Cognitive distortions are a central feature in the development and maintenance of gambling disord... more Cognitive distortions are a central feature in the development and maintenance of gambling disorder, despite not being a diagnostic criterion. A substantial clinical literature confirms that targeting distortions in the context of cognitive behavioral treatment adds efficacy in individual and group settings, across demographics. Several current instruments measure illusion of control, gambler’s fallacy, and other distortions. However, they are subject to criticism such as lack of content validity through incompleteness or including noncognitive factors such as emotion or excessively broad cognitive factors such as cognitive bias, lack of factor analytic confirmation, and lack of measurement invariance confirmation. We advocate that the next step is to clarify what is and what is not a contributing cognitive distortion in gambling disorder, including clarification of illusion of control and other concepts with multiple definitions. It is concluded that a next generation of instruments, improved on these metrics, will contribute to increased understanding and treatment efficacy.
ABSTRACT This study uses content analysis to provide a qualitative exploration of how life roles ... more ABSTRACT This study uses content analysis to provide a qualitative exploration of how life roles are affected by frequent (i.e. at least weekly) gambling, based on in-depth interviews with a community sample of 161 non-treatment-seeking frequent gamblers. Over half (51.6%) of the participants indicated problems associated with gambling and 131 examples were identified. The majority of problems were relational (50.4%), followed by financial (19.8%), work (13.7%), and school related (8.4%). Slightly less than half of participants (41.7%) reported losses due to gambling and 92 examples were provided. The most frequently reported loss was identity related (54.3%), which included self-esteem/shame (38.0%), estrangement from family (34.0%), estrangement from friends (16.0%), and estrangement from work colleagues (6.0%). Additional losses included health (29.3%) and financial (8.7%). Almost two-thirds of participants (64.6%) reported difficulty concentrating in family (18.4%), work (16.8%), and school (9.6%) activities, whereas general concentration problems comprised an additional 48.8% of the examples provided. Half of participants (49.1%) discussed behavioral withdrawal due to gambling, which included withdrawal from work (44.3%), relationships (24.5%), school (15.1%), and personal (6.6%) activities. These findings paint a complex picture of how gambling interferes with different life roles for some frequent gamblers, identifying important areas for future research and practice.
Demographic, experiential, and cognitive variables in evacuation behavior from Hurricanes Harvey ... more Demographic, experiential, and cognitive variables in evacuation behavior from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Collected at the University of Georgia, December 2017.
Recent hurricanes in the Atlantic region of the southern United States triggered a series of evac... more Recent hurricanes in the Atlantic region of the southern United States triggered a series of evacuation orders in the coastal cities of Florida, Georgia, and Texas. While some of these urged voluntary evacuations, most were mandatory orders. Despite governments asking people to vacate their homes for their own safety, many do not. We aim to understand the observable and hidden variables involved in the decision-making process and model these in a partially observable Markov decision process, which predicts whether a person will evacuate or not given his or her current situation. We consider the features of the particular hurricane, the dynamic situation that the individual is experiencing, and demographic factors that influence the decision making of individuals. The process model is represented as a dynamic influence diagram and evaluated on data collected via a comprehensive survey of hurricane-impacted individuals.
Cognitive distortions are a central feature in the development and maintenance of gambling disord... more Cognitive distortions are a central feature in the development and maintenance of gambling disorder, despite not being a diagnostic criterion. A substantial clinical literature confirms that targeting distortions in the context of cognitive behavioral treatment adds efficacy in individual and group settings, across demographics. Several current instruments measure illusion of control, gambler’s fallacy, and other distortions. However, they are subject to criticism such as lack of content validity through incompleteness or including noncognitive factors such as emotion or excessively broad cognitive factors such as cognitive bias, lack of factor analytic confirmation, and lack of measurement invariance confirmation. We advocate that the next step is to clarify what is and what is not a contributing cognitive distortion in gambling disorder, including clarification of illusion of control and other concepts with multiple definitions. It is concluded that a next generation of instruments, improved on these metrics, will contribute to increased understanding and treatment efficacy.
Optimal planning in environments shared with other interacting agents often involves recognizing ... more Optimal planning in environments shared with other interacting agents often involves recognizing the intent of others and their plans. This is because others’ actions may impact the state of the environment and, consequently, the efficacy of the agent’s plan. Planning becomes further complicated in the presence of uncertainty, which may manifest due to the state being partially observable, nondeterminism in how the dynamic state changes, and imperfect sensors. A framework for decision–theoretic planning in this space is the interactive partially observable Markov decision process (I-POMDP), which generalizes the well-known POMDP to multiagent settings. This chapter describes the general I-POMDP framework and a particular approximation that facilitates its usage. Because I-POMDPs elegantly integrate beliefs and the modeling of others in the subject agent’s decision process, they apply to modeling human behavioral data obtained from strategic games. We explore the effectiveness of models based on simplified I-POMDPs in fitting experimental data onto theory-of-mind–based recursive reasoning.
Much research in the last two decades has demonstrated that human responses deviate from the perf... more Much research in the last two decades has demonstrated that human responses deviate from the performance deemed normative according to various models of decision making and rational judgment (e.g., the basic axioms of utility theory). This gap between the normative and the descriptive can be interpreted as indicating systematic irrationalities in human cognition. However, four alternative interpretations preserve the assumption that human behavior and cognition is largely rational. These posit that the gap is due to (1) performance errors, (2) computational limitations, (3) the wrong norm being applied by the experimenter, and (4) a different construal of the task by the subject. In the debates about the viability of these alternative explanations, attention has been focused too narrowly on the modal response. In a series of experiments involving most of the classic tasks in the heuristics and biases literature, we have examined the implications of individual differences in performa...
1. Illustrates the dispute between unbounded and bounded rationality as it pertains to the fields... more 1. Illustrates the dispute between unbounded and bounded rationality as it pertains to the fields of artificial intelligence, animal behavior, and economics. Each section begins with a brief outline of the state of the dispute in its discipline, and concludes with speculative suggestions of future directions that each field might follow in pursuing fast and frugal strategies. Analyses reveal that in these 3 fields, the idea of simple heuristics is advancing conceptually; however, its quantitative impact remains small in comparison with older ...
Cognitive distortions are a central feature in the development and maintenance of gambling disord... more Cognitive distortions are a central feature in the development and maintenance of gambling disorder, despite not being a diagnostic criterion. A substantial clinical literature confirms that targeting distortions in the context of cognitive behavioral treatment adds efficacy in individual and group settings, across demographics. Several current instruments measure illusion of control, gambler’s fallacy, and other distortions. However, they are subject to criticism such as lack of content validity through incompleteness or including noncognitive factors such as emotion or excessively broad cognitive factors such as cognitive bias, lack of factor analytic confirmation, and lack of measurement invariance confirmation. We advocate that the next step is to clarify what is and what is not a contributing cognitive distortion in gambling disorder, including clarification of illusion of control and other concepts with multiple definitions. It is concluded that a next generation of instruments, improved on these metrics, will contribute to increased understanding and treatment efficacy.
ABSTRACT This study uses content analysis to provide a qualitative exploration of how life roles ... more ABSTRACT This study uses content analysis to provide a qualitative exploration of how life roles are affected by frequent (i.e. at least weekly) gambling, based on in-depth interviews with a community sample of 161 non-treatment-seeking frequent gamblers. Over half (51.6%) of the participants indicated problems associated with gambling and 131 examples were identified. The majority of problems were relational (50.4%), followed by financial (19.8%), work (13.7%), and school related (8.4%). Slightly less than half of participants (41.7%) reported losses due to gambling and 92 examples were provided. The most frequently reported loss was identity related (54.3%), which included self-esteem/shame (38.0%), estrangement from family (34.0%), estrangement from friends (16.0%), and estrangement from work colleagues (6.0%). Additional losses included health (29.3%) and financial (8.7%). Almost two-thirds of participants (64.6%) reported difficulty concentrating in family (18.4%), work (16.8%), and school (9.6%) activities, whereas general concentration problems comprised an additional 48.8% of the examples provided. Half of participants (49.1%) discussed behavioral withdrawal due to gambling, which included withdrawal from work (44.3%), relationships (24.5%), school (15.1%), and personal (6.6%) activities. These findings paint a complex picture of how gambling interferes with different life roles for some frequent gamblers, identifying important areas for future research and practice.
Demographic, experiential, and cognitive variables in evacuation behavior from Hurricanes Harvey ... more Demographic, experiential, and cognitive variables in evacuation behavior from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Collected at the University of Georgia, December 2017.
Recent hurricanes in the Atlantic region of the southern United States triggered a series of evac... more Recent hurricanes in the Atlantic region of the southern United States triggered a series of evacuation orders in the coastal cities of Florida, Georgia, and Texas. While some of these urged voluntary evacuations, most were mandatory orders. Despite governments asking people to vacate their homes for their own safety, many do not. We aim to understand the observable and hidden variables involved in the decision-making process and model these in a partially observable Markov decision process, which predicts whether a person will evacuate or not given his or her current situation. We consider the features of the particular hurricane, the dynamic situation that the individual is experiencing, and demographic factors that influence the decision making of individuals. The process model is represented as a dynamic influence diagram and evaluated on data collected via a comprehensive survey of hurricane-impacted individuals.
Cognitive distortions are a central feature in the development and maintenance of gambling disord... more Cognitive distortions are a central feature in the development and maintenance of gambling disorder, despite not being a diagnostic criterion. A substantial clinical literature confirms that targeting distortions in the context of cognitive behavioral treatment adds efficacy in individual and group settings, across demographics. Several current instruments measure illusion of control, gambler’s fallacy, and other distortions. However, they are subject to criticism such as lack of content validity through incompleteness or including noncognitive factors such as emotion or excessively broad cognitive factors such as cognitive bias, lack of factor analytic confirmation, and lack of measurement invariance confirmation. We advocate that the next step is to clarify what is and what is not a contributing cognitive distortion in gambling disorder, including clarification of illusion of control and other concepts with multiple definitions. It is concluded that a next generation of instruments, improved on these metrics, will contribute to increased understanding and treatment efficacy.
Optimal planning in environments shared with other interacting agents often involves recognizing ... more Optimal planning in environments shared with other interacting agents often involves recognizing the intent of others and their plans. This is because others’ actions may impact the state of the environment and, consequently, the efficacy of the agent’s plan. Planning becomes further complicated in the presence of uncertainty, which may manifest due to the state being partially observable, nondeterminism in how the dynamic state changes, and imperfect sensors. A framework for decision–theoretic planning in this space is the interactive partially observable Markov decision process (I-POMDP), which generalizes the well-known POMDP to multiagent settings. This chapter describes the general I-POMDP framework and a particular approximation that facilitates its usage. Because I-POMDPs elegantly integrate beliefs and the modeling of others in the subject agent’s decision process, they apply to modeling human behavioral data obtained from strategic games. We explore the effectiveness of models based on simplified I-POMDPs in fitting experimental data onto theory-of-mind–based recursive reasoning.
Much research in the last two decades has demonstrated that human responses deviate from the perf... more Much research in the last two decades has demonstrated that human responses deviate from the performance deemed normative according to various models of decision making and rational judgment (e.g., the basic axioms of utility theory). This gap between the normative and the descriptive can be interpreted as indicating systematic irrationalities in human cognition. However, four alternative interpretations preserve the assumption that human behavior and cognition is largely rational. These posit that the gap is due to (1) performance errors, (2) computational limitations, (3) the wrong norm being applied by the experimenter, and (4) a different construal of the task by the subject. In the debates about the viability of these alternative explanations, attention has been focused too narrowly on the modal response. In a series of experiments involving most of the classic tasks in the heuristics and biases literature, we have examined the implications of individual differences in performa...
1. Illustrates the dispute between unbounded and bounded rationality as it pertains to the fields... more 1. Illustrates the dispute between unbounded and bounded rationality as it pertains to the fields of artificial intelligence, animal behavior, and economics. Each section begins with a brief outline of the state of the dispute in its discipline, and concludes with speculative suggestions of future directions that each field might follow in pursuing fast and frugal strategies. Analyses reveal that in these 3 fields, the idea of simple heuristics is advancing conceptually; however, its quantitative impact remains small in comparison with older ...
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Papers by Adam Goodie