Three studies tested whether adopting strong (relative to weak) approach goals in relationships (i.e., goals focused on the pursuit of positive experiences in one's relationship such as fun, growth, and development) predict greater sexual desire. Study 1 was a 6-month longitudinal study with biweekly assessments of sexual desire. Studies 2 and 3 were 2-week daily experience studies with daily a...

acceptance and commitment therapy (act) is a new development within behavioral therapy. its goal is to promote psychological flexibility. numerous studies show that suffering results when people attempt to avoid their inner experiences (experiential avoidance). this experiential avoidance often leads to rigid and inflexible behavior that also leads them to compromise their goals and what is imp...

People using consumer software applications typically do not use technical jargon when querying an online database of help topics. Rather, they attempt to communicate their goals with common words and phrases that describe software functionality in terms of structure and objects they understand. We describe a Bayesian approach to modeling the relationship between words in a user's query for ass...

Plan recognition is a ubiquitous task in artificial intelligence and pervasive computing research. The multigoal recognition problem presents a major challenge in the real world of plan recognition. Users often pursue several goals in a concurrent and interleaving manner, where the pursuit of goals may spread over different parts of an activity sequence and may be pursued in parallel. Existing ...

Goals are an essential attitude of proactive agents described with mentalistic attitudes. Nonetheless, in the literature no well agreed-upon definition of the term goal has arisen so far. In this paper it is argued that a property-based view on goals can help understanding the nature of the goal concept. Therefore, the goal concept is discussed with respect to typical properties, which are asso...

We study an automata-theoretic approach to planning for temporally extended goals. Specifically, we devise techniques based on nonemptiness of Büchi automata on infinite words, to synthesize sequential and conditional plans in a generalized setting in which we have that: goals are general temporal properties of desired execution; dynamic systems are represented by finite transition systems; inc...

Given a set of conditions that may be present in a patient, this paper presents a methods for choosing the optimal combination of treatment actions, taking into account interactions among the available therapeutic and diagnostic procedures. The multiple-threshold approach is an extension of the threshold approach for individual conditions, and it offers a precise way of computing the optimal ac...

Relapse prevention (RP) plays a major role in the vast number of treatment programs for sexual offenders. However, despite its widespread application, questions have been raised regarding the uncritical adoption of the approach (R. K. Hanson, 1996). More specifically, the way in which it is presented to sexual offenders has been criticized for being unhelpfully negative in focus (Mann, 2000) an...

This article examines how people depart from optimality during multiple-goal pursuit. The authors operationalized optimality using dynamic programming, which is a mathematical model used to calculate expected value in multistage decisions. Drawing on prospect theory, they predicted that people are risk-averse when pursuing approach goals and are therefore more likely to prioritize the goal in t...