loneliness and belonging: is stoic cosmopolitanism still defensible ?

In view of recent articles citing the Stoics as a defence or refutation of cosmopolitanism it is legitimate to ask whether the Stoics did in fact have an argument for cosmopolitanism which may be useful to contemporary political philosophers. I begin by discussing an interpretation of Stoic views on cosmopolitanism by Martha Nussbaum and A.A. Long and show that the arguments they attribute to the Stoics are not tenable in the light of present day philosophy. I then argue that the Stoics did offer a very different argument for cosmopolitanism which is both more interesting and more plausible in that it draws on a conception of human nature similar to Aristotles and contemporary virtue ethics. Lastly I consider an objection made to their particular brand of cosmopolitanism by Martha Nussbaum, namely that a Stoic cosmopolitan life is devoid of personal affiliation and therefore unbearably lonely. I argue that this objection is in fact unfounded.I would like to thank William Wringe, Annick Jaulin, the members of the Bilkent Seminar Group and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments.     

Interaction with a high-versus low-competence influence source in inductive reasoning

Literature on inductive reasoning shows that when testing hypotheses, people are biased toward the use of confirmatory strategies (P. C. Wason, 1960). In the present article, the authors presented 2 studies showing how people use confirmation and disconfirmation strategies during actual interaction in problem solving. Study 1 showed that participants were able to learn to use disconfirmation when confronted with a low-competence, nonthreatening partner. When the partner was high in competence (thereby threatening the participant's competence), participants used confirmation, even when the partner used disconfirmation. In Study 2, the authors aimed at generalizing the aforementioned results by exploring the hypothesis that disconfirmation stems from the possibility of diverging from norms. Participants who were confronted with the violation of a conversational norm used a high proportion of disconfirmation, whatever the source of influence. When there was no violation but there was a low-competence partner, the proportion of disconfirmation was high; when there was no violation but there was a high-competence partner, the proportion of disconfirmation was low. The authors discussed the interpersonal functions of confirmation and disconfirmation.     

The Linguistic Formulation of Fallacies Matters: The Case of Causal Connectives

Argumentation - While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them...     

Colour and emotion: children also associate red with negative valence

The association of colour with emotion constitutes a growing field of research, as it can affect how humans process their environment. Although there has been increasing interest in the association of red with negative valence in adults, little is known about how it develops. We therefore tested the red–negative association in children for the first time. Children aged 5–10 years performed a face categorization task in the form of a card‐sorting task. They had to judge whether ambiguous faces shown against three different colour backgrounds (red, grey, green) seemed to ‘feel good’ or ‘feel bad’. Results of logistic mixed models showed that – as previously demonstrated in adults – children across the age range provided significantly more ‘feel bad’ responses when the faces were given a red background. This finding is discussed in relation to colour–emotion association theories.     

Predicting the Personal Appeal of Marketing Images Using Computational Methods

Images play a central role in digital marketing. They attract attention, trigger emotions, and shape consumers’ first impressions of products and brands. We propose that the shift from one‐to‐many mass communication to highly personalized one‐to‐one communication requires an understanding of image appeal at a personal level. Instead of asking “How appealing is this image?” we ask “How appealing is this image to this particular consumer?” Using the well‐established five‐factor model of personality, we apply machine learning algorithms to predict an image's personality appeal—the personality of consumers to which the image appeals most—from a set of 89 automatically extracted image features (Study 1). We subsequently apply the same algorithm on new images to predict consequential outcomes from the fit between consumer and image personality. We show that image‐person fit adds incremental predictive power over the images’ general appeal when predicting (a) consumers’ liking of new images (Study 2) and (b) consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions (Study 3).     

The inhibition capacities of children with mathematical disabilities.

Several authors have argued that mathematical disabilities might result from difficulties in inhibiting irrelevant information. The present study addresses this issue by assessing three inhibition functions in 40 ten-year-old children: suppression of irrelevant information from working memory, inhibition of prepotent responses, and interference control. We found no significant differences between children with math disabilities and typically achieving controls, or between children with arithmetic facts disabilities and children with above-average arithmetic facts skills. These findings, along with other empirical evidence and with theoretical considerations, cast doubt on the inhibition deficit hypothesis.     

Anger and time perception in children

The present study investigated age-related variations in judgments of the duration of angry facial expressions compared with neutral facial expressions. Children aged 3, 5, and 8 years were tested on a temporal bisection task using angry and neutral female faces. Results revealed that, in all age groups, children judged the duration of angry faces to be longer than that of neutral faces. Findings are discussed in the framework of internal clock models and the adaptive function of emotion.     

Working memory, strategy execution, and strategy selection in mental arithmetic

A total of 72 participants estimated products of complex multiplications of two-digit operands (e.g., 63 × 78), using two strategies that differed in complexity. The simple strategy involved rounding both operands down to the closest decades (e.g., 60 × 70), whereas the complex strategy required rounding both operands up to the closest decades (e.g., 70 × 80). Participants accomplished this estimation task in two conditions: a no-load condition and a working-memory load condition in which executive components of working memory were taxed. The choice/no-choice method was used to obtain unbiased strategy execution and strategy selection data. Results showed that loading working-memory resources led participants to poorer strategy execution. Additionally, participants selected the simple strategy more often under working-memory load. We discuss the implications of the results to further our understanding of variations in strategy selection and execution, as well as our understanding of the impact of working-memory load on arithmetic performance and other cognitive domains.     

Relative contributions of kind- and domain-level concepts to expectations concerning unfamiliar exemplars: Developmental change and domain differences

Two inferential routes allow children to produce expectations about new instances of ontological categories like “animal” and “artefact.” One is to generalise information from a “look-up table” of familiar kind-concepts. The other one is to use independent expectations at the level of ontological domains. Our experiment pits these two sources of information against each other, using a sentence-judgement task associating properties with images of familiar and unfamiliar artefacts and animals. “Strange” properties are compatible with the ontological concept, but not encountered in any familiar kind. A look-up strategy would lead children to reject them and an independent expectation strategy to accept them. In both domains, we find a difference in reaction to strange properties associated with familiar vs. unfamiliar items, which shows that even young children do use independent domain-level information. We also found a U-shaped curve in propensity to use such abstract information. In addition, animal categories are the object of much more definite domain-level expectations, which supports the notion that the animal domain is more causally integrated than the artefact domain.