Two studies examined intergroup schadenfreude -malicious pleasure at an outgroup’s misfortune. Study 1 showed that schadenfreude regarding a German loss in soccer was increased by interest in soccer and threats of Dutch inferiority. The effect of inferiority threat was especially strong for participants less interested in soccer, as the more interested showed relatively high schadenfreude. Stud...

BACKGROUND Suppose a standard therapy (Standard) has been established to provide a clinically important reduction in risk of irreversible morbidity or mortality. In that setting, the safety and efficacy of an experimental intervention likely would be assessed in a clinical trial providing a comparison with Standard rather than a placebo arm. Such a trial often is designed to assess whether the ...

The concept of the lonely person is not well defined. Its meaning varies somewhat from person to person, and people seem to apply different standards when they judge loneliness in themselves and in others. Therefore, when people say "~I feel lonely," their intended meanings are not precise. Three people beginning psychotherapy with a complaint of loneliness may have quite distinct problems in m...

The article offers an account of emotional mechanisms (EMs). EMs are claimed to be personal, often unconscious, distinctively patterned, mental processes whereby emotion a given kind is transmuted into different kind. After preliminary considerations about emotions as felt evaluations, the identifies three families mechanisms. These set in motion when (for example, envy, shame or anger) generat...

BACKGROUND The interpretation of the results of active-control trials regarding the efficacy and safety of a new drug is important for drug registration and following clinical use. It has been suggested that non-inferiority and equivalence studies are not reported with the same quantitative rigor as superiority studies. METHODS Standard methodological criteria for non-inferiority and equivale...

OBJECTIVES To identify non-inferiority trials within a cohort where the experimental therapy is the same as the active control comparator but at a reduced intensity and determine if these non-inferiority trials of reduced intensity therapies have less favourable results than other non-inferiority trials in the cohort. Such a finding would provide suggestive evidence of biocreep in these trials....

After a non-inferiority margin is established, a prospective non-inferiority trial is usually conducted to confirm the noninferiority of the new product when compared to the existing product. Non-inferiority trials typically require considerably larger sample sizes than placebo-controlled trials [4]. This is due to the fact that the margin of equivalence (non-inferiority) is often much smaller ...