Affordances, broadly construed as opportunities for action, have been used to explain game-related phenomena in a variety of different contexts. This paper presents a cognitivist theory of affordances, which is general enough that it subsumes several related theories, yet precise enough that it provides a useful lens through which to view games. The framework is a re-contextualization of older ...

Mental health and well-being can be related to both individual as well as environmental factors. In order to address the latter relationship we use an Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) approach to capture the mood of 10 persons in real-time and real-life via questionnaires sent to their smartphones. This paper focuses on the timing of the questionnaire trigger. In order to avoid the questio...

This study tested the hypothesis that changes in momentary affect, abstinence motivation, and confidence would predict lapse risk over the next 12-24 hr using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data from smokers attempting to quit smoking. One hundred and three adult, daily, treatment-seeking smokers recorded their momentary affect, motivation to quit, abstinence confidence, and smoking beha...

The time-varying influences of peer and family support on adolescent daily mood were explored among youth transitioning from middle school to high school (8th to 9th grade, N = 268) as compared to youth transitioning from 10th to 11th grade (N = 240). Real-time measures of daily positive and negative affect (ecological momentary assessments) were collected via palmtop computers at baseline, 6 m...

Over the last years, health psychology has amounted impressive evidence that social factors play a critical role in primary and tertiary prevention. However, compared with other fields, it has somewhat lagged behind in implementing methodological advances that can considerably improve the sophistication of the assessment of such social factors. In essence, this article seeks to motivate readers...

We study endogenous formation of patent pools in the framework of Lerner and Tirole (2004). Open membership coalitions as well as closed membership coalitions are considered. We show that complete pools are formed under both mechanisms only if restrictive conditions are satisfied. As in this game a coalition may impose negative or positive externalities on outsiders, it depends on model paramet...

Offspring of depressed parents are at risk for depression and recent evidence suggests that reduced positive affect (PA) may be a marker of risk. We investigated whether self-reports of PA and fMRI-measured striatal response to reward, a neural correlate of PA, are reduced in adolescent youth at high familial risk for depression (HR) relative to youth at low familial risk for depression (LR). F...

Research on emotion experience in response to valenced stimuli has consistently shown that people with schizophrenia have the capacity to experience emotion. Specifically, people with schizophrenia report similar experiences to both positive and negative emotion-eliciting stimuli as individuals without the disorder. However, it is less clear if people with schizophrenia experience similar level...

This article considers W. Ross Ashby’s ideas on the nature of embodied minds, as articulated in the last five years of his career. In particular, it attempts to connect his ideas to later work by others in robotics, perception and consciousness. While it is difficult to measure his direct influence on this work, the conceptual links are deep. Moreover, Ashby provides a comprehensive view of the...