People's Evaluations Research Articles

The important role of dACC in shyness.

Shyness is often characterized by the avoidance of social contact, the fear of other people's evaluations and a lack of self-esteem. Generally, individuals with high levels of shyness are more likely to suffer from psychosomatic stress and social anxiety. However, the structural brain basis of individual shyness among healthy people has not yet been investigated with DTI (diffusion tensor imaging). Thus, in this study, we investigated the relationship between FA (fractional anisotropy), WMV (white matter volume), GMV (gray matter volume) and shyness in a large healthy sample of 318 college students. Multiple regression was used to analyze the correlations among regional FA, WMV, GMV and shyness, adjusting for age, sex, and total intracranial volume. The results showed that shyness was significantly, negatively associated with FA, WMV and GMV in a cluster that included the dACC (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex) and the MCC (middle cingulate cortex) and was significantly positively associated with the GMV in the IPL (inferior parietal lobule), an effect that may have been related to the weaker ability to regulate emotion in these participants and their state of being overly worried about others' evaluations. Finally, mediation analyses revealed that the correlation between shyness and psychosomatic stress was mediated by a region including the dACC and the MCC.

People's Evaluations of Income Inequality and the Gini Coefficient: Different in Details, Similar in Patterns

People's Evaluations of Income Inequality and the Gini Coefficient: Different in Details, Similar in Patterns

Confidence modulates exploration and exploitation in value-based learning.

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in cognitive processing. In this study, we aim to investigate the ability agents possess to track and report the noise inherent in their mental operations, often in the form of confidence judgments. Here, we argue that humans can use uncertainty inherent in their representations of value beliefs to arbitrate between exploration and exploitation. Such uncertainty is reflected in explicit confidence judgments. Using a novel variant of a multi-armed bandit paradigm, we studied how beliefs were formed and how uncertainty in the encoding of these value beliefs (belief confidence) evolved over time. We found that people used uncertainty to arbitrate between exploration and exploitation, reflected in a higher tendency toward exploration when their confidence in their value representations was low. We furthermore found that value uncertainty can be linked to frameworks of metacognition in decision making in two ways. First, belief confidence drives decision confidence, i.e. people’s evaluation of their own choices. Second, individuals with higher metacognitive insight into their choices were also better at tracing the uncertainty in their environment. Together, these findings argue that such uncertainty representations play a key role in the context of cognitive control.

Patients' satisfaction and public and private sectors' health care service quality in Pakistan: Application of grey decision analysis approaches.

The study aims to evaluate the comprehensive relationship between patient satisfaction and five dimensions of health care service quality in Pakistani public/private health care sectors, using a novel grey relational analysis (GRA) models and the Hurwicz criteria of decision making under uncertainty. Data were collected from private and public health care facilities of Pakistan through an improved SERVQUAL instrument. Deng's GRA, absolute GRA, and the second synthetic GRA models were applied to address the problem under study. Grey relational analysis models revealed that reliability and responsiveness are most strongly predicting patient satisfaction in public and private health care sectors, respectively. The Hurwicz criteria showed that patients are more likely to be satisfied from private health care facilities. Limitations of SERVQUAL model are also the limitations of the study; eg, the study suggests that because of the absence of "cost," which is a key quality indicator of Pakistani public sector health care facilities, the model was unable to comprehensively evaluate the health care situation in light of the observations of price-focused Pakistani patients. The study recommends tailoring of SERVQUAL model for the resource-scant and underdeveloped countries where people's evaluation of the quality of the hospitals is likely to be influenced by the price of services. The study is a pioneer in health care evaluation of public and private sectors of Lahore and Rawalpindi while using GRA models, in general, and the second synthetic GRA model, in particular. It presents an alternative method to the statistical way of analyzing data by successfully demonstrating the use of grey methods, which can make reasonable decisions even through small samples.

Procedural justice and the law

AbstractThis article considers procedural justice in the law, with specific reference to the adjudicative context of governmental officials applying legal standards to particular cases. We critically survey the three main accounts of procedural justice in the literature: utilitarian, outcome‐based, and dignitarian. Utilitarian and outcome‐based theories share the instrumental view that the only purpose of procedures is to lead to accurate legal outcomes. However, the former are willing to trade off the benefits of accuracy against its costs, whereas the latter hold that procedural rights are necessary to guard against the injustice caused when individuals' legal rights are mistakenly denied. Dignitarian theories maintain that process matters apart from outcomes, because procedures should show respect for individuals' dignity in the Kantian sense of rational agency. We present a new perspective, drawing on relational theory. Relational theory holds that we are social creatures whose self‐identities and sense of self‐respect are bound up with the quality of our relationships with other individuals, groups, and institutions. Our relational account is informed by empirical research in social psychology which has found that people's evaluation of procedures is substantially influenced by relational concerns.

Decision-making Neuroscience-based Research on Stock Herd and Anti-herd Behavior

The purpose of this paper was to help investors understand the nature of the current situation of financial market so as to make correct investment decisions. The methodology adopted was mainly applying decision-making neuroscience to study the neural mechanisms behind the two types of informational herding decisions and their mechanisms. Results showed that under the condition that the net flow of funds was positive, the act of choosing to purchase stocks can be considered as a herd behavior, and the opposite behavior can be considered as an anti-herd behavior. A conclusion can be drawn that individuals' perception and assessment of information about other people's behaviors, attitudes, or evaluations influence the behavior of individuals during the decision-making stage.

Grandiose and vulnerable narcissists disagree about whether others' vulnerable narcissism is relatable and tolerable

The narcissistic-tolerance hypothesis suggests that narcissists view other narcissists as more similar to the self and, hence, more likeable. Studies on this phenomenon have been limited to people's evaluations of narcissistic grandiosity devoid of narcissistic vulnerability. To expand the scope of testing and add to understanding narcissism and interpersonal evaluation, participants (N = 535) completed indices of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism and rated liking for and similarity to a fictional target who either presented as a vulnerable narcissist or a non-narcissist. The vulnerable-narcissist target was rated as less likeable and similar to the self, but these effects were reduced as a function of perceivers' vulnerable, but not grandiose, narcissism. When interactive effects of perceiver self-esteem and target condition were controlled, the narcissism forms largely converged on similarity and liking ratings as a function of target condition. In sum, the study expands the scope of testing for narcissistic tolerance, offers a boundary for narcissistic tolerance, corroborates the notion of distinct vulnerable and grandiose identities, and provides insight into narcissists' social perception.

Changing preferences towards redistribution: How deliberation shapes welfare attitudes

AbstractThe article departs from the argument that research on welfare attitudes is, so far, dominated by large‐scale survey‐studies, which allow for generalizable insights into citizens' preferences and evaluations, but are necessarily limited in their ability to capture the dynamic and contextual aspects of attitude formation. In order to broaden the horizon of welfare attitudes' research, this article introduces a new qualitative method, namely deliberative forums. In these large group discussions—originally developed for participatory decision‐making—attitudes, opinions, and preferences are core aspects of the deliberation process, and the article argues that by observing deliberation, we can observe attitude construction “in vivo”. The evidence from a two‐day German deliberation event illustrates in an exploratory manner how information, reasoning, and group processes can influence people's evaluations and expressed policy preferences with regard to redistribution. By linking participants' answers from a survey before and after the event to their statements during the discussions, the article not only shows that the preferences for redistribution people expressed in the survey answers are often higher after the deliberative event, but also seeks to make sense of attitudinal dynamics on the basis of the qualitative material by pointing towards the role of information, reasoning, and group processes.

Formulating appearance and perpetuation models of abnormal eating behaviors in adolescent women, and effective legal support

The relationship between body image dissatisfaction and the desire to be slim with a tendency for eating disorders was investigated. Female college students participated in a survey (N=237). Results of path analysis indicated that “dissatisfaction with other people's opinion of one's body” influenced “dissatisfaction with plumpness and the desire to be slim.” Also, “dissatisfaction with plumpness and the desire to be slim” caused “inappropriate dieting behaviors,” “apprehension concerning food intake,” and “binge eating.” Therefore, it is possible that sensitivity to other people's evaluations in interpersonal relationships originates from the tendency for eating disorders. These findings indicate that in the prevention and treatment of eating disorders, cognitive behavioral therapy is appropriate for addressing body image problems and problematic eating behaviors, including inappropriate dieting behaviors, whereas self-psychology and interpersonal therapy might be effective for problems related to the self, including values and roles. It is suggested that appropriate selection and integration of these psychotherapies could result in more favorable therapeutic outcomes.

Reflective and Non-conscious Responses to Exercise Images.

Images portraying exercise are commonly used to promote exercise behavior and to measure automatic associations of exercise (e.g., via implicit association tests). The effectiveness of these promotion efforts and the validity of measurement techniques partially rely on the untested assumption that the images being used are perceived by the general public as portrayals of exercise that is pleasant and motivating. The aim of this study was to investigate how content of images impacted people's automatic and reflective evaluations of exercise images. Participants (N = 90) completed a response time categorization task (similar to the implicit association test) to capture how automatically people perceived each image as relevant to Exercise or Not exercise. Participants also self-reported their evaluations of the images using visual analog scales with the anchors: Exercise/Not exercise, Does not motivate me to exercise/Motivates me to exercise, Pleasant/Unpleasant, and Energizing/Deactivating. People tended to more strongly automatically associate images with exercise if the images were of an outdoor setting, presented sport (as opposed to active labor or gym-based) activities, and included young (as opposed to middle-aged) adults. People tended to reflectively find images of young adults more motivating and relevant to exercise than images of older adults. The content of exercise images is an often overlooked source of systematic variability that may impact measurement validity and intervention effectiveness.

Subjective well-being in Europe: a multidimensional statistical analysis of ESS data

Subjective well-being refers to people's own evaluations of their lives, evaluations that are both affective and cognitive where the affective part is better known as happiness and the cognitive as life satisfaction. Many studies have been conducted to discover the determinants of well-being and most of them have outlined the importance of household's income. Nevertheless, the relationship between income and SWB is not so simple and many other factors can intervene. In this study, the main source of the data analysed is ESS, a large multi-country survey, which has as the main scope to evaluate social characteristics of European citizens. We attempted to discover the most important social factors that influence two determinants of SWB, happiness and life satisfaction and whether these determinants have the same impact on other variables. For the analysis of the data a method from the multidimensional field is applied, correspondence analysis. The final results extracted, seem to prove an interaction of life satisfaction and happiness with most variables of the study and it was deduced that income has not the most powerful interdependence with SWB.

Comparability of web and telephone survey modes for the measurement of subjective well-being

We compare subjective well-being measures collected with a web and telephone surveys to test whether survey mode affects people's evaluations of their well-being. We use unique, nationally representative data from Luxembourg which contains five measures of subjective well-being collected through web and telephone surveys. Oaxaca decomposition and multinomial logit with Coarsened Exact Matching indicate that the survey mode affects peoples' well-being scores. Web respondents are more likely to report low well-being and less likely to report the neutral category. However, the consequences for statistical inference are negligible. Our results support the view that web and telephone surveys are comparable tools for collecting subjective data, such as people's well-being.

The world looks better together: How close others enhance our visual experiences

AbstractPeople derive a number of benefits from sharing experiences with close others. However, most research on this topic has been restricted to forms of sharing involving explicit socializing, including verbal communication, emotion expression, and behavioral interaction. In two studies, these complexities were eliminated to find out whether merely experiencing visual stimuli (photographs) simultaneously with a close other—without communicating—enhances people's evaluations of those stimuli relative to coexperiencing the same stimuli with a stranger or alone. Compared to when viewers were alone, visual scenes were enhanced (better liked and seen as more real) when coexperienced with a close other and were liked less when coexperienced with a stranger. Implications for close relationships are discussed.

People Wait Longer when the Alternative is Risky: The Relation Between Preferences in Risky and Inter‐temporal Choice

AbstractIn two experiments, we demonstrate that despite indicating indifference when probed about risk or delay in isolation, when forced to explicitly trade‐off between the two, participants prefer delayed over risky rewards. This pattern of findings sets a boundary condition for any common utility‐based comparison process involving both risk and delay. Furthermore, this change from indifference‐in‐isolation to delay‐preference‐in‐a‐trade‐off strengthens as reward amount increases. Exploratory modeling results suggest that the shift in preference can be explained by allowing for different discount rates for delay‐only choices compared with when delay is in competition with risk. This explanation is better than one in which probability weighting is different between risk‐only choices and risks considered in the presence of a delay. Together, the empirical and modeling work lays a path for future investigations of why and when people's evaluation of the properties of risky and delayed choices vary as a function of the alternatives on offer. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Uninformative Photos Can Increase People's Perceived Knowledge of Complicated Processes

To what extent can photos influence people's evaluations of their own knowledge? For example, can photos affect how well people think they understand processes? To answer this question, in six experiments we asked people to indicate how well they understood various processes (such as how rainbows form). Sometimes the processes that were described appeared after a related photo (such as a photo of a rainbow) whereas other times the processes appeared alone. People tended to report that they understood processes that appeared with photos better than processes that appeared alone. This pattern fits with the idea that photos make it easier to generate relevant thoughts and images—an experience people tend to interpret as evidence that they know or understand related information.

Music to Make Your Mouth Water? Assessing the Potential Influence of Sour Music on Salivation.

People robustly associate various sound attributes with specific smells/tastes, and soundtracks that are associated with specific tastes can influence people’s evaluation of the taste of food and drink. However, it is currently unknown whether such soundtracks directly impact the eating experience via physiological changes (an embodiment account), or whether they act at a higher cognitive level, or both. The present research assessed a version of the embodiment account, where a soundtrack associated with sourness is hypothesized to induce a physiological response in the listener by increasing salivary flow. Salivation was measured while participants were exposed to three different experimental conditions – a sour soundtrack, a muted lemon video showing a man eating a lemon, and a silent baseline condition. The results revealed that salivation during the lemon video condition was significantly greater than in the sour soundtrack and baseline conditions. However, contrary to our hypothesis, there was no significant difference between salivation levels in the sour soundtrack compared to the baseline condition. These results are discussed in terms of potential mechanisms underlying the auditory modulation of taste perception/evaluation.

Evaluation of natural sounds in urban greenery: potential impact for urban nature preservation.

Most humans now live in cities and their main experience of nature is through urban greenery. An increasing number of studies show the importance of urban green spaces for well-being, although most of them are based on visual perception. A questionnaire examining people's evaluations of natural sounds was answered by 1326 individuals living near one of six urban green areas of varying naturalness in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. Women and the elderly reported greater calmness when hearing bird song and rustling leaves (and placed a higher importance on the richness of bird species) than did men, younger and middle-aged individuals. Independent of age and gender, urban woodlands (high naturalness) had higher evaluations than parks (low naturalness). Our results suggest that to increase positive experiences of urban green areas, demographic variables of gender and age should be taken into account, and settings that mimic nature should be prioritized in planning.

The impact of recommendations and warnings on the quality evaluation of health websites: An online experiment

With the increase in availability of online health information (OHI), consumers need to be able to properly evaluate the quality of health websites. Although several established evaluation criteria for OHI are available, these are rarely used by consumers. To improve people's ability and motivation to critically evaluate OHI, insights into how these criteria can optimally be communicated are needed. This study aims to investigate whether educational messages recommending the use of quality criteria can improve consumers' ability to evaluate OHI credibility, especially among people with low health literacy. We also test whether these messages can yield a stronger effect when combined with information warning consumers against using non-established criteria. In an online experiment, we randomly assigned 403 participants to one of four conditions and asked them to evaluate two websites of different quality. The conditions consisted of recommendations promoting the use of established evaluation criteria, warnings against using commonly adopted non-established criteria, a combination of the two, and a control group. Participants exposed to messages recommending established criteria evaluated the credibility of the lower quality website as poorer, and were better able to discriminate between high and low quality information compared to those in the control group. A combination of recommendations and warnings also improved people's ability to evaluate, but did not yield a stronger effect than the recommendations alone. Subgroup analysis, however, showed that these effects existed only for those with high health literacy. We conclude that providing consumers with criteria to evaluate OHI might be a viable way to improve people's evaluation skills of online health materials. Further research is needed to identify efficient ways to communicate these criteria to low health literate audiences.

Seasonal differences in thermal sensation in the outdoor urban environment of Mediterranean climates - the example of Athens, Greece.

Outdoor urban areas are very important for cities and microclimate is a critical parameter in the design process, contributing to thermal comfort which is important for urban developments. The research presented in this paper is part of extensive field surveys conducted in Athens aimed at investigating people's thermal sensation in a Mediterranean city. Based on 2313 questionnaires and microclimatic data the current work focuses on the relative frequencies of people's evaluation of the thermal along with the sun and wind sensations between two seasons trying to identify the seasonal differences in thermal sensation. The impact of basic meteorological factors on thermal discomfort with respect to season are also examined, as well as the use of the outdoor environment. Results show that psychological adaptation is an important contributing factor influencing perception of the thermal environment between seasons. In addition, the thermal sensation votes during the cool months show that individuals are satisfied to a great extend with the thermal environment whereas the combination of high air temperature, strong solar radiation and weak wind lead to thermal discomfort during summertime. As far as the appropriate urban design in the Mediterranean climate is concerned, priority should be given to the warm months of the year.

An evaluation of the lighting environment in the public space of shopping centres

Interior lighting quality influences people's visual comfort and satisfaction with a space. Based on a field study about the effects of lighting environments on occupancies in eight shopping malls with three different latitudes and a wide range of size from 30,000 to 210,000 m2 all over China, this study investigates the differences in subjective evaluations, the correlations between the lighting environments of public spaces and people's evaluations, and the regressions of scene mean luminance. A questionnaire survey and HDR-image techniques have been used to gather subjective feedback and collect physical lighting data. The results show that the subjective evaluations among different groups (gender, age, education background, and duration of stay in the shopping malls) are similar. The existence of daylighting plays an important role in subjective satisfaction, but not crucial enough to their brightness perception. The mean luminance values of these scenes are closely correlated to the diversity of the subjective evaluations. For shopping centres, the optimal Lmean value is 1000 cd/m2 for a mixed daylighting and artificial lighting environment, and 75 cd/m2 as the recommended Lmean value for an artificial lighting environment.