In tort lawsuits, plaintiffs may seek damages for loss of enjoyment of life, so-called hedonic loss, which occurred as a result of an accident or injury. In 2 studies, we examined how people judge others' adaptation and hedonic loss after an injury. Laypeople's forecasts of hedonic loss are relevant to concerns about whether jurors appropriately compensate plaintiffs. Longitudinal data of subje...

Hedonic aspects are increasingly considered as an important factor in user acceptance of information systems, especially for activities with high selffulfilling value for the users. In this paper we report on the results of an experiment investigating the hedonic qualities of an interactive large-display workspace for collocated collaboration in sales-oriented travel advisory. The results show ...

Stress can increase reward pursuits: This has traditionally been seen as an attempt to relieve negative affect through the hedonic properties of a reward. However, reward pursuit is not always proportional to the pleasure experienced, because reward processing involves distinct components, including the motivation to obtain a reward (i.e., wanting) and the hedonic pleasure during the reward con...

Stress can increase reward pursuits: This has traditionally been seen as an attempt to relieve negative affect through the hedonic properties of a reward. However, reward pursuit is not always proportional to the pleasure experienced, because reward processing involves distinct components, including the motivation to obtain a reward (i.e., wanting) and the hedonic pleasure during the reward con...

Negative symptoms have clear functional implications in schizophrenia and are typically unresponsive to current treatments. The cognitive model of negative symptoms suggests that dysfunctional beliefs are influential in the development and maintenance of negative symptoms and schizophrenia. The current study reports on a preliminary investigation of a new measure of Negative Expectancy Appraisa...

BACKGROUND Anhedonia and stress sensitivity have been identified as promising depressive phenotypes. Research suggests that stress-induced anhedonia is a possible mechanism underlying the association between stress and depression. The present proof-of-concept study assessed whether hedonic capacity and stress perception are heritable and whether their genetic and environmental contributions are...

Positive Psychology is contributing to a more precise definition of the outline of human well-being and is fully incorporating studies on positive elements (strengths and positive emotions) that are without doubt amplifying the framework of research and conduct of psychology, in particular that of Clinical Psychology and Health Psychology. Over the last few years, academic debate has, from a sc...

Affective neuroscience aims to understand how affect (pleasure or displeasure) is created by brains. Progress is aided by recognizing that affect has both objective and subjective features. Those dual aspects reflect that affective reactions are generated by neural mechanisms, selected in evolution based on their real (objective) consequences for genetic fitness. We review evidence for neural r...

We consider hedonic coalition formation games in which each player has preferences over the other players and his preferences over coalition structures are based on the best player (B-/B-hedonic games) or the worst player (W /W-hedonic games) in his coalition. We show that for B-hedonic games, an individually stable partition is guaranteed to exist and can be computed efficiently. Similarly, th...