Urban Space,Representation, and Artifice

This article offers a semiotic approach to modes of representation and organization of urban space. With point of departure in the art historian Donald Preziosi’s account of art history as episteme of modernity, the aim is to characterise codes that regulate the representations of urban space in a development from modernity towards a post- or hypermodern condition. In order to understand especially developments in aesthetic representation, Roman Jakobson’s semiotic mode of “artifice” is reintroduced. It seems that the application of this semiotic mode is highly relevant to the understanding of aesthetic representation in general but also and especially to the understanding of the aesthetics of three-dimensional artefacts. The article concludes with a tentative matrix of urban spatial trends and a perspective to the impact of changes in communications technology on the developments of urban space. Although the article has a theoretical scope, it refers to a number of examples from and observations in the urban environment.

Violations of coherence in subjective probability: a representational and assessment processes account

Coherent judgment is a cardinal feature of rational cognition. Six experiments revealed systematic violations of coherence in probability judgment in which participants assigned different probabilities to mathematically equiprobable events. Experiments 1-5 revealed a strict refocusing effect: Compared to an occurrence frame, a non-occurrence frame resulted in higher estimates if base-rate evidence favored occurrence, lower estimates if evidence favored non-occurrence, and similar estimates if evidence supported indifference. Moreover, Experiments 5 and 6 revealed a pessimistic bias in which the less favorable of two equiprobable events was assigned greater probability. The findings support a Representational and Assessment Processes account (RAP) in which subjective probability is influenced by the perceived compatibility between representations of focal events and representations of evidence.     

Aesthetic interaction as fit between interaction attributes and experiential qualities

Designing an aesthetic interaction is an important issue for Interaction Design (ID) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). While a number of frameworks exist, the experimental study of potential underlying principles remains rare. In this paper, we suggest that particular interaction attributes (e.g., “fast”) are systematically related to particular experiential qualities (e.g., “feeling competent”) and that interaction “feels better” if interaction matches the intended experience. A laboratory study (N = 32) explores this notion by testing two different ways of interacting within the same activity (opening a wine bottle) in two different experiential scenarios (focusing on relatedness, focusing on competence). Two corkscrews with different interaction profiles were used: one assumed to support a feeling of competence and the other to support relatedness. As expected, we found systematic shifts in preferences for specific corkscrews, differences in affective experience and in the relationships between interaction attributes and experiential qualities depending on the fit of interaction to the experience.     

A logical formalization of the OCC theory of emotions

In this paper, we provide a logical formalization of the emotion triggering process and of its relationship with mental attitudes, as described in Ortony, Clore, and Collins’s theory. We argue that modal logics are particularly adapted to represent agents’ mental attitudes and to reason about them, and use a specific modal logic that we call Logic of Emotions in order to provide logical definitions of all but two of their 22 emotions. While these definitions may be subject to debate, we show that they allow to reason about emotions and to draw interesting conclusions from the theory.     

What kind of evaluative states are emotions? The attitudinal theory vs. the perceptual theory of emotions

This paper argues that Deonna and Teroni's attitudinal theory of emotions faces two serious problems. The first is that their master argument fails to establish the central tenet of the theory, namely, that the formal objects of emotions do not feature in the content of emotions. The second is that the attitudinal theory itself is vulnerable to a dilemma. By pointing out these problems, our paper provides indirect support to the main competitor of the attitudinal theory, namely, the perceptual theory of emotions.     

Neurobiological foundations of aesthetics and art

A theory of the neurobiological foundations of aesthetics and art is described. This has its roots in emotion, in which what is pleasant or unpleasant, a reward or punisher, is the result of an evolutionary process in which genes define the (pleasant or unpleasant) goals for action. To this is added the operation of the reasoning, syntactic, brain system which evolved to help solve difficult, multistep, problems, and the use of which is encouraged by pleasant feelings when elegant, simple, and hence aesthetic solutions are found that are advantageous because they are parsimonious, and follow Occam's Razor. The combination of these two systems, and the interactions between them, provide an approach to understanding aesthetics that is rooted in evolution and its effects on brain design and function.     

大学生对艾滋病患者的责任归因及惩戒行为反应

本研究通过被试对特定情景的反应借助于结构方程模型来确定对艾滋病患者的部位和控制性归因、责任判断、情感以及惩戒行为之间的数量化关系。309名大学生被试参与了该项研究,研究结果表明：对艾滋病的内部可控归因引起较高责任推断,较高生气类情感反应和较低同情类情感反应,以及较高惩戒行为;部位和控制性归因影响到责任判断和情感反应,责任推断除了直接影响到惩戒行为反应外,还间接地以情感反应为中介对惩戒为发挥作用。论文还结合中国文化的特点对结果进行了讨论。     

Contrasting stochastic and support theory accounts of subadditivity

Numerous studies have found that likelihood judgment typically exhibits subadditivity in which judged probabilities of events are less than the sum of judged probabilities of constituent events. Whereas traditional accounts of subadditivity attribute this phenomenon to deterministic sources, this paper demonstrates both formally and empirically that subadditivity is systematically influenced by the stochastic variability of judged probabilities. First, making rather weak assumptions, we prove that regressive error (or variability) in mapping covert probability judgments to overt responses is sufficient to produce subadditive judgments. Experiments follow in which participants provided repeated probability estimates. The results support our model assumption that stochastic variability is regressive in probability estimation tasks and show the contribution of such variability to subadditivity. The theorems and the experiments focus on within-respondent variability, but most studies use between-respondent designs. Numerical simulations extend the work to contrast within- and between-respondent measures of subadditivity. Methodological implications of all the results are discussed, emphasizing the importance of taking stochastic variability into account when estimating the role of other factors (such as the availability bias) in producing subadditive judgments.     

自我责任归因与推断的心理结构与特征

基于日常经验取向,运用问卷调查的方法,探索自我责任归因与推断的心理结构及其基本特征。对382名被试问卷调查的统计分析结果显示：（1）自我责任归因与推断结构是一种一元单向决定模式,即“责任推断→责任情感→责任行为”。（2）个体倾向于较多地将挫折或失败的原因归咎于可控起因,而较少归因于不可控起因。（3）个体在进行自我责任推断时,可控性程度仅对责任的大小构成影响,并不影响对是否承担责任的推断。（4）在自身应为挫折或失败承担责任时,个体在情感体验上较多自我责备,较少自我同情;在行为反应上,较多积极应对,较少甚至不大会消极应对。     

道德判断的分级现象

Blair(1996)发现即使没有心理理论的孤独症儿童,也具备道德判断能力。而Kahn(2004)认为没有心理理论就不可能完成道德判断。已有研究表明,道德判断可能需要一定程度的心理理论。孤独症儿童心理理论存在困难,影响他们理解道德情景并进行正确的道德判断,但这是否与任务的要求道德判断能力的程度不同有关呢?研究增加道德情景的复杂程度,进一步考察儿童道德判断规律。结果发现,道德判断有分级现象,第一级是直接对道德行为进行判断,孤独症和正常儿童都能完成该任务,可能是以原始情绪为基础的;第二级道德判断是对简单道德情景进行判断,需要以心理理论为基础,只有正常儿童才能完成;而对行为与意图不一致的复杂道德判断则需要以更加丰富的经历或者经验为基础,但其属于三级道德判断还是二级道德判断的高级形式还需要进一步的研究。     

Reply to Kurth,Crosby, and Basse’s review of Emotions,Values, and Agency

In this reply, I argue that the worries raised by Kurth and this coauthors are not fatal for the perceptual theory of emotions. A first point to keep in mind in discussing the analogy argument in favor of that account is that what counts is the overall balance of similarities and differences, given their respective weight. In any case, I argue that none of the alleged differences between sensory perceptual experiences and emotions are such as to rule out that emotions are a kind of perceptual experience which can confer epistemic justification of our evaluative beliefs. Finally, I suggest that the perceptual theory is in a position to nicely capture what happens when we disagree about evaluative issues.