Predicting Confirmation Bias

Chapter five provides details of the meta-analyses into confirmation bias. It will show that the analytical conditions of diagnostic weighting of initial information, consistency of information, hypothesis testing instructions and type of information likely have an impact on confirmation bias. It will also show that the results undermine key assumptions in predominant predictions models the inability to identify diagnostic value of information theory concerning confirmation bias (Koslowski and Maqueda 1993, and Kuhn et al. 1988). The chapter proposes alternative models for predicting serial position effects and confirmation bias. These models argue that whilst the risk of occurrence of serial position effects and confirmation bias are impacted by different analytical conditions, they share an underlying cognitive process: a force towards forming a focal hypothesis early on in belief acquisition.

Dynamics of Gender Self and Other in Sharon Doubiago's South America Mi Hija

This paper explores the poetic feminist discourse of the South American poet Sharon Doubiago's epic South America Mi Hija and how she engenders and maintains her gender's visions and beliefs in masculine societies that still engulf the whole human world. She poetically defends herself and her gender refusing to submit to the standing patriarchal paradigm. She portrays herself as a modern spokesperson of her gender and its vulnerability to victimization. Doubiago also tries to cast her challenge against the dominant patriarchal power. Further, this paper sheds light on the poet’s optimism in winning the battle in the light of modern feminist analysis, providing relevant representations of her poetic discourse. It elucidates how the poet publicizes her feminist and gender thoughts despite the domination of the masculine power. As a result, as an intimate feminist poet, Doubiago succeeds in identification with her psyche and other similar selves that can assimilate with her soul and vision. In a broader sense, the focal hypothesis of this paper revolves around conceptualizing feminist poetics and gender in an appreciative receptionist way.

What is the Order Among the Varieties of Goodness? A Question Posed by von Wright; and a Conjecture Made by Aristotle

The great variousness and plurality of goodness has given comfort to general scepticism about values and a multitude of metaethical attitudes or predilections. But is this variousness and plurality really the hotch-potch it has appeared? The paper recapitulates and expands von Wright's typology of the varieties of goodness and looks to explain the order or system that underlies the phenomena by developing and extending a conjecture of Aristotle's, the so-called ‘focal hypothesis’, and combining therewith a suggestion of von Wright's, to the effect that the central case of something good is the faring well of a being. By means of focal hypothesis, one may account fairly well for medical, technical, instrumental, beneficial and utilitarian goodness. Other varieties such as hedonic and ethical goodness complicate the picture, as also do all cases where it seems that an antecedent kind of goodness impinges upon a being. These complications mirror in part the finding that the human scale of values is not a scale exclusively of human values.

A Clinical Approach to Brief Dynamic Psychotherapies in Child Psychiatry

This paper reviews the position of brief psychotherapies in child psychiatry. Brief psychotherapy with children and families has received less attention than similar work with individual adults. After reviewing literature on brief dynamic psychotherapy with children and their families, the authors, describe an approach which developed in an outpatient child psychiatry team. After a brief assessment, a focal hypothesis and plan of treatment are concluded. A decision is made as to which unit (the family group, an individual, or a combination of individuals) would be most strategic to treat. The authors coin the phrase “focal treatment unit” to express this concept.