What explains people's propensity to ask existential questions that they have little hope of resolving, such as: Why are we here? What, if any, is our purpose? What is the structure of the universe? That humans engage in these endeavors has long puzzled evolutionary theorists, as they go beyond the immediate demands of fending for ourselves, seeking safety, finding food, and reproducing, which occupy the daily lives of other animals. In this book, philosopher Helen De Cruz draws on a wide (...) range of disciplines and thinkers, from Aristotle and 12th-century Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl to Jewish thinker Abraham Heschel and science writer Rachel Carson, showing how awe and wonder lie at the heart of such existential questions. She argues that there is an emotional basis to this drive for inquiry, as wonder and awe are epistemic emotions that help us think about big-picture questions and that motivate the answers we provide to those questions. (shrink)

Spaces can make certain forms of philosophical activity more likely or more fruitful among the people who occupy them, and many public philosophers aim to promote one or another form of fruitful philosophical activity. It's helpful to distinguish four ways in which spaces can facilitate philosophical reflection and interaction: domain‐general cognitive facilitation, domain‐specific cognitive facilitation, affective facilitation, and relational facilitation. This chapter shows how philosophical spaces shape the activity of their occupants in ways of interest to public philosophers. Groups can (...) be unjustly excluded from philosophical communities for any number of reasons, but some of that exclusion is territorial. There are a number of challenges facing the would‐be designer of a philosophical space. The chapter presents three such challenges and offers some suggestions for how designers of philosophical spaces might address them. These include: the problem of rapport, the problem of urban social psychology, and the problem of the outsider. (shrink)

Preservice teachers' preparedness, perception, and affect toward certain technology systems influence the student acquisition of science knowledge, process skills, teaching innovation, and willingness to use technology in their classroom. The purpose of this study was to explore teachers' affective responses to a virtual reality-enabled scientific experiment system. Fifty-one preservice teachers majoring in educational technology participated in the study. They were divided into two groups, and their reactions were measured separately on two occasions. The first occasion used a standard system following (...) the principle of Donald Norman's affective design model. The VaSE system was then revised with a strict version of ADM before the participants' reactions were measured for a second time. The positive and negative affect scale was utilized for affective state evaluation. Semi-structured interviews that focused on affective experiences were organized using an ADM framework and conducted immediately after the participants used VaSE. The results indicated that the positive affect experienced by the preservice teachers was significantly enhanced, and the negative affect was significantly weakened. Academic level, gender, and prior experience were important random effect factors that impacted the affective experience. It was also revealed that participants were more likely to be affected by immersion and interactivity in terms of enhancing positive affect and were more likely to be affected by behavioral layer elements in terms of weakening negative affect. A conclusion has been drawn to provide theoretical and practical suggestions for training preservice teachers in ways that improve their ability to integrate technology into the classroom. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explain previous inconsistent results regarding the effects of positive affect on creative cognition based on the motivational dimensional model of affect theory and provide the underlying neural correlates of the effects of different approach-motivation intensities of positive affect on creative processes (creative idea generation and creative idea evaluation) using the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technique. Sixty participants were randomly assigned to three groups (high-approach-motivated positive affect (HAM), low-approach-motivated positive affect (LAM) and affectively neutral (...) state (NS)) to complete corresponding tasks in creative idea generation and creative idea evaluation stages. In the creative idea generation stage, the results indicated that the LAM group achieved a higher performance in flexibility and originality than the NS group. However, compared with the NS group, the LAM group exhibited a lower sensitivity in the creative idea evaluation stage. The fNIRS technique provides an ideal approach with high ecological validity for exploring the issue of affect and creativity. In current study, fNIRS results showed that the HAM group exhibited significantly more activation in the bilateral frontal lobe than the LAM group and NS group in the creative idea generation stage. This result could reflect individuals attempting to overcome a narrowed attentional scope state through the activation of bilateral frontal cortical resources in the creative process. In the creative idea evaluation stage, compared with the NS group, the LAM group showed significant deactivation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a brain area associated with executive, controlled processing. Moreover, the approach-motivation intensity altered the connectivity between the left prefrontal cortex and left superior temporal gyrus in the creative idea generation stage. Thus, the influences of positive affect on creative cognitive processes (both creative performance and hemodynamic responses) were modulated by the approach-motivation intensity in the creative idea generation and creative idea evaluation stages. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNegative emotions typically have an adverse effect on reasoning, especially analytic or logical reasoning. This effect can be explained using an attentional framework in which emotion detracts limited-capacity cognitive resources which are required for reasoning. Another possibility is that the effect of emotion on reasoning is mediated by arousal, as previous research has shown that physiological arousal can be associated with decreased reasoning performance. In this research, we used a dual-task paradigm combining a syllogistic reasoning task and a time production (...) task. Prospective timing allows to disentangle the effects of attention and arousal: time productions should lengthen if emotion takes up cognitive resources that are therefore not available for timing, whereas time productions should shorten if emotional reasoning results from increased arousal. Results from two experiments confirm the adverse impact of emotion on logical reasoning performance. Reasoning about emotional contents led t... (shrink)

Affect has been found to play important role in word and sentence processing. What is less understood is the role it plays in the process by which interlocutors arrive at what speakers mean. In the present review, the way affect modulates how we comprehend what others mean is examined. This is done by reviewing studies that have employed experimental methods using both written materials and spoken utterances. The goal of the present review is to better understand how the inferential process (...) is framed by affective factors and to propose ways of integrating affectivity into pragmatics. In Part 1, the motivation for the present review is explicated. In Part 2, experimental evidence is presented and suggestions are offered about how to best operationalise variables crucial for disentangling affect from other mechanisms that contribute to utterance interpretation. In Part 3, central notions of pragmatics are discussed with regard to affectivity, which it is proposed that, if construed as a goal-oriented activity that serves interpersonal configuration, can account for several pragmatic phenomena. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe financial crisis of 2008 was unforeseen partly because the academic theories that underpin policy making do not sufficiently account for uncertainty and complexity or learned and evolved human capabilities for managing them. Mainstream theories of decision making tend to be strongly normative and based on wishfully unrealistic “idealized” modeling. In order to develop theories of actual decision making under uncertainty, we need new methodologies that account for how human actors often manage uncertain situations “well enough.” Some possibly helpful methodologies, (...) drawing on digital science, focus on the role of emotions in determining people's choices; others examine how people construct narratives that enable them to act; still others combine qualitative with quantitative data. (shrink)

Previous correlational studies have shown that both psychological detachment from work and positively thinking about work during non-work time are associated with favorable affective states. In our research we integrate these contradictory findings and add more rigor to detachment research by using an experimental design. In two experimental studies conducted in the laboratory, we manipulated two different kinds of detachment from work (thinking about a hobby; explicit detachment instruction) and three different kinds of thinking about work (thinking negatively, thinking positively, (...) thinking in an unspecific way) by short written instructions. Results show that both detachment strategies lead to a reduction in negative affect (in both studies) and to an increase in positive affect (in one study). The effect of detachment was particularly strong when it was contrasted with thinking negatively about work and when end-of-workday negative affect was high. In some of the comparisons, the affective benefits of positively thinking about work were stronger than those of psychological detachment from work. Taken together, our studies demonstrate that detachment from work as well as positive thinking improves subsequent affect, highlighting the causality underlying the association between psychological detachment from work – as a core recovery experience – and subsequent affective states. (shrink)

Many theories on cognition assume that people adapt their decision strategies depending on the situation they face. To test if and how affect guides the selection of decision strategies, we conducted an online study (N = 166), where different mood states were induced through video clips. Results indicate that mood influenced the use of decision strategies. Negative mood, in particular anger, facilitated the use of non-compensatory strategies, whereas positive mood promoted compensatory decision rules. These results are in line with the (...) idea that positive mood broadens the focus of attention and thus increases the use of compensatory decision strategies that take many pieces of information into account, whereas negative mood narrows the focus of attention and thus fosters non-compensatory strategies that rely on a selective use of information. The results further indicate that gaining a deeper theoretical understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that govern decision processes requires taking emotions into account. (shrink)

The traditional view of cognition as detached from emotions is recently being questioned. This study aimed to investigate the influence of emotional valence on the accuracy and bias in the representation of numbers on the mental number line (MNL). The study included 164 participants who were randomly assigned into two groups with induced positive and negative emotional valence using matched arousal film clips. Participants performed a computerised number-to-position (CNP) task to estimate the position of numbers on a horizontal line. The (...) results showed that participants in the positive valence group exhibited a rightward bias, while those in the negative valence group showed an opposite pattern. The analysis of mean absolute error revealed that the negative valence group had higher error rates compared to the positive valence group. Furthermore, the MNL estimation pattern analysis indicated that a two-cycle cyclic power model (CPM) best explained the data for both groups. These findings suggest that emotional valence influences the spatial representation of numbers on the MNL and affects accuracy in numerical estimations. Our findings are finally discussed in terms of body-specificity and the Brain’s Asymmetric Frequency Tuning (BAFT) theories. The study provides new insights into the interplay between emotions and numerical cognition. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual framework for studying the influence of mood on managerial ethical decision making. We draw on mood-congruency theory and the affect infusion model to propose that mood influences managerial ethical decision making through deliberate and conscious assessments of the moral intensity of an ethical issue. By accounting for proscriptive and prescriptive morality—i.e., harmful and prosocial behavior, respectively—we demonstrate that positive and negative mood may have asymmetrical and paradoxical effects on ethical decision making. Specifically, our analysis suggests (...) that individuals in a positive mood will be more likely to engage in prosocial behavior but less likely to refrain from activities that have harmful consequences for others, whereas individuals in a negative mood will be more likely to avoid activities that put others at risk or harm but at the same time less prone to engaging in activities that have positive consequences for others. Importantly, we account for the context within which managers make their decisions by examining how situational strength may moderate the influence of mood on managerial ethical decision making. Finally, we discuss how organizations can leverage the double-edged sword effect of mood on ethical decision making and prevent, control and manage the risk of unethical decision making on the part of managers. (shrink)

We address concerns raised by Maul (2012) regarding the validity of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). We respond to requests for clarifications of our model, and explain why the MSCEIT’s scoring methods stand up to scrutiny and why many reported reliabilities of the MSCEIT may be underestimates, using reanalyses of the test’s standardization sample of N = 5,000 to illustrate our point. We also organize findings from four recent articles that provide evidence for the MSCEIT’s validity based on its (...) relations with other tests. (shrink)

A growing body of evidence suggests that emotional states under which individuals perform decision-making tasks modulate performance. Studies have mainly reported that negative emotions can differe...

Emotions imply a revision of our beliefs inasmuch as they are triggered by a discrepancy between our expectancies and new situations. I will study the converse relation: how emotions, particularly recurrent emotions that reappear in similar situations in the long term, are incentives to revise not only our beliefs but also the order of priorities between their related desires. Understanding how affects can revise both beliefs—under their committing aspect—and the order of desires, implies seeing the dynamics of affects as interacting (...) with external dynamics and the order of priorities as a weak one. These philosophical considerations shed new light on the diversity of emotions, on their different temporalities, and on the paradox of emotional sharing. (shrink)

Effective human–robot teaming increasingly requires humans to work with intelligent, autonomous machines. However, novel features of intelligent autonomous systems such as social agency and incomprehensibility may influence the human’s trust in the machine. The human operator’s mental model for machine functioning is critical for trust. People may consider an intelligent machine partner as either an advanced tool or as a human-like teammate. This article reports a study that explored the role of individual differences in the mental model in a simulated (...) environment. Multiple dispositional factors that may influence the dominant mental model were assessed. These included the Robot Threat Assessment, which measures the person’s propensity to apply tool and teammate models in security contexts. Participants were paired with an intelligent robot tasked with making threat assessments in an urban setting. A transparency manipulation was used to influence the dominant mental model. For half of the participants, threat assessment was described as physics-based ; the remainder received transparency information that described psychological cues. We expected that the physics-based transparency messages would guide the participant toward treating the robot as an advanced machine, while psychological messaging would encourage perceptions of the robot as acting like a human partner. We also manipulated situational danger cues present in the simulated environment. Participants rated their trust in the robot’s decision as well as threat and anxiety, for each of 24 urban scenes. They also completed the RoTA and additional individual-difference measures. Findings showed that trust assessments reflected the degree of congruence between the robot’s decision and situational danger cues, consistent with participants acting as Bayesian decision makers. Several scales, including the RoTA, were more predictive of trust when the robot was making psychology-based decisions, implying that trust reflected individual differences in the mental model of the robot as a teammate. These findings suggest scope for designing training that uncovers and mitigates the individual’s biases toward intelligent machines. (shrink)

Positive emotions (PEs) impact cognitive processes, including executive functions (EFs; i.e. inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility). However, previous reviews and meta-analyses report contradicting results. Thus, this review takes a novel approach to overcome conflicting findings by clearly conceptualising PE induction and by providing a detailed description of the tasks used to assess EFs, as well as by exclusively focusing on EFs. A systematic literature review and meta-analysis was performed. Study inclusion criteria required that subjects were healthy individuals over 18 years, (...) PEs were induced in a controlled laboratory setting, a baseline measurement and a control condition was required, and finally, EFs were measured as a dependent variable using valid measurement instruments. The literature search was performed on PRIMUS, including relevant databases such as ERIC, MEDLINE, Psych ARTICLES, Psych INFO or SocINDEX. From a total of 6,661 identified articles, only 13, which featured 20 experimental studies, were included. Results show that the overall induction of PEs successfully caused an increase in valence and/or positive emotions. However, no significant effects of PE on EFs were detected (d = −0.051, p =.405). Reasons and future research will be discussed. (shrink)

Epistemologists typically assume that the acquisition of knowledge from testimony is not threatened at the stage at which audiences interpret what proposition a speaker has asserted. Attention is instead typically paid to the epistemic status of a belief formed on the basis of testimony that it is assumed has the same content as the speaker’s assertion. Andrew Peet has pioneered an account of how linguistic context sensitivity can threaten the assumption. His account locates the threat in contexts in which an (...) audience’s evidence under-determines which proposition a speaker is asserting. I argue that Peet’s epistemic uncertainty account of the threat is mistaken and I propose an alternative. The alternative locates the threat in contexts that provide factors that give audiences a mistaken psychological certainty or confidence that a speaker has asserted a proposition she has not. (shrink)

How do affect and cognition interact in managerial decision making? Over the last decades, scholars have investigated how managers make decisions. However, what remains largely unknown is the interplay of affective states and cognition during the decision-making process. We offer a systematization of the contributions produced on the role of affect and cognition in managerial decision making by considering the recent cross-fertilization of management studies with the neuroscience domain. We implement a Systematic Literature Review of 23 selected contributions dealing with (...) the role of affect and cognition in managerial decisions that adopted neuroscience techniques/points of view. Collected papers have been analyzed by considering the so-called reflexive (X-) and reflective (C-) systems in social cognitive neuroscience and the type of decisions investigated in the literature. Results obtained help to support an emerging “unified” mind processing theory for which the two systems of our mind are not in conflict and for which affective states have a driving role toward cognition. A research agenda for future studies is provided to scholars who are interested in advancing the investigation of affect and cognition in managerial decision making, also through neuroscience techniques – with the consideration that these works should be at the service of the behavioral strategy field. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople often continue to rely on misinformation in their reasoning after they have acknowledged a retraction; this phenomenon is known as the continued-influence effect. Retractions can be particularly ineffective when the retracted misinformation is consistent with a pre-existing worldview. We investigated this effect in the context of depressive rumination. Given the prevalence of depressotypic worldviews in depressive rumination, we hypothesised that depressive rumination may affect the processing of retractions of valenced misinformation; specifically, we predicted that the retraction of negative misinformation (...) might be less effective in depressive ruminators. In two experiments, we found evidence against this hypothesis: in depressive ruminators, retractions of negative misinformation were at least as effective as they were in control participants, and more effective than retractions of positive misinformation. Findings are interpreted in terms of an attentional bias that may enhance the sali... (shrink)

Résumé Cette recherche porte sur le rôle joué par les différents éléments d’une image dans l’interprétation de cette image et dans les émotions qu’elle induit. A partir de l’approche structurale de la théorie des représentations sociales on suppose que certains des éléments d’une image seraient centraux tandis que d’autres seraient périphériques. Pour explorer cette piste on a retouché trois photographies originales afin de supprimer certains des éléments qu’elles montraient. Les photographies originales et les photographies retouchées ont été présentées à trois (...) groupes de participants qui devaient, pour chaque photographie, produire trois associations verbales puis évaluer le niveau d’activation des émotions ressenties. Les résultats montrent que certains des éléments d’une image en déterminent à la fois le sens et les émotions qu’elle induit, d’autres n’en déterminent que les émotions, d’autres enfin ne déterminent ni la signification, ni les émotions induites. Ces résultats suggèrent que dans le cadre de la théorie des représentations sociales, l’analyse des images en termes d’éléments centraux et périphériques pourrait être très utile pour mieux comprendre comment fonctionnent ces images en tant que systèmes sémiotiques. (shrink)

Previous research shows differences in reasoning about emotional and neutral stimuli. A common explanation hypothesised for this effect is that emotion incurs an additional cognitive load. If this is the case, incidental emotion should have a greater impact on the reasoning of less proficient reasoners, and when items are more difficult, because a greater proportion of available cognitive resources must be allocated to the task. We manipulated the emotional value of reasoning stimuli using conditioning and with the simultaneous presentation of (...) images. The deleterious effect of emotion on logicality was greater for less proficient reasoners. There was also some indication that the effect of emotion may be more pronounced for more difficult items. Physiological responses and affective evaluations of the stimuli were similar across groups, irrespective of reasoning proficiency. Results provide some support for the hypothesis that the impact of emotion occurs through increased cognitive load. (shrink)

Neuroscience investigations of emotional influences on social cognition have been dominated by the somatic marker hypothesis and dual-process theories. Taken together, these lines of inquiry have not provided strong evidence that emotional influences on social cognition rely on neural systems which code for bodily signals of arousal nor distinguish emotional reasoning from other modes of reasoning. Recent findings raise the possibility that emotionally influenced social cognition relies on two stages of neural changes: once when emotion is elicited and a different (...) set of changes at the time of social cognitive judgment. These findings suggest that affect infusion models may be a fruitful framework for bridging neuroscience and psychological understanding of the role of emotion in social cognition. (shrink)

Emotions influence human decisions under risk and uncertainty, even when they are unrelated to the decisions, i.e. incidental to them. Empirical findings are mixed regarding the directions and sizes of the effects of discrete emotions such as fear, anger, or happiness. According to the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF), appraisals of certainty and control determine why same-valence emotions can differentially alter preferences for risky and uncertain options. Building upon this framework of emotion-specific appraisals, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 28 (...) experimental studies on the effects of discrete incidental emotions on decision-making under risk and uncertainty. We evaluated potential moderators at the task and study levels. We find emotion-specific, moderately heterogeneous effects partially in line with the expectations of the ATF. The framing and financial consequences of choices, the type of choices, and the presence of other participants during the task do not moderate the effect. Our meta-analytic results support the differential influence of discrete, incidental emotions on decision-making under risk and uncertainty depending on appraisals other than valence. We discuss limited sample sizes and heterogeneity as reasons for the absence of significant moderators and encourage experimental investigations of individual differences in the susceptibility to incidental affective influences. (shrink)

This study analyses the sensitivity of public goods contributions through the lens of psychological motives. We report the results of a public goods experiment in which subjects were induced with the motives of care and anger through autobiographical recall. Subjects’ preferences, beliefs, and perceptions under each motive are compared with those of subjects experiencing a neutral autobiographical recall control condition. We find, but only for those subjects with the highest comprehension of the game, that care elicits significantly higher contributions than (...) anger, with the control treatment in between. This positive influence of the care motive on unconditional giving is accounted for partly by preferences for giving and partly by beliefs concerning greater contributions by others. Anger also affects attention to own and other’s payoffs and perceptions of the game’s incentive structure. (shrink)

Works of art can be difficult in several ways. One important way is by making us face up to unsettling truths. Such works typically receive praise. I maintain, however, that sometimes they deserve moral censure. The crux of my argument is that, just as we have a right to know the truth in certain contexts, so too we have a right not to know it. Provided our ignorance does not harm or seriously endanger others, the decision about whether to know (...) the truth ought to be left to us. Within this limit, therefore, difficult art is morally problematic if it intentionally targets those who have chosen not to know. To illustrate the problem, I discuss the literary writings of Søren Kierkegaard, which aim to deceive readers into seeing unpleasant truths about themselves that they seek to ignore. (shrink)