Research traditions in psychology in which the evaluation-performance relationship was examined do not show agreement on the mediating process, nor is there any compelling evidence that favors one account over the others. On the basis of a molecular analysis of performance on the Remote Associates Test (RAT), Harkins (2006) argued that the potential for evaluation motivates participants to perf...

We describe a hierarchical structure for a knowledge-based analog circuit synthesis tool. Analog circuit topologies are represented as a hierarchy of abstract functional blocks each with associated design knowledge. We also describe mechanisms to select from among alternate design styles, and to translate performance specifications from one level in the hierarchy to the next lower level. A prot...

Perspective taking is often the glue that binds people together. However, we propose that in competitive contexts, perspective taking is akin to adding gasoline to a fire: It inflames already-aroused competitive impulses and leads people to protect themselves from the potentially insidious actions of their competitors. Overall, we suggest that perspective taking functions as a relational amplif...

The effects of attributions for success on the alleviation of mood and performance deficits of clinically depressed inpatients were investigated. Depressed patients were randomly assigned to either an acutely depressed group or an improved depressed group that was exposed to a learned helplessness induction procedure. All subjects received 80% positive feedback on a task allegedly measuring soc...

Experimental research reliably demonstrates that self-regulatory deficits are a consequence of prior self-regulatory effort. However, in naturalistic settings, although people know that they are sometimes vulnerable to saying, eating, or doing the wrong thing, they cannot accurately gauge their capacity to self-regulate at any given time. Because self-regulation and autonomic regulation colocal...

People can solve problems in more than one way. Two general strategies involve (A) methodical, conscious, search of problem-state transformations, and (B) sudden insight, with abrupt emergence of the solution into consciousness. This study elucidated the influence of initial resting brain-state on subjects' subsequent strategy choices. High-density electroencephalograms (EEGs) were recorded fro...

This study examines whether contrived success on a task closely related to school subjects would promote students’ self-efficacy. In our previous study, junior high school students who experienced contrived success on anagram tasks raised their sense of self-efficacy and kept it high for a year. We tried to replicate that study, substituting calculation tasks for the anagrams. One hundred eight...

This paper presents an efficient method for approximate string matching against a lexicon. We define a filter that for each source word selects a small set of target lexical entries, from which the best match is then selected using generalized edit distance, where edit operations can be assigned an arbitrary weight. The filter combines a specialized hash function with best-first search. Our wor...