Children use many cues to differentiate reality from fantasy, including context, testimony from others, and physical evidence in the world around them. However, due to individual differences, some children hold strong reality status biases that interfere with their ability to infer reality status from these cues correctly. This research identified two general cognitive skills, inhibitory control and a metacognitive understanding of certainty, which serve as mechanisms for overcoming biases to infer reality status. In general, children with a high interest in fantastical play and older children with poorer developed inhibitory control skills are more likely to display a reality status bias. Additionally, children with reality status biases are more likely to overcome them to infer reality status correctly when they have a better metacognitive understanding of certainty and better developed inhibitory control. This research informs both the fantasy/reality literature and the scientific reasoning literature in demonstrating how biases can affect children's judgments. / text

Decisions among alternatives that do not fit rigorous numerical frameworks are common. Such decisions, in which the various aspects of the alternatives are considered simultaneously, are called a tradeoff studies. Tradeoff studies may be more common than optimization problems, but are not generally formalized in written form.Tradeoff studies are broadly recognized and mandated as the method for considering many criteria simultaneously. They are the primary method for making a decision among alternatives listed in the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Decision Analysis and Resolution (DAR) process.The field of Decision Making can explain why the mechanics of tradeoff studies are approached with underconfidence, and can also help eliminate biases from the tradeoff process. Many conclusions obtained from Judgment and Decision Making (JDM), Cognitive Science and Experimental Economics can be used to shed light on various aspects of the tradeoff process. Of course, since many experiments were designed to reveal truths about choice at a basic level, they do not exactly model the processes of tradeoff studies. The technique used to compare the basic experiments and tradeoff studies will be abstraction.Abstraction noun 1. a general concept formed by extracting common features from specific examples, 2. the process of extracting the underlying essence.What follows is a union of the fields of tradeoff studies and cognitive decision making. Because these two areas have never before been explicitly unified, I have produced some unfinished areas in which specific research needs to be done. At this stage, the work of unification must necessarily be conducted at an abstract level.

Research suggests that, during stress, resilient individuals use positive emotion regulation strategies and experience a greater number of positive emotions than those who are less resilient. Therefore, differences could be expected in attentional biases towards emotional stimuli based on resilience. The current study investigated attentional biases towards neutral, negative and positive images in response to varying levels of resilence and mood induction conditions (neutral, negative and positive). Sixty participants viewed a series of pre and post-mood induction slides in order to measure attentional biases to emotional stimuli. The study provided evidence for the presence of trait and state congruent attentional biases. More resilient individuals demonstrated an initial bias towards positive stimuli and once emotion was aroused, the bias was away from negative stimuli. Additionally, mood congruent attentional biases were observed for participants induced into positive and negative mood states. Implications as they apply to research and clinical practice are discussed.

Individuals utilize heuristics in order to simplify problems, which may lead to biases in decision-making. The research question of this study is: “How does the affect heuristic impact the investment process of private equity decision-makers reviewing proposals?” Through an exploratory multi-case analysis, insight is provided into complex private equity decisions by studying biases in the investment process. This is a study of private equity groups’ (PEG) decision-making process when they consider businesses for investment. Qualitative data was generated from semi-structured interviews with twenty private equity decision-makers. The deliberative heuristics applied in the teaser review are learned from process experience and guide the deliberation on whether to proceed. Simplifying heuristics are applied in the more informal review process. Organizational learning was exhibited as the PEGs have modified their investment structures based on previous experiences. The study indicates that experience and learning lead to the construction of an affect heuristic that subsequently impacts investments. It also confirms the need for strategic decision-makers to recognize their own biases and adjust their processes accordingly. A significant practical implication of this study is the insight provided into the views of the PEG decision-makers as they anticipate the need to supplement the management team is helpful to business owners and their advisors. The study highlights the opportunities for biases in PEG decision-making processes. Accessing decision-makers at larger PEGs and approaching more middle market firms would broaden the results.

I present behavioural data contributing to existing research that (implicit) self-predictions are overly reliant on current intentions at the time of the decision (Koehler & Poon, 2006). Results are consistent with previous findings that self-predictions are often insensitive to translatability cues and overly influenced by desirability cues. We show that although participants typically benefit from a reminder, it is undervalued at the time of the decision (Experiment 1 & 3a) as participants are not willing to pay for a reminder service, unless it is offered free of charge (Experiment 2). Our findings also show that participants fail to incorporate temporal delay sufficiently in their opt-in decisions, even though temporal delay was found to be a significant predictor return behaviour (Experiments 1, 2 & 3b). Instead, decisions were found to be highly influenced by desirability factors (Experiments 1 & 2) which were not significant predictors of task completion. Finally, using a construal manipulation intended to induce participants to think about the decision options in either a concrete or abstract way influenced decisions (Experiment 3a), and subsequently influenced how much participants benefitted from the reminder in task completion (Experiment 3b).

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The purpose of the present study was to analyze whether self-esteem stability moderated the association between self-esteem level and the forms of self-enhancement strategies. Previous research has found that self-esteem level can predict the forms of self-enhancement, whereas the advances in the conceptualization of self-esteem recommend that the self-esteem stability is another essential variable in terms of analyzing the relationship between self-esteem and self-enhancement. Depending on the relevant researches on use and gratification theory, which indicate that people use social media for self-enhancement and fulfilling their inner needs. This research focused on examining the forms of individual’s self-enhance on WeChat Circle of Friends (COF) and how it influenced by the interaction between self-esteem level and self-esteem stability by analyzing 305 participants in China. The results of the study show that both self-esteem level and stability was positively correlated with direct self-enhancement, but negatively correlated with indirect self-enhancement. Furthermore, the findings also show that self-esteem stability moderated the association between self-esteem level and direct self-enhancement such that individuals with stable high self-esteem reported higher levels of frequency in direct self-enhancement. However, the findings also revealed the self-esteem stability failed to moderate the association between self-esteem level and indirect self-enhancement presentation. These results suggest that self-esteem level and self-esteem stability will interact to impact the forms of self-enhancement. The importance of considering both stability and level of self-esteem in analyses of self-enhancement presentation on social media is discussed.

Two studies were conducted in which we examined the relation between shyness and facial expression processing in children. In Study 1, facial expression recognition was examined by asking 97 children ages 12 to 14 years to identify six different expressions displayed at 50% and 100% intensity, as well as a neutral expression. In Study 2, the focus shifted from the recognition of emotions to the interpretation of emotions. In this study, 123 children aged 12 to 14 years were asked a series of questions regarding how they would perceive different facial expressions. Findings from Study 1 showed that, in the case of shy boys, higher levels of shyness were related to lower recognition accuracy for sad faces displayed at 50% intensity. However, in most cases, shyness was not related to facial expression recognition. The results from Study 2 suggested broader implications for shy children. The findings of Study 2 demonstrated that shyness is predictive of biased facial expression interpretation and that rejection sensitivity mediates this relation. Overall the results of these two studies add to the research on facial expression processing in shy children and suggest that cognitive biases in the way facial expressions are interpreted may be related to shy children’s discomfort in social situations.

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