Emotional facial expressions can inform researchers about an individual's emotional state. Recent technological advances open up new avenues to automatic Facial Expression Recognition. Based on machine learning, such technology can tremendously increase the amount of processed data. FER is now easily accessible and has been validated for the classification of standardized prototypical facial expressions. However, applicability to more naturalistic facial expressions still remains uncertain. Hence, we test and compare performance of three different FER systems with human emotion recognition for standardized (...) posed facial expressions and for non-standardized acted facial expressions. For the standardized images, all three systems classify basic emotions accurately and they are mostly on par with human raters. For the non-standardized stimuli, performance drops remarkably for all three systems, but Azure still performs similarly to humans. In addition, all systems and humans alike tend to misclassify some of the non-standardized emotional facial expressions as neutral. In sum, emotion recognition by automated facial expression recognition can be an attractive alternative to human emotion recognition for standardized and non-standardized emotional facial expressions. However, we also found limitations in accuracy for specific facial expressions; clearly there is need for thorough empirical evaluation to guide future developments in computer vision of emotional facial expressions. (shrink)

Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness (‘C-tests’) are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural organoids, and xenobot technology. Although a number of C-tests have been proposed in recent years, most are of limited use, and currently we have no (...) C-tests for many of the populations for which they are most critical. Here, we identify challenges facing any attempt to develop C-tests, propose a multidimensional classification of such tests, and identify strategies that might be used to validate them. (shrink)

Since its conception nearly 20 years ago, Logic Programming - the idea of using logic as a programming language - has been developed to the point where it now plays an important role in areas such as database theory, artificial intelligence and software engineering. However, there are still many challenging research issues to be addressed and the UK branch of the Association for Logic Programming was set up to provide a forum where the flourishing research community could discuss important issues (...) of Logic Programming which were often by-passed at the large international conferences. This volume contains the twelve papers which were presented at the ALPUK's 3rd conference which was held in Edinburgh, 10-12 April 1991. The aim of the conference was to give a broad but detailed technical insight into the work currently being done in this field, both in the UK and by researchers as far afield as Canada and Bulgaria. The breadth of interest in this area of Computer Science is reflected in the range of the papers which cover - amongst other areas - massively parallel implementation, constraint logic programming, circuit modelling, algebraic proof of program properties, deductive databases, specialised editors and standardisation. The resulting volume gives a good overview of the current progress being made in the field and will be of interest to researchers and students of any aspects of logic programming, parallel computing or database techniques and management. (shrink)

Odor and color are strongly associated. Numerous studies demonstrate consistent odor‐color associations, as well as effects of color on odor perception and language. Yet, we know little about how these associations arise. Here, we test whether language is a possible mediator of odor‐color associations, specifically whether odor‐color associations are mediated by implicit odor naming. In two experiments, we used an interference paradigm to prevent the verbalization of odors during an odor‐color matching task. If participants generate color associations subsequent to labeling (...) an odor, interfering with verbalization during the task should affect the ability to make color associations. In Experiment 1, contrary to our hypothesis, verbal interference did not affect odor‐color matches. However, since performance accuracy on the verbal interference task was high, it is possible our task did not sufficiently disrupt verbal processing. In Experiment 2, we, therefore, used an active verbal interference task, and still found no difference across interference conditions. Odor naming accuracy, odor familiarity, and odor pleasantness, however, did predict odor‐color matches. This suggests that although color associations are related to semantic factors, they are not generated by recruiting odor labels in the moment. Overall, our results do not provide evidence that language plays an online role in odor‐color associations, instead, they are consistent with the claim that language may have shaped associations during development. (shrink)

In American Heat, Donald Brown critically analyzes the U.S. response to global warming, inviting readers to examine the implicit morality of the U.S position, and ultimately to help lead the world toward an equitable sharing of the burdens and benefits of protecting the global environment. In short, Brown argues that an ethical focus on global environmental matters is the key to achieving a globally acceptable solution.

Philosophy and model theory frequently meet one another. Philosophy and Model Theory aims to understand their interactions -/- Model theory is used in every ‘theoretical’ branch of analytic philosophy: in philosophy of mathematics, in philosophy of science, in philosophy of language, in philosophical logic, and in metaphysics. But these wide-ranging appeals to model theory have created a highly fragmented literature. On the one hand, many philosophically significant mathematical results are found only in mathematics textbooks: these are aimed squarely at mathematicians; (...) they typically presuppose that the reader has a significant background in mathematics; and little clue is given as to their philosophical significance. On the other hand, the philosophical applications of these results are then scattered across disconnected pockets of papers, separated by decades or more. -/- The first aim of Philosophy and Model Theory, then, is to consider the philosophical uses of model theory. On a technical level, we try to show how philosophically significant results connect to one another, and also to state the best version of a result for philosophical purposes. On a philosophical level, we show how similar dialectical situations arise repeatedly, across fragmented debates in varied philosophical areas. -/- The second aim of Philosophy and Model Theory, though, is to consider the philosophy of model theory. Model theory itself is rarely taken as the subject matter of philosophising (contrast this, say, with the philosophy of biology, or the philosophy of set theory). But model theory is a beautiful part of pure mathematics, and worthy of philosophical study in its own right. (shrink)

How is nostalgia positioned among self-relevant emotions? We tested, in six studies, which self-relevant emotions are perceived as most similar versus least similar to nostalgia, and what underlies these similarities/differences. We used multidimensional scaling to chart the perceived similarities/differences among self-relevant emotions, resulting in two-dimensional models. The results were revealing. Nostalgia is positioned among self-relevant emotions characterised by positive valence, an approach orientation, and low arousal. Nostalgia most resembles pride and self-compassion, and least resembles embarrassment and shame. Our research pioneered (...) the integration of nostalgia among self-relevant emotions. (shrink)

By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that both aspects of pain are critical to its experience. Recent experimental work, however, suggests a public view that is at odds with this conceptualisation. (...) By demonstrating that the public does not necessarily endorse central tenets of the “mental” view of pain (subjectivity, privacy, and incorrigibility), experimental philosophers have argued that the public holds a more “body-centric” view than most clinicians and scholars. Such a discrepancy would have important implications for how the public interacts with pain science and clinical care. In response, we tested the hypothesis that the public is capable of a more “mind-centric” view of pain. Using a series of vignettes, we demonstrate that in situations which highlight mental aspects of pain the public can, and does, recognize pain as a mental phenomenon. We also demonstrate that the public view is subject to context effects, by showing that the public’s view is modified when situations emphasizing mental and somatic aspects of pain are presented together. (shrink)

_Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach_ offers a new, short term psychotherapeutic approach to working dynamically with children who suffer from irritability, oppositional defiance and disruptiveness. _RFP-C_ enables clinicians to help by addressing and detailing how the child’s externalizing behaviors have meaning which they can convey to the child. Using clinical examples throughout, Hoffman, Rice and Prout demonstrate that in many dysregulated children, _RFP-C_ can: Achieve symptomatic improvement and developmental maturation as a result of (...) gains in the ability to tolerate and metabolize painful emotions, by addressing the crucial underlying emotional component. Diminish the child’s use of aggression as the main coping device by allowing painful emotions to be mastered more effectively. Help to systematically address avoidance mechanisms, talking to the child about how their disruptive behavior helps them avoid painful emotions. Facilitate development of an awareness that painful emotions do not have to be so vigorously warded off, allowing the child to reach this implicit awareness within the relationship with the clinician, which can then be expanded to life situations at home and at school. This handbook is the first to provide a manualized, short-term dynamic approach to the externalizing behaviors of childhood, offering organizing framework and detailed descriptions of the processes involved in _RFP-C_. Supplying clinicians with a systematic individual psychotherapy as an alternative or complement to PMT, CBT and psychotropic medication, it also shifts focus away from simply helping parents manage their children’s misbehaviors. Significantly, the approach shows that clinical work with these children is compatible with understanding the children’s brain functioning, and posits that contemporary affect-oriented conceptualizations of defense mechanisms are theoretically similar to the neuroscience construct of implicit emotion regulation, promoting an interface between psychodynamics and contemporary academic psychiatry and psychology. Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach is a comprehensive tool capable of application at all levels of professional training, offering a new approach for psychoanalysts, child and adolescent counselors, psychotherapists and mental health clinicians in fields including social work, psychology and psychiatry. (shrink)

Universals are putative objects like wisdom, morality, redness, etc. Although we believe in properties (which, we argue, are not a kind of object), we do not believe in universals. However, a number of ordinary, natural language constructions seem to commit us to their existence. In this paper, we provide a fictionalist theory of universals, which allows us to speak as if universals existed, whilst denying that any really do.

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

Tim Button explores the relationship between words and world; between semantics and scepticism. -/- A certain kind of philosopher – the external realist – worries that appearances might be radically deceptive. For example, she allows that we might all be brains in vats, stimulated by an infernal machine. But anyone who entertains the possibility of radical deception must also entertain a further worry: that all of our thoughts are totally contentless. That worry is just incoherent. -/- We cannot, then, be (...) external realists, who worry about the possibility of radical deception. Equally, however, we cannot be internal realists, who reject all possibility of deception. We must position ourselves somewhere between internal realism and external realism, but we cannot hope to say exactly where. We must be realists, for what that is worth, and realists within limits. -/- In establishing these claims, The Limits of Realism critically explores and develops several themes from Hilary Putnam’s work: the model-theoretic arguments; the connection between truth and justification; the brain-in-vat argument; semantic externalism; and conceptual relativity. The book establishes the continued significance of these topics for all philosophers interested in mind, logic, language, or the possibility of metaphysics. (shrink)

Tim Bayne draws on philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience in defence of the claim that consciousness is unified. He develops an account of what it means to say that consciousness is unified, and then applies this account to a variety of cases - drawn from both normal and pathological forms of experience - in which the unity of consciousness is said to break down. He goes on to explore the implications of the unity of consciousness for theories of consciousness, for the (...) sense of embodiment, and for accounts of the self. The Unity of Consciousness draws on a wide range of findings within philosophy and the sciences of the mind to construct an account of the unity of consciousness that is both conceptually sophisticated and scientifically informed. (shrink)

Does thought have distinctive experiential features? Is there, in addition to sensory phenomenology, a kind of cognitive phenomenology--phenomenology of a cognitive or conceptual character? Leading philosophers of mind debate whether conscious thought has cognitive phenomenology and whether it is part of conscious perception and conscious emotion.

In this article, the authors utilize the philosophical methodology developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to formulate a theory of educational realism. The goal is to posit an embodied form of education that emerges from within the movements of the multitude. The connection between multitudinous movement and education is the concept of choreography, which destabilizes habituated movements, unleashing creative alternatives. The paper concludes with several examples of choreography as an exopedagogy for cultivating embodied, swarm intelligence from the work of (...) noted choreographer William Forsythe. (shrink)

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one’s past, can serve as a resource for individuals coping with discomforting experiences. The experience of bereavement poses psychological and physical risks....

We argue that corporate social performance (CSP) has become a legitimizing identity (brand) for researchers in the business and society field, but it has not developed into a viable theoretical or operational construct. Because measuring CSP is contingent on the operational setting (industry, issues, etc.), it is difficult to produce worthwhile comparisons across studies or generalizing beyond the boundaries of a specific study. The authors suggest that researchers remove the CSP label from their operational variables, and instead narrowly define their (...) studies in operational terms. They provide aworking example of the proposed research direction by examining the theory underlying the popular CSP–financial performance (FP) debate. In the authors’ conceptualization, stakeholder action provides the underlying logic connecting CSP-FP, and we recast the research question to investigate the conditions under which stakeholders will take action to influence the focal organization and when those actions will influence the CSP-FP link. (shrink)

A modest proposal concerning laws, counterfactuals, and explanations - - Why be Humean? -- Suggestions from physics for deep metaphysics -- On the passing of time -- Causation, counterfactuals, and the third factor -- The whole ball of wax -- Epilogue : a remark on the method of metaphysics.

In this work Tim Ingold provides a persuasive new approach to the theory behind our perception of the world around us. The core of the argument is that where we refer to cultural variation we should be instead be talking about variation in skill. Neither genetically innate or culturally acquired, skills are incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment.They are as much biological as cultural.

Organizational ethics—defined as the alignment of an institution’s practices with its mission, vision, and values—is a growing field in health care not well characterized in empirical literature. To capture the scope and context of organizational ethics work in United States healthcare institutions, we conducted a nationwide convenience survey of ethicists regarding the scope of organizational ethics work, common challenges faced, and the organizational context in which this work is done. In this article, we report substantial variability in the structure of (...) organizational ethics programs and the settings in which it is conducted. Notable findings included disagreement about the activities that comprise organizational ethics and a lack of common metrics used to assess organizational ethics activities. A frequently cited barrier to full engagement in these activities was poor institution-wide understanding about the role and function of organizational ethics resources. These data suggest a tension in the trajectory of organizational ethics’ professionalization: while some variability is appropriate to the field’s relative youth, inadequate attention to definitions of organizational ethics practice and metrics for success can impede discussions about appropriate institutional support, leadership context, and training for practitioners. (shrink)

To understand the mind, we need to draw equally on the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience. But these two fields have very separate intellectual roots, and very different styles. So how can these two be reconciled in order to develop a full understanding of the mind and brain.This is the focus of this landmark new book.

Accounts of the nation and national identity have tended to focus upon the transmission by cultural elites of authoritative culture, invented traditions and folk customs. Following Billig, I suggest that the national is increasingly located in the everyday and in the realm of popular culture; far more so than in ‘high’ and ‘official’ forms of culture. To exemplify this, I discuss national automobilities, specifically exploring the role of iconic models, mundane motorscapes and the everyday, habitual performances of driving. With a (...) particular focus upon British and Indian car cultures, I further suggest that the ‘national’ is not a singular or monolithic entity but is constituted out of a vast matrix of interrelated elements, three of which are the models, geographies and performances identified above. As the national proliferates and expands, becoming globalized, it generates multiple forms of national identity, although consistencies and points of focus remain. Accordingly, as in other cultural fields, I argue that while global manifestations of automobility proliferate, this has not necessarily diminished the salience of the national in the relationship between driving cars and identity. The national thus remains a powerful constituent of identity precisely because of its often unreflexive grounding in everyday spaces and practices. (shrink)

What do we owe to our descendants? How do we balance their needs against our own? Tim Mulgan develops a new theory of our obligations to future generations, based on a new rule-consequentialist account of the morality of individual reproduction. He also brings together several different contemporary philosophical discussions, including the demands of morality and international justice. His aim is to produce a coherent, intuitively plausible moral theory that is not unreasonably demanding, even when extended to cover future people. While (...) the book focuses on developing this new account, there are also substantial discussions of alternative views, especially contract-based accounts of intergenerational justice and competing forms of consequentialism. (shrink)

Neuropsychological results are increasingly cited in cognitive theories although their methodology has been severely criticised. The book argues for an eclectic approach but particularly stresses the use of single-case studies. A range of potential artifacts exists when inferences are made from such studies to the organisation of normal function – for example, resource differences among tasks, premorbid individual differences, and reorganisation of function. The use of “strong” and “classical” dissociations minimises potential artifacts. The theoretical convergence between findings from fields where (...) cognitive neuropsychology is well developed and those from the normal literature strongly suggests that the potential artifacts are not critical. The fields examined in detail in this respect are short-term memory, reading, writing, the organisation of input and output speech systems, and visual perception. Functional dissociation data suggest that not only are input systems organised modularly, but so are central systems. This conclusion is supported by findings on impairment of knowledge, visual attention, supervisory functions, memory, and consciousness. (shrink)