Free Acts and Robot Cats

Philosophical Studies -     

News Selection Patterns as a Function of Race: The Discerning Minority and the Indiscriminating Majority

This study examines whether White majority and Black minority members differ in selecting news stories that featured either individuals of their own group or dissimilar others. Hypotheses derived from social-cognitive theory, social comparison theory, and distinctiveness theories were tested utilizing unobtrusive observations of news story selections. This selective exposure research design overcomes methodological constraints of previous experimental studies that employed self-reports and forced-exposure techniques to measure responses of Blacks and Whites to race-specific media sources. Our sample consisted of 112 Blacks and 93 Whites, who browsed 10 online news stories while exposure was unobtrusively logged via software. The news site displayed equal numbers of Black and White characters, with the pictures associated with the news stories rotated across participants. Results indicate that Whites showed no preference based on the race of the character featured in the news story. In contrast, Blacks strongly preferred news stories featuring Blacks and spent more than twice the reading time on them compared to exposure to news stories featuring Whites.     

Acoustic correlates of emotional dimensions in laughter: Arousal,dominance, and valence

Although laughter plays an essential part in emotional vocal communication, little is known about the acoustical correlates that encode different emotional dimensions. In this study we examined the acoustical structure of laughter sounds differing along four emotional dimensions: arousal, dominance, sender's valence, and receiver-directed valence. Correlation of 43 acoustic parameters with individual emotional dimensions revealed that each emotional dimension was associated with a number of vocal cues. Common patterns of cues were found with emotional expression in speech, supporting the hypothesis of a common underlying mechanism for the vocal expression of emotions.     

Parents: Psychotherapy's scapegoats

In this article the author reviews the assumption made popular in self-help literature that parents are to blame for most failings in life. She traces the assumption's occurrence in writings of pioneer theorists and practitioners, and then cites researchers who describe a more complex understanding of human distress. She concludes by suggesting an approach to counseling which is supportive to parents.Dr. Alter is a therapist in private practice and teaches for Pacific School of Religion and New College Berkelely. She is the author of Resurrection Psychology: an Understanding of Human Personality based on the Life and Teachings of Jesus (Loyola, 1994) and many journal articles.     

Creativity profile of university and conservatory dance students

What are dance students' creative potential, Special personality characteristics and preferences for high energy activities? Using standardized and original paper and pencil instruments, comparisons were made among dance students in university and conservatory settings, college students and art students. The results demonstrated that dance students are creative, show strong preference for dynamic figures, and have distinct personality characteristics. The university dance students differed from the conservatory students in several important ways.     

Inadequate and infrequent are not alike: ERPs to deviant prosodic patterns in spoken sentence comprehension

The current study on German investigates Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) for the perception of sentences with intonations which are infrequent (i.e. vocatives) or inadequate in daily conversation. These ERPs are compared to the processing correlates for sentences in which the syntax-to-prosody relations are congruent and used frequently during communication. Results show that perceiving an adequate but infrequent prosodic structure does not result in the same brain responses as encountering an inadequate prosodic pattern. While an early negative-going ERP followed by an N400 were observed for both the infrequent and the inadequate syntax-to-prosody association, only the inadequate intonation also elicits a P600.     

Easy on the mind, easy on the wrongdoer: Discrepantly fluent violations are deemed less morally wrong

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that discrepancies in processing fluency influence the perceived wrongness of moral violations. Participants were presented with numerous moral violations in easy or difficult to read font. For some violations experienced perceptual fluency was consistent with the fluency associated with previous violations, whereas for others it was more fluent or more disfluent. Results show that, across multiple vignettes, participants rated moral violations that were processed with discrepant fluency as less morally wrong than those processed with discrepant disfluency. The current work highlights the importance of metacognitive experiences in moral judgment and contributes to the emerging literature on the role of experiential factors in moral judgment.     

On the Conditional Analysis of Phenomenal Concepts

Zombies make trouble for physicalism. Intuitively, they seem conceivable, and many take this to support their metaphysical possibility – a result that, most agree, would refute physicalism. John Hawthorne (2002) [Philosophical Studies 109, 17–52] and David Braddon-Mitchell (2003) [The Journal of Philosophy 100, 111–135] have developed a novel response to this argument: phenomenal concepts have a conditional structure – they refer to non-physical states if such states exist and otherwise to physical states – and this explains the zombie intuition. I argue that this strategy fails. The considerations Hawthorne and Braddon-Mitchell adduce in support of their analysis in fact do no such thing. Further, their main argument for the analysis is self-defeating: exactly similar reasoning would undermine the view it is meant to establish. Finally, on closer inspection the conditional analysis is incompatible with the zombie intuition. Thus, not only is the analysis incapable of explaining the intuition: the intuition’s plausibility indicates that the analysis is incorrect. I also suggest that the allure of the conditional-analysis strategy may derive from a questionable view about what explaining the intuition would require. An erratum to this article is available at .