A Posteriori Physicalism and Introspection

Introspection presents our phenomenal states in a manner otherwise than physical. This observation is often thought to amount to an argument against physicalism: if introspection presents phenomenal states as they essentially are, then phenomenal states cannot be physical states, for we are not introspectively aware of phenomenal states as physical states. In this article, I examine whether this argument threatens a posteriori physicalism. I argue that as along as proponents of a posteriori physicalism maintain that phenomenal concepts present the nature of their referents in a partial and incomplete manner, a posteriori physicalism is safe.     

Neural correlates of establishing, maintaining, and switching brain states

Although the study of brain states is an old one in neuroscience, there has been growing interest in brain state specification owing to MRI studies tracing brain connectivity at rest. In this review, we summarize recent research on three relatively well-described brain states: the resting, alert, and meditation states. We explore the neural correlates of maintaining a state or switching between states, and argue that the anterior cingulate cortex and striatum play a critical role in state maintenance, whereas the insula has a major role in switching between states. Brain state may serve as a predictor of performance in a variety of perceptual, memory, and problem solving tasks. Thus, understanding brain states is critical for understanding human performance.     

Conflict and Loss Aversion in Multiattribute Choice: The Effects of Trade-Off Size and Reference Dependence on Decision Difficulty

Two experiments assess the type and amount of conflict influencing decision difficulty in hypothetical scenarios where subjects chose between two alternatives made to appear relatively attractive (approach–approach conflicts) or relatively unattractive (avoidance-avoidance conflicts), each involving attribute trade-offs across alternatives (embedded approach–avoidance conflicts). In Experiment 1, independent of information processing demands, decisions are more difficult when alternatives are unattractive and/or attribute trade-offs are large. Reference states that change the relative attractiveness of the alternatives increase or decrease decision difficulty in a manner consistent with loss aversion: Superior reference states increase decision difficulty more than inferior reference states reduce it. Experiment 2 further tests the reference dependence of decision difficulty by varying the nature of the reference state (stated comparators, as in Experiment 1, or endowments) as well as its extremity. Endowed reference states affect decision difficulty more than reference states that are stated comparators. Moreover, consistent with loss aversion, inferior reference states that are twice as extreme as superior reference states reduce decision difficulty about as much as the superior reference states increase it. The results demonstrate that decisions can be made easier or harder by way of reference dependence, and that the loss aversion so prevalent in preference formation generalizes to perceptions of decision difficulty in multiattribute settings.     

驾驶员情绪状态研究

采用驾驶员情绪状态量表(DPOMS),对265名客车驾驶员的情绪状态进行了问卷调查。结果表明：(1)年龄对驾驶员的疲劳状态有显著影响,对其余各种情绪状态没有显著影响;(2)女驾驶员的紧张精绪显著高于男驾驶员,积极情绪(精力)显著于低于男驾驶员;(3)出租汽车驾驶员的愤怒、疲劳、紧张等消极精绪显著高于公交大客车驾驶员,积极情绪(精力)显著低于公交大客车驾驶员;(4)事故组驾驶员的愤怒、疲劳、紧张、慌乱等消极情绪显著高于安全组驾驶员,积极情绪(精力)显著低于安全组驾驶员。     

Contributions of emotion understanding to narrative comprehension in children and adults

This study examined to what extent children and adults differ in how they process negative emotions during reading, and how they rate their own and protagonists’ emotional states. Results show that both children’s and adults’ processing of target sentences was facilitated when they described negative emotions. Processing of spill-over sentences was facilitated for adults but inhibited for children, suggesting children needed additional time to process protagonists’ emotional states and integrate them into coherent mental representations. Children and adults were similar in their valence and arousal ratings as they rated protagonists’ emotional states as more negative and more intense than their own emotional states. However, they differed in that children rated their own emotional states as relatively neutral, whereas adults’ ratings of their own emotional states more closely matched the negative emotional states of the protagonists. This suggests a possible difference between children and adults in the mechanism underlying emotional inferencing.     

Influence of children's emotional states on the recognition of emotion in peers and social motives to change another's emotional state

This experiment addressed the question of whether children's own emotional states influence their accuracy in recognizing emotional states in peers and any motives they may have to intervene in order to change their peers' emotional states. Happiness, sadness, anger, or a neutral state were induced in preschool children, who then viewed slides of other 4-year-old children who were actually experiencing each of those states. Children's own emotional states influenced only their perception of sadness in peers. Sad emotional states promoted systematic inaccuracies in the perception of sadness, causing children to mislabel sadness in peers as anger. Children had high base rates for using the label “happy,” and this significantly enhanced their accuracy in recognizing that state. Low base rates for labeling others as in a neutral state reduced accuracy in recognizing neutrality. Children were generally motivated to change sad, angry, and neutral states in peers, and they were most motivated to change a peer's state if they were to be the agent of such change. The results are discussed in terms of the limited role of children's own emotional states in their recognition of emotion in others or motives to intervene and in terms of factors influencing the perception of emotion, such as base rate preferences for labeling others as experiencing, or not experiencing, particular emotional states.     

WHAT ARE SEEMINGS?

We are all familiar with the phenomenon of a proposition seeming true. Many think that these seeming states can yield justified beliefs. Very few have seriously explored what these seeming states are. I argue that seeming states are not plausibly analyzed in terms of beliefs, partial beliefs, attractions to believe, or inclinations to believe. Given that the main candidates for analyzing seeming states are unsatisfactory, I argue for a brute view of seemings that treats seeming states as irreducible propositional attitudes.     

A temporal modelling environment for internally grounded beliefs,desires and intentions

In this paper the internal dynamics of mental states, in particular states based on beliefs, desires and intentions, is formalised using a temporal language. A software environment is presented that can be used to specify, simulate and analyse temporal dependencies between mental states in relation to traces of them. If also relevant data on internal physical states over time are available, these can be analysed with respect to their relation to mental states as well.     

Distinguishing between emotion and nonemotion: Judgments about experience

The conceptual distinction between emotion and nonemotion subjective states was investigated in a series of three studies. Three questions were addressed. First, is there high agreement among people in identifying labels for subjective states as either emotion or nonemotion? Second, in judgments of the similarity of subjective states is the emotion-nonemotion distinction more or less salient than other properties of experience? Third, what criteria are used to distinguish conceptually between emotion and nonemotion states? Results indicated that, for many feeling states, there is no substantial agreement as to whether the state should be considered emotion or nonemotion, that the affective dimension of experience is not as salient as are other specific properties of experience (physiological arousal, activity level, valence), and that, in general, people express their individual judgment of emotion-nonemotion on the basis of some nonspecific combination of physiological arousal and character of cognitive state.     

School Violence and the Culture of Honor

ABSTRACT— We investigated the hypothesis that a sociocultural variable known as the culture of honor would be uniquely predictive of school-violence indicators. Controlling for demographic characteristics associated in previous studies with violent crime among adults, we found that high-school students in culture-of-honor states were significantly more likely than high-school students in non-culture-of-honor states to report having brought a weapon to school in the past month. Using data aggregated over a 20-year period, we also found that culture-of-honor states had more than twice as many school shootings per capita as non-culture-of-honor states. The data revealed important differences between school violence and general patterns of homicide and are consistent with the view that many acts of school violence reflect retaliatory aggression springing from intensely experienced social-identity threats.     

Against Characterizing Mental States as Propositional Attitudes

The reason for characterizing mental states as propositional attitudes is sentence form: ' S V s that p '. However, many mental states are not ascribed by means of such sentences, and the sentences that ascribe them cannot be appropriately paraphrased. Moreover, even if a paraphrase were always available, that in itself would not establish the characterization. And the mental states that are ascribable by appropriate senses do not form any natural subset of mental states. A reason for the characterization relying on beliefs, etc., about non-existing things is also rejected. Last, some sentences ascribing abilities and dispositions have the same grammatical form as some senses that ascribe mental states, so that the attempt to paraphrase the latter would obscure the conceptual relations between the two sorts. It follows that mental states are not relations to propositions.     

Staying on track: Planned goal striving is protected from disruptive internal states

Past implementation intention research focused on shielding goal striving from disruptive internal states (e.g., being anxious) by forming if-then plans that link these very states to instrumental coping responses. In the present line of research, we investigated whether planning out goal striving by means of if-then plans specifying opportunities to initiate goal-directed responses also protects goal striving from the negative impact of disruptive internal states. Indeed, in the face of disruptive internal states, participants who had been asked to form implementation intentions that targeted opportunities for initiating goal-directed responses outperformed participants with a mere goal intention to do well on a focal task goal. Actually, implementation intention participants performed as well as control participants who were not burdened by disruptive internal states such as being in a certain mood (Study 1), ego-depleted (Study 2), or self-definitionally incomplete (Study 3). Results are discussed by pointing to the importance of hypo-egoic self-regulation.     

Positive affect as implicit motivator: on the nonconscious operation of behavioral goals

Recent research has revealed that nonconscious activation of desired behavioral states--or behavioral goals--promotes motivational activity to accomplish these states. Six studies demonstrate that this nonconscious operation of behavioral goals emerges if mental representations of specific behavioral states are associated with positive affect. In an evaluative-conditioning paradigm, unobtrusive linking of behavioral states to positive, as compared with neutral or negative, affect increased participants' wanting to accomplish these states. Furthermore, participants worked harder on tasks that were instrumental in attaining behavioral states when these states were implicitly linked to positive affect, thereby mimicking the effects on motivational behavior of preexisting individual wanting and explicit goal instructions to attain the states. Together, these results suggest that positive affect plays a key role in nonconscious goal pursuit. Implications for behavior-priming research are discussed.     

Bipartism and the Phenomenology of Content

Bipartism is the common view that the nature of an intentional state can be wholly explained in terms of (a) its horizontal relations with other such states (as well as peripheral inputs and outputs); and (b) its vertical relations with the world. Extrapolating from Nagel, I try to show that bipartism is fundamentally mistaken. Some intentional states are conscious states, and thus there is something it is like to be in them. This phenomenology is of a piece with such states' interpretability: to know what it is like to be X at least involves being able to interpret X's conscious intentional states. But a bi-partist account of an intentional state is not, by itself, interpretational. So bipartist accounts, at least of conscious intentional states, are incomplete: they fail to capture their phenomenology.     

Development in children's representations of transformations and movements

This study tested the hypothesis that fourth-grade children tend more than first-grade children to represent transformations as ordered series of beginning, middle, and end states. On 15 different tasks, children were presented an object state constructed by the experimenter (e.g., a ball of clay or a pipe cleaner bent in the shape of an arc) and told to construct one or two other object states that “go best with” the experimenter's state(s). These instructions allowed children to choose the basis upon which to relate their states to the experimenters'. Fourth-graders predominantly constructed states that were components of continuous movements or transformations, whereas first-graders predominantly constructed states that related to the experimenters' on the basis of figural features. In a second phase of the procedure, we re-presented the states made by children and asked them to reconstruct the associated experimenter-constructed states from memory. As predicted, memory was better for children who spontaneously integrated states in transformations or movements than for children who related states on the basis of perceptual features. The results were discussed in relation to similar findings in other cognitive domains.     

Opacity,Transparency, and the Paradox of the Accessibility Requirement

Key issues in epistemology for the most part have to do with epistemic values such as justification, truth, and knowledge—that is, values related to the epistemic status of our propositional attitudes, mental events, and states. However, another important issue that is worth examining is the extent to which a subject is in a position to evaluate the strength of her epistemic position. In this paper, I wish to emphasize two properties of our mental states that play a decisive part in that respect: their opacity and transparency. In the following, I will assume that a mental state is opaque whenever it presents itself with no underlying reason, whereas states that are supported by apparent reasons are transparent. One main argument that I will defend is that even when the opacity and transparency of our mental states are not reliable cues, still they remain highly informative. Notably, I draw some implications relative to the externalist/internalist debate in epistemology. I examine the claim that only mental states that are justified are well grounded or justification conferring and the idea that often stands behind, that is, that only states whose reasons are accessible are justified—namely, the Accessibility Requirement. I also examine the source of a recent debate in epistemology: the epistemic status of our intuitive states, as these are perfect instances of opaque mental states. I conclude that intuitive states in some respect are less misleading than states that are supported by apparent reasons.     

Affective influences on within-person changes in work performance as mediated by attentional focus

A great deal of research has investigated the performance consequences of affective experiences at work, but the mediating mechanisms that explain these consequences remain understudied. In this study, we used experience sampling method to examine within-person relationships between changes in affective states and episodic performance, as mediated by attentional allocation and regulation. Our findings show that within-person changes in negative affective states have a concurrent association with episodic performance as mediated by reduced attentional allocation and regulation, while positive affective states are associated with better performance, as mediated by enhanced attentional allocation and regulation. Our results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the performance and attentional consequences of affective states at work.     

LICENSURE FOR BEHAVIOR ANALYSTS: THE PATH TO RESPONSIBLE AND COOPERATIVE ACTION

The increase in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders in the last decade has contributed to growth in the field of applied behavior analysis (ABA). This growth has been spurred by consumer demand for access to this evidence‐based treatment for those with an autism spectrum disorder. Presently, there are at least 34 states that have laws or regulations in place that mandate insurance coverage for autism spectrum disorders. There are also 14 states that have passed licensure or a similar regulatory mechanism for identifying competent providers of ABA. The following paper documents the process of insuring consumer advocacy and protection in the states of Missouri and Wisconsin through the passage of legislation that established licensure for practitioners of ABA. The evolution of this process in both of these states will be detailed as well as a number of lessons learned that should prove to be helpful as additional states move toward licensure for practitioners of ABA. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dispositional Optimism and Judgments of Future Life Events: Affective States as Moderators

This research examined the relation between dispositional optimism and judgments of future life events and whether this relation is moderated by affective states. In this study the moderating role of experimentally induced affective states, using film clips (N = 259), was investigated. After filling in the questionnaire for dispositional optimism, the participants were randomly assigned in the experimental conditions in order to induce positive versus negative affective states. Finally, the participants filled in the affective states and judgments of future life events scales. The results indicated that the participants with a higher level of optimism had the tendency to judge positive events as more likely and negative events as less likely to happen in the future. We found evidence for affective states as moderators; the association between dispositional optimism and judgments of future positive events depended on experimentally induced affective states. Specifically, in positive affective state condition, the association between dispositional optimism and judgments of future positive events was weaker than in both negative affective state and control conditions. The implications of these findings for understanding the role of optimism and affective states, in determining the judgments about the likelihood of future events are discussed.