We explored the possibility of a general brightness bias: brighter pictures are evaluated more positively, while darker pictures are evaluated more negatively. In Study 1 we found that positive pictures are brighter than negative pictures in two affective picture databases (the IAPS and the GAPED). Study 2 revealed that because researchers select affective pictures on the extremity of their affective rating without controlling for brightness differences, pictures used in positive conditions of experiments were on average brighter than those used in (...) negative conditions. Going beyond correlational support for our hypothesis, Studies 3 and 4 showed that brighter versions of neutral pictures were evaluated more positively than darker versions of the same picture. Study 5 revealed that people categorised positive words more quickly than negative words after a bright picture prime, and vice versa for negative pictures. Together, these studies provide strong support for the hypotheses that picture brightness influences evaluations. (shrink)

This special issue addresses how aspects of the communicative situation influence how influential persuasive utterances (or other strategies of influence) are in their contexts of use. Specifically, we study the effects of interactional, speaker-, addressee- and channel-related factors and of the interpersonal relationship between speaker and hearer, as well as the effects of referring to the shared context itself. The papers combined in this special issue provide evidence for the considerable impact of the here and now of the interactional context (...) on the persuasiveness of strategies of influence and contribute to our understanding of mechanisms of persuasion. (shrink)

Persuasive social robots can influence human behavior through giving advice. The current study investigates whether references to prior discourse and signals of empathy make an advice-giving robot an even more effective persuader and whether participants follow the robot’s advice and drink even more water when the robot additionally uses these strategies. We recruited students and university staff for a lab-study in which three different robot personalities on the same robot type presented health-related information. In one condition, the robot gave advice (...) and referred to something mentioned earlier in the conversation (i.e., to dialog history), in another condition, the robot gave advice and used empathic signals, and in the third condition, the robot gave advice only. Our results show that participants drank significantly more when the advice-giving robot also used the persuasive strategies of empathy and references to dialog history than when the robot only gave advice. This study shows that both strategies increase the persuasiveness of the robot and makes it more influential. (shrink)

In the near future, robots will function in social roles and attempt to influence the user’s behavior and / or thinking. The current contribution analyses how to influence robot influence: Persuasive robots can be personalized to make them more effective. We present an overview of (1) the user characteristics to which persuasive robots can be personalized, (2) considering the specific current situation of a user; and (3) the robot characteristics that can be personalized. Thereby, we give an overview of how (...) the persuasive robot’s physical appearance, behavior, (perceived) cognition and affect can be influenced to characteristics of the user (personalized) in order to make the robot more persuasive and thereby to understand better how the persuasive power of an embodied artificial social entity can be influenced. (shrink)

Nietzsche's use of metaphor has been widely noted but rarely focused to explore specific images in great detail. A Nietzschean Bestiary gathers essays devoted to the most notorious and celebrated beasts in Nietzsche's work. The essays illustrate Nietzsche's ample use of animal imagery, and link it to the dual philosophical purposes of recovering and revivifying human animality, which plays a significant role in his call for de-deifying nature.

We propose a cognitive and neurobiological model by which curiosity regulates affective memory, by positively biasing memory encoding through the promotion of emotion regulation. We begin with a brief overview of curiosity's observed emotional effects. Then we introduce three prominent models of affective memory encoding to suggest that the dopaminergic modulation of encoding associated with curiosity may positively bias memory processes. We situate the role of curiosity role in emotion regulation relative to its promotion of abstract thinking and cognitive flexibility. (...) We then identify the neural processes associated with abstraction and flexibility observed in the left inferior frontal gyrus, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and the lateral prefrontal cortex as the neurobiological mechanisms underlying our framework. (shrink)