Disgust is a primary emotion relevant to both clinical and social psychology. However, the current most popular disgust measure has serious psychometric weaknesses (Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, 1994). Furthermore, no extant measure assesses moral disgust as an emotional response to moral transgressions. The purpose of the present research is to develop a new measure, the Sensitivity to Disgust Measure (SDM). Data from 598 participants ranging in age from 21 to 83 years shows that the SDM measures disgust responses to stimuli from five elicitor domains: body products, body envelope violations and death, animals, sex, and moral transgressions. The alpha coefficient for the total scale is .90; and the coefficients for the subscales range from .78 to .87. Criterion-related validity analyses show that SDM scores predict responses to the Haidt et al.'s (1994) Disgust Scale, the Contamination Subscale of the Padua Inventory, the PANAS, and the Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Openness subscales of the Big Five Model. / Department of Psychological Science

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2005. / Adviser: Donna Mumme. Submitted to the Dept. of Experimental Psychology. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-117). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2007. / "Graduate Program in Philosophy." Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-261).

published_or_final_version / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Placeboeffekten; att få klinisk effekt av inaktiv behandling är ett fenomen som tilldrar sig allt större intresse. Trots att mekanismerna bakom effekten ännu är långt ifrån helt klarlagda så finns en stor mängd forskning som visar att placebobehandling på olika vis kan vara av klinisk relevans. Bland de mest imponerande demonstrationerna av placeboeffekten är de experiment som visar att s.k. klassisk betingning kan påverka immunförsvaret. Experiment har visat att detta är möjligt både hos gnagare och människor: en medicin administreras samtidigt som ett neutralt gustatoriskt stimulus i vad som kallas betingningsfasen. När denna genomförts kan associationen mellan smak och farmakologisk effekt vara så stark att samma smak, på egen hand, kan framkalla nämnd effekt. I detta arbete sammanfattas kort begrepp och forskning kring placebo i allmänhet och betingad placebo i synnerhet. Vetenskapliga belägg för betingad placebos förmåga till immunpåverkan granskas, och det mesta tyder på att sådan är möjlig i praktiken. Därefter diskuteras möjliga kliniska tillämpningar av betingad placebo i form av medicinsk dosreduktion. Avslutningsvis följer en kort genomgång av det stora kunskapsgapet mellan beläggen för denna dosreduktions kliniska relevans, och dess lämplighet inom konventionell vård.

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the modification of behavior of a thirty-five-year-old, hospitalized, chronic schizophrenic male. The hypothesis was that the patient's aggressive and self-injurious behavior could be modified through the use of aversion therapy.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 126-136).

In this dissertation, I examine two research questions. In chapters 2 and 3, based on idea of reference value that was first proposed by Kahneman and Tversky, I look at a potential house seller’s pricing strategy when the reference value plays a role. In chapter 2, I focus on the reference-dependence and its implications on loss aversion behavior, and I compare model predictions with documented empirical findings in the literature. In particular, I show that the stylized empirical evidence in the literature has relatively limited power on testing loss aversion, and I provide new specifications that aim to correctly test the loss aversion effect. In chapter 3, I examine a reference-dependent seller’s pricing strategy in a less heterogeneous housing market such as the multi-unit residential market. Acknowledging the fact that units in the same building serve as close substitutes for each other, I show that the recent transaction price on a unit in the same building may generate two signaling effects. First, the average willingness to pay among buyers is positively correlated with the observed price, which generates a spatio-temporal autocorrelation effect; second, after observing the prior price, the heterogeneity of the potential buyer’s willingness to pay decreases, inducing house sellers to mark down their asking prices. In chapter 4, I examine the power of monitoring and forcing contract on improving the managerial efficiency of REITs. I put particular emphasis on its implications regarding the choice of advisor type in REITs. I show that, for both internal and external advisors, increasing levels of monitoring power will increase their equilibrium effort under a stochastic forcing contract. Furthermore, I show that a crucial driving force regarding advisor choice is the heterogeneity of monitoring power between internal and external advisors and across REIT firms. Provided that the gap of monitoring power is large enough between internal and external advisors, shareholders could make use of the heterogeneity, and induce higher effort from external advisors. Hence, I am able to provide a theoretical justification regarding the potential appeal of an external managerial structure, which is usually regarded as being inferior to an internal managerial structure.

This dissertation contains three essays on learning and risk aversion. In the first essay we consider how learning may lead to risk averse behavior. A learning rule is said to be risk averse if it is expected to add more probability to an action which provides, with certainty, the expected value of a distribution rather than when it provides a randomly drawn payoff from this distribution, for every distribution. We characterize risk averse learning rules. The result reveals that the analysis of risk averse learning is isomorphic to that of risk averse expected utility maximizers. A learning rule is said to be monotonically risk averse if it is expected to increase the probability of choosing the actions whose distribution second-order stochastically dominates all others in every environment. We characterize monotonically risk averse learning rules. In the second essay we analyze risk attitudes for learning within the mean-variance paradigm. A learning rule is variance-averse if the expected reduced distribution of payoffs in the next period has a smaller variance than that of the current reduced distribution, in every set where all the actions provide the same expected payoff. A learning rule is monotonically variance-averse if it is expected to add probability to the set of actions that have the smallest variance in the set, when all the actions have the same expected payoff. A learning rule is monotonically mean-variance-averse if it is expected to add probability to the set of actions that have the highest expected payoff and smallest variance whenever this set is not empty. We characterize monotonically variance-averse and monotonically mean-variance-averse learning rules. In the last essay we analyze the social learning process of a group of individuals. We say that a learning rule is first-order monotone if the number of individuals that play actions with first-order stochastic dominant payoff distributions is expected to increase. We characterize these learning rules.

Texte remanié de: Dissertation--Philosophische Fakultät--Bonn--Universität, 2004. Titre de soutenance : Todesarten : zu den Poetologien des Ekels in der Prosa Thomas Bernhards. / Bibliogr. p. 241-255.