The Impact of Music-Based Rational-Emotive and Cognitive-Behavioral Education on Positive and Negative Emotions: A Preliminary Investigation in Ecological Conditions

Although there is an extensive literature showing that both rational-emotive and cognitive-behavioral interventions (REBT/CBT) and music can alter various emotional responses, little is known about their ability to impact on both positive and negative emotions simultaneously. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate whether classical music combined with REBT/CBT psycho-education on emotions can alter people’s levels of positive and negative emotions. A number of 459 participants (62.7% females; m age = 36.67, SD = 11.754) were recruited for this study from the public attending to a classical music concert. The classical music pieces were selected by a group of experts in order to be conceptualized in relationship with components of the REBT/CBT’s ABC model of emotions (e.g., catastrophyzing, acceptance/meditation) and this conceptualization was also delivered during the concert (i.e., before each corresponding musical part). Emotions were assessed before and after the entire performance for all participants. Results indicated a significant change in emotions between the two assessments (F(11,397) = 59.99, p < .001, partial η² = .62), revealing significant increases for all the positive emotions and decreases for all the negative emotions that have been evaluated. This is one of the first experimental studies conducted on large-scale in fully ecological settings to confirm that music-based rational-emotive and cognitive-behavioral education might change the intensity of people’s positive and negative emotions simultaneously. These findings are discussed in line with the existing models of music and emotions.     

Descartes’ Dog: a Clock with Passions?

Although much has been written on Descartes’ thought on animals, not so much has originated in, or has taken full account of, Descartes’ views on (human) emotions. I explore here the extent to which the latter can contribute to the debate on whether he embraced, and to which extent, the doctrine of the bête machine. I first try to show that Descartes’ views on emotions can help offer new support to the skeptical position without necessarily creating new tensions with other central aspects of his philosophy. And second, I sketch the type of theory of animal passions which Descartes could have accepted. The general conclusion I draw is not that Descartes did not hold the view of the bête machine but rather that we can find within his thought a solid stream of ideas, which became stronger towards the end of his life, that points in the opposite direction.     

Rank on Emotional Intelligence,Unlearning and Self-Leadership

Propelled from the inner circle after publishing The Trauma of Birth (1924), Otto Rank jettisoned Freud's science of knowing because it denied the intelligence of the emotions. Transforming therapy from knowing to being-in-relationship, Rank invented modern object-relations theory, which advocates continual learning, unlearning and relearning: that is, cutting the chains that bind us to the past. Separating, no matter how anxiety-provoking, from outworn phases of life, including previously taken-for-granted ideologies and internalized others, is essential for self-leadership. In 1926, Rank coined the terms “here-and-now” and “pre-Oedipal.” By 1926, Rank had formulated a model of “creative willing”—self-leadership infused with the intelligence of the emotions—as the optimal way of being-in-relationship with others.     

Depicting and seeing-in. The <Emphasis Type="Italic">‘Sujet’</Emphasis> in Husserl’s phenomenology of images

In this paper I investigate an underappreciated element of Husserl’s phenomenology of images: the consciousness of the depicted subject (Sujet or Bildsujet), which Husserl calls the Sujetintention, e.g. the awareness of the sitter of a portrait. Husserl claims that when a consciousness regards a figurative image, it is absorbed in the awareness of the depicted subject and yet this subject some how withholds its presence in the midst of its appearance in the image-object (Bildobjekt). Image-consciousness is an intuitive (anschaulich) consciousness that intends a being that is both ‘in’ and ‘beyond’ the image: the depicted subject haunts the image. Borrowing Richard Wollheim’s language, the aim of this study is to determine what it means for a consciousness to see a depicted-subject in an image-depiction, which happens on the basis of seeing an image-object in a material image-thing, like paint, canvas, ink, paper etc. Restricting myself to figurative images, I will argue against the view that the relation to the depicted subject is symbolic or signitive. I argue that the consciousness of the Sujet is quasi-perceptual, which allows for a better account of the depicted subject’s sense of absence. I develop this view on the basis of Husserl’s claims that the depicted subject is the bearer of norms inherent to intuitive appearances, which concern how the profiles and movements of an object ought to unfold, though they fail to do so for image-consciousness. This failure is not a mere privation for the image as a perceptual appearance but is inherent to its status as a mediated and artificial presence.     

Shared emotions: a Steinian proposal

The aim of this paper is to clarify the notion of shared emotion. After contextualizing this notion within the broader research landscape on collective affective intentionality, I suggest that we reserve the term shared emotion to an affective experience that is phenomenologically and functionally ours: we experience it together as our emotion, and it is also constitutively not mine and yours, but ours. I focus on the three approaches that have dominated the philosophical discussion on shared emotions: cognitivist accounts, concern-based accounts, and phenomenological fusion accounts. After identifying strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and summarizing the elements that a multifaceted theory of shared emotions requires, I turn to the work of the early phenomenologist Edith Stein to further advance an approach to shared emotions that combines the main strengths of Helm and Salmela’s concern-based accounts and Schmid’s phenomenological fusion account. According to this proposal, the sharedness of a shared emotion cannot be located in one element, but rather consists in a complex of interrelated features.     

Facial expression analysis with AFFDEX and FACET: A validation study

The goal of this study was to validate AFFDEX and FACET, two algorithms classifying emotions from facial expressions, in iMotions’s software suite. In Study 1, pictures of standardized emotional facial expressions from three databases, the Warsaw Set of Emotional Facial Expression Pictures (WSEFEP), the Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set (ADFES), and the Radboud Faces Database (RaFD), were classified with both modules. Accuracy (Matching Scores) was computed to assess and compare the classification quality. Results show a large variance in accuracy across emotions and databases, with a performance advantage for FACET over AFFDEX. In Study 2, 110 participants’ facial expressions were measured while being exposed to emotionally evocative pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), the Geneva Affective Picture Database (GAPED) and the Radboud Faces Database (RaFD). Accuracy again differed for distinct emotions, and FACET performed better. Overall, iMotions can achieve acceptable accuracy for standardized pictures of prototypical (vs. natural) facial expressions, but performs worse for more natural facial expressions. We discuss potential sources for limited validity and suggest research directions in the broader context of emotion research.     

Emotional Competence and Anxiety in Childhood and Adolescence: A Meta-Analytic Review

Anxiety is conceptualized as a state of negative emotional arousal that is accompanied by concern about future threat. The purpose of this meta-analytic review was to evaluate the evidence of associations between emotional competence and anxiety by examining how specific emotional competence domains (emotion recognition, emotion expression, emotion awareness, emotion understanding, acceptance of emotion, emotional self-efficacy, sympathetic/empathic responses to others’ emotions, recognition of how emotion communication and self-presentation affect relationships, and emotion regulatory processes) relate to anxiety in childhood and adolescence. A total of 185 studies were included in a series of meta-analyses (N’s ranged from 573 to 25,711). Results showed that anxious youth are less effective at expressing (r = ?0.15) and understanding emotions (r = ?0.20), less aware of (r = ?0.28) and less accepting of their own emotions (r = ?0.49), and report less emotional self-efficacy (r = ?0.36). More anxious children use more support-seeking coping strategies (r = 0.07) and are more likely to use less adaptive coping strategies including avoidant coping (r = 0.18), externalizing (r = 0.18), and maladaptive cognitive coping (r = 0.34). Emotion acceptance and awareness, emotional self-efficacy, and maladaptive cognitive coping yielded the largest effect sizes. Some effects varied with children’s age. The findings inform intervention and treatment programs of anxiety in youth and identify several areas for future research.     

Reasoning defeasibly about probabilities

In concrete applications of probability, statistical investigation gives us knowledge of some probabilities, but we generally want to know many others that are not directly revealed by our data. For instance, we may know prob(P/Q) (the probability of P given Q) and prob(P/R), but what we really want is prob(P/Q&;R), and we may not have the data required to assess that directly. The probability calculus is of no help here. Given prob(P/Q) and prob(P/R), it is consistent with the probability calculus for prob(P/Q&;R) to have any value between 0 and 1. Is there any way to make a reasonable estimate of the value of prob(P/Q&;R)? A related problem occurs when probability practitioners adopt undefended assumptions of statistical independence simply on the basis of not seeing any connection between two propositions. This is common practice, but its justification has eluded probability theorists, and researchers are typically apologetic about making such assumptions. Is there any way to defend the practice? This paper shows that on a certain conception of probability—nomic probability—there are principles of “probable probabilities” that license inferences of the above sort. These are principles telling us that although certain inferences from probabilities to probabilities are not deductively valid, nevertheless the second-order probability of their yielding correct results is 1. This makes it defeasibly reasonable to make the inferences. Thus I argue that it is defeasibly reasonable to assume statistical independence when we have no information to the contrary. And I show that there is a function Y(r, s, a) such that if prob(P/Q) = r, prob(P/R) = s, and prob(P/U) = a (where U is our background knowledge) then it is defeasibly reasonable to expect that prob(P/Q&;R) = Y(r, s, a). Numerous other defeasible inferences are licensed by similar principles of probable probabilities. This has the potential to greatly enhance the usefulness of probabilities in practical application.     

Aristotle,Akrasia, and the Place of Desire in Moral Reasoning

This paper serves both as a discussion of Henry’s (Ethical Theory Moral Practice, 5:255–270, 2002) interpretation of Aristotle on the possibility of akrasia – knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway – and an indication of the importance of desire in Aristotle’s account of moral reasoning. As I will explain, Henry’s interpretation is advantageous for the reason that it makes clear how Aristotle could have made good sense of genuine akrasia, a phenomenon that we seem to observe in the real world, while maintaining non-trivial distinctions between temperance (sôphrosunê), self-indulgence (akolasia), self-control (enkrateia) and akrasia. There are, however, some interpretive challenges that follow from Henry’s account and this paper is intended to explain and resolve those.     

Subjunctive Conditional Probability

There seem to be two ways of supposing a proposition: supposing “indicatively” that Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, it is likely that someone else did; supposing “subjunctively” that Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, it is likely that nobody would have written the play. Let P(B//A) be the probability of B on the subjunctive supposition that A. Is P(B//A) equal to the probability of the corresponding counterfactual, A □→B? I review recent triviality arguments against this hypothesis and argue that they do not succeed. On the other hand, I argue that even if we can equate P(B//A) with P(A □→B), we still need an account of how subjunctive conditional probabilities are related to unconditional probabilities. The triviality arguments reveal that the connection is not as straightforward as one might have hoped.     

The Mereological Foundation of Megethology

In Mathematics is megethology (Lewis (1993). Philosophia Mathematica, 1(1), 3–23) David K. Lewis proposes a structuralist reconstruction of classical set theory based on mereology. In order to formulate suitable hypotheses about the size of the universe of individuals without the help of set-theoretical notions, he uses the device of Boolos’ plural quantification for treating second order logic without commitment to set-theoretical entities. In this paper we show how, assuming the existence of a pairing function on atoms, as the unique assumption non expressed in a mereological language, a mereological foundation of set theory is achievable within first order logic. Furthermore, we show how a mereological codification of ordered pairs is achievable with a very restricted use of the notion of plurality without plural quantification.     

Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Technology: Tool Use,Forms of Life,Technique, and a Transcendental Argument

The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein is seldom used by philosophers of technology, let alone in a systematic way, and in general there has been little discussion about the role of language in relation to technology. Conversely, Wittgenstein scholars have paid little attention to technology in the work of Wittgenstein. In this paper we read the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty in order to explore the relation between language use and technology use, and take some significant steps towards constructing a framework for a Wittgensteinian philosophy of technology. This framework takes on board, and is in line with, insights from postphenomenological and hermeneutic approaches, but moves beyond those approaches by benefiting from Wittgenstein’s insights into the use of tools, technique, and performance, and by offering a transcendental interpretation of games, forms of life, and grammar. Focusing on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language in the Investigations, we first discuss the relation between language use and technology use, understood as tool use, by drawing on his analogy between language and tools. This suggests a more general theory of technology use, understood as performance. Then we turn to his epistemology and argue that Wittgenstein’s understanding of language use can be embedded within a more general theory about technology use understood as tool use and technique, since language-in-use is always already a skilled and embodied technological practice. Finally, we propose a transcendental interpretation of games, forms of life, and grammar, which also gives us a transcendental way of looking at technique, technological practice, and performance. With this analysis and interpretation, further supported by comments on robotics and music, we contribute to using and integrating Wittgenstein in a more systematic way within philosophy of technology and engage with perennial questions from the philosophical tradition.     

Contextual-Hierarchical Reconstructions of the Strengthened Liar Problem

In this paper we shall introduce two types of contextual-hierarchical (from now on abbreviated by ‘ch’) approaches to the strengthened liar problem. These approaches, which we call the ‘standard’ and the ‘alternative’ ch-reconstructions of the strengthened liar problem, differ in their philosophical view regarding the nature of truth and the relation between the truth predicates T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹ of different hierarchy-levels. The basic idea of the standard ch-reconstruction is that the T r ⁿ⁺¹-schema should hold for all sentences of \(\mathcal {L}^{n}\). In contrast, the alternative ch-reconstruction, for which we shall argue in section four, is motivated by the idea that T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹ are coherent in the sense that the same sentences of \(\mathcal {L}^{n}\) should be true according to T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹. We show that instances of the standard ch-reconstruction can be obtained by iterating Kripke’s strong Kleene jump operator. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how instances of the alternative ch-reconstruction can be obtained by a slight modification of the iterated axiom system KF and of the iterated strong Kleene jump operator.     

Sources of Meaning in Life Among Chinese University Students

The current studies were designed to explore the structure of sources of meaning in life among Chinese university students. In Study 1, we content-analyzed 171 students’ answers to the question of what made their lives meaningful and derived 74 frequently mentioned ideas. Then, we composed a questionnaire based on these ideas and administered it to another sample of 523 university students in Study 2. Seven underlying dimensions were identified through exploratory factor analysis: Self-development (i.e., to accomplish one’s aspirations and actualize one’s potential), social commitment (i.e., to contribute to society and to adhere to moral principles), interpersonal relationships (i.e., relationships with family members, friends and others), secular pursuits (i.e., stable jobs, material possessions and social status), experiences in life (i.e., to experience all the joys and sorrows in life), civilization (i.e., reading, thinking, music and arts), and autonomy (i.e., to make decisions freely and take charge of one’s own life). Results are discussed in light of the philosophical influences in Chinese culture, especially those from Confucianism and Taoism.     

Grounding and the explanatory role of generalizations

According to Hempel’s (Aspects of scientific explanation and other essays. The Free Press, New York, 1965) influential theory of explanation, explaining why some a is G consists in showing that the truth that a is G follows from a law-like generalization to the effect that all Fs are G together with the initial condition that a is F. While Hempel’s overall account is now widely considered to be deeply flawed, the idea that some generalizations play the explanatory role that the account predicts is still often endorsed by contemporary philosophers of science. This idea, however, conflicts with widely shared views in metaphysics according to which the generalization that all Fs are G is partially explained by the fact that a is G. I discuss two solutions to this conflict that have been proposed recently, argue that they are unsatisfactory, and offer an alternative.     

The Structure Group of a Generalized Orthomodular Lattice

Orthomodular lattices with a two-valued Jauch–Piron state split into a generalized orthomodular lattice (GOML) and its dual. GOMLs are characterized as a class of L-algebras, a quantum structure which arises in the theory of Garside groups, algebraic logic, and in connections with solutions of the quantum Yang–Baxter equation. It is proved that every GOML X embeds into a group G(X) with a lattice structure such that the right multiplications in G(X) are lattice automorphisms. Up to isomorphism, X is uniquely determined by G(X), and the embedding \(X\hookrightarrow G(X)\) is a universal group-valued measure on X.     

Substance concepts and personal identity

According to one argument for Animalism about personal identity, animal, but not person, is a Wigginsian substance concept—a concept that tells us what we are essentially. Person supposedly fails to be a substance concept because it is a functional concept that answers the question “what do we do?” without telling us what we are. Since person is not a substance concept, it cannot provide the criteria for our coming into or going out of existence; animal, on the other hand, can provide such criteria. This argument has been defended by Eric Olson, among others. I argue that this line of reasoning fails to show Animalism to be superior to the Psychological Approach, for the following two reasons: (1) human animal, animal, and organism are all functional concepts, and (2) the distinction between what something is and what it does is illegitimate on the reading that the argument needs.     

The Factor Structure of the Forms of Self-Criticising/Attacking &amp; Self-Reassuring Scale in Thirteen Distinct Populations

There is considerable evidence that self-criticism plays a major role in the vulnerability to and recovery from psychopathology. Methods to measure this process, and its change over time, are therefore important for research in psychopathology and well-being. This study examined the factor structure of a widely used measure, the Forms of Self-Criticising/Attacking & Self-Reassuring Scale in thirteen nonclinical samples (N?=?7510) from twelve different countries: Australia (N?= 319), Canada (N?= 383), Switzerland (N?= 230), Israel (N?=?476), Italy (N?=?389), Japan (N?=?264), the Netherlands (N?=?360), Portugal (N?=?764), Slovakia (N?=?1326), Taiwan (N?=?417), the United Kingdom 1 (N?=?1570), the United Kingdom 2 (N?=?883), and USA (N?=?331). This study used more advanced analyses than prior reports: a bifactor item-response theory model, a two-tier item-response theory model, and a non-parametric item-response theory (Mokken) scale analysis. Although the original three-factor solution for the FSCRS (distinguishing between Inadequate-Self, Hated-Self, and Reassured-Self) had an acceptable fit, two-tier models, with two general factors (Self-criticism and Self-reassurance) demonstrated the best fit across all samples. This study provides preliminary evidence suggesting that this two-factor structure can be used in a range of nonclinical contexts across countries and cultures. Inadequate-Self and Hated-Self might not by distinct factors in nonclinical samples. Future work may benefit from distinguishing between self-correction versus shame-based self-criticism.     

The Hidden Set-Theoretical Paradox of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Tractatus</Emphasis>

We are familiar with various set-theoretical paradoxes such as Cantor's paradox, Burali-Forti's paradox, Russell's paradox, Russell-Myhill paradox and Kaplan's paradox. In fact, there is another new possible set-theoretical paradox hiding itself in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1989). From the Tractatus’s Picture theory of language (hereafter LP) we can strictly infer the two contradictory propositions simultaneously: (a) the world and the language are equinumerous; (b) the world and the language are not equinumerous. I call this antinomy the world-language paradox. Based on a rigorous analysis of the Tractatus, with the help of the technical resources of Cantor’s naive set theory (Cantor in Mathematische Annalen, 46, 481–512, 1895, Mathematische Annalen, 49, 207–246, 1897) and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (hereafter ZFC) (Jech 2006: 3–15; Kunen 1992: xv–xvi; Bagaria 2008: 619–622), I outline the world-language paradox and assess the unique possible solution plan, i.e., the mathematical plan utilizing ‘infinity’. I conclude that Wittgenstein cannot solve the hidden set-theoretical paradox of the Tractatus successfully unless he gives up his finitism.