Perceived control and negative outcome expectancy as mediators of problem gamblers\u27 readiness to change and predictors of abstinence versus moderation as change goal.

The aim of the present study was to examine why some gamblers experience shifts in motivational readiness to change their gambling practices while others do not. This cross-sectional study of gamblers at different points across the spectrum of change attempted to extend the Addicted-self model of recovery to the study of problem gambling by examining the associations of perceived control and negative outcome expectancy with gamblers\u27 readiness to change. The present study also investigated the interaction of these two constructs in predicting gamblers\u27 choice of change goals. To facilitate this investigation, the present study sought to validate newly-developed measures of perceived control over gambling (PCOG) and negative gambling outcome expectancies (NGOE). Two hundred twenty eight community-dwelling problem gamblers were recruited for the study. Participants consisted of three subsets of gamblers: (i) gamblers in pre-contemplation, contemplation, and preparation, (ii) gamblers in action pursuing abstinence as their change goal, and (iii) gamblers in action pursuing moderation as their change goal. Abstainers were found to have the lowest perceived control over gambling and the highest negative gambling outcome expectancies compared to the other two groups. Moderators did not differ from pre-changers in perceived control or negative outcome expectancy. Both perceived control over gambling and negative gambling outcome expectancy predicted motivational readiness to change scores. Perceived control and negative outcome expectancy also mediated the relation between negative gambling consequences and motivational readiness to change. A structural equation model showed support for an addicted-self concept as an underlying latent construct mediating the behaviour change process. Clinical implications of perceived control over gambling and negative gambling outcome expectancy as targets for therapeutic interventions as well as useful indices for developing treatment-client matching guidelines are discussed.Dept. of Philosophy. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .J49. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-11, Section: B, page: 6275. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

Emotions, Intuitions and Risk Perception in Critical Care

The theory of decision-making as it applies to bioethics and healthcare assumes a rational decision maker: someone who knows all his alternatives, has clear preferences, can rank and weigh risks and benefits of an intervention, and always acts in his own best interests. However, the growing body of research from the field of decision science shows that, in reality, such a purely rational decision maker does not exist. Instead, patients are rational within personal or environmental constraints such as uncertainty or ambiguity in which non-rational approaches such as emotion and intuition are instrumental. This issue is particularly important in critical care. To ensure that patients receive the end-of-life care that they want, especially considering the increase in futile care, proper risk communication is necessary. While the move from paternalism to the current emphasis on patient empowerment and shared decision-making means that patients and surrogates want comprehensive and understandable information about their conditions and treatment in order to participate fully in decisions about their care, emotions complicate this decision-making. Though there is a great deal of empirical research on emotions and risk perception, there is a lack of philosophical research on this topic, especially when it comes to futility considerations in critical care. This research asserts that emotions should be considered a necessary component of ethical assessment of risk and communication about risk, especially in the field of critical care. It explores the existing literature on how people employ emotions and deliberation in their decision-making, and it questions the existing bias among normative scholars that decisions resulting from deliberation are inherently better or superior to those grounded in intuition. Furthermore, this research attempts to determine the value of autonomy in designing health policies grounded in behavioral economics. While providers want patients to make decisions that promote their own interests, this task is rarely achieved when patients are left alone to make important decisions. This research questions whether providers should let their patients make decisions that divert them from their own health goals or intervene by actively directing patients toward choices that are most likely to promote their goals

Turning to Food: Religious Contact and Conversion in Early Modern Drama

In this dissertation, I am proposing a new way to explore Anglo-Judeo-Islamic relations in early modern drama: to focus on the way food, drink, and the humoral body materializes on stage as “conversion panic,” which is dramatized in a range of scenarios from overt xenophobia to more nuanced scenes of acceptance and tolerance. Because the early modern English believed that diet – eating with religious others and/or eating foods from other nations – could alter their humoral makeup to the extent that their internal, physiological bodies underwent a religious conversion, they were constantly and consciously aware of the looming possibility of conversion. The hydraulic premise of humoral physiology thus extended, I contend, to religious identity: just as humors were fluid, so too was religious identity. Food, which is at once a central “non-natural” for the humoral body and an essentially theatrical element, provides an important point of convergence for investigating religious difference in early modern drama. To examine food’s role in the Anglo-Judeo-Islamic equation is to better understand how the early modern English simultaneously managed their fears, maintained their cultural and religious identities, and developed or nurtured economic and political ties with the other. To offer a more comprehensive picture of English interactions with religious others, I study early modern English histories, travel narratives, medical tracts, sermons, and other pamphlets, in addition to the English representation of religious others on stage. The plays I discuss span approximately forty-seven years, starting with Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1584) and extending to the late Jacobean sequel to The Fair Maid of the West (c. 1631) by Thomas Heywood. I conclude that examining interfaith relationships from the perspective of foodways widens the possibility that the early modern English did not always look to the Turk, Jew, or Catholic in contempt. Rather, studying these interfaith encounters in tandem with humoral theory and culinary practices establishes the fact that the early modern English were conscious of their sameness with others, and responded to this awareness with attitudes ranging from outright resistance to compassionate acceptance

Fake News and News Anxiety in Early Modern England

This work defines and analyzes the concepts of fake news and news anxiety in early modern England, arguing that fears about the dishonesty, abundance, and intrusiveness of cheap newsprint became key cultural concerns—concerns that find frequent expression in the literature of the time. Professional theater and commercial news came of age together in England, and the dramatic stage, itself a kind of news venue, proved a trenchant critic of printed news. Other academic works have examined connections between commercial news and professional theater, but mine is the first to examine the theater’s anxious preoccupation with fake news. This study focuses on the role of news, fake news, and news-related anxieties in the plays of Shakespeare

Advances in the sociology of trust and cooperation: theory, experiments, and field studies

The problem of cooperation and social order is one of the core issues in the social sciences. The key question is how humans, groups, institutions, and countries can avoid or overcome the collective good dilemmas that could lead to a Hobbesian war of all against all. Using the general set of social dilemmas as a paradigmatic example, rigorous formal analysis can stimulate scientific progress in several ways. The book, consisting of original articles, provides state of the art examples of research along these lines: theoretical, experimental, and field studies on trust and cooperation. The theoretical work covers articles on trust and control, reputation formation, and paradigmatic articles on the benefits and caveats of abstracting reality into models. The experimental articles treat lab based tests of models of trust and reputation, and the effects of the social and institutional embeddedness on behavior in cooperative interactions and possibly emerging inequalities. The field studies test these models in applied settings such as cooperation between organizations, informal care, and different kinds of collaboration networks. The book will be exemplary for rigorous sociology and social sciences more in general in a variety of ways: There is a focus on effects of social conditions, in particular different forms of social and institutional embeddedness, on social outcomes. Theorizing about and testing of effects of social contexts on individual and group outcomes is one of the main aims of sociological research. Modelling efforts include formal explications of micro-macro links that are typically easily overlooked when argumentation is intuitive and impressionistic Extensive attention is paid to unintended effects of intentional behavior, another feature that is a direct consequence of formal theoretical modelling and in-depth data-analyses of the social processe

Advances in the Sociology of Trust and Cooperation

The book identifies conditions for trust and cooperation. It highlights unintended consequences of individually rational behavior, and shows how trust and cooperation change dependent on social embeddedness. Such analyses inspire experimental tests in lab conditions, but also tests through empirical applications in field studies. The results of this mixed-method approach can in turn be used to inspire further theoretical work

(In)formal perceptions and arguments on tourism governance multifaceted concept

A brief exploratory approach to (in)formal perceptions and arguments on tourism governance multifaceted concep

Holding down the Fort

This Open-Access-book questions the relationship between institutionalized images and understandings of policing – the monolithic ideas common to most, if not all, Western law enforcement agencies – and contextual, situative, and local interactions where the human representatives of policing – street-level officers – come into contact with residents. The political and theoretical association of specific forms of “Western” policing with democratic society can be illustrated in the case of German integration: narratives of reform and essentially forging new democratic police agencies in the “new German states” stand at odds with much of the experience and statements of officers who continued to serve following (Re)Unification. Officers who present their works primarily in terms of their local responsibilities, expectations and more specifically to their unique and individual relationship and connection to their communities downplay the relevance of high-level policing policy. Based on a two-year ethnographic study of policing in a rural county in the German state of Brandenburg, this book explores the local nature of policing both in terms of how police officers imagine their communities to be and with reference to broader societal expectations and assumptions of what police, essentially, are, can effectively do, and should effectively do

Holding down the Fort

This Open-Access-book questions the relationship between institutionalized images and understandings of policing – the monolithic ideas common to most, if not all, Western law enforcement agencies – and contextual, situative, and local interactions where the human representatives of policing – street-level officers – come into contact with residents. The political and theoretical association of specific forms of “Western” policing with democratic society can be illustrated in the case of German integration: narratives of reform and essentially forging new democratic police agencies in the “new German states” stand at odds with much of the experience and statements of officers who continued to serve following (Re)Unification. Officers who present their works primarily in terms of their local responsibilities, expectations and more specifically to their unique and individual relationship and connection to their communities downplay the relevance of high-level policing policy. Based on a two-year ethnographic study of policing in a rural county in the German state of Brandenburg, this book explores the local nature of policing both in terms of how police officers imagine their communities to be and with reference to broader societal expectations and assumptions of what police, essentially, are, can effectively do, and should effectively do

Entertaining the Idea

To entertain an idea is to take it in, pay attention to it, give it breathing room, dwell with it for a time. The practice of entertaining ideas suggests rumination and meditation, inviting us to think of philosophy as a form of hospitality and a kind of mental theatre. In this collection, organized around key words shared by philosophy and performance, the editors suggest that Shakespeare’s plays supply readers, listeners, viewers, and performers with equipment for living. In plays ranging from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to King Lear and The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare invites readers and audiences to be more responsive to the texture and meaning of daily encounters, whether in the intimacies of love, the demands of social and political life, or moments of ethical decision. Entertaining the Idea features established and emerging scholars, addressing key words such as role play, acknowledgment, judgment, and entertainment as well as curse and care. The volume also includes longer essays on Shakespeare, Kant, Husserl, and Hegel as well as an afterword by theatre critic Charles McNulty on the philosophy and performance history of King Lear