Embodied information affects judgements about politicians: The impact of haptic weight sensations and hand cleansing

Politicians' characteristics attract voters' attention and dominate impression formation. Thereby, social judgements are deduced from different information being available in a certain situation. The literature suggests that incidental bodily sensations can influence judgement processes. Here, two bodily treatments—the haptic sensation of weight and the act of hand cleansing—simultaneously contribute to judgements about politicians. This study expands previous works by (a) investigating potential interactions of two haptic information cues, (b) providing evidence for the significant role of conceptual closeness between embodied cues and judgement dimensions, (c) showing that hand cleansing leads to harsher moral judgements independently of whether a misconduct has been committed or not, and (d) showing that the familiarity of the target to be judged does not moderate the effect of embodied information. The results demonstrate that judgements can be modulated by basal sensorimotor experiences. We discuss implications and the important issue of result generalisation and replicability.     

Personality as a work of art

The idea of the personality as a work of art offers a new conception of personality. From this perspective, personality would be the ethical and aesthetic style each person gives to their life, according, naturally, to the prevailing personal circumstances and social values. The idea is developed in two parts. In the first, which constitutes the empirical part, a historical review, from the time of Homer to the present day, reveals a ‘great chain of personality’, with its characteristics in each era. In the second, or transcendental part, we argue that it is some kind of work-of-art or life project that constitutes personality, whatever its aesthetic form. From this point of view, life projects, though in principle fictitious, may end up forging a person's true character, in accordance with a person-character dialectic. This dialectic is well illustrated by the literary figure of Don Quixote, but it is equally valid for anybody in everyday life. In any case, it is understood that the development of a personality is a dramatic task (in line with the theatrical sense that is at the basis of this conception). Among the most important consequences of this idea is the confirmation of responsibility as an essential constituent of the person.     

"I know what I like": stability of aesthetic preference in Alzheimer's patients

Two studies explored the stability of art preference in patients with Alzheimer's disease and age-matched control participants. Preferences for three different styles of paintings, displayed on art postcards, were examined over two sessions. Preference for specific paintings differed among individuals but AD and non-AD groups maintained about the same stability in terms of preference judgments across two weeks, even though the AD patients did not have explicit memory for the paintings. We conclude that aesthetic responses can be preserved in the face of cognitive decline. This should encourage caregivers and family to engage in arts appreciation activities with patients, and reinforces the validity of a preference response as a dependent measure in testing paradigms.     

The lover of the beautiful and the good: Platonic foundations of aesthetic and moral value

Though acknowledged by scholars, Plato’s identification of the Beautiful and the Good has generated little interest, even in aesthetics where the moral concepts are a current topic. The view is suspect because, e.g., it is easy to find examples of ugly saints and beautiful sinners. In this paper the thesis is defended using ideas from Plato’s ancient commentators, the Neoplatonists. Most interesting is Proclus, who applied to value theory a battery of linguistic tools with fixed semantic properties—comparative adjectives, associated gradable adjectives, mass nouns, and predicate negations—all with a semantics that demand a privative scale of value. It is shown how it is perfectly possible to interpret value terms Platonically over privative Boolean algebras so that beautifuland good diverge while at higher levels other value terms are coextensional. Considerations are offered that this structure conforms to actual usage.     

Dissimilarity cumulation theory in arc-connected spaces

This paper continues the development of the Dissimilarity Cumulation theory and its main psychological application, Universal Fechnerian Scaling [Dzhafarov, E.N and Colonius, H. (2007). Dissimilarity Cumulation theory and subjective metrics. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 51, 290-304]. In arc-connected spaces the notion of a chain length (the sum of the dissimilarities between the chain’s successive elements) can be used to define the notion of a path length, as the limit inferior of the lengths of chains converging to the path in some well-defined sense. The class of converging chains is broader than that of converging inscribed chains. Most of the fundamental results of the metric-based path length theory (additivity, lower semicontinuity, etc.) turn out to hold in the general dissimilarity-based path length theory. This shows that the triangle inequality and symmetry are not essential for these results, provided one goes beyond the traditional scheme of approximating paths by inscribed chains. We introduce the notion of a space with intermediate points which generalizes (and specializes to when the dissimilarity is a metric) the notion of a convex space in the sense of Menger. A space is with intermediate points if for any distinct there is a different point such that (where D is dissimilarity). In such spaces the metric G induced by D is intrinsic: coincides with the infimum of lengths of all arcs connecting to In Universal Fechnerian Scaling D stands for either of the two canonical psychometric increments and (ψ denoting discrimination probability). The choice between the two makes no difference for the notions of arc-connectedness, convergence of chains and paths, intermediate points, and other notions of the Dissimilarity Cumulation theory.     

辩证思维方式与中国古典建筑审美特征

辩证思维方式是中国古代哲学思维方式之一,它深刻地影响了中国古典建筑审美特征的形成,使其在有无相生、虚实相资,中庸为道、和美为贵,情理并重、礼乐相成三个方面体现出中国传统文化的特色。     

Aesthetics as evaluative forms of agency to perceive and design reality: A reply to aesthetic realism

Following a naturalist-realist point of view, this paper attempts to contribute to the metaphysical question of whether or not reality includes aesthetics. During evolution, cognitive agents have constructed (goal-directed) regulatory abilities forming anticipatory contents in the form of feelings regarding opportunities for interaction. These feelings are considered to be the fundamental part of an evaluative or (what in this paper considered as aesthetic) behavior through which agents show a preference to aspects of their external world. Thus, ‘aesthetic’ denotes an agential behavior based on an organization of processes integrated in a form that identifies, evaluates, and compares sources of interaction-success or error in specific aspects of external reality. While agents approach the same aspects of reality as they all interact with the same world, our claim is that aesthetic normativity cannot be an objective feature of this reality. This model overcomes problems of correspondence in the sense that an agent's actions and thoughts ought to react to any pre-given (aesthetic) quality or norm, while at the same time it emphasizes the self-directedness of aesthetic behavior that enables the development of creative forms of cognition.     

Aesthetic interaction as fit between interaction attributes and experiential qualities

Designing an aesthetic interaction is an important issue for Interaction Design (ID) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). While a number of frameworks exist, the experimental study of potential underlying principles remains rare. In this paper, we suggest that particular interaction attributes (e.g., “fast”) are systematically related to particular experiential qualities (e.g., “feeling competent”) and that interaction “feels better” if interaction matches the intended experience. A laboratory study (N = 32) explores this notion by testing two different ways of interacting within the same activity (opening a wine bottle) in two different experiential scenarios (focusing on relatedness, focusing on competence). Two corkscrews with different interaction profiles were used: one assumed to support a feeling of competence and the other to support relatedness. As expected, we found systematic shifts in preferences for specific corkscrews, differences in affective experience and in the relationships between interaction attributes and experiential qualities depending on the fit of interaction to the experience.