The Voluntary Facial Action Technique: A Method to Test the Facial Feedback Hypothesis

According to the facial feedback hypothesis, facial muscles do not only express emotions, they also have the ability to modulate subjective experiences of emotions and to initiate emotions. This study examined the voluntary facial action technique, where participants were instructed to react with the Zygomatic major muscle (smile) or the Corrugator supercilii muscle (frown) when exposed to different stimuli. The results demonstrate that the technique effectively induces facial feedback effects. Through use of this technique we further addressed three important areas of facial feedback and found, first, that facial feedback did not modulate the experience of positive and negative emotion evoking stimuli differently. Second, the modulating ability provided significant feedback effects, while the initiating ability did not. Third, an effect of feedback remained and could be detected even some time after the critical manipulation. It is concluded that the present technique can be used in the future study of facial feedback.     

Life satisfaction: A study based on the organization of personal projects

A methodology about personal project was used to understand perceived life satisfaction. Variables derived from the Personal Project Matrix were shown to explain variability in reported life satisfaction in two separate studies (university and professional samples). The results indicated that personal projects of students had been organized in systems and these systems' properties had meaningful effects on life satisfaction. A cross-validation analysis revealed that professionals' projects did not show the same systemic feature which students' projects had. But some variables such as projects performed in general places, stress, and amount of reported obstacles discriminated life satisfaction scores meaningfully.     

Well-being and ill-being: Different dimensions?

This paper presents evidence for regarding well-being and ill-being as distinct, although not orthogonal dimensions. It is suggested that well-being and ill-being may be like measures of quantitative and verbal ability in intelligence tests. For some purposes (e.g. for admitting students to particular courses of study) it may be sensible to use only one of the measures. For other purposes a combined measure-I.Q.-is appropriate. In this study we employ Indices of Well-Being and Ill-Being and a combined measure, Balance of Well-Being and Ill-Being. Using data from the first wave (1981) of an Australian panel study (N=942), four measures of well-being and three measures of ill-being were factor analysed, confirming the existence of distinct dimensions. The value of the distinctions was underlined by findings indicating that well-being and ill-being have different correlates and causes. Wellbeing depends more than ill-being on the personality traits of extraversion and optimism, and also on the existence of supportive social networks. Ill-being is more strongly related to SES, poor health and low scoring on the trait “personal competence”,. Overall, however, it was found that more variance can be accounted for in the Balance of Well-Being and Ill-Being Index than in the separate indices of Well-Being and Ill-Being.     

The Swing of the Regulatory Pendulum in Europe: From Precautionary Principle to (Regulatory) Impact Analysis

Regulation in Europe is currently driven by three distinct, yet not entirely unrelated factors. These are competitiveness, sustainable development and governance. Increasingly these factors influence both the need for, and concepts of, what the European Commission (the Commission) refers to as “better regulation.” To ensure better regulation, two regulatory philosophies have been put forward, namely the precautionary principle and impact assessment.^1,2 In this paper, I first briefly describe the current drivers of better regulation. Then I examine the use of these two regulatory philosophies in helping to achieve better regulation. In the final section I offer some speculations on the future development of European Union (EU) regulation. Will elements of the Commission and the EU member states operate in an even more precautionary environment, or will the implementation of the precautionary principle be seen as too costly, forcing regulators to resort to an even greater use of impact analysis?     

European Union Policy on Asylum and Immigration. Addressing the Root Causes of Forced Migration: A Justice and Home Affairs Policy of Freedom,Security and Justice?

This paper contributes to the debate on the development of the future common European Union Policy on Asylum and Immigration. It seeks to explain the rationale behind the evolution of the Union's policy outlook on asylum and immigration. It then analyses the most recent Union‐wide policy tools available to address asylum and migration issues, arguing that common European asylum policies thus far have focused on containment of migration flows seen as a threat to the European internal security regime and in response to perceived populist pressures. The return and readmission clauses now being implemented, in agreements with countries outside of the Union, serve to illustrate this point, as does the political willingness to extra‐territorialize asylum processing. However, the focus on eliminating the root causes of migration flows is a relatively new paradigm, developed since the 1999 Tampere European Council. Although off to a slow start, the European Union Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument may become an institutional outlet to create a more normative framework for asylum and migration. The success of such a framework is contingent upon breaking with earlier conceptualizations of “asylum” as a security threat. Implicit in such a framework is the need to retain a clear distinction between asylum‐ and labour‐related migration. Partnerships must also be granted a budget sufficient for their establishment in real terms with countries of origin and transit. Lastly, there must be changes in modes of governance, as well as institutional reform, if efforts to elaborate a strategy on asylum and migration are to be executed successfully. Curiously, while the proposed Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe sought to abolish the pillar structure put in place by the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, it would have retained the institutional inhibitions imposed by long‐existing tensions between national and community administrations and the “inter‐pillar” battles between the foreign policy, humanitarian and development dimensions of the EU apparatus. The current political debate about moving Europe “closer to its people”, following the rejection of the proposed Constitution at national referenda in France and the Netherlands, appears unlikely to solve any of these tensions.     

Subjective qualitative information structures based on orderings

This paper is motivated by the following question: Can one axiomatize information first and then probability in terms of information rather than vice versa as suggested by information theory? The emphasis here is on a new methodological approach toward a conceptualization of behavioral information which might be better suited for inferences involving nonrepeatable events or an insufficient number of repeatable events, based on the assumption that information is prior to probability statements. The main idea is to generate (via a Boolean homorphism) a Boolean algebra of events by an appropriate information structure and to utilize the notion of a topogeneous order similar to that of a Boolean order.     

The Evolution of Cooperative Strategies for Asymmetric Social Interactions

How can cooperation be achieved between self-interested individuals in commonly-occurring asymmetric interactions where agents have different positions? Should agents use the same strategies that are appropriate for symmetric social situations? We explore these questions through the asymmetric interaction captured in the indefinitely repeated investment game (IG). In every period of this game, the first player decides how much of an endowment he wants to invest, then this amount is tripled and passed to the second player, who finally decides how much of the tripled investment she wants to return to the first player. The results of three evolutionary studies demonstrate that the best-performing strategies for this asymmetric game differ from those for a similar but symmetric game, the indefinitely repeated Prisoner’s dilemma game. The strategies that enable cooperation for the asymmetric IG react more sensitively to exploitation, meaning that cooperation can more easily break down. Furthermore, once cooperation has stopped, it is much more difficult to reestablish than in symmetric situations. Based on these results, the presence of asymmetry in an interaction appears to be an important factor affecting adaptive behavior in these common social situations.     

A μ-σ-Risk Aversion Paradox and Wealth Dependent Utility

We report a surprising property of --preferences: the assumption of nonincreasing relative risk aversion implies the optimal portfolio being riskless. We discuss a solution of that paradox using wealth dependent utility functions in detail. Using the revealed preference theory we show that (general, i.e. not necessary -) wealth dependent utility functions can be characterized by Wald's axiom.