Darwin Puzzled? A Computer-assisted Analysis of Language in the Origin of Species

The aesthetically optimistic view of life in the last paragraph of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species contrasts with the evidence in his autobiography of a supposed perceptive colour blindness to the magnificence of nature. Accepting the theory of evolution as one of the scientific theories that has contributed to disenchantment, my aim is to delve into the Darwinian perception of natural beauty and solve this contrast of perceptions within the framework of the Weberian concept of “disenchantment of the world.” To do this, I have carried out a computer-assisted study of Darwin’s language focusing on the frequency of aesthetic-emotional and religious adjectives and adverbs in the six editions of the Origin. A semantic analysis of the lexicon shows that, although disenchanted, Darwin perceives nature as aesthetically enhanced. I arrive at the conclusion that Darwin’s alleged colour blindness does not come from a loss of his capacity to aesthetically perceive nature, but from his loss of religious belief.

     

Attentional Processing of Threat in Bipolar Disorder: Going Beyond Mood-Congruency

Emotional processing in bipolar disorder (BD) entails a complex attentional pattern not merely restricted to happy or sad biases, but also directed towards threatening information. This study examined threat-related bias on attentional orienting when participants were not instructed about the presentation of emotional stimuli (i.e., implicit instructions). An emotional dot-probe task in which an emotional face (i.e., threat, sad, happy) is simultaneously displayed with a neutral face was applied to BD individuals in their different episodes: mania (n?=?26), depression (n?=?24), and euthymia (n?=?28) as well as to a group of healthy controls (n?=?28). Symptomatic BD patients (i.e., in a manic or depressive episode) showed an attentional orienting bias toward threatening faces but not for happy or sad faces, while euthymic BD patients did not exhibit any attentional bias for emotional stimuli. A bias toward happy faces was found in the control group. Threat-related bias was not related to the severity of affective and anxiety symptoms in BD. When attention is not explicitly directed to emotional information, threat-related bias may characterize attentional orienting during mania and depression, but may be attenuated during euthymia.

     

Internal and External Shame in Healthy and Chronically Ill Samples: Exploring Links to Psychological Health

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - This study aimed to examine the role of decentering and committed action as mediators of the link of external and internal shame with...     

Three Sibling Survivors’ Perspectives of their Father’s Suicide: Implications for Postvention Support

Journal of Child and Family Studies - This qualitative case study describes three adult siblings’ experiences and their perceptions of support connected with the time before and after their...     

Disorientation and self-consciousness: a phenomenological inquiry

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - The present paper explores the phenomenology of disorientation and its relationship with self-consciousness. Section 1 discusses previous literature on...     

Using Autonomous Teams to Improve Quality of Life of People with Intellectual Disabilities

Applied Research in Quality of Life - This research study tested an intervention, based on autonomous teams and the service co-creation approach, to improve the social inclusion and...     

Motion integration during motion aftereffects

The perceived global motion of a stimulus depends on how its different local motion-direction vectors are distributed in space and time. When they are explicitly co-localized, as in the case of locally paired motion, competitive motion integration mechanisms produce a unitary global motion direction determined by their vector average. During motion aftereffects induced by simultaneous adaptation to multiple motion directions, just as in the case of locally paired motion, different directional signals originate simultaneously from exactly the same position in space. Therefore, the perceived global motion direction during motion aftereffects results from local vector averaging of the co-localized motion-direction signals induced by adaptation.     

Categories, prototypes and memory systems in Alzheimer's disease

Recent studies indicate that category learning is mediated by multiple neuronal systems. It has been shown that patients with marked impairments in executive functions, explicit memory and procedural learning can categorize the exemplars and prototype of a previously trained category. Simple, self-organizing neuronal networks can explain prototype learning and related dysfunctions in Alzheimer's disease, and provide a model of how prototype learning is mediated by circumscribed mechanisms in the visual cortex.     

Auditory and multisensory aspects of visuospatial neglect

Spatial neglect is a common neurological syndrome in which awareness of contralesional space is disrupted after unilateral (typically right) stroke. Although most research has focused on visual aspects of neglect, there is increasing evidence that neglect can often be multisensory. Here we focus on auditory disturbances that can co-occur with visual neglect. Patients selected for showing visual neglect often also show deficits in localization of single sounds; and also in the detection or identification of contralesional sounds, particularly in the presence of an ipsilesional competitor. Moreover, auditory and visual aspects of neglect often correlate in their severity across patients. These results are considered in relation to recent neuroimaging findings in the normal brain, showing that the brain regions typically damaged in neglect patients might contain multimodal representations of space.     

How choice ecology influences search in decisions from experience

Research into human decision-making has often sidestepped the question of search despite its importance across a wide range of domains such as search for food, mates, allies, visual targets or information. Recently, research on decisions from experience has made progress in finding out how individual characteristics shape search for information. Surprisingly little is known, however, about how the properties of the choice ecology shape people's search. To fill this void, we analyzed how two key ecological properties influence search effort: domain of choice (gains vs. losses) and experienced variance (variance vs. no variance). Many people search longer when facing the prospect of losses relative to gains. Moreover, most people search more in options in which they experience variance relative to options they experience as invariant. We conclude that two factors that have been identified as important determinants of choice also influence search of information.