Relational Models Theory

The project of this thesis is topically and methodologically based on Hydronymia Slovaciae, a project being composed by Slovak linguists whose aim is to exhaustively map Slovak hydronymy according to individual instructions and which is a part of all European composition of hydronymy Hydronymia Europaea. This thesis applies individual instructions to Czech environment, particularly the Ostravice river drainage basin (Moravian-Silesian Region). Its aim is to bring a complete description of hydronymy, and therefore the names of watercourses (streams, rivers), water areas (dams, lakes, ponds, tarns), water sources and waterfalls in the Ostravice drainage basin from the synchronous and diachronous points of view. The subjects of the research are thus historical and contemporary toponyms of the river basin, which are examined from the following perspectives: lexical basis, toponymic models and also historical one. The major part of the thesis comprises two lexicons (the lexicon of the watercourses names and the lexicon of the water areas, water sources and waterfalls names), which contain the lists of historical variants of every hydronym and which describe their origin, especially of the motivation of their naming.

i I dedicate this work to my parents, Joe and Stavroula Akinyode and sister, Sophia Osawe-Akinyode who contributed immensely to my pursuit of a Masters degree. I would have not been able to reach this far without the support of Maria Berger-Liehm and Peter Liehm and Michaela Berger; thank you. I also extend my gratitude to all the guidance provided by the staff in the Institute of Media and Communication at the Technical University of Ilmenau especially towards the completion of this thesis. Particularly, I would like to acknowledge the most often than not brief, but precise pieces of advice given to me by Professor Martin Löffelholz over the course of my two year study. I hope this work expresses my appreciation for the opportunity to study at the institute. I thank Dr. Andreas Schwarz for his patience and support but most importantly his encouragement during the period of writing this thesis. I also would have never made it this far if not for the help of my good friend Akhil Agrawal who was there when times were rough. In direct support for this research I would like to extend my appreciation to Michaela Berger for the wonderful work in the translation of the survey from English to German; this went a long way to secure the success of the field work. I also express my humble gratitude for her unconditional friendship that ensured the mental support that was crucial for making my stay in Germany a pleasurable one. Also I appreciate Dr. Akinola Akinyemi for his input during our discussions about the scientific method as it applies to the social sciences. Thanks to all those anonymous students who partook in the experiment/survey. Finally, the University Regensburg library for the vast number of material needed for this thesis. ii Two themes run recurrently throughout this thesis that details a theoretical reconstruction of organization-public relationships within crisis situations and its operationalization in current crisis communication research. Implications from the empirical investigation show support for a strategic view of public relations as a proactive management function whose main objective is to balance overall organizational missions with the dynamics that are prevalent in business environments by building and protecting its intangible resource base. The research isolates crises as peak points stemming from the inevitable conflicts of interests during the ongoing relationships that link the organization to its stakeholders. Crisis management is placed as a reactive sub-functionality of an inherently proactive public relation (PR) framework. A between-subject randomized web-based experimental design provides evidence that the primary unit of analysis in PR research-relationships-might be the more important than previously conceived when strategically responding to the threats posed by crises. A student sample (n=290) was exposed to a simulation of a past Deutsche Bahn (DB) crisis trough an article describing a preventable yet challenging situation. A post-crisis response statement given was manipulated. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of four crisis response messages that were configured based on guidelines from the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). Prior to experimental manipulation, a pre-test measured perceptions of relationships with DB. Findings indicate that (1) pre-existing perceptions of relationship quality with DB had considerable impact on how participants reacted to crisis response messages on the outcomes of (a) reputation and (b) attribution of responsibility and on (2) the extent of account honouring. That is, the extent to which they (a) accepted the message and (b) assigned credibility/trustworthiness. A relational view to crisis management theoretically welcomes crises as dangerous opportunities to learn, adapt, reconfigure and understand stakeholder dynamics. This thesis which mostly focuses on for-profit organizations offers insights to the strategic effectiveness of crisis response strategies from a stakeholder orientation and concludes that the focus of managing reputation limits the application of public relations theory. A focus on relationships provides valid and reliable performance indicators for the competitive advantage of organizations and the creation of value both for the organization and society as a whole.

Conceptual representations of warmth have been shown to be related to people's perceptions of ambient temperature. Based on this premise, we hypothesized that merely thinking about personality traits related to communion (but not agency) influences physical experience of warmth. Specifically, the three studies revealed that (a) perceptions of temperature are influenced by both positive and negative attributes within the communion but not agency dimension, (b) the effect is stronger when traits indicate sociability rather than morality sub-dimension of communion, and (c) communion activation affects temperature perceptions independently of target’s or self-perceptions.

The present research investigated whether accommodation, typically formulated as the tendency to deliberately inhibit a destructive reaction in response to a partner’s destructive behavior, could also occur spontaneously. Supporting this notion, results of the first study revealed that participants respond to their partner’s angry face with a spontaneous smile, whereas strangers’ angry faces are mimicked and thus lead to a spontaneous frown. Importantly, the facial EMG data are moderated by participants’ daily interaction styles: Only people experiencing themselves in a communal relationship show spontaneous acts of accommodation, whereas this is not the case for people in exchange relationships. The moderation occurred in our first (spontaneous) and third study (forced accommodation). The results of the second study replicated the first experiment in that participants in communal relationships frowned less towards partner’s subliminally presented angry faces, but more to their sad faces. The authors discuss their findings as spontaneous social emotion regulation.

The article adopts a socio-psychological perspective to approach financial regulation in the European Union. While behavioural approaches to finance have expanded the understanding of markets’ dynamics, the analytical tools of behavioural sciences have been seldom applied to financial regulators. Through the lenses of social-psychology, the article fills this gap and explores how financial regulators ‘think’. After offering a typology to navigate through the multi-layered EU architectural framework for financial markets regulation and supervisions, the socio-psychological dimension of selected EU institutions is examined by looking at their constitutional and legal framework. To this aim, the article focuses on the group dynamics within the primary decision-making organs of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the European Supervisory Authorities. These organs are considered as groups of individuals and their behaviours analysed through the prism of the ‘unified theory of social relations’. This approach is deployed to offer new insights over current tensions between Eurozone and non-Eurozone countries, and sheds new light over the fractures, within regulators, generated by the UK’s decision to leave the EU.

Humanist conceptions of the person evolve across history. Whereas humanism has served a pivotal role in the caregiving professions, its individualist emphasis now stands as an impediment to its future. Proposed is a relational reconceptualization of the person, placing relational as opposed to individual well-being at the forefront of humanists' concerns.

„There are few theoretical approaches to which historian respond so negatively as to the explanation of historical processes by such theories“, the German historian Rainer Waltz states most accurately in his study on „Theories of Social Evolution and History“; there he also presents two main causes for this rejection: a moral one, the perversion of evolutionary thinking in so-called Social Darwinist theories in the 19th and 20th centuries, and a scientific one, the fear of a biologistic interpretation of human history by adopting evolutionary models (Walz, 2004). This distinguishes historical studies from other social sciences and humanities such as anthropology or sociology and even other historical disciplines such as archaeology, where evolutionary models have become part of the methodological toolkit (Renfrew & Bahn, 2008; for a rare example from the field of history of literature cf. Moretti, 2009).
Although most historians are reluctant to adopt evolutionary models (yet alone in their mathematized or sociobiologist form) for the interpretation of human past (respectively the larger or smaller period of time they are specialised in), terms such as “evolution” and concepts of evolutionary thinking such as “adaption” or “selection” are used in numerous descriptions of historical events and processes, albeit often in a metaphorical way (Walz, 2004). At the same time it is evident that major developments in human history such as the emergence of the human kind itself, of human culture and of complex social structures such as states as well as phenomena of long duration (up to the scale of “Big History” from the Big Bang until present times as it has been attempted in the last decades, Spier 2010) cannot be explained without the help of evolutionary concepts (cf. Blute, 2010; Voland, 2009); but again, these subjects refer mainly to the fields of evolutionary biologists and psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists or (prehistoric) archaeologists (cf. Yoffee, 2004). Some specialists from these disciplines have also tried to adapt such concepts for the entire human history beyond its “beginnings”, but have equally found mixed reception among historians, especially if they try to demonstrate some kind of progress in the development of humanity as for instance Steven Pinker has done most recently in his study on “Why Violence has declined” (Pinker, 2011; see also Atran, 2002; Boyd & Richerson, 2005; Morris, 2010).
In contrast to this (non)-use of evolutionary concepts for historical studies, we intend to demonstrate the benefit of a complex evolutionary approach for the analysis of a specific period of late medieval/early modern history between 1200 and 1500 CE, which has been attributed central importance for the so-called “Rise of the West”, since it saw the beginning of European overseas expansion at its end (cf. Goldstone, 2009; Morris, 2010).
In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it (1978), the medieval world entered a period of severe crisis in demography, economy, politics and religion. This crisis took hold in all regions, ranging from China in the East to England in the West. Even before the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death (1346-1352), deteriorating climatic conditions had ended the period of demographic and economic expansion that began in the 10th century (Behringer, 2007; Atwell, 2001; Benedictow, 2004; Brook, 2010).
The local and regional impacts and consequences of these general crisis-laden conditions may have differed; outcomes ranged from actual societal collapse to the emergence of powerful new polities. But these conditions provide a framework for global perspective on this period and allow us to use the 14th century-crisis as a field of “natural experiments of history”, as Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson have called them (Diamond & Robinson, 2011); accordingly, we analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies (cf. also Borsch, 2005). In particular, we will analyse and compare five polities in the “Old World”, England, Hungary, Byzantium, Egypt and China, of which three disappeared around the end of this period due to the expansion of the most successful newly emerged Ottoman Empire (Byzantium in 1453, Mamluk Egypt in 1517, Hungary in 1526/1541; cf. also Preiser-Kapeller, 2011).
In order to be able to capture variations and complexities within this sample, we adopt concepts and tools provided by the field of complexity science. We understand complex systems as large networks of individual components, whose interactions at the microscopic level produce “complex” changing patterns of behaviour of the whole system on the macroscopic level. In the last decades, historians and social scientists also tried to use concepts of complexity theory for the description of phenomena in their own fields, but again often only in a “metaphoric” way (Gaddis, 2002; Hatcher & Bailey, 2001). Less frequently, though, historians have tried to make use of the mathematical foundations of complexity theory or of quantitative tools provided by this field (Kiel & Elliott, 1997; Preiser-Kapeller, 2012). Recent scholarship has implemented some of these tools especially for the construction of macro-models of socio-economic development (Goldstone, 1991; Turchin, 2003; Turchin & Nefedov, 2009).
In addition, we combine complexity theory with the analytical framework of “systems theory” developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) in order to capture the interdependencies between politics, economy and religion within a polity and with the political, economic and ecological environment (Luhmann, 1997; Becker & Reinhardt-Becker, 2001; Becker, 2004). Luhmann´s theory is valuable for our analysis in various aspects; it makes us aware of the reduction of environmental and social complexity which is reflected in our historical sources, and it provides a framework to approach complex mechanisms within and the dependencies between various social spheres and their environment. Its evolutionary aspects have also been analysed by Walz (2004). In addition, we employ methods and tools of network analysis, which allow us to capture, analyse and model linkages and cause-effect correlations in society, economy, politics and religion on the macro- and micro-level down to groups and individuals (Gould, 2003; Lemercier, 2005).
Overall, our analytical approach allows us to capture the “diversité véritable” without losing track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”, as Victor Liebermann has called them, 2009) with regard to the transformation of polities and societies and their adaption to this “first world crisis”. Thereby, the value of a framework of evolutionary dynamics for the exploration of human history will be demonstrated

References
Atran, S. (2002). In Gods We Trust. The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Atwell, W. S. (2001). Volcanism and Short-Term Climatic Change in East Asian and World History, c. 1200–1699. Journal of World History 12/1, 29-98.
Becker, F. & Reinhardt-Becker, E. (2001). Systemtheorie. Eine Einführung für die Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag.
Becker, F. (Ed.). (2004). Geschichte und Systemtheorie. Exemplarische Fallstudien. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag.
Behringer, W. (2007). Kulturgeschichte des Klimas. Von der Eiszeit bis zur globalen Erwärmung. Munich: C. H. Beck.
Benedictow, O. J. (2004). The Black Death 1346–1353. The Complete History. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Blute, M. (2010). Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution. Solutions to Dilemmas in Cultural and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Borsch, St. J. (2005). The Black Death in Egypt and England. A Comparative Study. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (2005). The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brook, T. (2010). The troubled Empire. China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge (Mass.), London: Harvard University Press.
Diamond, J. & Robinson, J. A. (Eds.). (2011). Natural Experiments of History. Cambridge (Mass.), London: Harvard University Press.
Gaddis, J. L. (2002). The Landscape of History. How Historians map the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldstone, J. A. (1991). Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goldstone, J. A. (2009). Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500–1850. New York: Mcgraw-Hill Higher Education.
Gould, R. V. (2003). Uses of Network Tools in Comparative Historical Research. In: J. Mahoney & D. Rueschemeyer (Eds.). Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (p. 241-269). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hatcher, J. & Bailey, M. (2001). Modelling the Middle Ages. The History and Theory of England´s Economic Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kiel, L. D. & Elliott, E. (Eds.). (1997). Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences. Foundations and Applications. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Lemercier, Cl. (2005). Analyse de réseaux et histoire. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 52/2, 88-112.
Lieberman, L. (2009). Strange Parallels. Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. Vol. 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luhmann, N. (1997). Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. 2 Vols., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Moretti, F. (2009). Kurven, Karten, Stammbäume. Abstrakte Modelle für die Literaturgeschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Morris, I. (2010). Why The West Rules For Now: The Patterns of History and what they reveal about the Future. London: Profile Books.
Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of our Nature. Why Violence has declined. London: Viking.
Preiser-Kapeller...

We, humans, are social creatures. Most of the time, we are rather good at understanding others and we efficiently coordinate our behaviour with friends and strangers. But how do we do this? What are the psychological processes that enable us to understand and to interact with each other? For more than 30 years, philosophers and psychologists have assumed that we understand others by attributing to them mental states – such as beliefs, desires, or intentions. This ability is called “mindreading.” There are two common ways to explain how mindreading works. According to theory-theory, we have a tacit theory about how mental states come about and guide behaviour. According to simulation theory, we simulate other people’s mental processes by imagining what it is like to be in their situation. Recently, several authors, whom I label interactionists, have challenged the view that social cognition is based on mindreading. They argue that social cognition is based on various bodily processes...

Literature in interpersonal relations has described the sense of intimacy towards others in terms of physical closeness and warmth. Research suggests that these descriptions should be taken literally. Past work (IJzerman & Semin, 2009) revealed that temperature alterations affect the construal of social relations. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) suggest that such findings are unidirectional. However, recent research indicates that the recollection of social exclusion induces perceptions of lower temperature (Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008). In this work, we elaborate on these findings to provide new insights into processes central to interpersonal relations. In four studies, we hypothesized and found that actual physically induced experiences of proximity not only increase feelings of social proximity but more importantly perceptions of higher temperature. Moreover, we show that verbally induced social proximity also induce perceptions of higher temperature. The broader implications of these findings for interpersonal relations are discussed.

A graph can be used to represent a system of arbitrary re-
lations. The infinite Relational Model (IRM) finds clusters
in such graphs revealing relationships within clusters and
amongst clusters in the form of link probabilities. A graph
can be binary or weighted, but the IRM only works for binary
graphs. When a graph is weighted it can be made binary
by thresholding, resulting in a loss of information. In this
paper we propose a model that works for graphs with count
weights (IWRM) and test if it performs better than the IRM
on synthetic and real data. We find that the IWRM, when
tested on synthetic data, performs better for sparse graphs,
they perform equally for dense graphs and that the IRM per-
forms better for very dense graphs. When tested on real data
the IRM has AUC = 0.75 (n=10, std 0.07) and the IWRM has
AUC = 0.67 (n=10, std = 0.06).

Two experiments analyzed social conflicts based on A. P. Fiske's (1991, 1992) four relational models: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. Because each model has a distinct logical structure, it was hypothesized that social conflicts in which participants used incommensurate models would lead to more extreme reactions than would conflicts in which both participants used the same model. Participants (N = 178 for Study 1, N = 132 for Study 2) in both experiments read 16 interpersonal scenarios in which an expectation based on one of the four models was contradicted by a negative outcome based on one of the four models. In neither experiment was the incommensurability interaction hypothesis supported. However, exploratory analyses indicated a significant main effect for equality matching and a significant interaction for communal sharing. The results are interpreted as providing qualified support for the role of relationship structures in conflict.

COMPARING RELATIONAL MODELS ACROSS CULTURES:
DISCOVERING HOW MAQUILADORA AND PARENT COMPANY MANAGERS CONSTRUCT THEIR SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS AT WORK

Mark David Woodhull, Ph.D.

Touro University International 2006

This cross-cultural business anthropology study focuses on how Mexican maquiladora managers and United States/Canada parent company managers construct social
relationships at work. Lifting the veil of national culture, the study focuses on the cultural environment of organizational-level management. High attrition among NAFTA
management expatriates and the regional importance of NAFTA partner relationships requires a better understanding of managerial differences in collectivistic Hispanic
Mexico and individualistic Anglo United States and Canada. The study relies on Alan Page Fiske’s 1991 Relational Models Theory (RMT) to form a theoretical basis for
research. Relational Models Theory describes all human social relationships as behavior manifestations of four fundamental constructs; Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. The models are compared across the contextual domains of Exchange, Distribution & Use, Work, Morals, Decisions, Influence, and
Identity that serve to define the management environment. The study employs survey and empirical methodology on rank-ordered ordinal data. Results indicate highly significant
scope and scale differences and some commonalities in how Mexican maquiladora managers and parent company managers from the United States and Canada organize
relationships in their respective work environments. Implications for Relational Models Theory and NAFTA-related research are discussed and future international management
research directions suggested.

This paper develops a theoretical and methodological application of Tilly's [Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press] assertions that inequalities are inherently relational and categorical. We focus on the specific proposition that inequalities are exaggerated when categorical social distinctions are mapped onto positional distinctions internal to organizations. Using samples of Australian and U.S. organizations we examine the influence of sex and other status distinctions upon between-class wage inequality. In both countries class inequality is exaggerated when workers are women and managers men. These between-class inequality producing processes are also present for other categorical distinctions available in the data we use (education, permanent vs. temporary worker, dominant vs. marginal linguistic group in Australia, permanent vs. temporary worker and white vs. non-white in the U.S.). In the U.S. the coefficients for relational sex composition are twice as large as in Australia, suggesting historical-institutional differences between the countries enables gender to exert a stronger influence on between-class inequality in the U.S. We further examine the institutional differences in these categorical bases for inequality by examining the extent to which they vary within the two countries as a function of two historically relevant institutional distinctions in wage setting regimes-formalization in the U.S. and centralized wage awards in Australia. As expected these institutional differences shape the extent and type of between-class wage inequality. We conclude that researchers should move methodologically towards observing relations within organizations to reflect the theoretical advances of the past two decades.

Conceptual representations of warmth have been shown to be related to people's perceptions of ambient temperature. Based on this premise, we hypothesized that merely thinking about personality traits related to communion (but not agency) influences physical experience of warmth. Specifically, the three studies revealed that (a) perceptions of temperature are influenced by both positive and negative attributes within the communion but not agency dimension,(b) the effect is stronger when traits indicate sociability rather ...

Conceptual representations of warmth have been shown to be related to people's perceptions of ambient temperature. Based on this premise, we hypothesized that merely thinking about personality traits related to communion (but not agency) influences physical experience of warmth. Specifically, the three studies revealed that (a) perceptions of temperature are influenced by both positive and negative attributes within the communion but not agency dimension,(b) the effect is stronger when traits indicate sociability rather ...

General Game Players (GGPs) are programs which can play an arbitrary game given only its rules and the Game Description Language (GDL) is a variant of Datalog used in GGP competitions to specify the rules. GDL inherits from Datalog the use of Horn clauses as rules and recursion, but it too requires stratification and does not allow to use quantifiers. We present an alternative formalism for game descriptions which is based on first-order logic (FO). States of the game are represented by relational structures, legal moves by structure rewriting rules guarded by FO formulas, and the goals of the players by formulas which extend FO with counting. The advantage of our formalism comes from more explicit state representation and from the use of quantifiers in formulas. We show how to exploit existential quantification in players' goals to generate heuristics for evaluating positions in the game. The derived heuristics are good enough for a basic alpha-beta agent to win against state of the art GGP.

The present paper reports results of empirical investigation for a model that posits a complementary relationship between self-blaming and other-blaming emotions and suggests that distinctive relationships between them depend on the relational context and associated moral codes. Relevant findings of two studies in Turkish culture that examined different aspects of the model are presented. The first study provided partial support for the relationship between shameand guilt-proneness and relational model preferences. The findings of the second study revealed strong support for the complementary relationship (1) between shame related to rejection or exclusion and disgust in contexts that represented the communal sharing relational model / divinity moral code; (2) between shame related to status loss and contempt in contexts that represented the authority ranking relational model / community moral code and (3) between guilt and anger in contexts representing equality matching or market ...

Relational models are commonly used in scene analysis systems. Most such systems are experimental and deal with only a small number of models. Unknown objects to be analyzed are usually sequentially compared to each model. In this paper, we present some ideas for organizing a large database of relational models. We define a simple relational distance measure, prove it is a metric, and using this measure, describe two organizational/access methods: clustering and binary search trees. We illustrate these methods with a set of randomly generated graphs.

We show how to translate games defined in the Game Description Language (GDL) into the Toss format. GDL is a variant of Datalog used to specify games in the General Game Playing Competition. Specifications in Toss are more declarative than in GDL and make it easier to capture certain useful game characteristics. The presented translation detects structural properties of games which are not directly visible in the GDL specification.

We show how to translate games defined in the Game Description Language (GDL) into the Toss format. GDL is a variant of Datalog used to specify games in the General Game Playing Competition. Specifications in Toss are more declarative than in GDL and make it easier to capture certain useful game characteristics. The presented translation must thus detect structural properties of games which are not directly visible in the GDL specification.

Twins are two extensions onto SQL to support user privacy in social networks: one is corporate-based and the other is user-centric, corresponding to well-known mandatory access control and discretionary access control models-respectively. This paper illustrates the former. The approach adds some predicates to the CREATE TABLE command to capture common corporate-based user privacy requirements, such as purpose, generalization, and retention, required by social networks desiring to support privacy. Hence, the corporation, when creating the underlying databases, defines what the mandatory privacy policies are with which all users must comply. The extension is supported with underlying catalogues, algorithms, and prototype. The key contribution is a low-cost mechanism to develop new systems-that are privacy-preserved-and to transform legacy database MAC models to their privacypreserving equivalents. Although our examples are from social networks, the results apply to data security and user privacy of other enterprises too.

In this article, a relational model of inequality is applied to understand organizational wage inequality patterns. The authors begin by laying out a relational model arguing that wage distributions emerge from actors within workplaces negotiating and contesting who should receive greater or lesser rewards for their work. These claims typically involve constructing categorical distinctions between people and jobs, attaching meaning to those categories, and actors in those categories attempting to exploit value and hoard opportunities through a process of claims making. Using the Australian National Organizations Study, the influence of relational differences between jobs on wage inequalities is modeled. It was found that jobs comprising actors with higher status and greater power in the labor process are often able to use their status and power relative to others to extract greater rewards, generating wage inequality between jobs. The effects of these relational status and labor pro...

What leads people to describe some of their interpersonal relationships as "close" and "warm" and others as "distant" and "cold"? proposed that conceptual metaphors facilitate social cognition by allowing people to use knowledge from a relatively concrete (source) domain (e.g., physical distance) in understanding a different, usually more abstract (target) concept (e.g., love). We concur that such a notion of metaphors can greatly enrich the field of social cognition. At the same time, we believe it is important to devote greater theoretical attention to the nature of metaphorical representations in social cognition. We believe that Landau et al. place too much emphasis on sociocognitive metaphors as top-down knowledge structures and pay too little attention to the constraints that shape metaphors from the bottom up. In the present contribution, we highlight important bottom-up constraints, imposed through bodily constraints and social scaffolds. Sociocognitive metaphors do not exist just for mental representation but for action as well. We discuss the relevance of grounding sociocognitive metaphors for broader motivational purposes.

Conceptual representations of warmth have been shown to be related to people's perceptions of ambient temperature. Based on this premise, we hypothesized that merely thinking about personality traits related to communion (but not agency) influences physical experience of warmth. Specifically, the three studies revealed that (a) perceptions of temperature are influenced by both positive and negative attributes within the communion but not agency dimension,(b) the effect is stronger when traits indicate sociability rather ...

Consonant with a functional view of moral emotions, we argue that morality is best analyzed within relationships rather than in individuals, and use Fiske's (1992) theory of relational models (RMs: communal sharing [CS], authority ranking [AR], equality matching [EM], and market pricing [MP]) to predict that violations in different RMs will arouse different intensities of other-blaming emotions (anger, contempt and disgust) in both observers and victims, together with different intensities of self-blaming emotions (shame and guilt) in perpetrators, and to predict that these patterns of emotion will show similarity across both individuals and cultures. Three studies, using vignettes portraying moral violations in all RMs in different experimental designs, supported these expectations, while also producing some unexpected results. The intensity of shame and guilt varied markedly across RMs, but with little difference between the two emotions. The intensity of all 3 other-blaming emotions also varied across RMs. Anger was the most intense emotional response to violation in all RMs, whereas disgust and contempt were stronger in CS than in other RMs. Disgust and shame were linked more strongly in CS than in other RMs, and anger and guilt were more strongly linked than other emotion pairs in EM. Moral emotions in RMs involving hierarchy (AR and MP) differed widely depending on the perpetrator's dominant or subordinate status. Both Turkish (TR) and English-speaking (EN) samples showed similar patterns of all moral emotions across RMs. Understanding the functions of moral emotions in relationships using relational models can help to clarify multiple aspects of moral psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

According to appraisal theory, emotions result from an individual's meaning analysis of the implications of his/her circumstances for personal well-being, and individual differences in emotion arise when individuals appraise similar situations differently. Relational models of appraisal attempt to describe the situational and dispositional antecedents of appraisals, and should allow one to predict such individual differences. In this article, we review three examples of our efforts toward developing relational appraisal models. In two, we start with a particular appraisal component, motivational relevance and problem-focused coping potential (Smith & Lazarus, 1990), respectively, and describe and test the relational model proposed for that component. In the third, as a precursor to developing a true relational model, we examine another appraisal component, emotion-focused coping potential, from a more dispositional perspective. We conclude by considering both the potential valu...

Achieving goals in a complex environment in which many players interact is a general task demanded from an AI agent. When goals of the players are given explicitly, such setting can be described as a multi-player game with complete information. We introduce a general model of such games in which states are represented by relational structures (hypergraphs), possibly with real-valued labels, and actions by structure rewriting rules. For this model, we develop an algorithm which computes rational strategies for the players. Our algorithm can be parametrized by a probabilistic evaluation function and we devise a general procedure for learning such evaluations. First tests on a few classical examples substantiate the chosen game model and our algorithm.

I. INTRODUCTION The derivation of Situation Assessments from signal data is a key tactical military decision making task. We are studying the use of automated reasoning techniques to provide dynamic decision support to commanders in such an environment. We have ...

General Game Players (GGPs) are programs which can play an arbitrary game given only its rules and the Game Description Language (GDL) is a variant of Datalog used in GGP competitions to specify the rules. GDL inherits from Datalog the use of Horn clauses as rules and recursion, but it too requires stratification and does not allow to use quantifiers. We present an alternative formalism for game description which is based on first-order logic (FO). States of the game are represented by relational structures, legal moves by structure rewriting rules guarded by FO formulas, and the goals of the players by formulas which extend FO with counting. The advantage of our formalism comes from more explicit state representation and from the use of quantifiers in formulas. We show how to exploit existential quantification in players' goals to generate heuristics for evaluating positions in the game. The derived heuristics are good enough for a basic alpha-beta agent to win against state of the art GGP.