The main purpose with this paper is to describe how a psychologically motivated conceptual space can be obtained with MDS (multidimensional scaling) and how it can be expressed in terms of a more primitive “physical” (or mathematical) one. The idea is demonstrated practically with the aid of two experimental pilot studies. The paper is concluded by a critical discussion of the method used.

Utility is a concept that is central to economics, finance, and decision theory. In the informing sciences, it also plays a central role: that of explaining the client’s motivation to be informed. Unfortunately, existing economic models of utility are plagued by many anomalies when applied to individual clients and also fail to incorporate many important features that are relevant to informing ...

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are designed to provide natural and intuitive communication with a human user. One major current topic in agent design consequently is to enhance their believability, often by incorporating internal models of emotions or motivations. As psychological theories often lack the necessary details for direct implementation, many agent modelers currently rely on m...

Magicians use misdirection to prevent you from realizing the methods used to create a magical effect, thereby allowing you to experience an apparently impossible event. Magicians have acquired much knowledge about misdirection, and have suggested several taxonomies of misdirection. These describe many of the fundamental principles in misdirection, focusing on how misdirection is achieved by mag...

What is an authentic replication attempt and what is not? Gerber et al.’s paper (1) gives us the opportunity to reflect on this issue of longstanding concern to us. Gerber et al. (1) attempted to replicate our 2011 research (2), which showed that referring to voting with nouns rather than verbs in a pre-election survey (e.g., “How important is it to you to [be a voter/ vote]. . .”) could increa...

We analyze a psychologically-based model of voter turnout. Potential voters experience regret if they fail to vote, which is the motivation for participation in voting. Regret from abstention is inversely related to the margin of victory. Voters on the winner’s side experience less regret than those on the loser’s side. We show that the unique equilibrium involves positive voter turnout. We sho...

This study was designed to assess the level of psychological distress in a heterogeneous group of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and compare them with the general population and psychiatric outpatients. A total of 118 patients with COPD, a random sample of 500 subjects from the general population and 500 psychiatric outpatients participated in this study. The Dutch ...