Preconceptions of taste based on color

The authors examined preconceptions of taste based on color with a questionnaire administered to 45 college students. The questionnaire related 8 tastes with 10 colors. The results suggested that only a limited number of colors are positively associated with preconceptions of taste. However, certain colors (e.g., red and green) showed consistent patterns of association with taste. Implications for future research examining an indirect relationship between color and taste are discussed.     

Escaping Heaven

In response to the problem of Hell, Buckareff and Plug (Relig Stud 41:39–54, 2005; Relig Stud 45:63–72, 2009) have recently proposed and defended an ‘escapist’ conception of Hell. In short, they propose that the problem of Hell does not arise because God places an open-door policy on Hell. In this paper, I expose a fundamental problem with this conception of Hell—namely, that if there’s an open door policy on Hell, then there should be one on Heaven too. I argue that a coherent conception of Heaven cannot have such a policy. Hence, escapism is not an adequate response to the problem of Hell.     

Escaping the Dark Side of Curiosity

Curiosity as a clinical entity has been a neglected subject in the psychoanalytic literature. Freud never addressed the issue of curiosity systematically. His interest was in trying to account for children's sexual questioning. Nevertheless, hinderance to internal curiosity—this is to say, that which intimidates and abates the appetite for an exploration of one's motives—is part and parcel of psychoanalytic inquiry. And, arguably, there is no greater clinical challenge for the analyst than trying to treat an analysand who appears to lack an interest in the underlying causes of his unhappiness. The problem of impeded self-inquiry is usually exacerbated in people with more serious emotional disturbances. My position here is that in studying the conditions that mitigate against curiosity in a seriously disturbed patient, we gain access to an enlarged version of the curiosity problems of our less disturbed patients. Here I interpret my clinical impressions about problems with curiosity with ideas from the writings of Martin Buber and Albert Camus.     

Escaping the natural attitude about gender

Alex Byrne’s article, “Are Women Adult Human Females?”, asks a question that Byrne treats as nearly rhetorical. Byrne’s answer is, ‘clearly, yes’. Moreover, Byrne claims, woman is a biological category that does not admit of any interpretation as (also) a social category. It is important to respond to Byrne’s argument, but mostly because Byrne’s argument is a paradigmatic instance of a wider phenomenon. The slogan “women are adult human females” is a political slogan championed by anti-trans activists, appearing on billboards, pamphlets, and anti-trans online forums. In this paper, I respond to Byrne’s argument, revealing significant problems with its background assumptions, content, and methodology.

     

The Institution of Philosophy: Escaping Disciplinary Capture

Philosophers view themselves as critical thinkers par excellence. But they have overlooked the institutional arrangements that govern their lives. The early twentieth‐century research university disciplined philosophers, placing them in departments, where they wrote for and were judged by their disciplinary (and now increasingly subdisciplinary) peers. Oddly, this change has been unremarked upon, or has been treated as simply part of the necessary professionalization of an academic field of research. The department has been tacitly assumed to be a neutral space from which thought germinates; it is not itself an object of reflection. We find no explorations of the effects that departmentalization might have on philosophical theorizing, or speculations about where else philosophers could be housed, or how, by being located elsewhere, they might develop alternative accounts of the world or have come up with new ways of philosophizing.     

Escaping from Rama: Portraits of Indian women

This study examines visual, post-colonial portraits of the Indian women of the Sanskrit epics, in order to show the sociocultural, historical-ideological roots of this aesthetic. After independence, Hindu movements found in the epics a female archetype, who stands for the Hindu community. Post-colonial visual representations maintained this idealistic characterisation within a binary system, according to which women can be angelic guarantors of the social order or devilish, sexually uncontrolled creatures. This ambiguity derives from the double nature of the female principle of the world, shakti, and the visual storytelling tradition or chitrakatha. Using the same Indian storytelling tradition, female points of view have begun to criticise this nationalistic, ‘male gaze’. In the graphic novel Sita's Ramayana, Rama and male activities, particularly war, are secularised and criticised as selfish by female characters, foremost of whom is Sita, a model of the devoted and pure bride or pativrata.     

Kierkegaard,Levinas and the Question of Escaping Metaphysics

While Kierkegaard and Levinas may well be thought of as religious or ethical thinkers, I should not like the reader to be misled by this into assuming that this article is primarily about religion or ethics. Rather, my main concern may more properly be described as metaphysical or epistemological, for I am interested in certain styles of thinking that underlie the religious/ethical themes dealt with here. Thus, this article aims to show that in relation to traditional metaphysical styles, and to each other, the thinking of Kierkegaard and Levinas is parallel and divergent in complex ways. Both share a mistrust of modernist metaphysics, which they aim to escape by pointing to the way in which conceptions of metaphysical totalities (or systems) are breached by a destabilising infinity already internal to them. This anticipates later postmodern styles of thinking which challenge modern metaphysics, its resentment against time, and its confidence in human power to represent all that is by means of closed systems of interpretation. To the extent that they offer philosophical alternatives that accommodate the temporal, both have had highly significant contributions to make to a postmodern style of thinking that has implications not limited to religion or ethics. A study of the philosophical strategies of these two thinkers, where they seem to succeed or fall short in relation to each other and to the traditional strategies of metaphysics, should go some way toward clarification of what I believe to be the most viable style of thinking for a postmodern world. As I see it, one is confronted with three options. The first, represented by Kierkegaard’s ‘infinite resignation,’ may be associated with a Derridean style of thinking. Kierkegaard himself abandons this in favour of a style of thinking for which faith and revelation stand as metaphors. Levinas, in contrast, offers an alternative whose leitmotif is ethical responsibility. I shall try to show in the end that the first of these, which best accommodates the ‘undecidability’ of a middle ground, is the most suitable for contemporary thinkers.     

Difficulty scaling of recognition items

Usual system: take as scale value the normal deviate corresponding to the areap = (p –p ₀)/(1 –p ₀), wherep is the proportion of correct answers andp ₀ is the chance proportion. Ifp p ₀, the item difficulty is unscalable. Proposed system: take as scale value the normal deviate corresponding to the areap =p ^x , withx so chosen thatp = .5 whenp is half-way betweenp ₀ and 1. Table givesD (=500 + 100z) forp = .00(.01)1.00 and for (= number of alternatives) 2,3,4,5,6,7, .     

Difficulty and interpersonal attraction

Male subjects learned that they would have to perform an easy, moderately difficult, or very difficult memory task in order to qualify for a “learning session” in which they would be accompanied by a moderately attractive female. Subjective measures taken just prior to task performance indicate that subjects viewed the female target as more attractive, sexy, and cute in the Moderately Difficult task condition than in the Easy and Very Difficult task conditions. Results are discussed in terms of a recently proposed model of motivation (Brehm 1979; Brehm, Wright, Solomon, Silka, & Greenberg, 1983), and research on the relation between difficulty and interpersonal attraction.     

Escaping capture: bilingualism modulates distraction from working memory

We ask whether bilingualism aids cognitive control over the inadvertent guidance of visual attention from working memory and from bottom-up cueing. We compare highly-proficient Catalan-Spanish bilinguals with Spanish monolinguals in three visual search conditions. In the working memory (WM) condition, attention was driven in a top-down fashion by irrelevant objects held in WM. In the Identify condition, attention was driven in a bottom-up fashion by visual priming. In the Singleton condition, attention was driven in a bottom-up fashion by including a unique distracting object in the search array. The results showed that bilinguals were overall faster than monolinguals in the three conditions, replicating previous findings that bilinguals can be more efficient than monolinguals in the deployment of attention. Interestingly, bilinguals were less captured by irrelevant information held in WM but were equally affected by visual priming and unique singletons in the search displays. These observations suggest that bilingualism aids top-down WM-mediated guidance of attention, facilitating processes that keep separate representations in WM from representations that guide visual attention. In contrast, bottom-up attentional capture by salient yet unrelated input operates similarly in bilinguals and monolinguals.     

Monty Hall Dilemma的困难原因探讨

采用Monty Hall Dilemma的经典研究范式,探讨了大学生被试在不同提示条件下对MHD问题的解决情况,结果发现只有在条件关系提示下,MHD的作业成绩才得到了明显的改善,但是正确率也只有35.7%。这表明MHD问题困难的原因很可能是多方面的,如认为主持人的行为完全是随机事件,很难意识到参与者的最初选择与主持人打开特定盒子间的三种条件关系;多数被试作出选择的理由是非理性的,如“坚持第一选择,相信自己的直觉”;不能正确判断MHD问题的内在概率关系以及缺乏认真思考的动力等。     

数列推理项目的难度模型构建

研究基于数列推理项目的认知模型归纳整合和丰富了数列推理项目的刺激特征,基于这些刺激特征生成了92个数列题目,组成四套不同的测验,共给466名学生施测。结果表明:测验的EAP信度为0.87,其中双层运算项目适合高水平能力被试;刺激特征及其交互作用显著影响题目难度;使用LLTM模型构建项目难度模型,该模型可以有效预测项目难度,预测项目难度和实测项目难度的相关为0.85。这说明研究选择和拓展的刺激特征能够显著增加和预测题目的难度。     

Escaping the World: Linguistic Indicators of Suicide Attempts in Poets

The purpose of this study was to determine features of language use in the texts of poets who committed suicide and to identify psychological factors contributing to depression and suicide. Texts of suicidal and non-suicidal poets were analyzed via the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program. ANOVA and logistic regression analysis revealed predictors of suicide: higher percentage of words self-oriented, expressed negative emotions, ambiguity, exclusion attitude toward reality, and lower percentages of words related to others, world entitativity, and experiencing the world. The data support hypotheses that suicide is facilitated by weak social bonds, egocentrism, helplessness, and visions of an unordered, uncertain, and unsafe world.     

Toward a Science of Other Minds: Escaping the Argument by Analogy

Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at work. In this paper, we show how this argument by analogy is flawed with respect to the case of second‐order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states.