A person who has reason instead of instinct needs to be informed in order to survive. The relationship of vital knowledge with the soul, the source of life, has been established with emotions. Throughout the history of philosophy up to the 19th century, emotion has been a subject viewed negatively. Despite this, all deep-rooted wisdoms in the world, especially philosophy defined as love of wisdom, have accepted emotions as a criterion or a psychological sign of reaching the truth. In the (...) last century, with the legitimacy of the view that the self-awareness of consciousness is emotional rather than mental, the relationship between knowledge and emotion has been placed on the agenda of philosophy and science. The emotional basis of Islamic wisdom, as in the original forms of Judaism and Christianity, is fear and its more intense derivative, terror. In other words, the emotion of the person who acquires vital information is at the most severe level. In the translation of terms such as taqwa, and rughb, which express these feelings, into Western languages, the etymological closeness between the terms terror and terrorism, the foreignness to Islamic wisdom, and deliberate manipulations have given negative meanings to its authentic and positive basis. (shrink)

Literature that can be found everywhere in Jacques Derrida’s writing forms the backbone of his whole corpus from democracy to law, from politics to ethics, from philosophy to art. He uses literature as a weapon against the domination of philosophy where main philosophical figures like Plato and Socrates who exclude literature had a share of this literary work. Many interpreters of Derrida sees him not a philosopher but a literary writer and this claims are both fair (from the traditional philosophical (...) concept) and unfair (from the era where reaching the absolute is impossible). In this sense, recent years there have been various efforts to engage Jacques Derrida's conception of literature. In this work, because of literature is the "experience of singularity" for Derrida, we will try to deal with Derrida and literature relations through the singularity. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractSAD is a state of depression induced by a lack of sufficient sunlight that occurs at high latitudes during the fall and winter. SAD causes people to be risk-adverse. Granting agencies of high latitude countries should time high-risk research competitions so they do not coincide with the SAD months.

Listening to music can be an intensely moving experience. Many people love music in part because of its power to alter or amplify their moods, and turn to music for inspiration, comfort, or therapy. It is a puzzle, then, why many of us spend so much time listening to sad music. If music can influence our moods, and assuming that most people would prefer to be happy not sad, why would we choose to listen to sad music? I revisit the (...) question of why we like sad music, drawing from work in both the philosophy and psychology of music, as well as work in the philosophy and science of affect. I argue to shift the focus of the question to music-induced moods, not emotions. This reframes the debate but does not dissolve the paradox. To understand what is appealing about the affective experience of listening to sad music I suggest we take into account the unique features of music-induced sad mood. I argue that sad mood and a certain sort of focused music listening are mutually reinforcing in ways that differ from other mood/music interactions. Sad mood and sad music are, in a sense, made for each other. (shrink)

Sadness is generally seen as a negative emotion, a response to distressing and adverse situations. In an aesthetic context, however, sadness is often associated with some degree of pleasure, as suggested by the ubiquity and popularity, throughout history, of music, plays, films and paintings with a sad content. Here, we focus on the fact that music regarded as sad is often experienced as pleasurable. Compared to other art forms, music has an exceptional ability to evoke a wide-range of feelings and (...) is especially beguiling when it deals with grief and sorrow. Why is it, then, that while human survival depends on preventing painful experiences, mental pain often turns out to be explicitly sought through music? In this article we consider why and how sad music can become pleasurable. We offer a framework to account for how listening to sad music can lead to positive feelings, contending that this effect hinges on correcting an ongoing homeostatic imbalance. Sadness evoked by music is found pleasurable (1) when it is perceived as non-threatening; (2) when it is aesthetically pleasing; and (3) when it produces psychological benefits such as mood regulation, and empathic feelings, caused, for example, by recollection of and reflection on past events. We also review neuroimaging studies related to music and emotion and focus on those that deal with sadness. Further exploration of the neural mechanisms through which stimuli that usually produce sadness can induce a positive affective state could help the development of effective therapies for disorders such as depression, in which the ability to experience pleasure is attenuated. (shrink)

Experimental induction of sad mood states is a mainstay of laboratory research on affect and cognition, mood regulation, and mood disorders. Typically, the success of such mood manipulations is reported as a statistically significant pre- to post-induction change in the self-rated intensity of the target affect. The present commentary was motivated by an unexpected finding in one of our studies concerning the response rate to a well-validated sad mood induction. Using the customary statistical approach, we found a significant mean increase (...) in self-rated sadness intensity with a moderate effect size, verifying the “success” of the mood induction. However, that “success” masked that, between one-fifth and about one-third of our samples reported absolutely no sadness in response to the mood induction procedure. We consider implications of our experience for emotion research by commenting upon the typically overlooked phenomenon of nonresponse, suggesting changes in reporting practices regarding mood induction success, and outlining future directions to help scientists determine why some subjects do not respond to experimental mood induction. (shrink)

Many people appear to attach great value to sad music. But why? One way to gain insight into this question is to turn away from music and look instead at why people value sad conversations. In the case of conversations, the answer seems to be that expressing sadness creates a sense of genuine connection. We propose that sad music can also have this type of value. Listening to a sad song can give one a sense of genuine connection. We then (...) explore the nature of this value in two experimental studies. The results suggest a striking relationship between music and conversation. People see something distinctively musical in works that express precisely those emotions that they think most create connection within conversation. (shrink)

Inhibition, an executive function, is critical for achieving goals that require suppressing unwanted behaviours, thoughts, or distractions. One hypothesis of the emotion and goal compatibility theory is that emotions of sadness and fear enhance inhibitory control. Across Experiments 1–4, we tested this hypothesis by inducing a happy, sad, fearful, and neutral emotional state prior to completing an inhibition task that indexed a specific facet of inhibition (oculomotor, resisting interference, behavioural, and cognitive). In Experiment 4, we included an anger induction to (...) examine whether valence or motivational-orientation best-predicted performance. We found support that fear and sadness enhanced inhibition except when inhibition required resisting interference. We argue that sadness and fear enhance inhibitory control aiding the detection and analysis of problems (i.e. sadness) or threats (i.e. fear) within one’s environment. In sum, this work highlights the importance of identifying how negative emotions can be beneficial for and interact with specific executive functions influencing down-stream processing including attention, cognition, and memory. (shrink)

Enjoyment of negative emotions in music is seen by many as a paradox. This paper argues that the paradox exists because it is difficult to view the process that generates enjoyment as being part of the the same system that also generates the subjective negative feeling. Compensation theories explain the paradox as the compensation of a negative emotion by the concomitant presence of one or more positive emotions. But compensation brings us no closer to explaining the paradox because it does (...) not explain how experiencing sadness itself is enjoyed. The solution proposed is that an emotion is determined by two critical processes—labelled motivational action tendency (MAT) and subjective feeling (SF). For many emotions the two processes are coupled in valence. For example, happiness has positive MAT and positive SF, annoyance has negative MAT and negative SF. However, in an aesthetic context, such as listening to music, emotion processes can become decoupled. Sadness retains its negative SF but the aversive, negative MAT is inhibited, leaving sadness to still be experienced as a negative valanced emotion, while contributing to the overall positive MAT. Individual differences, mood and previous experiences mediate the degree to which the aversive aspects of MAT are inhibited. The reason for hesitancy in considering or testing this parallel processes hypothesis, as well as the preponderance of research on sadness at the exclusion of other negative emotions, are discussed. (shrink)

This guest column marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Jacques Derrida. The journal in which it appears, Common Knowledge, was not especially receptive to deconstruction during Derrida's lifetime, but Lesley Chamberlain in retrospect sees reasons to reconsider his role in intellectual history now. The delicacy of Derrida's mission, she argues, has been misunderstood. He is best placed in the company not of the “deconstructionists” who thought to follow in his footsteps but, rather, in the company of the moralistic (...) and theologically minded German philosophers and thinkers who inspired him, from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. A personal fear of being pinned down, coupled with his tragic Jewish witness to a philosophical quest for certainty gone astray, led the “Sad Rider,” one of many possible Derridas, to want to “erase” as much as he wanted to write — despite which, he was not spared being turned into an industry. (shrink)

People tend to show greater liking for expressions of sadness when these expressions are described as art. Why does this effect arise? One obvious hypothesis would be that describing something as art makes people more likely to regard it as fictional, and people prefer expressions of sadness that are not real. We contrast this obvious hypothesis with a hypothesis derived from the philosophical literature. In this alternative hypothesis, describing something as art makes people more inclined to appropriate it, that is, (...) to see it as an expression of their own sadness. Study 1 found that describing the exact same sad text as art (e.g., a monologue) as opposed to not-art (e.g., a diary entry) led to increased liking for the work. Study 2 showed that this effect is not mediated by fictionality. Study 3 showed that the effect is mediated by appropriation. Study 4 looked at the impact of a manipulation of fictionality. Describing a work as fictional did lead to increased liking, but this effect was completely mediated by appropriation. These results provide at least some initial support for the appropriation hypothesis. (shrink)

Mood has varied effects on cognitive performance including the accuracy of face recognition . Three experiments are presented here that explored face recognition abilities in mood-induced participants. Experiment 1 demonstrated that happy-induced participants are less accurate and have a more conservative response bias than sad-induced participants in a face recognition task. Using a remember/know/guess procedure, Experiment 2 showed that sad-induced participants had more conscious recollections of faces than happy-induced participants. Additionally, sad-induced participants could recognise all faces accurately, whereas, happy- and (...) neutral-induced participants recognised happy faces more accurately than sad faces. In Experiment 3, these effects were not observed when participants intentionally learnt the faces, rather than incidentally learnt the faces. It is suggested that happy-induced participants do not process faces as elaborately as sad-induced participants. (shrink)

People tend to show greater liking for expressions of sadness when these expressions are described as art. Why does this effect arise? One obvious hypothesis would be that describing something as art makes people more likely to regard it as fictional, and people prefer expressions of sadness that are not real. We contrast this obvious hypothesis with a hypothesis derived from the philosophical literature. On this alternative hypothesis, describing something as art makes people more inclined to appropriate it, i.e., to (...) see it as an expression of their own sadness. Study 1 found that describing the exact same sad text as art (e.g., a monologue) as opposed to not-art (e.g., a diary entry) led to increased liking for the work. Study 2 showed that this effect is not mediated by fictionality. Study 3 showed that the effect is mediated by appropriation. Study 4 looked at the impact of a manipulation of fictionality. Describing a work as fictional did lead to increased liking, but this effect was completely mediated by appropriation. These results provide at least some initial support for the appropriation hypothesis. (shrink)

Recent work on hypercomputation has raised new objections against the Church–Turing Thesis. In this paper, I focus on the challenge posed by a particular kind of hypercomputer, namely, SAD computers. I first consider deterministic and probabilistic barriers to the physical possibility of SAD computation. These suggest several ways to defend a Physical version of the Church–Turing Thesis. I then argue against Hogarth's analogy between non-Turing computability and non-Euclidean geometry, showing that it is a non-sequitur. I conclude that the Effective version (...) of the Church–Turing Thesis is unaffected by SAD computation. (shrink)

The current study investigated how sad expressions during encoding affected recognition of facial identity in visual working memory and its electrophysiological correlates. Event-related poten...

Reading is one of the most common everyday activities, yet research elucidating how affective influence reading processes and outcomes is sparse with inconsistent results. To investigate this question, we randomly assigned participants (N = 136) to happiness (positive affect), sadness (negative affect), and neutral video-induction conditions prior to engaging in self-paced reading of a long, complex science text. Participants completed assessments targeting multiple levels of comprehension (e.g. recognising factual information, integrating different textual components, and open-ended responses of concepts from memory) (...) after reading and after a week-long delay. Results indicated that the Sadness (vs. Happiness) condition had higher comprehension scores, with the largest effects emerging for assessments targeting deeper levels comprehension immediately after reading. Eye-tracking analyses revealed that such benefits may be partly driven by sustained attentional focus over the 20-minute reading session. We discuss results with respect to theories on affect, cognition, and text comprehension. (shrink)

Three experiments were conducted in order to validate 56 musical excerpts that conveyed four intended emotions (happiness, sadness, threat and peacefulness). In Experiment 1, the musical clips were rated in terms of how clearly the intended emotion was portrayed, and for valence and arousal. In Experiment 2, a gating paradigm was used to evaluate the course for emotion recognition. In Experiment 3, a dissimilarity judgement task and multidimensional scaling analysis were used to probe emotional content with no emotional labels. The (...) results showed that emotions are easily recognised and discriminated on the basis of valence and arousal and with relative immediacy. Happy and sad excerpts were identified after the presentation of fewer than three musical events. With no labelling, emotion discrimination remained highly accurate and could be mapped on energetic and tense dimensions. The present study provides suitable musical material for research on emotions.Keywords. (shrink)

Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861) and Robert Browning (1812-1889) first fell in love through letters, which they began to write to each other in 1845 (Figures 1 and 2). Their growing relationship, slowly progressing from letter to first encounter and eventual secret marriage in 1846, is documented in two volumes of letters, with a plot that unfolds as warmly and compellingly as the best page-turner invented by a novelist. Both were master wordsmiths, so the beauty of their letters is no (...) surprise. But one reason Barrett Browning was such a prolific correspondent is that she spent much of her life housebound, due to an illness whose nature was never truly explained when she was alive and that has been .. (shrink)

In Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning, Carrie Jenkins invites the reader to reconceptualize romantic love. In particular, she takes issue with the ide.

Past research has provided some evidence of positive relationships between leisure and cognitive functioning, but questions remain regarding their mechanisms. We argue that specific negative emotio...

ABSTRACTRecognising a facial expression is more difficult when the expresser's body conveys incongruent affect. Existing research has documented such interference for universally recognisable bodil...

The World Health Organization states that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and predicts that by 2030 the epidemic of depression raging across the world will be the single biggest contributor to the overall burden of disease of all health conditions. Yet this gloomy picture masks a number of paradoxes concerning the diagnosis and cultural interpretation of depression that appear to challenge the claimed prevalence rates on which it is based. This book's essays by some of the world's (...) leading researchers and scholars on depression explores these anomalies in detail from multidisciplinary and multicultural perspectives, and in doing so reshapes the debate on the nature of depression that is currently under way in the US and abroad. At the book's core is the exploration from the multiple perspectives of a key dilemma: is the epidemic of depression real or is it just apparent? In particular, could it be the result of criteria laid down in the official American classification system of mental disorders, the DSM, interacting with cultural changes to reshape our view of melancholy, pathologizing what were formerly normal symptoms of grief or intense sadness? The debate over the DSM's conception of depression has an international relevance, with the WHO's upcoming revisions to its International Classification of Diseases requiring coordination with the DSM. This collection of perspectives has an unprecedented international dimension, as scholars from Europe and around the world join US academics to explore a central and controversial element of contemporary psychiatric diagnosis - and one that has enormous practical implications for the future of mental health care and how we view our emotions. The book's accessible essays will make it useful to scholars, practitioners, and students across a wide range of disciplines. (shrink)

This paper discusses the philosophical doctrine of moral luck, as described by Bernard Williams in his book of the same name. It first describes Williams' account and then uses the case of Michael Stone, a convicted murderer with a long history of mental disorder, and mental health practitioners’ interventions in his case, to test and debate Williams’ views. It examines four major areas of these, including the classical notion of moral luck, retroactive judgement, agent regret and justifiable and unjustifiable decision‐making. (...) It concludes that, in view of what has been said, whilst Williams’ views are applicable and appropriate to many areas of the Stone case, ‘traditional’ moral views on rights, obligations and principles cannot be entirely laid aside in evaluating this. (shrink)

Presented here is a new result concerning the computational power of so-called SADn computers, a class of Turing-machine-based computers that can perform some non-Turing computable feats by utilising the geometry of a particular kind of general relativistic spacetime. It is shown that SADn can decide n-quantifier arithmetic but not (n+1)-quantifier arithmetic, a result that reveals how neatly the SADn family maps into the Kleene arithmetical hierarchy. Introduction Axiomatising computers The power of SAD computers Remarks regarding the concept of computability.