
Jussi PalomäkiFinnish Institute for Health and Welfare | THL
Jussi Palomäki
PhD; titles of docent in 1) cognitive science; and 2) the study of games and well-being
About
87
Publications
25,431
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1,212
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Introduction
I'm a cognitive scientist and game enthusiast. I study emotions, decision-making and expertise in various contexts, such as gambling, poker and esports. I've also previously worked on topics such as psychology of deception, memory, moral psychology and roboethics.
My webpage: https://herrasmies.github.io/
Additional affiliations
January 2014 - March 2016
January 2011 - December 2013
Publications
Publications (87)
Poker is a game of skill and chance involving economic decision-making under uncertainty. It is also a complex but well-defined real-world environment with a clear rule-structure. As such, poker has strong potential as a model system for studying high-stakes, high-risk expert performance. Poker has been increasingly used as a tool to study decision...
Poker is a game of skill and chance, where players often experience significant monetary losses. Detrimental out-of-control poker decision-making due to negative emotions is known as tilting. A qualitative assessment of losing and tilting was conducted by analysing stories about significant monetary losses, written by Finnish on-line poker players...
In this paper we show that heart-rate based audio/sonification biofeedback (HRSB) can be used to facilitate emotion regulation during poker play. We report on a laboratory experiment (N=29) where participants play No Limit Texas Hold’em poker while hearing heartbeats synchronized with their actual heart-rate (biofeedback condition) or at steady pac...
Flow is a state of “optimal experience” that arises when skill and task demands match. Flow has been well studied in psychology using a range of self-report and experimental methods; with most research typically focusing on how Flow is elicited by a particular task. Here, we focus on how the experience of Flow changes during task skill development....
Evolutionary psychology suggests that men are more likely than women to deceive to bolster their status and influence. Also gender perception influences deceptive behavior, which is linked to pervasive gender stereotypes: women are typically viewed as weaker and more gullible than men. We assessed bluffing in an online experiment (N = 502), where p...
Background
The lower risk gambling guidelines (LRGG) represent an evidence-based collaborative effort to provide clear advice to people on the limits of safe gambling consumption. The guidelines are as follows: 1) Gamble no more than 1% of household income per month; and 2) Gamble no more than 4 days per month; and 3) Avoid regularly gambling at mo...
There is limited research on substance use by higher education students in Finland, although significant differences in health behaviors - including substance use - between adolescents studying in high schools and vocational schools have
been found when examined by almost any metric. Studies on adult populations also point to socioeconomic differen...
Prison populations face heightened rates of addictive behaviors and significant stressors, including health challenges and social disparities. Although problem gambling is prevalent in criminal justice settings, its distinctiveness compared to other addictions among incarcerated individuals remains uncertain. This study examines risk factors associ...
Sustained attention is a fundamental cognitive ability that in- fluences various aspects of human functioning. Studies of the neural correlates of attention commonly treat sustained atten- tion as an isolated construct, however in any ecological con- text, sustained attention interacts with other executive func- tions such as inhibition of interfer...
Problematic internet use is recognised as an emerging public health issue, particularly among young adults. Yet, there is scarce information on problematic internet use as a predictor for academic burnout. This study aimed to identify academic burnout’s association with both problematic internet use and specific health-risk behaviour among higher e...
Mind upload, or the digital copying of an individual brain and mind, could theoretically allow one to “live forever.” If such a technology became available, who would be most likely to approve of it or condemn it? Research has shown that fear of death positively predicts the moral approval of hypothetical mind upload technology, while religiosity m...
Objective and Method
Electronic gambling machines are a prominent cause of significant gambling harms globally. We use simulations of a simplified video poker game to show how changes in game volatility, defined primarily by the size of the main prize, affect patterns of wins and losses as well as winning streaks.
Results
We found that in low- and...
We evaluate whether the feeling that all life is interconnected is associated with moral awareness of protecting the environment. We present a model in which different levels of awareness-awareness of self, other, and nature-are associated with environmental measures and moral awareness of environmental protection. Using path analysis (N = 634), we...
Aims:
To determine whether dissociative experiences moderate online problem gambling treatment effectiveness, and to characterize the temporal persistence of the relationship between dissociation and problem gambling.
Design:
Repeatedly measured self-report data on a guided online cognitive behavioral therapy for problem gambling collected on fo...
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...
Research in moral psychology has found that robots, more than humans, are expected to make utilitarian decisions. This expectation is found specifically when contrasting utilitarian action to deontological inaction. In a series of eight experiments (total N = 3752), we compared judgments about robots' and humans' decisions in a rescue dilemma with...
Flow is a well-known construct describing the experience of deep absorption in a task, typically demanding but intrinsically motivating, and conducted with high skill. Flow is operationalized by self-report, and various instruments have been developed for this, but none have been made available in the Finnish language in thoroughly validated form....
Artificial intelligences (AIs) are widely used in tasks ranging from transportation to healthcare and military, but it is not yet known how people prefer them to act in ethically difficult situations. In five studies (an anthropological field study, n = 30, and four experiments, total n = 2150), we presented people with vignettes where a human or a...
In six vignette-based experiments, we assessed people's moral reactions towards various cognition-enhancing brain implants, including their overall approval and perceived fairness, as well as the dehumanization of brain-implanted agents. Across the domains of memory (Studies 1-4, 6), general intelligence (Study 5A), and emotional stability (Study 5...
Objective:
There are tens of millions of problem gamblers in the world, many of whom either do not seek treatment or fail to commit to it. Dropout rates are high, and not enough is known about factors predicting treatment adherence. We focus on an online cognitive behavioral therapy program for severe problem gambling to determine the likelihood o...
At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...
Ethics statement: All the local laws and regulations were followed in full. Abstract Abstract Mind upload, or the digital copying of an individual brain and mind, could theoretically allow one to "live forever". If such a technology became available, who would be the most likely to approve of it or condemn it? Research has shown that fear of death...
Background and aims
Online interventions for problem gambling are increasingly popular, but not everyone benefits from them. We describe 12 years of real-world data from an online intervention for gambling problems and aim to find out the extent to which depression, alcohol use, and sense of financial control influence the effectiveness of the prog...
Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...
A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-021-00772-y
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults is understudied, especially regarding neural mechanisms such as oscillatory control of attention sampling. We report an electroencephalography (EEG) study of such cortical mechanisms, in ADHD-diagnosed adults during administration of Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA), a gold-standard con...
Mobile eye-tracking research has provided evidence both on teachers' visual attention in relation to their intentions and on teachers’ student-centred gaze patterns. However, the importance of a teacher’s eye-movements when giving instructions is unexplored. In this study we used mobile eye-tracking to investigate six teachers’ gaze patterns when t...
Artificial intelligence and robotics are rapidly advancing. Humans are increasingly often affected by autonomous machines making choices with moral repercussions. At the same time, classical research in robotics shows that people are adverse to robots that appear eerily human—a phenomenon commonly referred to as the uncanny valley effect. Yet, litt...
With rapid developments in robotics and artificial intelligence, the prospect of automating rescue operations and protecting trained professionals from life-threatening risk is becoming increasingly viable. What moral standards do people expect rescue robots to enforce? Previous research has emphasized the notion that robots are expected to conform...
The ongoing conversation on AI ethics and politics is in full swing and has spread to the general public. Rather than contributing by engaging with the issues and views discussed, we want to step back and comment on the widening conversation itself. We consider evolved human cognitive tendencies and biases, and how they frame and hinder the convers...
Flow is an intrinsically motivating (i.e. ‘autotelic’) psychological state of complete absorption in moment-to-moment activity that can occur when one performs a task whose demands match one's skill-level. Flow theory proposes that Flow causally leads to better performance, but empirical evidence for this assumption is mixed. Recent evidence sugges...
We report a psychometric scale validation study on a Finnish translation of the Flow Short Scale (FSS). Data from 200 Finnish speaking participants were collected via the Prolific Academic platform. To analyse the scale's factorial structure, we performed Mokken scale analysis, Parallel Analysis, Very Simple Structures analysis and a standard Confi...
Introduction
Extraversion and conscientiousness are well‐studied personality traits associated with reward processing and goal prioritization, respectively, and bear on individual differences in financial risk‐taking. Using unique large datasets, we investigated the link between these traits and male online gamblers’ actual betting participation an...
INTRODUCTION. Extraversion and conscientiousness are well-studied personality traits associated with reward processing and goal prioritization, respectively, and bear on individual differences in financial risk-taking. Using unique large datasets, we investigated the link between these traits and male online gamblers’ actual betting participation a...
Personality describes the average behaviour and responses of individuals across situations; but personality traits are often poor predictors of behaviour in specific situations. This is known as the "personality paradox".
We evaluated the interrelations between various trait and state variables in participants' everyday lives. As state measures, w...
This is the first of two chapters introducing the moral psychology of robots and transhumanism. Evolved moral cognition and the human conceptual system has naturally embedded difficulties in coping with the new moral challenges brought on by emerging future technologies. The reviewed literature outlines our contemporary understanding based on evolu...
Part 1 concluded by introducing the concept of the new ontological category – explaining how our cognitive machinery does not have natural and intuitive understanding of robots and AIs, unlike we have for animals, tools, and plants. Here the authors review findings in the moral psychology of robotics and transhumanism. They show that many peculiari...
In this Research Topic, High Performance Cognition (HPC) emerges as a generic term for the study of human performance and skill acquisition, from novices on an unfamiliar task (as most psychological experiments) to experts displaying superior levels of domain-specific skill. We received 11 pieces of empirical work across several experimental tasks...
In this chapter, we will provide theoretical background of discussion on issues related to AIs. Some of the main topics, theories and frameworks are mind perception and moral cognition, moral psychology, evolutionary psychology, trans-humanism and ontological categories shaped by evolution.
In this chapter we focus on some of the problems that novel trans-humanistic technologies pose to our moral cognition. We use an interdisciplinary approach for analyzing these problems and use a wide range of theories from e.g evolutionary psychology, moral psychology, anthropology and cognitive science.
Through five experimental studies we measured moral reactions to brain implants. We used three different measurements: 1) moral approval, or the general acceptance of brain-enhancing implants and people getting such implants, 2) perceived unfairness of the enhancement and 3) dehumanization of persons using brain implants. In our vignettes, the enha...
The idea of sex with robots seems to fascinate the general public, raising both enthusiasm and revulsion. We ran two experimental studies (N
s = 172 and 260) where we compared people’s reactions to variants of stories about a person visiting a bordello. Our results show that paying for the services of a sex robot is condemned less harshly than payi...
Personality describes the average behaviour and responses of individuals across situations; but personality traits are often poor predictors of behaviour in specific situations. This is known as the “personality paradox”.We evaluated the interrelations between various trait and state variables in participants’ everyday lives. As state measures, we...
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults is understudied, especially regarding neural mechanisms such as oscillatory control of attention sampling. We report an EEG study of such cortical oscillations, in ADHD-diagnosed adults taking a continuous performance test that measures the ability to sustain attention and inhibit impulsivit...
Keskustelu tekoälyn soveltamiseen liittyvistä eettisistä ja poliittisista kysymyksistä käy juuri nyt kuumana. Emme halua tässä puheenvuorossa osallistua keskusteluun tarttumalla johonkin tiettyyn eettiseen ongelmaan. Sen sijaan pyrimme sanomaan jotain itse keskustelusta ja sen vaikeudesta. Haluamme kiinnittää huomiota siihen, kuinka erilaiset ihmis...
Previous studies on gambling passion have identified that obsessive passion is related to negative consequences, including gambling pathology, whereas harmonious passion is mostly related to positive outcomes both during and after engagement in gambling activity. In the present study, we focused on poker players (N = 311) and investigated the assoc...
Artificial intelligences (AIs) are widely used in tasks ranging from transportation and healthcare to military. Many tasks carried out by autonomous AIs have consequences for human well-being, but it is still unclear how people would prefer them to act in ethically difficult situations. In six studies with data from two cultures (five quantitative...
Understanding the relationship between psychological and physiological factors in depression and depressive symptoms may help us define depression subcategories based on their parasympathetic nervous system activity and reactivity, and perhaps in the future, develop more effective symptom-based treatments. In this study we aimed to shed light on th...
Tässä kirjoituksessa käsittelemme ihmisen biologisen evoluution historiaa ja teknologisen kehityksen luomia haasteita ihmiskunnalle. Kirjoituksemme keskiössä on transhumanistisessa filosofiassa pitkään keskusteltu ajatus ihmisaivojen ”muuttamisesta” digitaaliseen muotoon, ja mitä tämän uuden ”digitaalisen ihmisen” luominen merkitsisi ihmiskunnan tu...
The idea of sex with robots seems to fascinate the general public, raising both enthusiasm and revulsion. We ran two experimental studies (Ns = 172 and 260) where we compared people’s reactions to variants of stories about a person visiting a bordello. Our results show that paying for the services of a sex robot is condemned less harshly than payin...
The uncanny valley (UV) effect refers to an eerie feeling of unfamiliarity people get while observing or interacting with robots that resemble humans almost but not quite perfectly. The effect is not well understood, and it is also unclear how well results from previous research on the UV can be replicated. In six studies, both in the laboratory an...
Flow is a state of `optimal experience' that arises when skill and task demands match. Flow has been well studied in psychology using a range of self-report and experimental methods; with most research typically focusing on how Flow is elicited by a particular task. Here, we focus on how the experience of Flow changes during task skill development....
The uncanny valley (UV) effect refers to an eerie feeling of unfamiliarity people get while observing or interacting with robots that resemble humans almost but not quite perfectly. The effect is not well understood, and it is also unclear how well results from previous research on the UV can be replicated. In six studies, both in the laboratory an...
The idea of separating a person’s consciousness and transferring it to another medium—'mind upload'—is being actively discussed in science, philosophy, and science fiction. Mind upload technologies are currently also being developed by private companies in Silicon Valley, and similar technological developments have received significant funding in t...
We evaluated how the dark triad (DT) personality traits (Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, Narcissism) influence willingness to claim for insurance in an online setting. In two mTurk studies (Ns 344 and 699) we created realistic online insurance claim tasks where participants could file claims for insured household items they had supposedly broken. We...
Psychological and other persuasive mechanisms across diverse contexts are well researched, with many studies of the effectiveness of specific persuasive techniques on distinct types of human behaviour. In the present paper, our specific interest lies in the development of a generalized modular psychometric tool to measure individuals’ susceptibilit...
Factor loadings and communalities based on a Principal Axis Factoring with Oblimin Rotation for 54 items from susceptibility to persuasion—II scale on main sample (n = 500).
(DOCX)
Standardised factor loadings / Correlations across items in StP-IIB factors (n = 279) in confirmatory factor analysis.
(DOCX)
Factor loadings for susceptibility to persuasion scale using Principal Axis Factoring with Oblimin Rotation (n = 6609).
(DOCX)
Standardised factor loadings / Correlations across items in factors for StP-II (n = 279) in confirmatory factor analysis.
(DOCX)
Susceptibility to persuasion—II scale items.
(DOCX)
Spearman rho correlations between plausibility and StP-II with its subscales.
(DOCX)
Psychological and other persuasive mechanisms across diverse contexts are well researched, with many studies of the effectiveness of specific persuasive techniques on distinct types of human behaviour. In the present paper, our specific interest lies in the development of a generalized modular psychometric tool to measure individuals’ susceptibilit...
Humans have evolved various adaptations against pathogens, including the physiological immune system. However, not all of these adaptations are physiological: the cognitive mechanisms whereby we avoid potential sources of pathogens-for example, disgust elicited by uncleanliness-can be considered as parts of a behavioural immune system (BIS). The me...
Multiple figures and tables, stimulus materials, and other additional information (statistical analyses, other covariates unrelated to current aims, data transparency table, and a glossary of poker terminology) in a single file.
(DOCX)
Tilting refers to losing control due to negative emotions, behaving erratically, and thereby suffering adverse consequences. The term tilt originated in poker playing communities, where it is often a consequence of so called bad beats, i.e. losing with an unlikely-to-lose poker hand. Often resulting in devastating monetary losses, tilting is ubiqui...
Machiavellianism has been considered in the literature as the symbol for manipulative strategies in social conduct. However, it has been rarely studied via behavioural experiments outside the laboratory, in more naturalistic settings. We report the first behavioural study (N = 490) evaluating whether Machiavellian individuals, high Machs, deceive m...
Tilting refers to losing control due to negative emotions,
behaving erratically, and thereby suffering adverse con-
sequences. The term tilt originated in poker playing
communities, where it is often a consequence of so called bad
beats, i.e. losing with an unlikely-to-lose poker hand. Often
resulting in devastating monetary losses, tilting is ubiq...