Successful social functioning requires quick and accurate processing of emotion and generation of appropriate reactions. In typical individuals, these skills are supported by embodied processing, recruiting central and peripheral mechanisms. However, emotional processing is atypical in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Individuals with ASD show deficits in recognition of briefly presented emotional expressions. They tend to recognize expressions using rule-based, rather than template, strategies. Individuals with ASD also do not spontaneously and quickly mimic emotional expressions, unless the task encourages (...) engagement. When processing emotional scenes, ASD individuals show atypical basic motivational responses, despite intact ability to verbally determine stimulus valence. We discuss how these findings highlight the contribution of both embodied and disembodied mechanisms to typical and atypical emotional functioning. (shrink)

We present a dynamical model of interaction between recognition memory and affect, focusing on the phenomenon of “warm glow of familiarity.” In our model, both familiarity and affect reflect quick monitoring of coherence in an attractor neural network. This model parsimoniously explains a variety of empirical phenomena, including mere-exposure and beauty-in-averages effects, and the speed of familiarity and affect judgments.

Pessoa (2013) makes an impressive case that emotion, motivation, and cognition are neurally intertwined. Our commentary broadens the discussion to the functional, “mind” level. We argue that philosophical and computational considerations justify some modern “separatist” views. We highlight several psychological phenomena that illustrate independence, including affective and motivational reactions to rudimentary inputs, and the guiding role of such reactions in cognition.

This article focuses on Bob Zajonc’s views on unconscious emotion, especially in the context of the debates about the independence of affect and cognition. Historically, Bob was always interested in the “mere”—basic, fundamental processes. His empirical demonstrations of precognitive and preconscious emotional processes, combined with his elegant expositions of them, sharply contrasted with cold and complex cognitive models. Interestingly, Bob tended to believe that whereas the causes of emotion can be unconscious, the emotional state itself tends to be conscious. However, (...) he reconsidered this assumption and in his later work showed that subjects in affective priming experiments do not experience conscious affect, but instead act on basic preferences. Today, Bob’s insights continue to inspire research on “unconscious emotion.”. (shrink)

Processing of facial expressions goes beyond simple pattern recognition. To elucidate this problem, Niedenthal et al. offer a model that identifies multiple embodied and disembodied routes for expression processing, and spell out conditions triggering use of different routes. I elaborate on this model by discussing recent research on emotional recognition in individuals with autism, who can use multiple routes of emotion processing, and consequently can show atypical and typical patterns of embodied simulation and mimicry.

My commentary applauds the authors' cognitive framework for capturing the inferential complexity and flexibility of emotion processing. The framework offers generative powers, as demonstrated by new studies, and an insightful perspective on classic studies. However, at the core, the framework is still symbolic and cold—reflecting its origins in amodal views of the mind. This leads to two troubles. First, the framework cannot incorporate evidence for embodied, modal processing of emotion. Second, the framework overemphasizes conceptual and conscious processing, leading to dismissal (...) of unconscious emotion. I question whether simply updating a symbolic cognitive framework is sufficient to capture the recent empirical and theoretical developments in emotion research. It might be time for a new modal and embodied theory of emotion. (shrink)

Facial electromyography (EMG) was used to investigate patterns of facial mimicry in response to partial facial expressions in two contexts that differ in how naturalistic and socially significant the faces are. Experiment 1 presented participants with either the upper- or lower-half of facial expressions and used a forced-choice emotion categorisation task. This task emphasises cognition at the expense of ecological and social validity. Experiment 2 presented whole heads and expressions were occluded by clothing. Additionally, the emotion recognition task is more (...) open-ended. This context has greater social validity. We found mimicry in both experiments, however mimicry differed in terms of which emotions were mimicked and the extent to which the mimicry involved muscle sites that were not observed. In the more cognitive context, there was relatively more motor matching (i.e. mimicking only what was seen). In the more socially valid context, participants were less likely to mimic only what they saw – and instead mimicked what they knew. Additionally, participants mimicked anger in the cognitive context but not the social context. These findings suggest that mimicry involves multiple mechanisms and that the more social the context, the more likely it is to reflect a mechanism of social regulation. (shrink)

People can support abstract reasoning by using mental models with spatial simulations. Such models are employed when people represent elements in terms of ordered dimensions (e.g. who is oldest, Tom, Dick, or Harry). We test and find that the process of forming and using such mental models can influence the liking of its elements (e.g. Tom, Dick, or Harry). The presumed internal structure of such models (linear-transitive array of elements), generates variations in processing ease (fluency) when using the model in (...) working memory (see the Symbolic Distance Effect, SDE). Specifically, processing of pairs where elements have larger distances along the order should be easier compared to pairs with smaller distances. Elements from easier pairs should be liked more than elements from difficult pairs (fluency being hedonically positive). Experiment 1 shows that unfamiliar ideographs are liked more when at wider distances and therefore easier to process. Experiment 2 replicates this effect with non-words. Experiment 3 rules out a non-spatial explanation of the effect while Experiments 4 offers a high-powered replication. Experiment 5 shows that the spatial effect spontaneously emerges after learning, even without a task that explicitly focuses on fluency. Experiment 6 employed a shorter array, but yielded no significant results. (shrink)

Presenting state-of-the-art work on the conscious and unconscious processes involved in emotion, this integrative volume brings together leading psychologists, ...

Much can be gained by specifying the operation of the emulation process. A brief review of studies from diverse domains, including complex motor-skill representation, emotion perception, and face memory, highlights that emulation theory offers precise explanations of results and novel predictions. However, the neural instantiation of the emulation process requires development to move the theory from armchair to laboratory.

Loneliness—perceived social isolation—is defined as a discrepancy between existing social relationships and desired quality of relationships. Whereas most research has focused on existing relationships, we consider the standards against which people compare them. Participants who made downward social or temporal comparisons that depicted their contact with others as better reported less loneliness than participants who made upward comparisons that depicted their contact with others as worse. Extending these causal results, in a survey of British adults, upward social comparisons predicted current (...) loneliness, even when controlling for loneliness at a previous point in time. Finally, content analyses of interviews with American adults who lived alone showed that social and temporal comparisons about contact with others were both prevalent and linked to expressed loneliness. These findings contribute to understanding the social cognition of loneliness, extend the effects of comparisons about social connection to the important public health problem of loneliness, and provide a novel tool for acutely manipulating loneliness. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFacial features that resemble emotional expressions influence key social evaluations, including trust. Here, we present four experiments testing how the impact of such expressive features is qualified by their processing difficulty. We show that faces with mixed expressive features are relatively devalued, and faces with pure expressive features are relatively valued. This is especially true when participants first engage in a categorisation task that makes processing of mixed expressions difficult and pure expressions easy. Critically, we also demonstrate that the impact (...) of categorisation fluency depends on the specific nature of the expressive features. When faces vary on valence, trust judgments increase with their positivity, but also depend on fluency. When faces vary on social motivation, trust judgments increase with their approachability, but remain impervious to disfluency. This suggests that people intelligently use fluency to make judgments on val... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The following text is a large fragment of the lectures on heresy that Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) gave between November 1982 and February 1983 on the Polish radio station Radio Free Europe. These lectures have never been published in English. They were only published under the title ‘Herezja’ in Poland after the author’s death in 2010 by the publishing company Znak. Kołakowski raises the universal and timeless issues of tolerance, ideological struggles, protection of doctrine by religious institutions and the changing (...) attitude of the Catholic Church towards heretical challenges (tackling them and attempting to annex and colonize certain ideas). The concept of heresy is an opportunity to describe the history of ideological conflicts, show how they arise and how they can be resolved. The story of struggle between dogmatists and heretics is an endless story of changing social order and giving new shapes to the reality created by people and their ideas. Kołakowski points out that any doctrinal, political or ideological system must allow for criticism and otherness. Nearly 40 years after these lectures were given, they retain a special freshness in the context of the political, ideological and social crisis that Europe is experiencing in the early twenty-first century. (shrink)

This Research Topic addresses the first Sustainable Development Goal, which is to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere.” Progress toward this goal is measured by a number of individual targets and indicators. As highlighted in the UN’s most recent SDG progress report, the slowdown in poverty reduction since 2015 has been greatly exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, for example, around 120 million people were pushed back into extreme poverty, representing the first increase in extreme poverty in over (...) 20 years. Along with workers in the informal economy, the pandemic has also disproportionately impacted young and female workers. At present, the goal of eradicating poverty by 2030 is not on course to be met, with around 600 million people expected to be living in extreme poverty in 2030. Against the backdrop of the growing climate crisis, significant efforts are therefore needed to bring the 2030 target within reach. * This Research Topic will address the first Sustainable Development Goal from a sociology-specific perspective. It will enquire about the framing and elaboration of the goal, its adaptation to particular geographical contexts, stakeholder involvement in it, and influence and impact of social mobility and social stratification studies on it. Given the setbacks to poverty reduction across the world resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s edition of the Research Topic will focus particularly on the challenges and complexities of poverty reduction in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. (shrink)

As far as existence of enduring subjects of change is concerned, Roman Ingarden's substance ontology stands in direct opposition to Whitehead's process metaphysics. However, with regard to domain of necessary relations, both systems are deeply platonic. Thus in this paper I pursue towards revealing some parallels and differences between both systems regarding views on ideal entities, necessary relations and pure possibilities. I examine whether having assumed contrary concepts of reality (substantial/procesual) both philosophers are forced to accept diverse conclusions in respect (...) to ideal entities domain. I also point out some crucial problems that are to be found in both systems: what is the ground of necessary relations – is it a nature of so called ideal qualities, or is it content of ideas (Ingarden); is it an individual or a relational essence of eternal objects, so called "primordial nature of God", or evolving actuality (Whitehead). Finally I investigate whether points of convergence between both concepts could serve as a basis for some modifications to overcome relevant problems. (shrink)

On the base of the classical logic the connectives of necessity and possibility have the equivalent positions in this sense that each of them is definable by the other one. The consequence of this fact is the possibility to define of the both modalities using the connective of identity. Thus, the connective of propositional identity defining the congruence of the propositional language has become the base of the reconstruction of necessity operator in some modal systems. Already in 1957 Greniewski [9] (...) obtained system S5 on the base of the propositional calculus with identity. Next, Cresswell [3], [4] reconstructed S4 and S5 in a similar way. Systematic investigations of this problem were undertaken by Suszko within the broader frame of SCI programme [16], [17], [18]. The connections between modal connectives and the connective of identity settle some philosophical sense of both modalities. Something is necessary, if it is identical with a logical truth. If something is different from the negation of some logical truth, it is possible. It is however, the “ontological” characteristics typical for modalities defined on the base of the classical logic. The settling of similar connections between intuitionistic identity and intuitionistic modalities uncover the philosophical sense of the “epistemic” necessity and possibility. Unfortunately, the symmetry between the classical and intuitionistic case is not entire. The acceptance of both equalities: = ¬ ¬ and = ¬ ¬, in the intuitionistic logic yields the classical versions of both modalities . Thus, there is a problem with defining the connective of intuitionistic possibility by the connective of identity. In Sections 2 and 3 two “partial” solutions of the mentioned problem are presented. They are “partial” because the connective of possibility has undesirable properties. The second solution yields the strengthening of the necessity connective, too. The main aim of this paper is obtained in Section 5, where a definition of the intuitionistic possibility is given. This definition uses the new connective of nonidentity, presented in Section 4. The new approach bases on the idea that some connectives like implication, negation, identity, necessity are “Heyting's” ones. The case of possibility is different. Together with coimplication, weak negation, and nonidentity, possibility belongs to the so-called “Brouwerian” connectives. The connectives of the first kind have such property that in Kripke's style semantics their interpretations in each point of this semantics are related to the interpretations in next points. In the case of the “Brouwerian” connectives the interpretations in each point depend on the interpretations in previous points. In this sense, “Heyting's” connectives are interpreted from the point of view of the future, while the interpretations of the “Brouwerian” connectives are from the point of view of the past. The relations between nonidentity and possibility connectives allow to say that in temporal semantics something is possible in the moment a, if before a there was such moment b in which it was different from the contradiction. Thus, “something is possible” does not mean that it held once in the past. A broader philosophical remarks about the nature of intuitionistic possibility are contained in two Comments in the last Section. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe author traces the impact of Abramowski's ideas on the recent history of Poland. His concepts were not only popular in the Polish Socialist Party and the syndicalist movement in the interwar period, but they also exerted a profound influence on the cooperative movement and democratic left-wing opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. The leaders of the Workers’ Defence Committee were much influenced by Abramowski's ideas and, according to some researchers, the Solidarity movement from 1980 to 1981 in Poland was (...) the culmination of his concepts. Today's anti-systemic movements in Poland are also inspired by Abramowski. The author also draws attention to certain similarities between Abramowski's ideas, Kropotkin's idea, Gramsci's concept of civil society and the thought of the young Marx. The author also outlines Abramowski's social ideas in the context of ideas promoted by the main theoreticians of the Polish left in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (shrink)

Volume 17, Issue 5, November 2020, Page 566-588.

ABSTRACT The article analyses the language used by the Polish nationalist right in relation to LGBT communities and the right to abortion. The authors show links between the language of Church hierarchs and right-wing columnists as the ideological backbone of the governing right-wing populist right. According to the authors, the attack on gender is the same method of political mobilisation and power management as the campaign against refugees and the anti-immigrant hysteria. On the one hand, the anti-gender discourse may strengthen (...) the narrative against the ‘liberal EU’ and, on the other hand, it is used to show substitute ‘scapegoats’ in Poland. Moral panic makes it possible to release class tensions in the manner that is safe for the system through the artificially induced cultural and ideological conflict. However, the dispersed anti-gender discourse has a real impact on social attitudes – on the one hand, it polarises social sympathies and, on the other hand, it strengthens conservative attitudes. The analysis is based on right-wing press articles, Church hierarchs’ statements, videos on YouTube and a parliamentary debate about the right to abortion. (shrink)

Interpretations of logics with only truth-functional connectives create a number of problems regarding the understanding of interpreted sentences. A particular problem is caused by the understanding of a sentence that is the negation of another. What is the meaning of sentence ¬p, for a particular sentence p? Even when we know what the semantic correlate of the sentence p is, we still do not know how to understand the semantic correlate of the sentence ¬p. The standard algebraic approach does not (...) explain much. The problem is still open, because it is still unclear how to understand the element of algebra −v(p). The propositional logic with the connective of the content implication, as it is a non-Fregean logic, proposes a simple solution to this problem. The key to understanding the content of the sentence ¬p is to understand the content of the sentence p. Because, the content of the natural language sentence usually has a partial understanding, so it can be understood differently. Therefore, the negation ¬p is here understood adequately to the current and partial understanding of the sentence p. It seems that the proposed approach is consistent with our daily thinking. (shrink)

The ancient paradox of Protagoras had the opinion of an unsolved problem. The two solutions proposed in the 20th century by W. Lenzen and L. Aqvist are considered to be the best. In fact none of them may be treated as proper. In the paper we show that both of authors avoid contradiction solely by means of mere neglect. However quite a simple solution seems to be feasible when the paradox is approached as an amphibolic construction, thus an ambiguity.

This book, provides a critical approach to all major logical paradoxes: from ancient to contemporary ones. There are four key aims of the book: 1. Providing systematic and historical survey of different approaches – solutions of the most prominent paradoxes discussed in the logical and philosophical literature. 2. Introducing original solutions of major paradoxes like: Liar paradox, Protagoras paradox, an unexpected examination paradox, stone paradox, crocodile, Newcomb paradox. 3. Explaining the far-reaching significance of paradoxes of vagueness and change for philosophy (...) and ontology. 4. Proposing a novel, well justified and, as it seems, natural classification of paradoxes. (shrink)

As shown in (Łukowski, Gensler, 2013), the paradox of the stone is a failed attempt to show that “omnipotence” is a contradictory concept. An element of the argument presented there is that God, while unable to lift the stone, can nevertheless annihilate it. This work considers the amplification of the paradox of the stone to the form generated by the question: can God create a stone which He will not be able to lift, nor, once created, will He be able (...) to destroy. (shrink)

This paper is a proposal of continuation of the work of C. Rauszer. The logic of falsehood created by her may constitute the starting point for construction of logic formalising reductive reasonings. The extension of Heyting-Brouwer logic to its deductive-reductive form sheds new light upon those classical tautologies which are rejected in intuitionism. It turns out that among HBtautologies there can be found all the classical ones. Some of them are characteristic for deductive reasoning and they are accepted by intuitionism. (...) Others formulate the laws of reductive reasoning. Many of them, including the law of excluded middle has been rejected in Heyting’s intuitionism. Intuitionism only permits for those reductive tautologies, which at the same time bear deductive character. Thus, the complete HB intuitionism does not reject any of the classical tautologies. Every classical tautology appears in HB logic in its deductive or reductive part. Some are even present in both parts. At the end it is shown that the law of excluded middle α∨¬α is a law of the reductive part of the traditional, Heyting’s intuitionistic propositional calculus. (shrink)

ABSTRACT How can we understand the term ‘utopia’ and does the adjective ‘utopian’ discredit the social thought to which it refers? The author discusses the role of utopia in the emergence of social sciences and alludes to Immanuel Wallerstein and his analysis of utopistics. He also defends the hypothesis that in the times of political, economic and ecological crisis which is sweeping through Europe and the world in the first decades of the twenty-first century, utopian thinking may be reborn not (...) only as a way of showing possible social alternatives, but also as a means of democratizing public debate and the existing status quo. In this perspective, utopianism can be invigorating not only for democracy, but also for independent and critical social thought. Social utopias, which contributed to the rise of the mass workers’ movement in the nineteenth century, today may become a force mobilizing human imagination and sensitivity to the struggles for a more emancipatory and democratic social order. (shrink)

Copernicus Festival, held annually, aims to demonstrate various dimensions of the relationship between science and culture. The third edition of the festival was devoted to the concept of beauty. During the six days of the festival about 7 thousand people took part in lectures, debates, discussions, workshops, concerts and other events.

Copernicus Festival, held annually, aims to demonstrate various dimensions of the relationship between science and culture. The third edition of the festival was devoted to the concept of beauty. During the six days of the festival about 7 thousand people took part in lectures, debates, discussions, workshops, concerts and other events.