Unleashing the Constructive Potential of Emotions: Some Critical Comments on Risk,Technology and Moral Emotions by Sabine Roeser

Science and Engineering Ethics -     

工程价值及其评价

考虑到工程活动就是从人类生存的现实出发,自觉依循主体尺度与客体尺度,变革现存世界、创造价值,并通过价值评价进而实现价值的过程。因此,有必要探究工程价值及其评价问题,以更好地指导作为人的生存方式的工程实践。一价值与工程价值一般认为价值是一种关系范畴,反映的是主体与客体之间的意义、效用关系,其基础是主客体的相互作用,来源于人的生产和生活实践,即人的需要。简单地说,价值是客体满足主体需要的一种关系。根据客体满足主体需要的状况和程度,价值被区分为正价值、零价值和负价值。工程价值是指工程活动及其成果满足人的需要的一…     

Emotions in Advice Taking: The Roles of Agency and Valence

Recently, advice taking has received attention in decision‐making research, and some studies suggest that emotions may play a role in this process. Yet a clear account of how emotions influence advice taking is lacking. The current research introduces a parsimonious explanation by suggesting that such effects can be predicted on the basis of two emotion dimensions: valence (positivity or negativity) and agency (self‐focused versus other‐focused). In five experiments with different emotion inductions and different measures for advice taking, the effects of positive emotions such as gratitude and pride and of negative emotions such as anger and shame on advice taking were studied. The findings reveal that emotion valence and agency exert an influence on advice taking and that this interaction effect is mediated by the perceived ability of the advisor. Together, these findings provide a unique theoretical and empirical contribution to our understanding of emotions in advice taking. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Structure of Attitudes Toward Persons Who Are Deaf: Emotions,Values, and Stereotypes

The relative effects of affect, cognition, and stereotyping on attitudes toward persons who are deaf were studied. Respondents (N = 175) were initially asked to list terms or phrases that described (a) a typical person who is deaf, (b) the feelings the respondent experienced when thinking of a typical person who is deaf, and (c) beliefs about how a typical person who is deaf either facilitates or blocks cherished values held by the respondent. Then, each respondent evaluated as positive or negative each of the terms or phrases he or she wrote down. The relative effects of personality variables and structural variables on prejudicial attitudes were also assessed. Affect and past experience figured prominently in respondents' attitudes toward people who are deaf. Explanations for these findings and the implications of these results for prejudice formation and reduction were explored, especially in light of the passage, implementation, and enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act.     

Group-Based Emotions: The Impact of Social Identity on Appraisals,Emotions, and Behaviors

Because group-based emotions are rooted in the social identity of the perceiver, we propose that group-based emotions should be sensitive to changes in this social identity. In three experiments, young women reported feeling more anger, fear, and disgust toward Muslims when their identity as women had been made salient, in comparison with various control conditions where their identity as young adults, as social sciences students, their personal identity, or no identity had been made salient. These effects were mediated by appraisals of intergroup threats. In Experiment 3, the salience of the woman social identity also increased intentions to avoid Muslims.     

Liking, Arousal Potential, and the Emotions Expressed by Music

Previous research indicates that the specific emotions expressed by stimuli may be closely associated with their pleasing and arousing qualities, and this parallels psychomusicological research on the relationship between these two stimulus qualities. In light of this, the present research contends that the emotions expressed by musical stimuli are associated with their pleasing and arousing qualities. Sixty subjects rated 32 musical excerpts on 11-point scales representing the expression of eight specific emotions. Statistical analyses showed that these emotion ratings were predictable on the basis of 60 additional subjects' ratings of each excerpt in terms of 'liking' and 'arousal potential'. This indicates that ratings of liking and arousal potential are essentially similar to ratings of the specific emotions expressed by musical stimuli. These results are discussed in terms of the relationship between liking and arousal potential, and the implications that this may have for research on affective processes.     

Emotions,Attitudes, and Reasons

Our emotional faculties respond to successes, gains, advantages, threats, losses, obstacles, and other personally significant objects or situations, producing positive or negative evaluations of them according to their perceived import. Being an evaluative response is a feature that emotions share with paradigm attitudes (beliefs, intentions, judgments, etc.). However, recently philosophers have been reluctant to treat emotions as attitudes. The usual reasons given have to do with the automaticity of emotions and their occasional recalcitrance. In this article, I argue that these things shouldn't disqualify emotions from counting as genuine attitudes. Our emotions do bear the kind of relationship with our reasons that is characteristic of our attitudes.     

Voters, Emotions, and Memory

In this paper we argue that emotional response to information encountered in campaigns has implications for the likelihood of remembering that information at the time of the vote. Most voting models are built on what voters remember—whether it is the placement of candidates on issues, or opened ended responses to prompts. That recall of memory is biased is well-known, but the extent to which those biases are driven by affective response to candidate information has not been studied. Using dynamic process tracing, we examine voters' emotional responses, information search, and candidate evaluations during a simulated presidential primary campaign. By manipulating anxiety and the amount of incongruent information that voters encounter, we can detect the direct influence of affect in information processing. We find evidence that voters are more likely to remember information that generates any affective reaction as opposed to information for which the subjects report no emotional response. However, we find little evidence that anxiety has a special role, compared to enthusiasm or anger, in increasing the likelihood that an individual item is remembered. This challenges a primary contention of the theory of Affective Intelligence that anxiety leads to more memories for campaign information.     

Emotions, Retribution, and Punishment

I examine emotional reactions to wrongdoing to determine whether they offer support for retributivism. It is often thought that victims desire to see their victimizer suffer and that this reaction offers support for retributivism. After rejecting several attempts to use different theories of emotion and different approaches to using emotions to justify retributivism, I find that, assuming a cognitive theory of emotion is correct, emotions can be used as heuristic guides much as suggested by Michael Moore. Applying this method to the actual emotional reactions of victims' relatives, however, does not find support for retributivism. Instead, it suggests punishment should be understood as part of a process of recovery with a complex set of demands. Retributive concerns can play a role in the process, but they don't have the priority that retributivism requires.     

Emotions,feelings and intentionality

Emotions, I will argue, involve two kinds of feeling: bodily feeling and feeling towards. Both are intentional, in the sense of being directed towards an object. Bodily feelings are directed towards the condition of one's body, although they can reveal truths about the world beyond the bounds of one's body – that, for example, there is something dangerous nearby. Feelings towards are directed towards the object of the emotion – a thing or a person, a state of affairs, an action or an event; such emotional feelings involve a special way of thinking of the object of the emotion, and I draw an analogy with Frank Jackson's well-known knowledge argument to show this. Finally, I try to show that, even if materialism is true, the phenomenology of emotional feelings, as described from a personal perspective, cannot be captured using only the theoretical concepts available for the impersonal stance of the sciences.     

Emotions,narrative and change

There is a wide agreement that emotions are central to the evaluation and understanding of change processes in psychotherapy. Unfortunately, most of the debate on the role of emotions has been influenced by the reductionist view of ‘psychophysiological symbolism’ (Averill 1996). We defend the position that, in order to understand their role in psychotherapy fully, we need to move in the direction of a more complex view of emotions. This paper presents a view of emotionsas social constructed phenomena operating via language and narrative. We present research suggesting that these narratives may be an essential process for understanding psychological disorders, how these disorders are developed and, finally, how they can be changed.     

Emotions,values, and aesthetic perception

Philosophical naturalism is a suitable background for an account of aesthetic perception as an alternative to traditional aesthetic theory. Pragmatist notion of habits as meanings gives a basis for a conception of emotions and values in the framework of organism environment interaction. Any object of perception may be a carrier of meanings if some habits are involved. This holds for linguistic expressions as well as for tones of color, doors and windows, museums, galleries and other non-linguistic sign-vehicles. The outcome is a multilayered system of meanings with which aesthetic perception is interpreted.