiful in rewards as it unveils the treasures of authentic interreligious dialogue engagements.

Dental decision-making under general anesthesia for patients with disabilities: A qualitative study.

This paper explores the variables which influence decision-making processes in dentists providing dental care for people with disabilities under general anesthesia (GA). Face-to-face semi-structured interviews were undertaken on a purposive sample. Audio recordings were transcribed and checked for accuracy. Using thematic content analysis methods open codes were developed inductively. Codes were analyzed further by three authors adopting a deductive approach, leading to final coding, sorting and themes, subtheme and framework development. Three themes emerged. The first theme explored Shared Decision Making, or lack thereof, as it influenced clinical reasoning. The second (Systematic, Analytical) and third (Intuition, and heuristics) themes explored features of clinical judgment as considered under dual process theory. Dentists primarily used intuitive decision-making processes and heuristic styled processes (or cognitive mental frames) assisted in intuition to extract teeth, without engaging type 2 processes. The dentists experience subtle modifiers to their decision-making that ultimately promote extraction of teeth under GA for people with disabilities. Bias training, simulation and post-hoc reflection are examples of recommendations which may be used to improve decision-making in this area.

Gated Adaptation during the Cape Town Drought: Mentalities, Transitions and Pathways to Partial Nodes of Water Security

Illustrating how mentalities govern private responses to risk, this article highlights the importance of mental frames in the selection of adaptation pathways. Scholarship emanating out of the Cape...

How managers frame and make sense of unexpected events in project implementation

This paper examines how managers’ framing and sensemaking of unexpected events alters and adapts over time during the course of a major project implementation. By adopting a process ontology, we study the temporal evolution of framing and sensemaking of unexpected events and how they recursively influence each other. We show how over time managers’ sensemaking shifts from one form of sensemaking to another as they frame and reframe events to cope with changes in their environment.Our study contributes in two important ways. First, we contribute to the discussions on framing and sensemaking literature by illustrating how they manifest recursively. In particular, we show how change in framing of events alters the form of sensemaking and how new forms of sensemaking enable actors to reframe their expectations. Second, we contribute to discussions on how project managers cope with unexpected events in large complex projects which may lead to failures or project termination. We show how unexpected events not only disrupt actors’ mental frames of what and how to accomplish as part of project implementation, but also how they rework their expectations to adapt and move forward.

The role of humorous elements in Cádizchirigotasin creating/reinforcing a local identity

AbstractThis paper adopts a relevance-theoretic perspective to analyse howchirigotas – one of the types of bands in Cádiz carnival – exploit a series of verbal and visual comic elements in order to create or reinforce local identity: (i) the names of the bands, (ii) their attire, (iii) gestures and (iv) the lyrics of their comical songs, which satirise, mock, criticise, ridicule, praise, flatter or censure events or states of affairs. These elements will be argued to make manifest assumptions, activate (private) mental frames or express attitudes about those events or states of affairs, which the audience discover are already manifest to, and shared by, its members. Checking that other people entertain similar assumptions about and/or have similar attitudes towards those events or states of affairs – i.e. the ‘joy of manifestness’ – will be shown to be essential for generating a feeling of in-group membership on which that of a local identity greatly depends.

The Potential Role of Awe for Depression: Reassembling the Puzzle.

Recently, interest in the unique pathways linking discrete positive emotions to specific health outcomes has gained increasing attention, but the role of awe is yet to be elucidated. Awe is a complex and transformative emotion that can restructure individuals' mental frames so deeply that it could be considered a therapeutic asset for major mental health major issues, including depression. Despite sparse evidence showing a potential connection between depression and awe, this link has not been combined into a proposal resulting in specific intervention guidelines. The aim of this perspective was three-fold: (i) to provide a new unifying model of awe's functioning—the Matryoshka model; (ii) to show systematic and explicit connections between this emotion and depression; and (iii) to suggest specific guidelines of intervention utilizing the potential therapeutic role of awe for mental health, specifically for depression. This theoretical endeavor in its entirety has been framed within the health domain.

Usos ideológicos de elementos prestados del euskera en la creación de palabras en español en el lenguaje periodístico

Neology is a natural process in the diachronic evolution of language, which founds a very fruitful gap in the language of journalism. This paper presents an analysis of the morphological, semantic and pragmatic behaviour of some linguistic elements coming from the Basque language, which have been documented in an ad hoc corpus from the Spanish press. The initial hypothesis is that formants from this language are used to activate mental frames that connect neologisms with terrorist violence in the recipients. This type of neology is especially prolific because it seeks concrete pragmatic effects, whether as part of the journalist style or of the media. We have reviewed the digital newspaper library of eleven newspapers in order to study the function of three formants: borroka, batasuno and –(t)arra. The conclusion is that the starting hypothesis on the use of elements of Basque to create tendentious neologisms is fulfilled.

Gated Adaptation during the Cape Town Drought: Mentalities, Transitions and Pathways to Partial Nodes of Water Security

Illustrating how mentalities govern private responses to risk, this article highlights the importance of mental frames in the selection of adaptation pathways. Scholarship emanating out of the Cape Town drought (2015–2018) has drawn attention to the effect of the drought on public mentalities and their response to the drought, transitional governance arrangements and off-grid responses to secure water supply. This article focusses on what mentalities and behaviors may not have changed for private actors that secured water through off-grid means. This is a contrarian view to the dominant drought response discourse, yet critical for understanding and charting future governance arrangements. While it is acknowledged that transforming frames have emerged from the drought and are enabling novel pathways, the article questions the distributional and transition effect of such shifts when considering gated actions that link with conventional or untransformed views and behaviors which themselves entrench alternative response pathways for the affluent.HighlightsConventional frames govern private responses to risk.Mentalities drive the selection of available response technologies.Range of selected pathways indicate plural and differential views.Private off-grid and gated responses contest transformed views or behaviors.

Public mission under scarcity: Behavioral insights into Greek higher education

Relying upon the heuristic presuppositions of behavioral economics, this study seeks to offer an expanded analysis of the public mission mandate of the Greek higher education sector. The examination outlines and parses qualitative evidence issued from the Greek Ministry of Education, and in particular from the hitherto untranslated document A Strategy for Higher Education in Greece: 2016–2020, in conjunction with a growing body of scholarship on the challenges of cultivating public trust in the Greek social landscape. The discussion negotiates the position of the Greek higher education system as a system of sustainable social prosperity and argues that its operational conditions of financial scarcity may entail broader and inadvertent ramifications, namely, the depletion of cognitive resources and the propagation of narrow mental frames in the pursuit of a public mission.

Geoliteracy, cartology, and a mobile serious game

Geoliteracy, cartology, and a mobile serious game

Do external environmental factors affect on strategic choice decisions of innovation?: The case of service organizations in a cross-cultural comparison

Decision making of innovation comes to the fore as sufficient justification for achieving competitiveness in a context of ever-increasing rivalry. In this formulation, decision makers are likely to form mental frames and sense-making processes in order to access complex interactions of external and organizational ingredients and make strategic decisions of innovation alternatives (service innovation, process innovation, ancillary innovation). This paper examines environmental factors that may explain managers’ strategic choice of a specific type of innovation in service sector organizations located in Qatar and Greece from the viewpoint of the managers’ distinct national cultures resulting in different attitudes and values. This research work examines several main-effect propositions regarding managers’ perspective chosen innovation alternatives, depending on the external forces (service need, diversity of need, increase in population, and influence of context) are dealing with. We illustrate the main effect by looking at surface manifestations of managerial decisions of innovation as outward expressions of distinct characteristics lying deeper in each national culture of origin: Qatari managers prefer service innovations more than Greek managers do. Furthermore, this article reports on the findings of an exploratory study comparing national differences in innovation selection decision between Qatari and Greek top managers that develop a number of interaction effects. To confirm our propositions we gathered experimental data from 118 Greek top managers and 61 Qatari top managers. A multilevel regression analysis was used to examine and assess the relative impacts of the environmental forces on innovation strategic decision-making.

Psycholinguistic Characteristics of Secondary Predication in Determining the Construction of a Peculiar Picture of the World of a Reader

The article deals with the analysis of psycholinguistic characteristics of explication of secondary predication, which are considered as dominant determinants of constructing a peculiar picture of the world of the reader. It is noted that in the scientific literature predication is categorized as a category that facilitates the constitution of a sentence in the form of a minimal communicative unit, which helps to establish the identity of the content of the sentence and the content of the reality which is surrounding us. It was determined that predication is: a) a category that contains signs of time, modality and personalization; b) a category that is essentially quasi-communicative, that is one that manifests itself in the attitudes of the opposition to themes and rams; c) a category that contains signs of time and modality.
 In this article the novel of Frederick Forsyth “The Odessa file” was analyzed (according to the structures of secondary predication). This analysis suggests that the largest number of secondary predication structures are components of predication structures: 2137 cases, representing 51.38% of the total (4159 of all structures of secondary predication). This group includes the structures of secondary predication of all five types, but the most frequent are the structures of secondary predication, where the secondary predication is expressed by the adjective: in 35.47%. In addition, it should be noted that the structures of secondary predication with the infinitive are the most frequent of all types of structures of secondary predication and make up 34.82% of the total sample size, that is, almost the third part from all amount of cases. The structures of secondary predication, that are Participle II and the structures of it modification, make up 30.89% of the total. However, in the novel of Frederick Forsyth “The Odessa file” also there are the structures of the secondary predication of all five types. Cases when the structures of secondary predication act as components of the modification structures are the least frequent (only 39.07% of the total), however, this group also includes the structures of secondary predication of all types.
 It was clarified the concept of secondary predication. We believe that secondary predication is the amplification of features of the sentence, which amplifies the meaning of the sentence to the reality that is surrounding us, thus these structures are facilitating, building the image of the world or a peculiar picture of the world of a reader, the picture which, in turn, will determine the mental scripts, frames and images of this man in the future.