BACKGROUND Occupational physicians are sometimes surprised at the decisions made by employment tribunals. AIM To assess employment tribunal judgements on disability discrimination in order to determine whether the evidence placed before the tribunal was appropriate and sufficient. METHOD Qualitative review of recorded tribunal judgements for an 18-month period between 1 January 2005 and 31 ...

An extensively revised heuristic-analytic theory of reasoning is presented incorporating three principles of hypothetical thinking. The theory assumes that reasoning and judgment are facilitated by the formation of epistemic mental models that are generated one at a time (singularity principle) by preconscious heuristic processes that contextualize problems in such a way as to maximize relevanc...

The scientific approaches employed by selected internationally recognized organizations in developing occupational exposure limits (OELs) for metals and other mining-related chemicals were surveyed, and differences and commonalities were identified. The analysis identified an overriding need to increase transparency in current OEL documentation. OEL documentation should adhere to good risk char...

Approach and avoidance constitute a basic dimension of all animal behavior. Although a large number of studies have investigated approach and avoidance elicited by specific sensory stimuli, comparatively little is known about default approach biases when stimulus information is absent or reduced. The amygdala is well known to contribute to approach and avoidance behaviors in response to specifi...

Two experiments pitted the default-interventionist account of belief bias against a parallel-processing model. According to the former, belief bias occurs because a fast, belief-based evaluation of the conclusion pre-empts a working-memory demanding logical analysis. In contrast, according to the latter both belief-based and logic-based responding occur in parallel. Participants were given dedu...

We examine the extent to which people’s judgments about whether a given member of a kind has a property are guided by prevalence estimates alone, or whether their acceptance of a generic generalization also impacts these judgments. Our data are not accounted for by prevalence estimates alone: acceptance of a generic disposes people to infer that, by default, a given member of a kind has the rel...

Pantomime, gesture in absence of speech, has no conventional meaning. Nevertheless, individuals seem to be able to produce pantomimes and derive meaning from pantomimes. A number of studies has addressed the use of co-speech gesture, but little is known on pantomime. Therefore, the question of how people construct and understand pantomimes arises in gesture research. To determine how people use...

The credit derivatives market has experienced remarkable growth over the past decade. As such, there is a growing interest in tools for pricing of the most prominent credit derivative, the credit default swap (CDS). In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm for pricing of basket default swaps (BDS). For this purpose, genetic network programming (GNP), which is one of the recent evolutiona...