A fundamental property of emotional responses is a change in action tendencies that allow the individual to cope with the situation. Most basically, there are two types of behaviour one can switch to when responding emotionally: approach or withdrawal. The present study examined whether the ability to switch to approach or withdrawal depends on the type of behaviour shown before. Using familiar (Experiment 1) and unfamiliar (Experiment 2) neutral stimuli, we first show that switching from approach to withdrawal is (...) generally easier than vice versa. In Experiment 3, we demonstrate that this holds true even when participants respond to emotional stimuli that typically elicit strong approach or withdrawal tendencies. These results indicate that there is a fundamental asymmetry in the ability to switch from approach to withdrawal or vice versa. As shown in Experiment 3, this asymmetry may represent a serious confound in many previous studies examining the link between stimulus valence and associated action tendencies, suggesting that the link between positive stimuli and approach tendencies may be stronger, and the link between negative stimuli and withdrawal tendencies weaker, than previously believed. (shrink)

Valency switching can appear especially puzzling if we think of moral reasons as ‘pushes and pulls’—considerations whose job it is to get us to act or to stop us acting. Talk of ‘default valency’ doesn't remove the puzzle, it merely restates it. We need a different picture of reasons—perhaps as providing a map of the moral terrain which helps us to see which actions are appropriate to which situations, and who the appropriate agents are. The role of (...) virtue concepts in particular is more complex and varied than that of providing ‘reasons for acting’. A more holistic picture of reasons can make valency switching less mysterious. Key Words: default valency • particularism • reasons • thick concepts • valency switching • virtues. (shrink)

In a typical reversal-learning experiment, one learns stimulus–outcome contingencies that then switch without warning. For instance, participants might have to repeatedly choose between two faces, one of which yields points whereas the other does not, with a reversal at some point in which face yields points. The current study examined age differences in the effects of outcome type on reversal learning. In the first experiment, the participants’ task was either to select the person who would be in a better mood (...) or to select the person who would yield more points. Reversals in which face was the correct option occurred several times. Older adults did worse in blocks in which the correct response was to select the person who would not be angry than in blocks in which the correct response was to select the person who would smile. Younger adults did not show a difference by emotional valence. In the second study, the negative condition was switched to have the same format as the positive condition (to select who will be angry). Again, older adults did worse with negative than positive outcomes, whereas younger adults did not show a difference by emotional valence. A third experiment replicated the lack of valence effects in younger adults with a harder probabilistic reversal-learning task. In the first two experiments, older adults performed about as well as younger adults in the positive conditions but performed worse in the negative conditions. These findings suggest that negative emotional outcomes selectively impair older adults’ reversal learning. (shrink)

Imagine a scenario where you are cooking and suddenly, the contents of the pot start to come out, and the oven bell rings. You would have to stop what you are doing and start responding to the changing demands, switching between different objects, operations and mental sets. This ability is known as cognitive flexibility. Now, add to this scenario a strong emotional atmosphere that invades you as you spontaneously recall a difficult situation you had that morning. How would you (...) behave? Recent studies suggest that emotional states do modulate cognitive flexibility, but these findings are still controversial. Moreover, there is a lack of evidence regarding the underlying brain processes. The purpose of the present study was, therefore, to examine such interaction while monitoring changes in ongoing cortical activity using EEG. In order to answer this question, we used two musical stimuli to induce emotional states (positive/high arousal/open stance and negative/high arousal/closed stance). Twenty-nine participants performed two blocks of the Madrid Card Sorting Task (MCST) in a neutral silence condition and then four blocks while listening to the counterbalanced musical stimuli. To explore this interaction, we used a combination of first-person (micro-phenomenological interview) and third-person (behavior and EEG) approaches. Our results show that compared to the positive stimuli and silence condition, negative stimuli decrease reaction times (RTs) for the shift signal. Our data show that the valance of the first emotional block is determinant in the RTs of the subsequent blocks. Additionally, the analysis of the micro-phenomenological interview and the integration of first- and third-person data show that the emotional disposition generated by the music could facilitate task performance for some participants or hamper it for others, independently of its emotional valence. When the emotional disposition hampered task execution, RTs were slower, and the P300 potential showed a reduced amplitude compared to the facilitated condition. These findings show that the interaction between emotion and cognitive flexibility is more complex than previously thought and points to a new way of understanding the underlying mechanisms by incorporating an in-depth analysis of individual subjective experience. (shrink)

High-frequency oscillations emerged as a neural code for both positive affect and fluent attentional processing from evolutionary simulations with artificial neural networks. Visual 50 Hz flicker, which entrains neural oscillations in the gamma band, has been shown to foster attentional switching, but can it also elicit positive affect? A three-faces display was preceded by a 50, 25, or 0 Hz flicker on the position of the odd-one-out . Participants decided on the gender or on the subjective valence of this (...) neutral target in an approach-avoidance task, which served as an implicit affective measure. Only the detection of 25 Hz flicker, but not of 50 Hz flicker, was above chance . Faces primed by invisible 50 Hz flicker were explicitly evaluated more positively than with 25 Hz or 0 Hz. This gamma flicker also facilitated approach reactions, and inhibited avoidance reactions relative to 25 Hz and 0 Hz flicker in Blocks 1 and 2. Attentional switching was, moreover, enhanced by the 50 Hz flicker. According to the Affect–Gamma hypothesis, also in biological neural networks, high-frequency gamma oscillations may code for positive affect. (shrink)

We provide a detailed history of the concepts of atomic number and isotopy before the discovery of protons and neutrons that draws attention to the role of evolving interplays of multiple aims and criteria in chemical and physical research. Focusing on research by Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford, we show that, in the context of differentiating disciplinary projects, the adoption of a complex and shifting concept of elemental identity and the ordering role of the periodic table led to a relatively (...) coherent notion of atomic number. Subsequent attention to valency, still neglected in the secondary literature, and to nuclear charge led to a decoupling of the concepts of elemental identity and weight and allowed for a coherent concept of isotopy. This concept received motivation from empirical investigations on the decomposition series of radioelements and their unstable chemical identity. A new model of chemical order was the result of an ongoing collaboration between chemical and physical research projects with evolving aims and standards. After key concepts were considered resolved and their territories were clarified, chemistry and physics resumed autonomous projects, yet remained bound by newly accepted explanatory relations. It is an episode of scientific collaboration and partial integration without simple, wholesale gestalt switches or chemical revolutions. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

The induction period is a very important time in the career of a teacher and has a long?term influence on the teacher?s professional development, efficacy, job satisfaction and the length of his/her career. One of the key roles in this period is played by the trainee?s mentor. This paper presents the results of the extensive project ?Partnership of Faculties and Schools?, carried out at the Pedagogical Faculty, University of Ljubljana, with the financial support of the European Social Fund and the (...) Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science and Sport. We studied an induction project involving 361 teacher trainees and 331 mentors. The study reveals the trainees? expectations towards their mentors and the mentors? and trainees? evaluations of how the mentor aids a teacher trainee in developing their competences. (shrink)

In order to realise increasingly complex objectives of compulsory education, it is necessary to have in place appropriate teaching concepts as well as assessment and testing guidelines. The question, however, is what should be assessed: levels of acquired knowledge, skills or attitudes? Should assessment be only a measure of the educational process outcomes, or should it also measure the process of knowledge acquisition itself? How should assessment be carried out in order to respect the principle of fairness and justice? In (...) this paper, we will present results of a research project in which we were interested to find out what teachers would assess if it were up to them to decide. Our survey was conducted on a representative sample of primary school teachers in Slovenia. In spite of clear regulations prescribing that teachers should only assess pupils’ progress in relation to the defined objectives and knowledge standards, teachers underlined the necessity to also consider other aspects of children’s development. (shrink)

Teacher competencies can be researched in many different ways. In the present article they are studied from the learner’s viewpoint. The article presents results of the extensive project “Teacher Education for New Competencies for the Knowledge Society and the Role of these Competencies in Educational Goal Attainment at School”, carried out at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana, with the financial support of the Slovenian Ministry of Education and Sport. We present the results of the learner’s judgement (...) of the teacher’s didactic competencies. We formed a questionnaire with which we operationalised teacher competencies with the purpose of measuring the teacher’s efficiency of instruction. In order to achieve the goals of modern instruction it is important to engage both models: learner‐centred and teacher‐centred education. The research showed that elements of the traditional instruction model are more frequently used than the model that demands a changed learner role. (shrink)

Prior studies have shown that people imagine their personal future to be more positive than their country’s collective future. The present research extends the nascent literature by examining the valence and perceived control of personal and national future events in a new experimental paradigm, the cultural generalizability of the findings, and the relation of future thinking to psychological well-being. US college students (Study 1) and US and Turkish community participants (Study 2) imagined what might happen to them and their country (...) in three time points (i.e., next week, next year, and in 10–15 years). They then rated the emotional valence and perceived control of the events and completed a psychological well-being measure. Both US and Turkish participants imagined their personal future to be more positive than their country’s future, whereas they attributed higher perceived control to their countries for national future events than to themselves for personal future events. The positivity of national (Study 1) and personal future events (Study 2) predicted better psychological well-being, whereas perceived control did not. These original findings enrich our theoretical understanding of future thinking. (shrink)

‘Valence’ is used in many different ways in emotion theory. It generally refers to the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ character of an emotion, as well as to the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ character of some aspect of emotion. After reviewing these different uses, I point to the conceptual problems that come with them. In particular, I dis- tinguish: problems that arise from conflating the valence of an emotion with the valence of its aspects, and problems that arise from the very idea that (...) an emotion (and/or its aspects) can be divided into mutually exclusive opposites. The first group of problems does not question the classic dichotomous notion of valence, but the second does. In order to do justice to the richness of daily emotions, emo- tion science needs more complex conceptual tools. (shrink)

In a provocative and important article, Robert Solomon argues that emotion researchers should abandon the notion of valence: it is used many different ways, and no single construct captures the pretheoretical distinction between positive and negative emotions. I echo Solomon in arguing that some of the most popular theories of valence are unlikely to succeed, though my case against these constructs comes from a noncognitive, as opposed to cognitive, perspective. I then argue that there is one notion of valence, related (...) to reward and punishment, that may apply to all emotions, and align with pretheoretical taxonomies. (shrink)

Despite the swirling tide of controversy surrounding the work of Machery et al. , the cross-cultural differences they observed in semantic intuitions about the reference of proper names have proven to be robust. In the present article, we report cross-cultural and individual differences in semantic intuitions obtained using new experimental materials. In light of the pervasiveness of the Knobe effect and the fact that Machery et al.’s original materials incorporated elements of wrongdoing but did not control for their influence, we (...) also examined the question of whether the moral valence of actions described in experimental materials might affect participants’ responses. Our results suggest that uncontrolled moral valence did not distort participants’ judgments in previous research. Our findings provide further confirmation of the robustness of cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions and strengthen the philosophical challenge that they pose. (shrink)

In this study, we analyzed the relationship between the amodal (semantic) development of words and two popular emotional norms (emotional valence and arousal) in English and Spanish languages. To do so, we combined the strengths of semantics from vector space models (vector length, semantic diversity, and word maturity measures), and feature-based models of emotions. First, we generated a common vector space representing the meaning of words at different developmental stages (five and four developmental stages for English and Spanish, respectively) using (...) the Word Maturity methodology to align different vector spaces. Second, we analyzed the amodal development of words through mixed-effects models with crossed random effects for words and variables using a continuous time metric. Third, the emotional norms were included as covariates in the statistical models. We evaluated more than 23,000 words, whose emotional norms were available for more than 10,000 words, in each language separately. Results showed a curve of amodal development with an increasing linear effect and a small quadratic deceleration. A relevant influence on the amodal development of words was found only for emotional valence (not for arousal), suggesting that positive words have an earlier amodal development and a less pronounced semantic change across early lifespan. (shrink)

Veit’s central claims are, first, that the function of valenced consciousness is to deal with pathological complexity, and, second, that pathological complexity is a trade-off problem associated with maximizing fitness. I argue that Veit’s hints about what pathological complexity amounts to pull in conflicting directions, and that the specific contribution of consciousness to dealing with a computational problem is under-motivated.

Self-relevance has been demonstrated to impair instrumental learning. Compared to unfamiliar symbols associated with a friend, analogous stimuli linked with the self are learned more slowly. What is not yet understood, however, is whether this effect extends beyond arbitrary stimuli to material with intrinsically meaningful properties. Take, for example, stimulus valence an established moderator of self-bias. Does the desirability of to-be-learned material influence self-learning? Here, in conjunction with computational modelling (i.e. Reinforcement Learning Drift Diffusion Model analysis), a probabilistic selection task (...) was used to establish if and how stimulus valence (i.e. desirable/undesirable posters) impacts the acquisition of knowledge relating to object-ownership (i.e. owned-by-self vs. owned-by-friend). Several interesting results were observed. First, undesirable posters were learned more rapidly for self compared to friend, an effect that was reversed for desirable posters. Second, learning rates were accompanied by associated differences in reward sensitivity toward desirable and undesirable choice selections as a function of ownership. Third, decisional caution was greater for self-relevant (vs. friend relevant) responses. Collectively, these findings inform understanding of self-function and how valence and stimulus relevance mutually influence probabilistic learning. (shrink)

A common coding account of bidirectional evaluation–behaviour interactions proposes that evaluative attributes of stimuli and responses are coded in a common representational format. This assumption was tested in two experiments that required evaluations of positive and negative stimuli during the generation of a positively or negatively charged motor response. The results of both experiments revealed a reduced evaluative sensitivity (d′) towards response-compatible stimulus valences. This action–valence blindness supports the notion of a common valence coding in action and evaluation.

We present a longitudinal computational study on the connection between emotional and amodal word representations from a developmental perspective. In this study, children's and adult word representations were generated using the latent semantic analysis (LSA) vector space model and Word Maturity methodology. Some children's word representations were used to set a mapping function between amodal and emotional word representations with a neural network model using ratings from 9‐year‐old children. The neural network was trained and validated in the child semantic space. (...) Then, the resulting neural network was tested with adult word representations using ratings from an adult data set. Samples of 1210 and 5315 words were used in the child and the adult semantic spaces, respectively. Results suggested that the emotional valence of words can be predicted from amodal vector representations even at the child stage, and accurate emotional propagation was found in the adult word vector representations. In this way, different propagative processes were observed in the adult semantic space. These findings highlight a potential mechanism for early verbal emotional anchoring. Moreover, different multiple linear regression and mixed‐effect models revealed moderation effects for the performance of the longitudinal computational model. First, words with early maturation and subsequent semantic definition promoted emotional propagation. Second, an interaction effect between age of acquisition and abstractness was found to explain model performance. The theoretical and methodological implications are discussed. (shrink)

Affective valence is increasingly thought to be the common currency underlying all forms of intuitive, non-discursive decision making, in both humans and other animals. And it is thought to constitute the good or bad (pleasant or unpleasant) aspects of all desires, emotions, and moods. This article contrasts two theories of valence. According to one, valence is an experience-directed imperative (‘more of this!’ or ‘less of this!’); according to the other, valence is a representation of adaptive value or disvalue. The latter (...) is shown to provide the better account. (shrink)

The contentious question of bilingual processing cost may be recast as a fresh question of code-switching (CS) strategies—quantitative preferences and structural adjustments for switching at particular junctures of two languages. CS strategies are established by considering prosodic and syntactic variables, capitalizing here on bidirectional multi-word CS, spontaneously produced by members of a bilingual community in northern New Mexico who regularly use both languages (Torres Cacoullos and Travis, 2018). CS strategies become apparent by extending the equivalence constraint, which states (...) that bilinguals avoid CS at points of word placement conflict (Poplack, 1980), to examine points of inconsistent equivalence between the languages. Such sites of variable equivalence are junctures where the word strings of the two languages are equivalent only sometimes due to language-internal variable structures. A case in point for the English-Spanish language pair is the boundary between main and complement clauses, where a conjunction occurs always in Spanish but variably in English. The prosodic distancing strategy is to separate the juncture of the two languages. Here the complement clause appears in a different prosodic unit from the main clause, disproportionately as compared both with monolingual benchmarks and with bilinguals' own unilingual English and Spanish. Prosodic distancing serves to mitigate variable equivalence. The syntactic selection strategy is to opt for the variant that is more quantitatively available and more discourse neutral. Here the preference is for the Spanish complementizer que—regardless of main or complement clause language— which is the more frequent option in bilinguals' combined experience in both their languages, whereas English complementizer that is subject to a number of conditioning factors. Syntactic selection serves to restore equivalence at sites of variable equivalence. Discovery of community CS strategies may spur reconsideration of processing cost as a matter of relative difficulty, which will depend on bilinguals' prosodic and syntactic choices at particular CS sites. (shrink)

Theories of embodied cognition hold that the conceptual system uses perceptual simulations for the purposes of representation. A strong prediction is that perceptual phenomena should emerge in conceptual processing, and, in support, previous research has shown that switching modalities from one trial to the next incurs a processing cost during conceptual tasks. However, to date, such research has been limited by its reliance on the retrieval of familiar concepts. We therefore examined concept creation by asking participants to interpret modality-specific (...) compound phrases (i.e., conceptual combinations). Results show that modality switching costs emerge during the creation of new conceptual entities: People are slower to simulate a novel concept (e.g., auditory jingling onion) when their attention has already been engaged by a different modality in simulating a familiar concept (e.g., visual shiny penny). Furthermore, these costs cannot be accounted for by linguistic factors alone. Rather, our findings support the embodied view that concept creation, as well as retrieval, requires situated perceptual simulation. (shrink)

In this paper, I concentrate on the notion of default valency, drawing on some of the distinctions made and thoughts given in my Introduction. I motivate why the notion is important for particularists to have up their sleeves by outlining a recent debate between particularists and generalists. I then move to the main aim of the piece which is to discuss how anyone, particularist and generalist alike, might seek to distinguish reason-generating features into different types. My main aim is (...) not to argue for a specific way of dividing such features into types but to present various taxonomical options. Key Words: ethics • features • generalism • particularism • valency. (shrink)

Valence is a central component of all affective states, including pains, pleasures, emotions, moods, and feelings of desire or repulsion.This paper has two main goals. One is to suggest that enough is now known about the causes, consequences, and properties of valence to indicate that it forms a unitary natural-psychological kind, one that seemingly plays a fundamental role in motivating all kinds of intentional action. If this turns out to be true, then the correct characterization of the nature of valence (...) becomes an urgent philosophical issue. There appear to be just two accounts that have the required generality. According to one, valence is a nonconceptual representation of value. According to the other, valence is an intrinsic qualitative property of experience. The second goal of the paper is to contrast and evaluate these two views of the nature of valence, drawing on the relevant empirical findings. Overall, I suggest that the representational account is more plausible. (shrink)

After half a century exploring dialectical thought, renowned cultural critic Fredric Jameson presents a comprehensive study of a misrepresented, vital strain in Western philosophy. The dialectic, the concept of the evolution of an idea through internal contradiction and conflict, transformed two centuries of Western philosophy. To Hegel, who dominated nineteenth-century thought, it was a metaphysical system. In the works of Marx, the dialectic became a tool for materialist historical analysis, a theoretical maneuver that his critics derided and his descendants on (...) the Left have wrestled with ever since. Jameson brings a theoretical scrutiny to bear on the questions that have arisen in the history of this philosophical tradition, contextualizing the debate with essays on commodification and globalization, and with reference to the work of Rousseau, Fichte, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and Lacan. Through rigorous, erudite examination, Valences of the Dialectic charts a movement toward the innovation of a "spatial" dialectic, culminating in a remarkable meditation on globalization, through a study of Paul Ricoeur. Jameson presents a new synthesis of thought that revitalizes dialectical thinking for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Emotional experiences typically labelled “being moved” or “feeling touched” may belong to one universal emotion. This emotion, which has been labelled “kama muta”, is hypothesised to have a positive valence, be elicited by sudden intensifications of social closeness, and be accompanied by warmth, goosebumps and tears. Initial evidence on correlations among the kama muta components has been collected with self-reports after or during the emotion. Continuous measures during the emotion seem particularly informative, but previous work allows only restricted inferences on (...) intra-individual processes because time series were cross-correlated across samples. In the current studies, we instead use a within-subject design to replicate and extend prior work. We compute intra-individual cross-correlations between continuous self-reports on feeling moved and (1) positive and negative affect; (2) goosebumps and subjective warmth and (3) appraisals of closeness and morality. Results confirm the predictions of kama muta theory that feeling moved by intensified communal sharing cross-correlates with appraised closeness, positive affect, warmth and (less so) goosebumps, but not with negative affect. Contrary to predictions, appraised morality cross-correlated with feeling moved as much as appraised closeness did. We conclude that strong inferences on emotional processes are possible using continuous measures, replace earlier findings, and are largely in line with theorising. (shrink)

Formal methods developed for modeling levels of selection problems have recently been applied to the investigation of major evolutionary transitions. We discuss two new tools of this kind. First, the ‘near-variant test’ can be used to compare the causal adequacy of predictively equivalent representations. Second, ‘state-variable gestalt-switching’ can be used to gain a useful dual perspective on evolutionary processes that involve both higher and lower level populations.

Most theories of affective influences on judgement and choice take a valence-based approach, contrasting the effects of positive versus negative feeling states. These approaches have not specified if and when distinct emotions of the same valence have different effects on judgement. In this article, we propose a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. We posit that each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive new events and objects in ways that are consistent with the original cognitive-appraisal dimensions (...) of the emotion. To pit the valence and appraisal-tendency approaches against one another, we present a study that addresses whether two emotions of the same valence but differing appraisals—anger and fear—relate in different ways to risk perception. Consistent with the appraisal-tendency hypothesis, fearful people made pessimistic judgements of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgements. In the Discussion we expand the proposed model and review evidence supporting two social moderators of appraisal-tendency processes. (shrink)

Bodily (dis)pleasures and emotions share the striking property of being valenced, i.e. they are positive or negative. What is valence? How do bodily (dis)pleasures and emotions relate to one another? This chapter assesses the prospects of two popular theses regarding the relation between bodily (dis)pleasures and emotions in light of what we can reasonably think about valence. According to the first thesis, the valence of bodily (dis)pleasures is explanatory prior vis-à-vis the valence of emotions. According to the second, emotions contain (...) bodily (dis)pleasures. I argue that bodily (dis)pleasures are intentional states whose valence is to be understood in terms of evaluative experience, and bring to light the similarities and dissimilarities between their intentional structure and that of emotions. On this backdrop, I offer reasons to conclude that we should adopt neither of the two theses. (shrink)

Deciphering how DCAFs (DDB1‐CUL4 Associated Factors) modulate a broad spectrum of cellular processes, including cell cycle progression and maintenance of genomic integrity is critical to better understand cellular homeostasis and diseases. Cells contain more than 100 DCAFs that associate with the Cullin‐Ring Ubiquitin Ligase 4 (CRL4) complex that target specific protein substrates for degradation. DCAFs are thought to act as substrate receptors that dictate the specificity of the ubiquitination machinery (“catalytic DCAFs”). However, recent studies have suggested that some DCAFs might (...) play a different role by targeting CRL4 complexes to distinct cellular compartments (“structural DCAFs”). Once localized to their correct cellular domains, these CRLs dissociate from the structural DCAFs prior to their association with other, substrate‐specific catalytic DCAFs. Thus, we propose that DCAF switches can provide a mechanistic basis for the degradation of proteins that regulate cell growth and proliferation at precise points in space and time. (shrink)

Time distortion in individuals with social anxiety has been defined as the seemingly slower passage of time in social situations and is related to both arousal and valence. Consequently, adaptive behavior is disrupted and interpersonal situations avoided. We explored the effects of valence and arousal on time distortion in individuals with social anxiety. Participants were assigned to two groups, High Anxiety (HA) and Low Anxiety (LA), presented with four types of facial expression stimuli (positive-high arousal, positive-low arousal, negative-high arousal, and (...) negative-low arousal), and asked to estimate the duration of stimulus presentation. Results indicated that, relative to other stimuli, the HA and LA groups perceived longer presentation for high-arousal negative and low-arousal positive stimuli, respectively. These findings suggest that anxious individuals’ time distortion was more severe in situations that evoked high arousal and involved negative emotion. (shrink)

The attempt to model the structure of consciousness in split-brain subjects is ongoing. This paper concerns the recently proposed ?switch model? of split-brain consciousness, according to which a split-brain subject possesses only a single stream of consciousness, unified at and across time, that shifts from one hemisphere to the other from moment to moment. The paper argues that while the central explanatory element of the switch model may account for some aspects of split-brain consciousness, the best general picture of split-brain (...) consciousness is still offered by some version of the ?conscious duality model.? (shrink)

IntroductionExercise at high intensity may cause lower affective responses toward exercise compared with moderate intensity exercise. We aimed to elucidate affective valence and enjoyment in high- and moderate-high interval exercise.MethodsTwenty recreationally active participants (9 females, 11 males, age range: 20–51 years) underwent three different treadmill running exercise sessions per week over a 3-week period, in randomized order; (1) CE70: 45 min continuous exercise at 70% of heart rate maximum (HRmax), (2) INT80: 4 × 4 min intervals at 80% of HRmax, (...) (3) INT90: 4 × 4 min intervals at 90% of HRmax. Pre-tests included graded submaximal steady state intensities and a test to exhaustion for determining peak oxygen uptake and HRmax. Affective valence (pleasure/displeasure) was measured before, during and after the sessions using the Feeling Scale (FS). Enjoyment was assessed before and after the sessions applying the Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale (PACES) and during the sessions using the Exercise Enjoyment Scale (EES).ResultsThe participants felt lower pleasure (between-sessions effect:p= 0.02,pη2: 0.13) during INT90 sessions (FS: 1.08, 95% CI: 0.35–1.92) compared with INT80 (FS: 2.35, 95% CI: 1.62–3.08,p= 0.052) and CE70 sessions (FS: 2.45, 95% CI: 1.72–3.18,p= 0.03), with no differences between INT80 and CE70 sessions (p= 1.00). There were higher enjoyment after INT80 sessions (PACES: 101.5, 95% CI: 95.7–107.3) versus CE70 sessions (PACES: 91.3 95% CI: 85.5–97.1,p= 0.046), and no differences between INT90 (PACES: 98.2, 95% CI: 92.4–103.4) and CE70 (p= 0.29) or INT80 (p= 1.00). For enjoyment during exercise, CE70 were perceived more enjoyable, and INT80 and INT90 less enjoyable in week 2 (EES: week x session:p= 0.01,pη2: 0.11; CE70: 4.3, 95% CI: 3.6–4.9, INT80: 4.6, 95% CI: 3.9–5.2, INT90: 4.0, 95% CI: 3.4–4.7) and 3 (EES: CE70: 4.2, 95% CI: 3.7–4.8, INT80: 4.8, 95% CI: 4.2–5.3, INT90: 4.3, 95% CI: 3.8–4.9) than in week 1 (EES: CE70: 3.5, 95% CI: 3.0–4.0, INT80: 5.0, 95% CI: 4.5–5.5, INT90: 4.5, 95% CI: 4.0–5.0).ConclusionThe negative affective consequences associated with high intensity interval exercise can be alleviated by keeping the intensity at or around 80% of HRmaxwhile preserving the beneficial enjoyment responses associated with interval exercise. (shrink)

The valence–arousal conflict theory assumes that both valence and arousal will trigger approaching or withdrawing tendencies. It also predicts that the speed of processing emotional stimuli will depend on whether valence and arousal trigger conflicting or congruent motivational tendencies. However, most previous studies have provided evidence of the interaction between valence and arousal only, and have not provided direct proof of the interactive links between valence, arousal and motivational tendencies. The present study provides direct evidence for the relationship between approach–withdrawal (...) tendencies and the valence–arousal conflict. In an empirical test, participants were instructed to judge the valence of emotional words after visual–spatial cues that appeared to be either approaching or withdrawing from participants. A three-way interaction was observed such that the response time was shorter if participants responded to a negative high-arousal stimulus after a withdrawing cue, or to a positive low-arousal stimulus after an approaching cue. These findings suggest that the approach–withdrawal tendency indeed plays a crucial role in valence–arousal conflict, and that the effect depends on the congruency of valence, arousal and tendency at an early stage of processing. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions regarding the status of emotion as a scientific domain usually get framed in terms of the question whether emotion is a natural kind. That approach to the issues is wrongheaded for two reasons. First, it has led to an intractable philosophical impasse that ultimately misconstrues the character of the relevant debate in emotion science. Second, and most important, it entirely ignores valence, a central feature of emotion experience, and probably the most promising criterion for demarcating emotion from cognition (...) and other related domains. An alternate philosophical hypothesis for addressing the issues is pro- posed. It is that emotion is a naturally occurring valenced phenomenon that is.. (shrink)

Based on content externalism, the question of whether self-knowledge is authoritative or not has launched a real controversy in the philosophy of mind. Boghossian proposed slow switching argument in defense of incompatibility of the two views. This argument has been criticized by some philosophers through different approaches. Vahid is one of them. He claimed that Boghossian's argument appeals to some controversial assumptions without which it cannot achieve its conclusion. In this article, I criticize Vahid's response to slow switching (...) argument and show that self-knowledge in Vahid's response differs in having authority and therefore in function from that of Boghossian. (shrink)

Organisations that design and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly commit themselves to high-level, ethical principles. However, there still exists a gap between principles and practices in AI ethics. One major obstacle organisations face when attempting to operationalise AI Ethics is the lack of a well-defined material scope. Put differently, the question to which systems and processes AI ethics principles ought to apply remains unanswered. Of course, there exists no universally accepted definition of AI, and different systems pose different ethical (...) challenges. Nevertheless, pragmatic problem-solving demands that things should be sorted so that their grouping will promote successful actions for some specific end. In this article, we review and compare previous attempts to classify AI systems for the purpose of implementing AI governance in practice. We find that attempts to classify AI systems proposed in previous literature use one of three mental models: _the Switch_, i.e., a binary approach according to which systems either are or are not considered AI systems depending on their characteristics; _the Ladder_, i.e., a risk-based approach that classifies systems according to the ethical risks they pose; and _the Matrix_, i.e., a multi-dimensional classification of systems that take various aspects into account, such as context, input data, and decision-model. Each of these models for classifying AI systems comes with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. By conceptualising different ways of classifying AI systems into simple mental models, we hope to provide organisations that design, deploy, or regulate AI systems with the vocabulary needed to demarcate the material scope of their AI governance frameworks. (shrink)

People implicitly generalize the actions of known individuals in a social group to unknown members. However, actions have social goals and evaluative valences, and the extent to which actions with different valences (helpful and harmful) are implicitly generalized among group members remains unclear. We used computer animations to simulate social group actions, where helping and hindering actions were represented by aiding and obstructing another's climb up a hill. Study 1 found that helpful actions are implicitly expected to be shared among (...) members of the same group but not among members of different groups, but no such effect was found for harmful actions. This suggests that helpful actions are more likely than harmful actions to be implicitly generalized to group members. This finding was replicated in Study 2 by increasing the group size from three to five. Study 3 found that the null effect for generalizing harmful actions among group members is not due to the difficulty of detecting action generalization, as both helpful and harmful actions are similarly generalized within particular individuals. Moreover, Study 4 demonstrated that weakening social group information resulted in the absence of implicit generalization for helpful actions, suggesting the specificity of group membership. Study 5 revealed that the generalization of helping actions occurred when actions were performed by multiple group members rather than being repeated by one group member, showing group-based inductive generalization. Overall, these findings support valence-dependent implicit action generalization among group members. This implies that people may possess different knowledge regarding valenced actions on category-based generalization. (shrink)

An explicitly frame related interpretation of a very general more for less result is used to establish a correspondingly general class of frame related switching results. These are used in turn to show how preference reversals of kinds found by Allais and others may not only be essentially non-paradoxical in character, but can be expected to be frequently observed, even under conditions of certainty and of complete information.

John Searle and Susanna Siegel have argued that cases of aspect‐switching show that visual experience represents a richer range of properties than colours, shapes, positions and sizes. I respond that cases of aspect‐switching can be explained without holding that visual experience represents rich properties. I also argue that even if Searle and Siegel are right, and aspect‐switching does require visual experience to represent rich properties, there is reason to think those properties do not include natural‐kind properties, such (...) as being a tomato. (shrink)

Code switching is defined as the use of two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation. It is a general phenomenon in Pakistani society. This research was conducted through a qualitative descriptive method; it produces descriptive data in the form of code switched sentences from editorial of Urdu newspaper. In this research paper I discussed code switching in editorial of an Urdu newspaper. Daily Khabrain Newspaper was selected for this purpose. One week newspapers were collected for (...) research from 1st January, 2020 to 7th January, 2020 to analyze code switching in editorial. In this research paper I discussed code switching in editorial of an Urdu newspaper. Aims and Objectives are; in this research paper I discussed code switching in editorial of an Urdu newspaper. Research Question was what type of code switching is in editorial in Daily Khabrain Newspaper? Daily Khabrain Newspaper from first January 2020 to 7th January 2020 was collected for the analysis of language or code switching and its type in editorial. Through the analysis of data of newspaper it can be concluded that the type of code switching was intra sentential, word code switching and total integrated Urdu. (shrink)

In the present study, we use a training design in two experiments to examine whether bilingual language switching facilitates two components of cognitive control, namely monitoring and inhibitory control. The results of Experiment 1 showed that training in language switching reduced mixing costs and the anti-saccade effect among bilinguals. In Experiment 2, the findings revealed a greater decrease of mixing costs and a smaller decrease of the anti-saccade effect from pre- to post-training for the language switching training (...) group compared to the L2 training group. Overall, the results suggest that extensive exercise in monitoring and inhibitory control among languages in an experimental setting may enhance the corresponding components of cognitive control. We discuss these findings in the context of the relationship between bilingual language control and executive control. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlexithymia is characterised by a lack of words for emotional experiences and it has been implicated in deficits in emotion processing. Research in this area has typically focused on judgem...