Haybron on Mood Propensity and Happiness

Daniel Haybron has made an original contribution to philosophical discussions of happiness. He has put forward a theory that identifies happiness with moods and the propensity to experience moods. Haybron’s contribution deserves a critical examination. The first section of my paper is interpretive. I show how Haybron uses the concepts of ‘central affective states’ and ‘mood propensity’ to define happiness. The second and third sections of the paper are critical. They focus on the inclusion of mood propensity in Haybron’s theory. In the second section I argue that his theory fails because there is an example that shows a subject can be happy even when that subject does not have a positive mood propensity. In the third section of the paper, I consider Haybron’s objection that the case in question is ‘object-specific’ and that it is not ‘emotionally-based’. I discuss both of these technical terms in detail. Moreover, I argue that a modified version of the counter example accommodates these technical terms while retaining the persuasiveness of the original example.

The Conceptual Complexity of Central Bankers and the Asian Financial Crisis

This paper examines the impact of the conceptual complexity of central bankers on exchange rate volatility during the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. Theoretically, this paper develops a framework to study the cognitive style of individual central bankers in conjunction with the institutional features of the central banks they head. The paper also controls for a variety of other common explanations for exchange rate volatility during this time period, including the number of veto players representing the political system and underlying structural features of the Asian economies. Empirically, the cross-sectional time-series analysis finds that more conceptually complex central bankers were able to reduce exchange rate volatility during the crisis years, especially when they inhabited highly independent central banks. This paper concludes that linking the study of key individuals to macroeconomic outcomes in the global political economy is a promising area of research.     

Cultivating the Opinionated: The Need to Evaluate Moderates the Relationship Between Crime Drama Viewing and Scary World Evaluations

The literature on cultivation processes assumes that second‐order judgments (e.g., attitudes) are repeatedly updated during viewing (i.e., on‐line) and can be reported when asked. In this article, we propose this reasoning only holds for people high in their need to evaluate (NTE). Low‐NTE individuals do not update their opinions on‐line and have to construct their attitudes memory‐based, limiting the likelihood of finding second‐order relationships. Results from a cross‐sectional survey among 226 adolescents indicate that crime drama viewing and scary world beliefs are only correlated among high‐NTE individuals. NTE does not moderate cultivation through nonfiction. The theoretical implications of memory‐based attitudes for second‐order cultivation are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research on attitudinal media effects.     

Stuttering theory,research, and therapy: A five-year retrospective and look ahead

This article reviews events in stuttering theory, research, and therapy that have transpired during the past 5 years. After the retrospective review, current work in the area of stuttering is examined. This analysis of the past and present was conducted in an effort to give clearer direction to future efforts to understand the disorder, and to study and treat it more effectively.     

Relation of Type A behavior to performance and satisfaction among sales personnel

Many of the personal characteristics frequently associated with successful sales performance are very similar to behaviors which are a part of the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern. This study investigated the relationship between Type A behavior and sales performance, as well as job satisfaction, among a sample of 355 life insurance agents. No significant differences were found between Type A and B agents and three measures of sales performance and one measure of general job satisfaction. Type A behavior among the sample was associated with measures of stress and number of health complaints. Possible explanations for the lack of Type A-performance and Type A-satisfaction relationships are discussed as is the importance of the association with stress and health complaints.     

Deontic Reasoning With Emotional Content: Evolutionary Psychology or Decision Theory?

Three experiments investigated the contrasting predictions of the evolutionary and decision-theoretic approaches to deontic reasoning. Two experiments embedded a hazard management (HM) rule in a social contract scenario that should lead to competition between innate modules. A 3rd experiment used a pure HM task. Threatening material was also introduced into the antecedent, p, of a deontic rule, if p then must q. According to the evolutionary approach, more HM responses (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000) are predicted when p is threatening, whereas decision theory predicts fewer. All 3 experiments were consistent with decision theory. Other theories are discussed, and it is concluded that they cannot account for the behavior observed in these experiments.     

Discrimination of polysyllabic sequences by one- to four-month-old infants

The goal of this research was to ascertain the effects of suprasegmental parameters (fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration) on discrimination of polysyllabic sequences by 1- to 4-month-old infants. A high-amplitude sucking procedure, with synthesized female speech, was used. Results indicate that young infants can discriminate the three-syllable sequences [marana] versus [malana] when suprasegmental characteristics typical of infant-directed speech emphasize the middle syllable. However, infants failed to demonstrate discrimination when adult-directed suprasegmentals were used and in several other experimental conditions in which prosodic parameters were manipulated. The pattern of results obtained in the six experiments suggests that the exaggerated suprasegmentals of infant-directed speech may function as a perceptual catalyst, facilitating discrimination by focusing the infant's attention on a distinctive syllable within polysyllabic sequences.     

Towards a theory of the rough ground: merging the policy and ethnographic frames of religion in the Kyrgyz Republic

Discussions of Islam present two analytical problems, one of interpretation and another of theory. Regarding interpretation, different frames – policy or ethnographic – for viewing religion influence our bias/understanding of religion and give us different senses of what ‘knowing’ the religion of a particular community means. The related issue is one of theory and connects to the problem of theorising movement: how people navigate their religious lives is not linear but much more random, related to events, and at times reified by (though always engaging with) the assumptions of policy agendas and the ethnographic imagination. Exploring implications that the policy and ethnographic frames have for Muslims in the Kyrgyz Republic, I argue that in synthesising the impact of different frames of analysis, a ‘theory of the rough ground’, while anything but neat, better portrays life as it is experienced locally.     

Now you see it, now you don't: controlling for contingencies and stimulus repetitions eliminates the Gratton effect

The Gratton (or sequential congruency) effect is the finding that conflict effects (e.g., Stroop and Eriksen flanker effects) are larger following congruent trials relative to incongruent trials. The standard account given for this is that a cognitive control mechanism detects conflict when it occurs and adapts to this conflict on the following trial. Others, however, have questioned the conflict adaptation account and suggested that sequential biases might account for the Gratton effect. In two experiments, contingency biases were removed from the task and stimulus repetitions were deleted to control for stimulus bindings. This eliminated the Gratton effect in the response times in both experiments, supporting a non-conflict explanation of the Gratton effect. A Gratton effect did persist in the errors of Experiment 1; however, this effect was not produced by the type of errors (word reading errors) that a conflict adaptation account should predict. Instead, tentative support was found for a congruency switch cost hypothesis. In all, the conflict adaptation account failed to account for any of the reported data. Implications for future work on cognitive control are discussed.