Surprising Events Research Articles

The Jeffords Effect

In May 2001, Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party and tipped control of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats. This paper uses the surprise event to demonstrate what I term the Jeffords effect: changes in the political landscape have large effects on the market value of firms. I use a firm's soft money donations to the national parties as the measure of how the firm aligns itself politically. In this event, study of large public firms, a firm lost 0.8% of market capitalization the week of Jeffords' switch for every $250,000 it gave to the Republicans in the previous election cycle. Based on the point estimates, the stock price gain associated with Democratic donations is smaller than the loss associated with Republican donations, but the estimates are consistent with the coefficients being equal and opposite. The results withstand several robustness checks, and the effects appear to persist long after the event. The relationship between soft money and stock returns may or may not be causal: Soft money could be a proxy for how well each party's policies suit a firm, or donations might affect how much help politicians give to a firm.

History and Happenstance: How Motivational Interviewing Got Its Start

Examining the intellectual roots of motivational interviewing, as well as the sometimes surprising events that led to its development, can be useful as a context for framing questions about the importance and rationale of the various elements of this clinical method. The origin of clinical components in motivational interviewing, such as empathy and the emphasis on client language, is explored as well as personal collaborations that led to the growth of this approach. Exploration of this developmental path may prove especially important as hypotheses about causal mechanisms of motivational interviewing are developed.

SUSTAIN: a network model of category learning.

SUSTAIN (Supervised and Unsupervised STratified Adaptive Incremental Network) is a model of how humans learn categories from examples. SUSTAIN initially assumes a simple category structure. If simple solutions prove inadequate and SUSTAIN is confronted with a surprising event (e.g., it is told that a bat is a mammal instead of a bird), SUSTAIN recruits an additional cluster to represent the surprising event. Newly recruited clusters are available to explain future events and can themselves evolve into prototypes-attractors-rules. SUSTAIN's discovery of category substructure is affected not only by the structure of the world but by the nature of the learning task and the learner's goals. SUSTAIN successfully extends category learning models to studies of inference learning, unsupervised learning, category construction, and contexts in which identification learning is faster than classification learning.

Human Unsupervised and Supervised Learning as a Quantitative Distinction

SUSTAIN (Supervised and Unsupervised STratified Adaptive Incremental Network) is a network model of human category learning. SUSTAIN initially assumes a simple category structure. If simple solutions prove inadequate and SUSTAIN is confronted with a surprising event (e.g. it is told that a bat is a mammal instead of a bird), SUSTAIN recruits an additional cluster to represent the surprising event. Newly recruited clusters are available to explain future events and can themselves evolve into prototypes/attractors/rules. SUSTAIN has expanded the scope of findings that models of human category learning can address. This paper extends SUSTAIN to account for both supervised and unsupervised learning data through a common mechanism. The modified model, uSUSTAIN (unified SUSTAIN), is successfully applied to human learning data that compares unsupervised and supervised learning performances.18

Towards a unified account of supervised and unsupervised category learning

(Supervised and Unsupervised STratified Adaptive IncrementalNetwork) is a network model of human category learning. SUSTAIN initially assumes a simple category structure. If simple solutions prove inadequate and SUSTAIN is confronted with a surprising event (e.g. it is told that a bat is a mammal instead of a bird), SUSTAIN recruits an additional cluster to represent the surprising event. Newly recruited clusters are available to explain future events and can themselves evolve into prototypes/attractors/rules. SUSTAIN has expanded the scope of findings that models of human category learning can address. This paper extends SUSTAIN so that it can be used to account for both supervised and unsupervised learning data through a common mechanism. A modified recruitment rule is introduced that creates new conceptual clusters in response to surprising events during learning. The new formulation of the model is called uSUSTAIN for ‘unified SUSTAIN.’ The implications of using a unified recruitment method for both supervised and unsupervised learning are discussed.

Climate change and nature conservation: Implications for policy and practice in Britain and Ireland

In Britain and Ireland, protection for nature conservation purposes has largely relied upon the designation of sites for the conservation of habitats and species. However, the results of predictive models indicate that changes in suitable climate space for individual species will be seen at regional and national scales over the coming decades. Species are also known to respond in different ways and at different rates to climate change, which is likely to affect the structure and function of existing ecosystems in equally varied ways. However, it is important that nature conservation policies and practices should consider the likely impacts of climate change on species, habitats and protected areas, but still remain flexible enough to cope with any surprise event. Models therefore ought to ensure that predictions cover a broad range of possible responses. Management options may need to include dynamic solutions such as strategically positioning new sites for climate-sensitive species as their climate space changes and implementing more flexible wider-countryside measures to enable species to disperse across an otherwise inhospitable landscape. Conservation objectives and targets therefore need to be considered at the site, national and international levels. In some situations, a valid management strategy may be to recognise that the magnitude of climate change will overwhelm any effort to protect the species or habitat type and that little can be done to prevent responses to climate change. Preservation is expected to continue to have an important role in ensuring the protection of some habitats and species, but is expected to become increasingly untenable.

Global warming versus ozone depletion: failure and success in North America

The success of ozone depletion as a social problem is used to examine and understand the relative failure of global warming. Starting with the (aborted) 'hot crisis' of the Greenhouse summer of 1988, this paper tries to show why, despite dire scientific warning, advantages in claims- making, and the perceived emergence of strange weather, global warming consistently obtained lesser outcomes. Whereas global warming is a complex and uncertain scientific issue, the ozone hole was associated and resonated with easy-to-understand bridging metaphors derived from the popular culture. The latter problem not only gave rise to a hot crisis, but was also caught up in a cultural whirl- wind—a rapidly evolving and progressive sequence of dynamic and often surprising events that surge through a variety of public arenas with a strong conversational and practical presence. Effec- tively, ozone loss provided a sense of concrete risk with both strong emotional overtones and every- day relevance for talk and action. Global warming, in contrast, is not amenable to bridging metaphors and did not lend itself to a cultural whirlwind.

Grabber–holder dynamics and network effects in technology innovation

Economists and marketing researchers have examined how network effects can have an impact on the adoption of technology and products, and how an intrinsic inferior product or technology may dominate the market. However, their studies have not explained how a producer could create network effect for a new product and how, after successfully creating the network effect for this product, the producer could lose it in a short period of time. While these studies provide insight into technology innovation after it happened, they fail to shed light on understanding many of the surprises that we experience in the process. The objective of this paper is to present a fundamental framework that helps us understand most of the surprising outcomes that we have seen in technology innovation processes, especially the winners and losers in an innovation process. The framework is built on a grabber–holder dynamic model that captures how all the intelligent agents involved in an innovation shape the forces that either induce a strong network effect or destroy a network effect that is already in place. The model can be used to explain many surprising events that have happened in technology innovation. In this paper, I apply the model to the Personal Computer innovation.

Responses of human frontal cortex to surprising events are predicted by formal associative learning theory.

Learning depends on surprise and is not engendered by predictable occurrences. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of causal associative learning, we show that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is associated specifically with the adjustment of inferential learning on the basis of unpredictability. At the outset, when all associations were unpredictable, DLPFC activation was maximal. This response attenuated with learning but, subsequently, activation here was evoked by surprise violations of the learned association. Furthermore, the magnitude of DLPFC response to a surprise event was sensitive to the relationship that had been learned and was predictive of subsequent behavioral change. In short, the physiological response properties of right DLPFC satisfied specific predictions made by associative learning theory.

The Productive Power of Confessions of Cruelty

The Productive Power of Confessions of Cruelty Sara L. Knox The ideological work of narratives of extreme violence is the subject of this essay. The apocryphal confessions of Henry Lee Lucas will be examined in order to show that narrative authority has greater power than fact, even where that fact is at issue in law. What maintains Lucas’s reputation as one of the world’s worst serial killers—even after the debunking of the majority of his confessions by the Attorney General of Texas—is the typicality of his self-spun narrative of serial killing. The cruelty to which he confessed eclipsed other more “ordinary” homicides, cases cleared on the basis of his confessions. In this way the “ideological work” of Lucas’s confessions is the construction of a horizon of “unacceptable” violence beneath which more ordinary cruelties vanish from sight. The Making of a Serial Killer Early in July 1998 Henry Lee Lucas had his single death sentence commuted to life imprisonment by then Governor of Texas, George W. Bush. This was a surprising event in several ways. It was surprising for Texas—the state with the largest number of prisoners on Death Row and the most executions since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. Stays and commutations sought on the basis of “new evidence” are seldom successful—the state is not above executing someone who is wrongfully accused, innocent, or (more frequently) has had no benefit of competent counsel.1 The increasing formalism of capital due process has meant a reduction of legitimate avenues for appeal. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit found against one of Lucas’s habeas corpus requests for review on the basis that “it is not settled law that a compelling claim of innocence is alone grounds for federal intervention”—that is to say, innocence is not enough if the death sentence was arrived at during a fair trial, by deliberation on the evidence then available.2 Lucas’s commutation came at the recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, a body who—in the twenty previous years of escalating execution rates—had not intervened once to stop an execution.3 But also surprising is the fact that this sudden largesse was directed at someone who continues to figure—in Web sites, true crime encyclopedias, monographs, and in the popular imagination—as one of America’s worst serial killers; Lucas is widely thought to have killed over 200 people. Even those whose business it is to critique the category of the serial killer tend to forget that the evidence to support his inflated kill ratio is slight. They forget the findings of the methodically researched “Lucas Report,” commissioned by the Texas Attorney General’s Office in 1986, which raised serious doubts about Lucas’s perverse success as a serial killer.4 The “Lucas Report” notwithstanding, Lucas’s name has not been erased from the popular pantheon of killers. People seem to want to believe the grimly evocative tales Lucas told to the Texas Rangers and folks from various County Sheriff’s offices who came to him, hat in hand, with their unsolved cases. It is almost as if compulsive lying could be taken as evidence of—or as an acceptable equivalent for—the supposedly compulsive quality of the most serial serial killings. In the case of Henry Lee Lucas, then, two questions arise. Firstly, why has the narrative of his guilt proven—against all evidence—so enduring? And, secondly, why was his claim for relief successful when the equally strong claims of so many others before him had not been? I’m going to argue that the answers to these two questions are related, as are the questions themselves. As I’ve already indicated, the law in the Lucas case was not exceptional enough to fully explain the granting of relief. Thus, in what follows, I explore the surprising coalescence of mercy and justice on the part of the State of Texas by comparing the case of Lucas to that of another convicted murderer, Karla Faye Tucker. Tucker was not a serial killer, but she confessed to and was condemned to death for crimes that...

Gaze direction and maternal pitch in surprise-eliciting situations

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that not only do babies use emotional signals from adults in order to relate emotions to specific situations (e.g., Campos & Stenberg, 1981) but also that mothers seek out emotional information from their infants ( Emde, 1992). Three groups of mothers and their infants, 3, 5 and 9 months old were video- and audio-taped, while playing in their homes with a soft toy and a remote-control Jack-in-the-box. During surprise-eliciting play with the Jack-in-the-box, maternal and infant gaze direction and their emotional expressions of surprise, pleasure, fear and neutral expressions were coded in three regions of the face. In addition, the mean fundamental frequency of maternal surprise-vocalisations was analysed. Maternal exclamations of surprise were compared with similar utterances of these mothers while playing with a soft toy as a baseline. During the surprise event, maternal and infant gaze directions as well as infant age were analysed in relation to maternal pitch. Results are discussed in terms of maternal use of the pitch of her voice to mark surprising situations, depending on the gaze-direction of the infant.

“I Was Really, Really, Really Mad!” Children's Use of Evaluative Devices in Narratives About Emotional Events

Children (ages 3, 5, and 8 years, mostly White and middle-class) were asked to tell personal experience narratives about a time when they had been happy, surprised, and mad. Their explicit emotion labels as well as their use of linguistic forms of evaluation to convey emotion were assessed. Five-year-old boys were the most likely to explicitly label anger, while gender and age differences in explicit emotion labels were absent for the other two emotions. However, children used many more linguistic devices for providing evaluation than explicit emotion labels in their narratives. They also provided more with age, and they used more evaluative devices when talking about anger-arousing events than about happy or surprising events. The few gender differences suggested that 3-year-old girls may acquire earlier mastery of evaluative devices than do boys, especially references to emotional states.

In Search of Identity: Nationalism and Religion in Eastern Europe

At the beginning of the 1990s an anecdote was very popular in Bulgaria: 'Someone asks radio Yerevan how many European states there will be in the year 2000. The answer is: eight, namely, the United States of Europe, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro.' We might also add the former Soviet republics. The anonymous author of this anecdote has aptly expressed the two simultaneous trends in the social-economic, political and cultural processes in Europe after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: on the one hand, the striving for, and concrete steps towards, the further development of supranational spaces and entities at different levels, such as the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe; and on the other hand, renationalisation and regionalisation, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, this disintegration reflects the separatist nationalistic attitudes suppressed for some decades under the cover of internationalist ideology and practice, and its extreme expressions were the bloody events in former Yugoslavia and Nagorny Karabakh, which once again reminded us of the importance of interethnic tolerance. One of the best television reports that I have seen on the war in former Yugoslavia ended with the revelation of a Russian volunteer: 'There aren't any atheists in the trenches here!' I had the opportunity to see personally the gaping wounds of the war during my trip from Rijeka to Dubrovnik in April 1994, and through conversations and discussions with people of different nationalities and denominations to feel the subtle insidious bonds between their sense of ethnic belonging and their intimate religiosity, which were so skilfully exploited by unscrupulous politicians and military men. The Orthodox and the Catholic faiths were unalterable characteristics of the Serbian and the Croatian popUlation. This gave a new sacred! dimension to the resentment and the hatred. Thus I came to the idea, more emotionally than rationally, of investigating the relations and alliances between two essential phenomena of the history of humankind religion and nationalism in their specific forms and relations in postcommunist European societies. Because of my position as a witness and participant in the hectic and often surprising events in this region, this paper is far from claiming to give cool diagnoses or to commit itself to lofty prognoses. This is not only because the specific character of these very historical processes makes the ground for such claims fairly questionable. My primary aim is to understand and explain better the world I am living in: typically behind the academic concepts and constructions concerning

"How Long Does It Take to Stop?" Methodological Analysis of Driver Perception-Brake Times

Human perception-brake reaction time (RT) studies have reported a wide variety of results. By analyzing a large number of data sets, however, it is possible to estimate times under specific conditions. The most important variable is driver expectation, which affects RTs by a factor of 2. When fully aware of the time and location of the brake signal, drivers can detect a signal and move the foot from accelerator to brake pedal in about 0.70 to 0.75 sec. Response to unexpected, but common signals, such as a lead car's brake lights, is about 1.25 sec, whereas RTs for surprise events, such as an object suddenly moving into the driver's path, is roughly 1.5 sec. These times are modulated somewhat by other factors, including driver age and gender, cognitive load, and urgency.

Exploring the concept of climate surprise

This paper examines the concept of climate surprise and its implications for environmental policymaking. Although long-term, incremental changes in climate can have serious consequences, it is usually the extreme, surprising events that cause the most damage to human health and property. Different taxonomies of surprise are explored, drawing from literature concerning diverse aspects of human society. Surprise is revealed to be a subjective concept in many respects, triggered by such factors as prior experience, belief systems, and media exposure. How policymakers have reacted to climate surprises in the past is considered, particularly with regard to choices made between pro-active and reactive measures. It is concluded that, while some kinds of surprise are truly unpredictable, there are other types that could be anticipated and their adverse effects forestalled.

Suspense, curiosity, and surprise: How discourse structure influences the affective and cognitive processing of a story

The structural affect theory (Brewer and Lichtenstein, 1982) states that different affective responses can be evoked by manipulating the order in which a story's events are narrated. Suspense is evoked by postponing the story's outcome, curiosity is evoked by presenting the outcome before the preceding events, and surprise is evoked by an unexpected event. Apart from evoking different affective responses, the manipulation of the event order can influence the cognitive processing as well. In this paper, an experiment is described in which the affective and cognitive effects of suspense, curiosity, and surprise structures are studied using a story by a professional author. The results showed that suspense can be evoked even when readers know how the story will end. The inclusion of a surprising event is highly appreciated. Furthermore, it leads to a better representation of the story's events, as was predicted by Kintsch (1980).

Children’s and Adults’ Reactions to a Schema-discrepant Event: A Developmental Analysis of Surprise

Three studies investigated age-related differences in the surprise reaction. Study 1 revealed that children and seniors showed a more pronounced action delay in response to a simple, hedonically neutral surprising event than young adults that could not be attributed to a general slowing of information processing. Studies 2 and 3 provided evidence that these age-related differences in action delay between children and young adults were due to children’s greater difficulties to ”nd an explanation for the occurrence of the surprising event and to decide on its relevance for action. These results support the idea that the core mechanism of surprise is evolutionary-based and age-invariant, but its eliciting conditions and consequences depend on developmental changes of knowledge structures.

Port Site Recurrences after Laparoscopic Surgery

Port site metastasis has been a surprising event after laparoscopic procedures in cancer patients. No clear data exist about this phenomenon. The aim of this study is to summarize current epidemiologic knowledge about the risk of this complication. A review of all case reports about port site recurrences was undertaken. To date, 164 cases of port site metastases after videoscopic procedures have been reported in 90 papers. We found 108 cases of implantation after laparoscopy for digestive tumors, 23 after thoracoscopy, 29 after gynecological and 4 after urological laparoscopy. Analysis of the current literature confirms that laparoscopy is associated with abdominal cell mobilization to the trocars and instruments. Also low-staged and highly differentiated tumors have been reported to cause post-laparoscopy tumor seeding. The temporary data of the CAE registry ‘port site metastases’ (Workgroup for Surgical Endoscopy of the German Society of Surgery) are also reported. The analysis of 80 histologically confirmed cases of port site recurrence shows a particular frequency after laparoscopic cholecystectomy for unsuspected gallbladder cancer (n = 59). Postoperative specimen examination revealed a T1 carcinoma in 9 cases (15%), T2 carcinoma in 33 (21%), T3 in 3 (5%) and T4 in 1 case (1.7%). The mean time to clinical tumor relapse was 6 months. Similar patterns were found in a lower number of port site metastases after laparoscopy for colon cancer (n = 2) and for other cancers (n = 9).Clinical evidence that laparoscopy with CO₂ pneumoperitoneum can enhance tumor dissemination is given. Port site metastases seem to be secondary to multiple factors including the gas used, local trauma, tumor manipulation, biologic properties of the tumor, and individual surgical skills.

Surprise and schema strength.

Through 4 experiments, the author investigated the effects of stimuli discrepant with schemas of varying strength on 3 components of surprise: the interruption of ongoing activities (indexed by response time increase), the focusing of attention on the schema-discrepant event (indexed by memory performance), and the feeling of surprise (indexed by self-reports). Response times were consistently found to increase with schema strength. This effect was attributed to the increasing difficulty of schema revision. In contrast, memory for the schema-discrepant event was not affected by schema strength, supporting the hypothesis that schema-discrepant stimuli are stored in memory with a distinct tag. Finally, self-reports of surprise intensity varied with schema strength only if they were made immediately after the surprising event without any intervening questions, suggesting that self-reports of surprise are highly susceptible to memory distortions.

Surprise and schema strength.

Through 4 experiments, the author investigated the effects of stimuli discrepant with schemas of varying strength on 3 components of surprise: the interruption of ongoing activities (indexed by response time increase), the focusing of attention on the schema-discrepant event (indexed by memory performance), and the feeling of surprise (indexed by self-reports). Response times were consistently found to increase with schema strength. This effect was attributed to the increasing difficulty of schema revision. In contrast, memory for the schema-discrepant event was not affected by schema strength, supporting the hypothesis that schema-discrepant stimuli are stored in memory with a distinct tag. Finally, self-reports of surprise intensity varied with schema strength only if they were made immediately after the surprising event without any intervening questions, suggesting that self-reports of surprise are highly susceptible to memory distortions.