We study players interacting under the veil of ignorance, who have -- coarse beliefs represented as subsets opponents' actions. analyze when these follow $\max \min$ or $\max\max$ decision criteria, which we identify with pessimistic optimistic attitudes, respectively. Explicitly formalizing attitudes and how reason interactively characterize behavioral implications related to common belief in ...

As is convincingly demonstrated in the target article (Simons et al., 2016, this issue), despite the numerous forms of brain training that have been tested and touted in the past 15 years, there’s little to no evidence that currently existing programs produce lasting, meaningful change in the performance of cognitive tasks that differ from the trained tasks. As detailed by Simons et al., numero...

This study investigates the influence of a decision aid on decision makers’ model-based choices, emotions during the use of the model, and attitudes towards the model. A time allocation decision model was biased to purposefully provide optimistic or pessimistic criterion levels, on which subjects based their allocations. The results of our experiment indicate that the degree of ‘‘optimism’’ and...

BACKGROUND Research suggests that reports of interpersonal discrimination result in poor mental health. Because personality characteristics may either confound or mediate the link between these reports and mental health, there is a need to disentangle its role in order to better understand the nature of discrimination-mental health association. We examined whether hostility, anger repression an...

Improving our understanding of hopelessness is central to suicide prevention. This is the first study to investigate whether generalized expectancies for the future Predicting Hopelessness 2 (optimism/pessimism) and specific future-oriented cognitions (future thinking) interact to predict hopelessness and dysphoria. To this end, participants completed measures of future thinking, optimism/pessi...

This study examines the relationship between investor demand for IPOs prior to offerings and aftermarket performance of IPO firms during the period from 1993 to 1997 in the Hong Kong stock market. The paper finds that the IPOs with high investor demand have large positive initial returns but negative longer-run excess returns, while the IPOs with low investor demand have negative initial return...

In supersymmetric models with minimal particle content and without left-right squark mixing, the conventional wisdom is that the 125.6 GeV Higgs boson mass implies top squark masses of O(10)  TeV, far beyond the reach of colliders. This conclusion is subject to significant theoretical uncertainties, however, and we provide evidence that it may be far too pessimistic. We evaluate the Higgs boson...

Capitalist globalisation has produced certain negative consequences for human resources, industrial democracy and humanity, in general. Globalisation is a powerful force that cannot be denied, however, conversely, it has also threatened life, in a broader sense. Globalisation was perceived by globalisers as a worldwide remedy for worldwide problems, but is viewed with great pessimism amongst pr...

Two studies examined the influence of approach and avoidance social goals on memory for and evaluation of ambiguous social information. Study 1 found that individual differences in avoidance social goals were associated with greater memory of negative information, negatively biased interpretation of ambiguous social cues, and a more pessimistic evaluation of social actors. Study 2 experimentall...