As If Religion Matters: Teaching the Introductory Course as if it Does

This essay chronicles the academic odyssey of a young professor who sets out to revise the department's Introduction to Religion course only to realize that she must first clarify her vocational commitments before she can create a teachable course. She is convinced through working with many students who express disdain or even hostility toward the subject matter that she wants to model a relationship to the subject matter that says religion matters, but is uncertain how to do this. After an autobiographical foray into her academic upbringing in active learning, the author articulates four values to model in her teaching: personal relevance, academic responsibility, ethics, and community. The author then engages current scholarship in active learning, and narrates the process of translating those four values into concrete course goals and particular assignments. The essay concludes with an assessment of teaching the revised course.     

Truth holds as such only if we do not torment it

Abstract

Christopher Bollas: Being a Character: Psycho-analysis and Self Experience. London: Routledge, 1993.

“Unconscious Logic. An Introduction to Matte Blanco's Bi-Logic and its Uses” by Eric Rayner. London: Routledge 1995.     

Play it again,Sam: On Liking Music

Abstract

Emotional responses to music are discussed in the context of a constructivist theory of emotion, which postulates evaluative cognitions that generate the quality of the experience, and autonomic (sympathetic) arousal that influences its intensity. Arousal is frequently generated by cognitive, pcrceptual, and behavioural discrepancies. Schema theory is used to describe the listener's knowledge of the complex structure of music. Schemas serve to interpret music as well as to produce expectations about its likely form and progression. When music is discrepant from the listener's expectations (as it often is), the concatenation of arousal and evaluation produces emotional experiences. This theoretical framework guides an interpretation of emotional responses to familiar and (physically) complex music, and suggests ways of understanding structural evaluations as well as effects of music that have their source outside of musical structure.     

Rethinking Procreation: Why it Matters Why We Have Children

Attempts to explain the intuitive wrongfulness in alleged ‘wrongful life’ cases commonly do so by attributing harmful wrongdoing to the procreators in question. Such an approach identifies the resulting child as having been, in some sense, culpably harmed by their coming into existence. By contrast, and enlarging on work elsewhere, this paper explores the relevance of procreative motivation, rather than harm, for determining the morality of procreative conduct. I begin by reviewing the main objection to the harm‐based approach, which arises out of Derek Parfit's analysis of the non‐identity problem and its implications for preconception cases. Most attempts to avoid the non‐identity objection adopt either an impersonal harm approach or draw on some version of a metaphysical modal counterpart theory to defend a person‐affecting harm account. But here I develop an alternative view. The proposed account construes the wrongness in the considered cases as ‘evil’ rather than harm, and the type of evil in question as being of a non‐grievance, welfare‐connected, collective kind. Understanding the wrongness in this way offers a basis for the view that it matters morally why we procreate, and not just whether or how we do so.     

Negative estimate of variance-accounted-for effect size: How often it is obtained,and what happens if it is treated as zero

Researchers recommend reporting of bias-corrected variance-accounted-for effect size estimates such as omega squared instead of uncorrected estimates, because the latter are known for their tendency toward overestimation, whereas the former mostly correct this bias. However, this argument may miss an important fact: A bias-corrected estimate can take a negative value, and of course, a negative variance ratio does not make sense. Therefore, it has been a common practice to report an obtained negative estimate as zero. This article presents an argument against this practice, based on a simulation study investigating how often negative estimates are obtained and what are the consequences of treating them as zero. The results indicate that negative estimates are obtained more often than researchers might have thought. In fact, they occur more than half the time under some reasonable conditions. Moreover, treating the obtained negative estimates as zero causes substantial overestimation of even bias-corrected estimators when the sample size and population effect are not large, which is often the case in psychology. Therefore, the recommendation is that researchers report obtained negative estimates as is, instead of reporting them as zero, to avoid the inflation of effect sizes in research syntheses, even though zero can be considered the most plausible value when interpreting such a result. R code to reproduce all of the described results is included as supplemental material.     

Biology is destiny only if we ignore it

Problems of sustainability and survivability are best met not with moralizing but with policies that take advantage of our increasingly understood evolved human psychology. This knowledge helps us understand why our problems recur, and why we need not expect them to have permanent solutions. What is needed is an evolutionary praxis. It is possible, for example, to create policies that work around our tendencies to hierarchize and to form into ethnocentric and mutually hostile groups. Although in many ways there may be a mismatch between our evolved human nature and contemporary society, the fact that it is we who construct our environments must reduce the extent of mismatch.     

Sleep on it, but only if it is difficult: Effects of sleep on problem solving

Previous research has shown that performance on problem solving improves over a period of sleep, as compared with wakefulness. However, these studies have not determined whether sleep is beneficial for problem solving or whether sleep merely mitigates against interference due to an interruption to solution attempts. Sleep-dependent improvements have been described in terms of spreading activation, which raises the prediction that an effect of sleep should be greater for problems requiring a broader solution search. We presented participants with a set of remote-associate tasks that varied in difficulty as a function of the strength of the stimuli–answer associations. After a period of sleep, wake, or no delay, participants reattempted previously unsolved problems. The sleep group solved a greater number of difficult problems than did the other groups, but no difference was found for easy problems. We conclude that sleep facilitates problem solving, most likely via spreading activation, but this has its primary effect for harder problems.     

Doing as if: The histrionic self-presentation style

The histrionic self-presentation style is introduced as a concept that describes specific individual differences in self-presentation, namely, performing explicit As-If-behaviors in everyday interactions. The As-If-Scale (AIS), a trait measure of histrionic self-presentation, shows good internal consistency and test–retest reliability as well as convergent and discriminant validity in several samples. Construct validation involved determining relations between the AIS and the Big Five, histrionic role concepts, motives, competencies, humor and ambivalence. Furthermore, the AIS yielded incremental validity in predicting behaviors related to histrionic self-presentation over and above the self-monitoring construct. The possible impact of the histrionic style for research on self-presentation and other fields is discussed. It is argued that histrionic phenomena are pervasive within many facets of our western culture and therefore deserve further examination.     

Shared Knowledge Matters: Culture as Intersubjective Representations

The intersubjective representation approach to culture focuses on cultural members’ shared knowledge representations about the culture that they are in. Members of the same culture tend to share certain knowledge representations of the central characteristics of the culture. These shared cultural representations are established and perpetuated through dynamic communicative processes. Recent empirical research has provided support for the incremental value of intersubjective cultural representations in research on cultural identity, social cognition, and behaviors. The intersubjective representation approach complements extant research on culture as self and external artifacts. In doing so, it allows for a more comprehensive understanding of culture’s role in social and personality psychological processes.     

Science as if situation mattered

When he formulated the program of neurophenomenology, Francisco Varela suggested a balanced methodological dissolution of the hard problem of consciousness. I show that his dissolution is a paradigm which imposes itself onto seemingly opposite views, including materialist approaches. I also point out that Varela's revolutionary epistemological ideas are gaining wider acceptance as a side effect of a recent controversy between hermeneutists and eliminativists. Finally, I emphasize a structural parallel between the science of consciousness and the distinctive features of quantum mechanics. This parallel, together with the former convergences, point towards the common origin of the main puzzles of both quantum mechanics and the philosophy of mind: neglect of the constitutive blindspot of objective knowledge.     

Play it again with feeling: computer feedback in musical communication of emotions

Communication of emotions is of crucial importance in music performance. Yet research has suggested that this skill is neglected in music education. This article presents and evaluates a computer program that automatically analyzes music performances and provides feedback to musicians in order to enhance their communication of emotions. Thirty-six semi-professional jazz /rock guitar players were randomly assigned to one of 3 conditions: (1) feedback from the computer program, (2) feedback from music teachers, and (3) repetition without feedback. Performance measures revealed the greatest improvement in communication accuracy for the computer program, but usability measures indicated that certain aspects of the program could be improved. Implications for music education are discussed.     

Punishment as Fair Play

This article defends the fair-play theory of legal punishment against three objections. The first, the irrelevance objection, is the long-standing complaint that fair play fails to capture what it is about crimes that makes criminals deserving of punishment; the others are the recently raised false-equivalence and lacks-integration objections. In response, I sketch an account of fair-play theory that is grounded in a conception of the political order as a meta-cooperative practice—a conception that falls somewhere between contractual and communitarian conceptions—and draw on this account to show how the theory can overcome the objections.

Why Aboutness Matters: Meta-Fictionalism as a Case Study

Philosophia - Recent work in the philosophy of language attempts to elucidate the elusive notion of aboutness (Berto 2018; Lewis 1988; Fine 2017a, b; Hawke 2017; Moltmann 2018; Yablo 2014). A...     

Play it again: neural responses to reunion with excluders predicted by attachment patterns

Reunion behavior following stressful separations from caregivers is often considered the single most sensitive clue to infant attachment patterns. Extending these ideas to middle childhood/early adolescence, we examined participants' neural responses to reunion with peers who had previously excluded them. We recorded event‐related potentials among nineteen 11‐ to 15‐year‐old youth previously classified on attachment interviews (11 secure and 8 insecure‐dismissing) while they played a virtual ball‐toss game (Cyberball) with peers that involved fair play, exclusion and reunion phases. Compared to secure participants, dismissing participants displayed a greater increment in the N2 during reunion relative to fair play, a neural marker commonly linked to expectancy violation. These data suggest a greater tendency toward continued expectations of rejection among dismissing children, even after cessation of social exclusion. In turn, the link between self‐reported ostracism distress and neural signs of negative expectancy at reunion was moderated by attachment, such that self‐reports were discordant with the neural index of expectancy violation for dismissing, but not for secure children. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoRel5c-4s .     

Pretend Play as Twin Earth: A Social-Cognitive Analysis

Pretend play appears to be important to a theory of mind, but exactly how or why has been controversial. One widely entertained hypothesis about why pretense is important to understanding minds is termed the Metarepresentational Model. According to this model, children knowingly consider and manipulate mental representations during pretense. Children appreciate these mental representations as such and later come to apply their understanding of mental representation outside of pretense domains. This article reviews evidence relevant to the metarepresentational model, and it is concluded that the evidence does not support it. Alternative models of the relationship between pretense and theory of mind are reviewed, culminating in a proposed developmental model of the relation. The Twin Earth model proposes specific relations between pretend play and understanding minds, from the ontogenesis of pretense to the later emergence of role play and mental representational understandings of pretense. Central to the proposal is the supposition that pretend play functions for children in much the way that Twin Earth functions for philosophers—by allowing for participation in and reasoning about nonactual situations.