Synchronous and desynchronous changes during fear reduction.

The purpose of this experiment, carried out on 27 subjects with intense and circumscribed fears, was to test one main hypothesis and several subsidiary predictions. The prediction that a high-demand in vivo treatment condition produces desynchronous changes and a low-demand treatment condition synchronous changes, was supported by some inter-session findings but not by the intra-session findings. The clear linear relation between heart-rate and reported fear was confirmed, as was the rapid habituation of the heart-rate response to phobic stimulation.The fear-reactions and fear-reductions of psychiatric and non-psychiatric were indistinguishable. High heart-rate responders and low heart-rate responders showed similar patterns of improvement. The constrained laboratory ‘treatment’ procedure used in the experiment produced large and rapid reductions in fear.     

On the Misrecognition of Identity: Muslims' Everyday Experiences in Scotland

Political theory is interested in the misrecognition of identity because it impacts individuals' autonomy in their self-definition and thus their ability to articulate and pursue identity-related interests. Here, we explore minority group members' experiences of being seen in terms that do not accord with their self-definition. Our data are qualitative, gathered through walking interviews with 24 Muslims in Scotland. Focusing on interactions in which they reported discrepancies between how they and others saw them, we differentiate four forms of misrecognition: (1) having the meaning of a valued identity (i.e., one's Muslim identity) defined by others in ways that one judges inaccurate and inappropriate; (2) having one's membership of a valued community (e.g., as a member of Scottish society) denied or rejected; (3) having one's identity (i.e., one's Muslim identity) overlooked such that one's distinctive identity-related needs are not taken into account; (4) being seen in terms of just one of one's many social identities (i.e., one's Muslim identity) such that other identities (judged more situationally relevant) are ignored. This empirically grounded typology contributes to wider debates about the forms of identity (mis)recognition and their political implications.     

The Rational Analysis Of Mind And Behavior

Rational analysis (Anderson 1990, 1991a) is an empiricalprogram of attempting to explain why the cognitive system isadaptive, with respect to its goals and the structure of itsenvironment. We argue that rational analysis has two importantimplications for philosophical debate concerning rationality. First,rational analysis provides a model for the relationship betweenformal principles of rationality (such as probability or decisiontheory) and everyday rationality, in the sense of successfulthought and action in daily life. Second, applying the program ofrational analysis to research on human reasoning leads to a radicalreinterpretation of empirical results which are typically viewed asdemonstrating human irrationality.     

Against Analytic Moral Functionalism

I argue against the analytic moral functionalist view propounded by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit. I focus on the 'input' clauses of our alleged 'folk moral theory'. I argue that the examples they give of such input clauses cannot plausibly be interpreted as analytic truths. They are in fact substantive moral claims about the moral 'domain'. It is a substantive claim that all human beings have equal moral standing. There are those who have rejected this, such as Herman Göring. He was loyal to a sub-class of humankind, but he suffered no conceptual confusion. Claims about what is morally relevant are substantive claims that cannot be known on purely conceptual grounds.     

Decision by sampling

We present a theory of decision by sampling (DbS) in which, in contrast with traditional models, there are no underlying psychoeconomic scales. Instead, we assume that an attribute's subjective value is constructed from a series of binary, ordinal comparisons to a sample of attribute values drawn from memory and is its rank within the sample. We assume that the sample reflects both the immediate distribution of attribute values from the current decision's context and also the background, real-world distribution of attribute values. DbS accounts for concave utility functions; losses looming larger than gains; hyperbolic temporal discounting; and the overestimation of small probabilities and the underestimation of large probabilities.     

Conceptual beliefs about human values and their implications: human nature beliefs predict value importance, value trade-offs, and responses to value-laden rhetoric

Beliefs that may underlie the importance of human values were investigated in 4 studies, drawing on research that distinguishes natural-kind (natural), nominal-kind (conventional), and artifact (functional) beliefs. Values were best characterized by artifact and nominal-kind beliefs, as well as a natural-kind belief specific to the social domain, "human nature" (Studies 1 and 2). The extent to which values were considered central to human nature was associated with value importance in both Australia and Japan (Study 2), and experimentally manipulating human nature beliefs influenced value importance (Study 3). Beyond their association with importance, human nature beliefs predicted participants' reactions to value trade-offs (Study 1) and to value-laden rhetorical statements (Study 4). Human nature beliefs therefore play a central role in the psychology of values.     

Taxometric analysis of fuzzy categories: a Monte Carlo study

A small Monte Carlo study examined the performance of a form of taxometric analysis (the MAXCOV procedure) with fuzzy data sets. These combine taxonic (categorical) and nontaxonic (continuous) features, containing a subset of casts with intermediate degrees of category membership. Fuzzy data sets tended to yield taxonic findings on plot inspection and two popular consistency tests, even when the degree of fuzziness, i.e., the proportion of intermediate cases, was large. These results suggest that fuzzy categories represent a source of pseudotaxonic inferences, if on is understood in the usual binary, "either-or" fashion. This in turn implies that dichotomous causes cannot be confidently inferred when taxometric analyses yield apparently taxonic findings.     

Sequence effects in categorization of simple perceptual stimuli

Categorization research typically assumes that the cognitive system has access to a (more or less noisy) representation of the absolute magnitudes of the properties of stimuli and that this information is used in reaching a categorization decision. However, research on identification of simple perceptual stimuli suggests that people have very poor representations of absolute magnitude information and that judgments about absolute magnitude are strongly influenced by preceding material. The experiments presented here investigate such sequence effects in categorization tasks. Strong sequence effects were found. Classification of a borderline stimulus was more accurate when preceded by a distant member of the opposite category than by a distant member of the same category. It is argued that this category contrast effect cannot be accounted for by extant exemplar or decision-bound models of categorization. The effect suggests the use of relative magnitude information in categorization. A memory and contrast model illustrates how relative magnitude information may be used in categorization.