Recommending beauty: semantics and pragmatics of aesthetic predicates

The paper offers a semantic and pragmatic analysis of statements of the form ‘x is beautiful’ as involving a double speech act: first, a report that x is beautiful relative to the speaker’s aesthetic standard, along the lines of naive contextualism; second, the speaker’s recommendation that her audience comes to share her appraisal of x as beautiful. We suggest that attributions of beauty tend to convey such a recommendation due to the role that aesthetic practices play in fostering and enhancing interpersonal coordination. Aesthetic practices are driven by a disposition towards the attunement of attitudes and aesthetic recommendations contribute to forwarding such attunement. Our view is motivated by an attempt to satisfy the following set of desiderata: to account for (i) the experiential nature of aesthetic judgments, (ii) disagreements in aesthetic debates, and (iii) the normative aspirations of aesthetic discourse, as well as to avoid appealing to (iv) error theory and (v) realist ontological commitments.     

Children's number processing is context dependent

The aim of this paper was to test the hypothesis of a context dependence of number processing in children. Fifth-graders were given two numbers presented successively on screen through a self-presentation procedure after being asked either to add or subtract or compare them. We considered the self-presentation time of the first number as reflecting the complexity of the encoding for a given planned processing. In line with Dehaene's triple-code model, self-presentation times were longer for additions and subtractions than for comparisons with two-digit numbers. Alternative interpretations of these results in terms of more cognitive effort or more mental preparation in the case of addition and subtraction than comparison are discussed and ruled out.     

Interpersonal similarity as a social distance dimension: Implications for perception of others’ actions

Building on the assumption that interpersonal similarity is a form of social distance, the current research examines the manner in which similarity influences the representation and judgment of others’ actions. On the basis of a construal level approach, we hypothesized that greater levels of similarity would increase the relative weight of subordinate and secondary features of information in judgments of others’ actions. The results of four experiments showed that compared to corresponding judgments of a dissimilar target, participants exposed to a similar target person identified that person’s actions in relatively more subordinate means-related rather than superordinate ends-related terms (Experiment 1), perceived his or her actions to be determined more by feasibility and less by desirability concerns (Experiment 3), and gave more weight to secondary aspects in judgments of the target’s decisions (Experiment 2) and performance (Experiment 4). Implications for the study of interpersonal similarity, as well as social distance in general, are discussed.     

Talking about sunbed tanning in online discussion forums: Assertions and arguments

Objective: There is increasing evidence of both health and appearance risks associated with sunbed use. At the same time, the sunbed industry promotes the benefits of using sunbeds, and the image of a tanned skin as attractive and healthy arguably remains embedded within contemporary western culture. These tensions are played out in everyday conversations, and this paper reports a study which explored how sunbed users manage them within online discussion forums.

Design: A total of 556 posts from 13 sunbed-related threads, taken from six different UK-based online forums, were analysed thematically followed by techniques from discourse analysis.

Main outcome measures: Informed by social representations theory and discursive-rhetorical psychology, the way social representations of sunbed use are constructed, debated and disputed in online discussion forums were explored.

Results: Sunbed users drew upon numerous representations to distance and protect themselves from negativity they were confronted with in the forums, utilising a range of rhetorical, discursive strategies to help them.

Conclusion: Theoretical contributions and potential practical implications of the findings are discussed. Findings indicate, for example, that those working on campaigns and interventions in this area need to consider the wider negativity and argumentative orientation of sunbed users’ responses.     

Mental representations of social status

How do people think about social status? We investigated the nature of social status and number representations using a semantic distance latency test. In Study 1, 21 college students compared words connoting different social status as well as numbers, which served as a control task. Participants were faster at comparing occupations and numbers that were semantically farther apart relative to those more closely related. In Study 2, we examined the semantic distance effect for a social status category, for which participants have as much knowledge of, as with numbers. We asked 15 US Navy Midshipmen to compare the social status associated with different ranks in the Navy as well as compare number magnitudes. Participants were fastest when comparing ranks far in status relative to ranks close in status. These findings reveal that humans have mental representations of social status that share properties with that of number.     

Reasoning about the future: Doom and Beauty

According to the Doomsday Argument we have to rethink the probabilities we assign to a soon or not so soon extinction of mankind when we realize that we are living now, rather early in the history of mankind. Sleeping Beauty finds herself in a similar predicament: on learning the date of her first awakening, she is asked to re-evaluate the probabilities of her two possible future scenarios. In connection with Doom, I argue that it is wrong to assume that our ordinary probability judgements do not already reflect our place in history: we justify the predictive use we make of the probabilities yielded by science (or other sources of information) by our knowledge of the fact that we live now, a certain time before the possible occurrence of the events the probabilities refer to. Our degrees of belief should change drastically when we forget the date—importantly, this follows without invoking the “Self Indication Assumption”. Subsequent conditionalization on information about which year it is cancels this probability shift again. The Doomsday Argument is about such probability shifts, but tells us nothing about the concrete values of the probabilities—for these, experience provides the only basis. Essentially the same analysis applies to the Sleeping Beauty problem. I argue that Sleeping Beauty “thirders” should be committed to thinking that the Doomsday Argument is ineffective; whereas “halfers” should agree that doom is imminent—but they are wrong.     

Cultural representations of thinness in women, redux: Playboy magazine's depiction of beauty from 1979 to 1999

Playboy's portrayal of the male ideal of feminine beauty, in terms of overall body size, percent normative weight, and waist-to-hip ratios (WHRs), was analyzed for the years 1979–1999. Trends were examined through body measurements obtained from Playboy centerfolds. Results reveal a continuation of the low body mass index (BMI) found in the Playmates by earlier studies; however, for the 21 years examined, the trend towards increasing thinness seems to have stabilized and may have begun to actually reverse. There was also an increase in the centerfolds’ WHRs over the 21-year time period. Overall, the results support the continued valuing in American society of a thin ideal for women; while the images of beauty have become somewhat heavier over the 21-year period reviewed, the Playmates remain markedly below weights normative for their age group.     

Johnson—Laird的“心理模型”理论述评

该文对Johnson—Laird的心理模型理论从心理模型的含义、表述该理论的一组原理、推理过程、该模型对推理结果的预测等方面作了综合评述,并对该理论在不同推理形式的心理模型描述方面作了解析。在充分肯定该模型对推理心理学的发展所作出的重要贡献的同时,也指出了这一模型在理论表述中所存在的主要问题。     

Seeing close others as we see ourselves: One’s own self-complexity is reflected in perceptions of meaningful others

Although past research has established a correspondence between the content of knowledge about the self and close others, the current work evaluated the prediction that the self-concept also influences the structure of these perceptions. Specifically, we expected greater correspondence in the complexity of mental representations between the self and others included in the self. In Study 1, we found that self-complexity was related to the perceived complexity of a close other and that this outcome did not reflect a general tendency to perceive the world in a systematically complex or simple fashion (i.e., cognitive complexity). In Study 2, we found that the correspondence between self-complexity and complexity of representations of others increased for individuals more included in the self. Finally in Study 3, we observed that experimentally manipulating inclusion of other in the self resulted in perceived structural similarity between representations of the self and others. Implications of self-concept representation for social relationships are discussed.     

Media presentation of the mental health bill and representations of mental health problems

This paper discusses the findings of a study that examined the way in which the Mental Health Bill of June 2002 was presented in the British national and local media over a 3‐year period. A Lexis Nexis search yielded 256 articles, which were then analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Overall, and perhaps contrary to what might have been expected given previous studies' conclusions regarding the media's negative portrayal of mental ill health, most articles tended to present a negative view of the Bill as unnecessarily repressive, and consequently were more sympathetic towards mental heath service clients, although this was not the case for tabloid articles. However, this paper then considers the more implicit representations found within the articles. It focuses particularly on the continued linking of mental ill health and violence, and also on the way in which the mental health service user might be portrayed as passive and rather pitiful as an alternative to violent and dangerous. It is suggested that the continued use of such images may stem from the fact that mental health problems have long been constructed as ‘Other’, and are therefore deeply engrained in our society. The implications of this for anti‐stigma campaigns are briefly discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Priming as a way of understanding children’s mental representations of the social world

Priming is a well established tool for experimental examination of how mental representations drive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that has been widely used in adult research. Priming is also a well established technique in cognitive development research. Social development research, however, has rarely used priming as a research method despite evidence that this technique is promising for helping researchers untangle causal connections between children’s mental representations and children’s social development outcomes. This paper discusses how priming methods may yield important insights into the role that children’s mental representations of the social world play in children’s social functioning. We begin by discussing the theoretical conceptualization underlying priming and priming methods. We next review evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of priming techniques in child development research. We conclude by suggesting ways in which priming can inform future research in social development using research examining attachment, social-information-processing, gender development, and mood and mental health as examples.     

From ‘Virgin Births’ to ‘Octomom’: Representations of Single Motherhood via Sperm Donation in the UK News

The use of sperm donation by single women has provoked public, professional and political debate. Newspapers serve as a critical means of both broadcasting this debate and effecting a representation of this user group within the public sphere. This study uses the theory of social representations to examine how single motherhood by sperm donation has been represented in the UK news over time. The study sampled news coverage on this topic in eight British newspapers during three 4‐year periods between the years 1988 and 2012. The dataset of news reports (n = 406) was analysed using a qualitative approach. Findings indicated that UK media reports of single women using donor sperm are underpinned by conventional categories of the ‘personal’, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘natural’ that when paired with their corollaries produce a representation of this user group as the social ‘other’. The amount of coverage on this topic over time was found to vary according to the political orientation of different media sources. Using key concepts from social representations theory, this article discusses the relationship between themata and anchoring in the maintenance of representations of the social ‘other’ in mass mediated communication. Findings are explained in relation to theoretical conceptions of the mass media and its position within the public sphere. It is argued that the use of personal narratives in news reports of single mothers by sperm donation may have significant implications for public understandings of this social group. © 2016 The Authors. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Efficient Communication in Written and Performed Music

Since its inception, Shannon's information theory has attracted interest for the study of language and music. Recently, a wide range of converging studies have shown how efficient communication pervades language, from phonetics to syntax. Efficient principles imply that more resources should be assigned to highly informative items. For instance, average information content was shown to be a better predictor of word length than frequency, revisiting the famous Zipf's law. However, in spite of the success of the efficient communication framework in the study of language and speech, very little work has investigated its relevance in the analysis of music. Here, we examine the organization of harmonic information in two large corpora of Western music, one made of MIDI files directly sequenced from scores, and the other made of MIDI recordings of live performances of highly skilled piano players. We show that there is a clear positive relationship between (contextual) information content of harmonic sequences and two essential musical properties, namely duration and loudness: the more unexpected a harmonic event is, the longer and the louder it is.     

Complexity and Novelty: Reading Mark C. Taylor

In this article the author maintains that complexity theory relies on reductionist assumptions, showing itself not to be completely convincing in dealing with the issue of novelty. First, an outline of Mark C. Taylor's The Moment of Complexity is presented as an exemplary case, particularly for his attempt to import complexity theory into the social sciences. Then, the connection between complexity theory and evolutionism is considered, arguing that this connection prevents complexity theory from giving a convincing account of the emergence of novelty. A provisional conclusion is offered by arguing that novelty should be conceived as arising from a “widening” of reduction at the individual level.     

Multiple Factors and Multiple Mechanisms Determine the Quality of Conscious Experiences: A Reply to Anzulewicz and Wierzchoń

In this Letter to the Editor, we seize the opportunity to respond to the recent comments by Anzulewicz and Wierzchoń, and further clarify and extend the scope of our original paper. We re‐emphasize that conscious experiences come in degrees, and that there are several factors that determine this degree. Endorsing the suggestions of Anzulewicz and Wierzchoń, we discuss that besides low‐level attentional mechanisms, high‐level attentional and non‐attentional mechanisms might also modulate the quality of conscious experiences.     

A formal model for structuring local perceptions of environmental space

The problem of constructing computational models of space that mimic those found in human spatial reasoning is addressed. This paper extends a formal model that addressed point objects in a 2D world to include the presence of line objects and barriers. The problem consists of determining an appropriate global model for the spatial configuration given a sequence of local views or observations. A formal model is proposed based on constraint network theory. The model leads to the identification of stable regions within which perceptual information about the environment changes slowly, and zones of transition within which the perceptual information changes more quickly. A special case of transition zones is a gateway, which may be viewed as a kind of discontinuity or singularity in the model. It is expected that the model obtained will be used to mimic human mental representations of navigable outdoor environments.     

演绎推理是基于规则还是模型?——来自空间推理的证据

对空间推理的研究有助于探明其加工机制以及验证心理逻辑理论和心理模型理论。行为研究通过考察多种影响空间推理的因素(如心理模型数量、前提的对象顺序等)证实了心理模型理论的预测。脑成像的研究表明,空间推理活动主要激活枕-顶-额脑区网络,顶区可能是推理的特异性脑区。研究的结果同样支持心理模型理论。未来的研究应该整合演绎推理的不同理论,加强对不同演绎推理任务的研究,并将脑成像技术与EEG或ERP结合起来,进一步探明人类空间推理的机制。