Why Does Fear Override Hope in Societies Engulfed by Intractable Conflict,as It Does in the Israeli Society?

The question of why fear overrides hope in societies embarked on the road of peacemaking after years of intractable conflict is answered on the basis of accumulated knowledge in the psychology and sociology of emotions. This knowledge suggests that fear is an automatic emotion, grounded in the perceived present and often based on the memorized past (also processed unconsciously), that leads to freezing of beliefs, conservatism, and sometimes preemptive aggression. Hope, in contrast, involves mostly cognitive activity, which requires the search for new ideas and thus is based on creativity and flexibility. Because hope is based on thinking, it can be seriously impeded by the spontaneous and unconscious interference of fear. Both fear and hope can become collective emotional orientations that organize society's views and direct its forms of action. It is assumed that societies involved in intractable conflict are dominated by a collective emotional orientation of fear, which is functional in their coping with the stressful and demanding situation. But such an orientation serves as a psychological obstacle to a peace process once it starts. The Israeli Jewish case of collective fear orientation is offered as an example. The presentation includes the roots of this orientation, the ways in which it is reflected and disseminated, and its expressions among the Israeli Jewish public; it ends optimistically with the suggestion that societies can determine to overcome their fear and establish a collective orientation of hope for peace.     

Cognitive Biases and Emotional Wisdom in the Evolution of Conflict Between the Sexes

Two recent theories within evolutionary psychology have produced novel insights into conflict between the sexes. According to error management theory (EMT), asymmetries over evolutionary time in the cost-benefit consequences of specific social inferences have produced predictable cognitive biases. Women, for example, appear to underinfer commitment in response to signals of resource display. Men often overinfer a woman's sexual desire when she merely smiles at or casually touches them. These inferential biases, according to EMT, represent functional adaptations rather than markers of irrationality in information processing. According to strategic interference theory , certain "negative emotions" function to motivate action to reduce conflict produced by impediments to preferred social strategies. Emotions such as jealousy and anger, rather than reducing rationality, may embody inherited ancestral wisdom functional in dealing with interference inflicted by other individuals. These evolution-based theories have produced novel empirical discoveries and challenge traditional theories anchored in the premise that cognitive biases and negative emotions necessarily lead to irrationality.     

Higher emotions and cognition

The paper presents models describing higher emotions and cognition. It argues that contents of models at the top of the mental hierarchy are higher meanings, which in a simplified way could be called meanings of life. These models are vague-fuzzy and inaccessible to consciousness. Improving these models and making steps toward even tentatively conscious forms of them relates to the highest aesthetic emotions, emotions of the beautiful. Experimental data confirming these relations between the beautiful and higher meanings are presented.     

Judaism and Theology In Martha Nussbaum's Ethics

The writings of Martha Nussbaum broadly defend an account of transcendence as internal, always rooted in the human context. Her account implies that any and all projects of normative theological ethics are superfluous, since they transcend the natural bounds of human experience and reason. This essay points toward a space for theology, specifically Jewish theology, in Nussbaum's work, through an analysis of her recent philosophical and autobiographical writings on Judaism. Nussbaum's account in Upheavals of Thought associates Judaism with carnality and vulnerability; this essay supplements her account by pointing to a non-natural origin of emotional judgments in some of the texts Nussbaum treats. This move serves to temper the emphasis on autonomy in liberal Jewish thought, and provides an account of transcendence which can serve as the basis of a more traditional Jewish theological ethics.     

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF EMOTIONS IN THE BHAGAVAD GĪTĀ

Religious texts and historical narratives are instrumental in defining appropriate emotions and moral reasoning in a culture. In the Bhagavad Gı tā, the warrior Arjuna is faced with a twofold dilemma: are his emotions appropriate and should emotions influence his actions? The Gı tā is thought to be a redacted text with three primary layers: the original verses, the Sāmkhya/Yoga layer, and the devotional bhakti layer. Cross‐cultural psychological theories of emotions are employed to analyze the layers of the Gı tā. It is argued that each of the three layers corresponds with one of three possible moral codes as proposed by R. A. Shweder and his colleagues (1997; 2000) : the Ethic of Autonomy (promoting personal well‐being and avoiding shame); the Ethic of Community (maintaining social order and emotional detachment); and the Ethic of Divinity (upholding cosmic order and endorsing emotional devotion). These three perspectives remain relevant for deciding emotionally laden moral dilemmas today.     

Which of the fallacies are fallacies of relevance?

This paper looks around among the major traditional fallacies — centering mainly around the so-called gang of eighteen — to discuss which of them should properly be classified as fallacies of relevance. The paper argues that four of these fallacies are fallacies primarily because they are failures of relevance in argumentation, while others are fallacies in a way that is more peripherally related to failures of relevance. Still others have an even more tangential relation to failures of relevance. This paper is part of a larger research project on dialecical relevance in argumentative discourse, currently underway in collaboration with Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst.     

Effects of achievement contexts on the meaning structure of emotion words

Little is known about the impact of context on the meaning of emotion words. In the present study, we used a semantic profiling instrument (GRID) to investigate features representing five emotion components (appraisal, bodily reaction, expression, action tendencies, and feeling) of 11 emotion words in situational contexts involving success or failure. We compared these to the data from an earlier study in which participants evaluated the typicality of features out of context. Profile analyses identified features for which typicality changed as a function of context for all emotion words, except contentment, with appraisal features being most frequently affected. Those context effects occurred for both hypothesised basic and non-basic emotion words. Moreover, both data sets revealed a four-dimensional structure. The four dimensions were largely similar (valence, power, arousal, and novelty). The results suggest that context may not change the underlying dimensionality but affects facets of the meaning of emotion words.     

Learning and growing from ‘communities of practice’: autoethnographic narrative vignettes of an aspiring educational researcher’s experience

This is an autoethnographic study that inquiries into my own journey as an aspiring educational researcher throughout the second course of my Master’s Program at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. My experiences take place in the context of a group of real educational researchers and their on-going research project at the faculty of education called ‘Beyond Plant Blindness: Seeing the importance of plants for a sustainable world’ (BPB). All of the experiences included in this study are expressed in the form of chronologically ordered narrative vignettes. In order to bring theoretical meaning to these experiences, the vignettes were critically reflected upon and interpreted through the concept Communities of Practice (CoP), which is central to situated learning theory. Through this conceptual lens, my experiences revealed that an aspiring educational researcher may feel emotional and intellectual growth as a newcomer who is granted legitimate peripheral participation in the ‘real’ researcher CoP. Consequently, this study sheds light on ways that real researchers may play a part in shaping the identities of aspiring educational researchers through learning experiences. However, more generally, this study may facilitate fresh conversations about the complexities of learning, identity, and inclusion in the field of educational research.     

特质正念与控制点调节日常生活中知觉压力对消极情绪的影响

考察日常生活中知觉压力对消极情绪的动态影响,检验特质正念的调节作用,并进一步探索正念的调节作用是否在不同控制点的个体中存在差异。共有95名在校大学生完成正念注意觉知量表（MAAS）,罗特控制点量表（LOCS）,并通过动态评估的方式,完成每天2次,持续14天的在日常生活情境中针对知觉压力和消极情绪的密集型追踪测量。多层线性模型结果表明：（1）在个体内水平,个体某一时刻的知觉压力可以显著预测个体下一时刻的消极情绪;（2）个体的正念水平越高,日常生活中知觉压力对消极情绪的预测力越低;（3）个体越倾向于内控,日常生活中知觉压力对消极情绪的预测力越低;（4）个体越倾向于外控,正念对日常生活中知觉压力影响消极情绪的调节作用越强。本研究验证了正念对日常生活中压力反应的保护作用,并提示外控者在面临压力时更有可能从正念中获益。     

Artificial consciousness, artificial emotions, and autonomous robots

Nowadays for robots, the notion of behavior is reduced to a simple factual concept at the level of the movements. On another hand, consciousness is a very cultural concept, founding the main property of human beings, according to themselves. We propose to develop a computable transposition of the consciousness concepts into artificial brains, able to express emotions and consciousness facts. The production of such artificial brains allows the intentional and really adaptive behavior for the autonomous robots. Such a system managing the robot’s behavior will be made of two parts: the first one computes and generates, in a constructivist manner, a representation for the robot moving in its environment, and using symbols and concepts. The other part achieves the representation of the previous one using morphologies in a dynamic geometrical way. The robot’s body will be seen for itself as the morphologic apprehension of its material substrata. The model goes strictly by the notion of massive multi-agent’s organizations with a morphologic control.