This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

This authoritative volume provides a comprehensive road map of the important and rapidly growing field of emotion regulation.

In Sensations of History, James J. Hodge argues that animation in new media art transforms historical experience in the digital age. Combining close textual analysis of experimental new media artworks with discussion of key phenomenological texts, Sensations of History argues for the broad critical significance of animation as we shift from analog to digital technologies. Hodge looks closely at animation aesthetics, which allow for a clear grasp of the ways digital technologies transform our sense of historical experience.

Both the psychology of perception and the philosophy of perception seem to show a new face when the process is considered at its own level, distinct from that of sensation. Unfamiliar conceptions in physics, anatomy, physiology, psychology, and phenomenology are required to clarify the separation and make it plausible. But there have been so many dead ends in the effort to solve the theoretical problems of perception that radical proposals may now be acceptable. Scientists are often more conservative than philosophers (...) of science. I end, therefore, as I began, with a plea for help. (shrink)

Emotion regulation has the odd distinction of being a wildly popular construct whose scientific existence is in considerable doubt. In this article, we discuss the confusion about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can and should be distinguished from one another. We describe a continuum of perspectives on emotion, and highlight how different (often mutually incompatible) perspectives on emotion lead to different views about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can be usefully distinguished. We argue that making differences in perspective (...) explicit serves the function of allowing researchers with different theoretical commitments to collaborate productively despite seemingly insurmountable differences in terminology and methods. (shrink)

Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is one of the great modern examinations of religion's meaning, function and impact on human affairs. In this volume, the first complete English-language commentary on the work, James J. DiCenso explains the historical context in which the book appeared, including the importance of Kant's conflict with state censorship. He shows how the Religion addresses crucial Kantian themes such as the relationship between freedom and morality, the human propensity to evil, the status (...) of historical traditions in relation to ethical principles, and the interface between individual ethics and social institutions. The major arguments are clearly and precisely explained, and the themes are highlighted and located within Kant's mature critical philosophy, especially his ethics. The commentary will be valuable for all who are interested in the continuing relevance of religion for contemporary inquiries into ethics, public institutions and religious traditions. (shrink)

One of the most fundamental distinctions in the field of emotion is the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation. This distinction fits comfortably with folk theories, which view emotions as passions that arise unbidden and then must be controlled. But is it really helpful to distinguish between emotion generation and emotion regulation? In this article, we begin by offering working definitions of emotion generation and emotion regulation. We argue that in some circumstances, the distinction between emotion generation and emotion (...) regulation is indeed useful. We point both to citation patterns, which indicate that researchers from across a number of sub-areas within psychology are making this distinction, and to empirical studies, which indicate the utility of this distinction in many different research contexts. We then consider five ways in which the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation can be problematic. We suggest that it is time to move beyond debates about whether this distinction is useful to a more specific consideration of when and in what ways this distinction is useful, and in this spirit, we offer recommendations for future research. (shrink)

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. (...) Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d’, where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer’s willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness. (shrink)

This paper and its subsequent parts (Part II and Part III) build on an earlier publication (McKenna 1986). They suggest that important clinical data on the relationship between infantile constitutional deficits and microenvironmental factors relevant to SIDS can be acquired by examining the physiological regulatory effects (well documented among nonhuman primates) that parents assert on their infants when they sleep together.I attempt to show why access to parental sensory cues (movement, touch, smell, sound) that induce arousals in infants while they (...) sleep could possibly help one of many different subclasses of infants either to override certain kinds of sleep-induced breathing control errors suspected to be involved in SIDS or to avoid them altogether. I do not suggest that solitary nocturnal sleep “causes” SIDS, that all parents should sleep with their infants, or that traditional SIDS research strategies should be abandoned. However, using evolutionary data, I do suggest that an adaptive fit exists between parent-infant sleep contact and the natural physiological vulnerabilities of the neurologically immature human infant, whose breathing system is more complex than that of other mammals owing to its speech-breathing abilities. This “fit” is best understood, it is argued, in terms of the 4–5 million years of human evolution in which parent-infant contact was almost certainly continuous during at least the first year of an infant’s life. Thus, to dismiss the idea that solitary sleep has no physiological consequences for infants does not accord with scientific facts. (shrink)

Modern emotion theories emphasise the adaptive value of emotions. Emotions are by no means always helpful, however. They often must be regulated. The study of emotion regulation has its origins in the psychoanalytic and stress and coping traditions. Recently, increased interest in emotion regulation has led to crucial boundary ambiguities that now threaten progress in this domain. It is argued that distinctions need to be made between (1) regulation of emotion and regulation by emotion; (2) emotion regulation in self and (...) emotion regulation in others; and (3) conscious and nonconscious emotion regulation. Using a process model of emotion generation, this review considers promising research on basic processes and individual differences in emotion regulation and poses five theoretical challenges. (shrink)

For all its popularity as a psychological construct, willpower is irremediably polysemous. A more helpful construct is self-control, defined as the self-regulation of conflicting impulses. We show how the process model of self-control provides a principled framework for examining how undesirable impulses may be weakened and desirable impulses may be strengthened.

One of the most fundamental distinctions in the field of emotion is the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation. This distinction fits comfortably with folk theories, which view emotions as passions that arise unbidden and then must be controlled. But is it really helpful to distinguish between emotion generation and emotion regulation? In this article, we begin by offering working definitions of emotion generation and emotion regulation. We argue that in some circumstances, the distinction between emotion generation and emotion (...) regulation is indeed useful. We point both to citation patterns, which indicate that researchers from across a number of sub-areas within psychology are making this distinction, and to empirical studies, which indicate the utility of this distinction in many different research contexts. We then consider five ways in which the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation can be problematic. We suggest that it is time to move beyond debates about whether this distinction is useful to a more specific consideration of when and in what ways this distinction is useful, and in this spirit, we offer recommendations for future research. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the ethical-political dilemma in Kant’s work, sometimes expressed through the metaphor of the “crooked wood of humanity.” Kant separates external and internal freedom and the types of legislation each form of freedom requires (coercive and noncoercive). Yet, he also argues that corrupt political institutions adversely affect individual ethical development, and, reciprocally, corrupt inner dispositions of a populace adversely affect the establishment of just political institutions. I argue that a major way in which Kant addresses this vicious circle (...) is through ethical institutions, that is, noncoercive public resources for articulating and disseminating the principles of the moral law. I discuss the idea of an ethico-civil society or ethical community formulated in the Religion as an ideal model for ethical institutions mediating the ethical and the legal-political in a noncoercive, progressive manner. (shrink)

Individuals and businesses make numerous payments every day. They sometimes have choices about what forms of payment to make or accept, and at other times are effectively forced to use a particular form. Often there is an asymmetric power relationship between payer and payee that raises the issue of whether one side unfairly exploits the other. Is it unethical exploitation for an employer to pay employees with a fee-laden payroll card over other more convenient forms of payment? Does the fee (...) structure of payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard unfairly exploit merchants? The bitcoin payment system is an ethical as well as technological evolution as it was designed to be an electronic payment system that does not rely upon trust. Can an entire payment system like bitcoin be “evil,” as charged by Krugman? Payment tools as such are ethically neutral, but can be used in an ethical or unethical manner. (shrink)

Postnatal parent-infant physiological regulatory effects described in the previous paper (Part I) are viewed here as being biologically contiguous with events that occur prenatally, preparing and sensitizing the fetus to the average microenvironment into which the infant is expected, based on its evolutionary past, to be born. Following McKenna (1986), evidence (some of which is circumstantial) is presented concerning fetal hearing and fetal amniotic liquid breathing as they are affected both by maternal cardiovascular blood flow sounds in the uterus and (...) by fluctuating maternal blood sugar levels. These data are linked in turn to the infant’s postulated postnatal responsivity to parental sensory cues, including auditory and vestibular respiratory cues that may assist infants as they “learn” to breathe and, for some, to resist a SIDS event. Data on the respiratory and vocalizing behavior of normal and hearing-impaired persons are used to show that not all forms of human breathing are innate; some forms develop with experience. These data reveal how human infants learn, for example, to coordinate higher and lower brain respiratory nuclei in the context of learning initially to cry with intent and purpose and later to speak. Voluntary, cortex-based breathing emerges at the same time that infants are most likely to die from SIDS, between 2 and 4 months of age. This switch between voluntary and involuntary breathing during both sleep (while dreaming) and wake cycles, which depends on the integration of higher cortical and lower brain stem nuclei, is complex and is possibly the basis of the human species’ unique susceptibility to SIDS—a syndrome as yet unrecognized in other species. These human infant vulnerabilities, including delayed maturity, can explain in part why natural selection ought to favor increased infant sensitivity to parental sensory cues provided by a caregiver—stimuli available in the evolving parental care environment that included parent-infant co-sleeping for more than 4–5 million years of human evolution. (shrink)

This article re-examines the anthropological scholarship of Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955), who served as the president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1914–1917), the Royal Anatomical Society (1918), and the British Association of the Advancement of Science (1927), who wrote prolifically on anatomy, evolution, and the idea of race. While most commonly associated with the Piltdown man hoax, Keith's contributions to the discipline were far greater and more complex. This essay specifically considers how Keith sought to problematize the concept of the (...) nation, considering the nation-state as an evolutionary unit. The first half of this essay examines Keith's theories on the mechanism of evolution (hormonal instincts) and how this informed his ideas of races and nations as evolutionary units. The second half of the essay considers how Keith deployed his ideas about evolutionary instincts, with the goal of advising Britons about how an evolutionary perspective would help understand, if not resolve, modern political challenges, both international and domestic, that faced the British Empire around the time of the First World War. (shrink)

It examines three core questions. First, what is the scope and direction of neuroscientific inquiry?

In the target article, Bowers et al. dispute deep artificial neural network (ANN) models as the currently leading models of human vision without producing alternatives. They eschew the use of public benchmarking platforms to compare vision models with the brain and behavior, and they advocate for a fragmented, phenomenon-specific modeling approach. These are unconstructive to scientific progress. We outline how the Brain-Score community is moving forward to add new model-to-human comparisons to its community-transparent suite of benchmarks.