The politics of certainty: Conceptions of science in an age of uncertainty

The prestige of science, derived from its claims to certainty, has adversely affected the humanities. There is, in fact, a "politics of certainty". Our ability to predict events in a limited sphere has been idealized, engendering dangerous illusions about our power to control nature and eliminate time. In addition, the perception and propagation of science as a bearer of certainty has served to legitimate harmful forms of social, sexual, and political power. Yet, as Ilya Prigogine has argued, renewed attention to the irreducible reality of time has brought us to "the end of certainty". As we enter the age of uncertainty, there is disagreement about how science should be understood and communicated. Some scientists cling to the ideal of certainty, while others emphasize the creative potential of spontaneity, novelty, and surprise.     

Moral Responsiveness and Discontinuity in Therapy: A Qualitative Study

Phenomenological qualitative methods were used to identify and describe moral elements in therapeutic relationships. Using the relational philosophy of E. Levinas (1961/1969, 1979/1987) as a base, data in which therapists and clients identified and described morally responsive experiences in therapy sessions were analyzed. These moments were often unexpected and included categories of surprise, interruption, willingness to change, and clarifications/repairs. Additional moral phenomena related to therapists' attitudes included asymmetrical indebtedness, attitude of serving, and tentativeness of diagnosis. Identified moments of moral responsiveness were frequently associated with clients' progress in therapy. This suggests that conceptually smooth and uninterrupted therapy may be less helpful than therapy that is discontinuous and able to change in the moment.     

Joy in the Midst of Suffering: Clowning as Care of the Spirit in Palliative Care

SUMMARY

We find joy in the midst of suffering at Daw House, a palliative care unit. Stories, ranging from moments of gentle tenderness to wild hilarity, speak of profound joy and of the courage of those who participate. We articulate some of the why and how of caring clowning. Clown Doctors aim to affirm people as people with richly storied lives, to give permission for both laughter and tears, and to bring consolation to the spirit. The art of clowning means that we seek to elevate people, to sensitively tailor music, touch, and colour to the interests of those we encounter, to invite a sense of wonder and spontaneity and to work to transform situations through the imagination.     

A new look at time and eternity

In his Systematic Theology, Vol. III, Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that God as eternal comprehends the different moments of time simultaneously and orders them to constitute a whole or totality. The author contends that this approach to time and eternity might solve the logical tension between the classical notion of divine sovereignty and the common sense belief in creaturely spontaneity/human freedom. For, if the existence of the events constituting a temporal sequence is primarily due to the spontaneous decisions of creatures, and if their being ordered into a totality or meaningful whole is primarily due to the superordinate activity of God, then both God and creatures play indispensable but nevertheless distinct roles in the cosmic process.     

Postmodernism's Self-Nullifying Reading of Nietzsche

In his very rich and insightful book, Kant's Theory of Freedom, Henry Allison argues that in the first Critique Kant's reason for rejecting Humean compatibilism in favor of an incompatibilist conception of practical freedom stems, not from a specific concern to ground morality, as many have supposed, but from his general conception of rational agency, which Allison explicates in terms of the idea of practical spontaneity. Practically spontaneous rational agency is subject to imperatives and therefore distinct from Humean agency. But it is not necessarily subject to the categorical imperative and hence is distinct from fully spontaneous (transcendentally free) moral agency. A conception thus emerges of an agent with limited spontaneity, subject to hypothetical but not categorical imperatives. A doubt may be raised, however, as to whether Kant's view can accommodate this conception of limited practical spontaneity. Reflection on Kant's notion of a hypothetical imperative suggests that the idea of limited spontaneity is in danger of either collapsing into the Humean picture or else turning out to be equivalent to the conception of full spontaneity appropriate to moral agency. There is thus reason to suppose that, for Kant, we would not be bound by imperatives at all if we were not bound by the categorical imperative.     

Feeling good-doing good: a conceptual analysis of the mood at work-organizational spontaneity relationship.

Five forms of organizational spontaneity are described (helping co-workers, protecting the organization, making constructive suggestions, developing oneself, and spreading goodwill). Organizational spontaneity is compared with the seemingly analogous constructs of organizational citizenship behavior and prosocial organizational behavior. Based on a selective review of the literature, a multilevel model of spontaneity is presented. Positive mood at work is a pivotal construct in the model and posited as the direct precursor of organizational spontaneity. Primary work-group characteristics, the affective tone of the primary work group, affective disposition, life event history, and contextual characteristics are proposed to have direct or indirect effects, or both, on positive mood at work. Motivational bases of organizational spontaneity also are described. The model and its implications are discussed.     

The Temporal Dynamics of Surprise

Guided by a temporal dynamics perspective, we review and integrate theories and empirical evidence on surprise. We conceptualize surprise as the initial response to unexpected events, which should be differentiated from subsequent states that occur after people had time to make sense of the unexpected outcome. To understand the nature of surprise, it is therefore important to take time into account. Following this, a review of immediate cognitive correlates of surprise shows that irrespective of the valence of the outcome, the initial responses are the same. Moreover, the temporal dynamics perspective reconciles seemingly contradictory findings regarding the valence of surprise, such that studies that focus on surprise while it happens (initial interruption) support the notion that it feels relatively negative, whereas studies that focus on states after cognitive mastering show that subsequent experiential states depend on the valence of the outcome.     

The processing of affectively valenced stimuli: The role of surprise

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the surprise mechanism activates a threat detection system that prioritises the processing of threat-related stimuli. In Experiment 1, participants responded to a dot that appeared during the presentation of two words. In the critical trial, one of the two words was either pleasant or unpleasant. In Experiment 2, depending on the condition, the participants had to decide whether at least one of two simultaneously presented pictures depicted either a pleasant or an unpleasant stimulus. In the critical trial, both a pleasant and an unpleasant picture appeared. In both experiments, the stimuli in the critical trial were presented either during routine behaviour or in the context of a surprising event. The results showed that during routine behaviour unpleasant stimuli received more attentive resources than pleasant stimuli only if the affective valence of the stimuli was action-relevant (Experiment 2). In contrast, in the context of surprise, unpleasant words engaged more attentive resources than pleasant words although they were action-irrelevant (Experiment 1). In addition, in the context of surprise, the decision time increase was more pronounced in the pleasant than in the unpleasant experimental group. This finding was interpreted as evidence that the threat detection system of the surprise mechanism initially searches for a threat-related stimulus.     

The role of surprise in the attribution process

Abstract

We report five studies which compared two theories linking surprise to causal attribution. According to the attributional model, surprise is frequently caused by luck attributions, whereas according to the expectancy-disconfirmation model, surprise is caused by expectancy disconfirmation and stimulates causal thinking. Studies 1 to 3 focused on the question of whether surprise is caused by luck attributions or by unexpectedness. In Studies 1 and 2, subjects had to recall success or failure experiences characterised by a particular attribution (Study 1) or by low versus high surprisingness (Study 2), whereas in Study 3, unexpectedness and luck versus skill attributions were independently manipulated within a realistic setting. The main dependent variables were unexpectedness (Studies 1 and 2), degree of surprise (Studies 1 and 3), and causal attributions (Study 2). The results strongly suggest that surprise is caused by expectancy disconfirmation, whereas luck attributions are neither sufficient nor necessary for surprise. Studies 4 and 5 addressed the question of whether surprise stimulates attributional thinking, again using a remembered-incidents technique. The findings of the previous studies were replicated, and it was confirmed that surprising outcomes elicit more attributional search than unsurprising ones. Additional results from Study 5 suggest that causal thinking is also stimulated by outcomes that are both negative and important.     

On a so‐Called Solution to a Paradox

The mooronic solution to the surprise quiz paradox says students know there will be a surprise quiz one day this week but they lose this knowledge on the penultimate day. This is because ‘there will be a surprise quiz one day this week’ then becomes an instance of Moore's paradox. This view has surprising consequences. Furthermore, even though the surprise quiz announcement becomes an instance of Moore's paradox on the penultimate day, this does not prevent the students from knowing the quiz is coming. I conclude that the first stage of the paradoxical argument succeeds and the mooronic solution fails.     

Working memory representations persist in the face of unexpected task alterations

It is well known that information can be held in memory while performing other tasks concurrently, such as remembering a color or number during a separate visual search task. However, it is not clear what happens to stored information in the face of unexpected tasks, such as the surprise questions that are often used in experiments related to inattentional and change blindness. Does the unpredicted shift in task context cause memory representations to be cleared in anticipation of new information? To answer this question, we ran two experiments where the task unexpectedly switched partway through the experiment with a surprise question. Half of the participants were asked to report the same attribute (Exp. 1?=?Identity, Exp. 2?=?Color) of a target stimulus in both presurprise and postsurprise trials, while for the other half, the reported attribute switched from identity to color (Exp. 1) or vice versa (Exp. 2). Importantly, all participants had to read an unexpected set of instructions and respond differently on the surprise trial. Accuracy on the surprise trial was higher for the same-attribute groups than the different-attribute groups. Furthermore, there was no difference in reaction time on the surprise trial between the two groups. These results suggest that information participants expected to report can survive an encounter with an unexpected task. The implication is that failures to report information on a surprise trial in many experiments reflect genuine differences in memory encoding, rather than forgetting or overwriting induced by the surprise question.     

Surprise and Motivation of Causal Search: How Are They Affected by Outcome Valence and Importance?

Two studies investigated whether the importance and valence of a target person's achievement outcome affect (a) the intensity of surprise an observer feels about the actual outcome and (b) the role surprise plays in the motivation of the search for a causal explanation for the target's outcome. The present experiments involved conditions controlling for the confounds among outcome valence, importance, and surprise. Both studies revealed that surprise intensity was affected by outcome valence and importance so that an important negative outcome elicits the highest surprise and unimportant success elicited the second highest surprise. Causal search was strong only after (unexpected) important failures. Results are explained in terms of an extended expectancy-disconfirmation approach.     

对“意外考试”悖论的一种非确定论解释

"意外考试"悖论中的一个重要问题是,老师宣告的意想不到的考试指的是什么,即我们如何解释"意外考试"或"意外"。实际上,导致"意外考试"悖论的根本原因就在于对"意外"的不恰当解释。为了防止走向确定论的阵营,我们将从心理层面上给予"意外"一种非确定论的解释,进而解决"意外考试"悖论的困境。当某件事的发生与主体在该事件发生之前某一时刻上的预期相悖,或者不在主体的预期之中时,我们称其为"意外"。关键在于,"意外"的发生总是针对主体在某个具体时刻上的预期或不预期而言的。对于"意外考试"悖论来说,不论老师所说的"意外考试"实际发生在哪一天,针对的都是学生在下周一之前某个时刻上的不预期。     

Exploring the Strength of Association between the Components of Emotion Syndromes: The Case of Surprise

A new experimental paradigm involving a computerised quiz was used to examine, on an intra-individual level, the strength of association between four components of the surprise syndrome: cognitive (degree of prospectively estimated unexpectedness), experiential (the feeling of surprise), behavioural (degree of response delay on a parallel task), and expressive (the facial expression of surprise). It is argued that this paradigm, together with associated methods of data analysis, effectively controls for most method factors that could in previous studies have lowered the correlations among the components of emotion syndromes. It was found that (a) the components of the surprise syndrome were all positively correlated; (b) strong association existed only between the cognitive and the experiential component of surprise; (c) the coherence between syndrome components did not increase with increasing intensity of surprise; and (d) there was also only moderate coherence between the components of the facial expression of surprise (eyebrow raising, eye widening, mouth opening), although in this case, coherence tended to increase with intensity. Taken together, the findings support only a weakly probabilistic version of a behavioural syndrome view of surprise. However, the component correlations seem strong enough to support the existence of strong associations among a subset of the mental or central neurophysiological processes engaged in surprise.     

情景知觉中的信息界定:从主观预期到“惊奇”算法

情景信息加工是情景知觉研究领域内的核心问题。然而,不同的研究者对"情景信息"的界定并不相同。在过去80多年的时间里对情景信息的界定先后经历了研究者主观确定、观察者评估、基于情景物理特征的计算模拟等方法。Itti和Baldi等人通过比较先验概率和后验概率之间的差异,提出了"惊奇"理论。文章介绍了真实情景知觉研究中"惊奇"理论的应用及进展,并指出"惊奇"算法的拓展及界定、情景知觉过程中的注意转换与"惊奇"的关系,以及社会情景知觉中的"惊奇"应用可能是未来相关领域需要进一步探索的问题。     

Children's Ability to Recognize Emotions From Partial and Complete Facial Expressions

The authors investigated children's ability to recognize emotions from the information available in the lower, middle, or upper face. School-age children were shown partial or complete facial expressions and asked to say whether they corresponded to a given emotion (anger, fear, surprise, or disgust). The results indicate that 5-year-olds were able to recognize fear, anger, and surprise from partial facial expressions. Fear was better recognized from the information located in the upper face than those located in the lower face. A similar pattern of results was found for anger, but only in girls. Recognition improved between 5 and 10 years old for surprise and anger, but not for fear and disgust.     

Evidence for strong dissociation between emotion and facial displays: the case of surprise

Eight experiments examined facial expressions of surprise in adults. Surprise was induced by disconfirming a previously established schema or expectancy. Self-reports and behavioral measures indicated the presence of surprise in most participants, but surprise expressions were observed only in 4%-25%, and most displays consisted of eyebrow raising only; the full, 3-component display was never seen. Experimental variations of surprise intensity, sociality, and duration/complexity of the surprising event did not change these results. Electromyographic measurement failed to detect notably more brow raisings and, in one study, revealed a decrease of frontalis muscle activity in the majority of the participants. Nonetheless, most participants believed that they had shown a strong surprise expression.     

Making sense of surprise: an investigation of the factors influencing surprise judgments

Surprise is often defined in terms of disconfirmed expectations, whereby the surprisingness of an event is thought to be dependent on the degree to which it contrasts with a more likely, or expected, outcome. The authors investigated the alternative hypothesis that surprise is more accurately modeled as a manifestation of an ongoing sense-making process. In a series of experiments, participants were given a number of scenarios and rated surprise and probability for various hypothetical outcomes that either confirmed or disconfirmed an expectation. Experiment 1 demonstrated that representational specificity influences the relationship that holds between surprise and probability ratings. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the inclusion of an enabling event lowers surprise ratings for disconfirming outcomes. Experiment 3 explored the reason for this effect, revealing that enabling events lower surprise by reducing uncertainty, thus enhancing ease of integration. Experiment 4 evaluated the contrast hypothesis directly, showing that differences in contrast are not correlated with differences in surprise. These results provide converging support for the view that the level of surprise experienced for an event is related to the difficulty of integrating that event with an existing representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).