Obituary: Amos Tversky (1937–1006).

Reports the death of Amos Tversky. Tversky received his bachelor of arts from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1961, majoring in philosophy and psychology. He received his doctor of philosophy degree from the University of Michigan in 1965. Tversky taught at Hebrew University (1966–1978) and at Stanford University. (1978–1996), where he was the inaugural Davis-Brack Professor of Behavioral Sciences and principal investigator at the Stanford Center on Conflict and negotiation. Since 1992 he held an appointment as senior visiting professor of economics and psychology and permanent fellow of the Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv University. Tversky's main research interests were in the study of similarity, judgment under uncertainty, and decision making. His last major contribution, support theory, focused on 2 observations that had been reported in the literature: The independently judged probabilities of an event and its complement add up to approximately one, whereas the judged probabilities of separate constituents of an inclusive event usually add up to much more than the judged probability of that event. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Control of spurious association and the reliability of the controlled variable.

The techniques of matched groups, analysis of covariance, and partial correlation represent various approaches to the prevention of a spurious association between X1 and X2 due to a confounding variable, X3. In all these techniques the use of an unreliable measure for X3 leads to a systematic bias of undercorrection. Adequate corrections are possible for the case of known reliability of X3. Groups should be matched on true scores rather than observed scores, but no correction is possible for the factorial design in which groups are formed on the basis of unreliable correlated measures. Partial correlations should be corrected for the effects of unreliability of the controlled variable. Spuriously high partials are usually obtained when this correction is not applied. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Choices, values, and frames.

Discusses the cognitive and the psychophysical determinants of choice in risky and riskless contexts. The psychophysics of value induce risk aversion in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses. The psychophysics of chance induce overweighting of sure things and of improbable events, relative to events of moderate probability. Decision problems can be described or framed in multiple ways that give rise to different preferences, contrary to the invariance criterion of rational choice. The process of mental accounting, in which people organize the outcomes of transactions, explains some anomalies of consumer behavior. In particular, the acceptability of an option can depend on whether a negative outcome is evaluated as a cost or as an uncompensated loss. The relationships between decision values and experience values and between hedonic experience and objective states are discussed. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes.

Documented with 2 experiments a phenomenon of duration neglect in people's global evaluations of past affective experiences. In Study 1, 32 Ss viewed aversive film clips and pleasant film clips that varied in duration and intensity. Ss provided real-time ratings of affect during each clip and global evaluations of each clip when it was over. In Study 2, 96 Ss viewed these same clips and later ranked them by their contribution to an overall experience of pleasantness (or unpleasantness). Experimental Ss ranked the films from memory; control Ss were informed of the ranking task in advance and encouraged to make evaluations on-line. Effects of film duration on retropsective evaluations were small, entirely explained by changes in real-time affects and further reduced when made from memory. Retrospective evaluations appear to be determined by a weighing average of "snapshots" of the actual affective experiences, as if duration did not matter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memories of yesterday’s emotions: Does the valence of experience affect the memory-experience gap?

Intense pain is often exaggerated in retrospective evaluations, indicating a possible divergence between experience and memory. However, little is known regarding how people retrospectively evaluate experiences with both pleasant and unpleasant aspects. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman. Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004b) provides a unique opportunity to examine memory-experience gaps in recollections of individual days, which elicit a wide gamut of emotions. We asked female participants (N = 810, Study 1, and N = 615, Study 2) to reconstruct episodes of the previous day using the DRM and demonstrated that memory and experience diverge for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. When they rated their day overall in a retrospectively evaluative frame of mind, the participants recalled more unpleasant and pleasant emotions than they reported feeling during the individual episodes, with a larger gap for unpleasant emotions than for pleasant emotions. The findings suggest that separate processes are used for committing positive and negative events to memory and that, especially when unpleasant emotions are involved, prudence is favored over accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Joint comment on "When does duration matter in judgment and decision making?" (Ariely & Loewenstein, 2000).

Recent research has demonstrated that people care about the temporal relationships within a sequence of experiences. There is considerable evidence that people pay particular attention to the way experiences improve or deteriorate over time and to their maximum (peak) and final values. D. Kahneman and coauthors suggested in earlier articles that people ignore or severely underweight duration (which they referred to as duration neglect). In the preceding article, D. Ariely and G. Loewenstein (see record 2000-16324-010) challenged the generalizability of these findings and their normative implications. In the current commentary, D. Ariely, D. Kahneman, and G. Loewenstein jointly examine the issue to provide a better understanding of what they feel they have learned from this literature and to discuss the remaining open questions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relation of a test of attention to road accidents.

Related a test of auditory selective attention, previously validated against criteria of flight proficiency, to the accident rate of 39 professional bus drivers. The test required the listener to monitor a relevant message and ignore a concurrent message presented to the other ear. A change in selective orientation was accompanied by a transient disruption of attention. Raven's Progressive Matrices was also administered, but results were not significantly correlated with the attention test. A measure of proneness to this type of disruption was significantly related to accident rate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality.

Early studies of intuitive judgment and decision making conducted with the late Amos Tversky are reviewed in the context of two related concepts: an analysis of accessibility, the ease with which thoughts come to mind; a distinction between effortless intuition and deliberate reasoning. Intuitive thoughts, like percepts, are highly accessible. Determinants and consequences of accessibility help explain the central results of prospect theory, framing effects, the heuristic process of attribute substitution, and the characteristic biases that result from the substitution of nonextensional for extensional attributes. Variations in the accessibility of rules explain the occasional corrections of intuitive judgments. The study of biases is compatible with a view of intuitive thinking and decision making as generally skilled and successful. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Determinants of the remembered utility of aversive sounds.

Retrospective evaluations of aversive episodes were studied in the context of a general model of "judgment by prototype" that has been applied in other situations. Unpleasant sounds of variable loudness and duration were the stimuli. In Experiment 1, continuous reports of annoyance closely tracked variations of noise intensity. Hypotheses about the determinants of retrospective evaluation were examined in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 confirmed a prediction of judgment by prototype: The effects of sound duration and intensity are additive in multitrial experiments. Experiment 4 confirmed a robust preference for aversive episodes that are "improved" by adding a period of reduced aversiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A population approach to the study of emotion: Diurnal rhythms of a working day examined with the day reconstruction method.

To date, diurnal rhythms of emotions have been studied with real-time data collection methods mostly in relatively small samples. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), a new survey instrument that reconstructs the emotions of a day, is examined as a method for enabling large-scale investigations of rhythms. Diurnal cycles were observed for 12 emotion adjectives in 909 women over a working day. Bimodal patterns with peaks at noon and evenings were detected for positive emotions; peaks in negative emotions were found at mid-morning and mid-afternoon. A V-shaped pattern was found for tired and an inverted U-shaped pattern for competent. Several diurnal patterns from prior studies were replicated. The DRM appears to be a useful tool for the study of emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)