Virtual milgram : empathic concern or personal distress? Evidence from functional MRI and dispositional measures

One motive for behaving as the agent of another"s aggression appears to be anchored in as yet unelucidated mechanisms of obedience to authority. In a recent partial replication of Milgram"s obedience paradigm within an immersive virtual environment, participants administered pain to a female virtual human and observed her suffering. Whether the participants" response to the latter was more akin to other-oriented empathic concern for her well-being or to a self-oriented aversive state of personal distress in response to her distress is unclear. Using the stimuli from that study, this event-related fMRI-based study analysed brain activity during observation of the victim in pain versus not in pain. This contrast revealed activation in pre-defi ned brain areas known to be involved in affective processing but not in those commonly associated with affect sharing (e.g., ACC and insula). We then examined whether different dimensions of dispositional empathy predict activity within the same pre-defi ned brain regions: While personal distress and fantasy (i.e., tendency to transpose oneself into fi ctional situations and characters) predicted brain activity, empathic concern and perspective taking predicted no change in neuronal response associated with pain observation. These exploratory fi ndings suggest that there is a distinct pattern of brain activity associated with observing the pain-related behaviour of the victim within the context of this social dilemma, that this observation evoked a self-oriented aversive state of personal distress, and that the objective"reality" of pain is of secondary importance for this response. These fi ndings provide a starting point for experimentally more rigorous investigation of obedience.

Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease from EEG by Means of Synchrony Measures in Optimized Frequency Bands

Several clinical studies have reported that EEG synchrony is affected by Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In this paper a frequency band analysis of AD EEG signals is presented, with the aim of improving the diagnosis of AD using EEG signals. In this paper, multiple synchrony measures are assessed through statistical tests (Mann–Whitney U test), including correlation, phase synchrony and Granger causality measures. Moreover, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is conducted with those synchrony measures as features. For the data set at hand, the frequency range (5-6Hz) yields the best accuracy for diagnosing AD, which lies within the classical theta band (4-8Hz). The corresponding classification error is 4.88% for directed transfer function (DTF) Granger causality measure. Interestingly, results show that EEG of AD patients is more synchronous than in healthy subjects within the optimized range 5-6Hz, which is in sharp contrast with the loss of synchrony in AD EEG reported in many earlier studies. This new finding may provide new insights about the neurophysiology of AD. Additional testing on larger AD datasets is required to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Beyond Value-at-Risk : GlueVaR Distortion Risk Measures

We propose a new family of risk measures, called GlueVaR, within the class of distortion risk measures. Analytical closed-form expressions are shown for the most frequently used distribution functions in financial and insurance applications. The relationship between Glue-VaR, Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) is explained. Tail-subadditivity is investigated and it is shown that some GlueVaR risk measures satisfy this property. An interpretation in terms of risk attitudes is provided and a discussion is given on the applicability in non-financial problems such as health, safety, environmental or catastrophic risk management

The use of flexible quantile-based measures in risk assessment

A new family of distortion risk measures -GlueVaR- is proposed in Belles- Sampera et al. -2013- to procure a risk assessment lying between those provided by common quantile-based risk measures. GlueVaR risk measures may be expressed as a combination of these standard risk measures. We show here that this relationship may be used to obtain approximations of GlueVaR measures for general skewed distribution functions using the Cornish-Fisher expansion. A subfamily of GlueVaR measures satisfies the tail-subadditivity property. An example of risk measurement based on real insurance claim data is presented, where implications of tail-subadditivity in the aggregation of risks are illustrated.

The connection between distortion risk measures and ordered weighted averaging operators

Distortion risk measures summarize the risk of a loss distribution by means of a single value. In fuzzy systems, the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) and Weighted Ordered Weighted Averaging (WOWA) operators are used to aggregate a large number of fuzzy rules into a single value. We show that these concepts can be derived from the Choquet integral, and then the mathematical relationship between distortion risk measures and the OWA and WOWA operators for discrete and finite random variables is presented. This connection offers a new interpretation of distortion risk measures and, in particular, Value-at-Risk and Tail Value-at-Risk can be understood from an aggregation operator perspective. The theoretical results are illustrated in an example and the degree of orness concept is discussed.

View-dependent information theory quality measures for pixel sampling and scene discretization in flatland

In this paper, we present view-dependent information theory quality measures for pixel sampling and scene discretization in flatland. The measures are based on a definition for the mutual information of a line, and have a purely geometrical basis. Several algorithms exploiting them are presented and compare well with an existing one based on depth differences

Informational Aesthetics Measures

The Birkhoff aesthetic measure of an object is the ratio between order and complexity. Informational aesthetics describes the interpretation of this measure from an information-theoretic perspective. From these ideas, the authors define a set of ratios based on information theory and Kolmogorov complexity that can help to quantify the aesthetic experience

Reward networks in the brain as captured by connectivity measures

An assortment of human behaviors is thought to be driven by rewards including reinforcement learning, novelty processing, learning, decision making, economic choice, incentive motivation, and addiction. In each case the ventral tegmental area/ventral striatum (nucleus accumbens) (VTAVS) system has been implicated as a key structure by functional imaging studies, mostly on the basis of standard, univariate analyses. Here we propose that standard functional magnetic resonance imaging analysis needs to be complemented by methods that take into account the differential connectivity of the VTAVS system in the different behavioral contexts in order to describe reward based processes more appropriately. We fi rst consider the wider network for reward processing as it emerged from animal experimentation. Subsequently, an example for a method to assess functional connectivity is given. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of such analyses by examples regarding reward valuation, reward expectation and the role of reward in addiction.

Cross-country data on the quantity of schooling: a selective survey and some quality measures

We survey a number of papers that have focused on the construction of cross-country data sets on average years of schooling. We discuss the construction of the different series, compare their profiles and construct indicators of their information content. The discussion focuses on a sample of OECD countries but we also provide some results for a large non-OECD sample.