The papers in this volume, first published in 1982, deal with a number of different aspects of Marx's ideas and the varying constructions put on them by later Marxists. Based on a lecture series, they examine Marxist views of the nature of philosophy, of history and historical explanation, the role and importance of politics, and of literature and the place of ethics. Among the Marxists considered are Lukacs, Sartre, Habermas, Althusser and Macherey. A continuous concern through the volume is the (...) relation within Marxist thought of fact and value, with the implications that will have for our actions. (shrink)

This article catalogs social processes contributing to construction of emotions across three time-scales, covering: natural selection; ontogenesis; and moment-by-moment transactions. During human evolution, genetic and cultural influences operate interdependently, not as separate forces working against each other. Further, leaving infants’ environment-open serves adaptive purposes. During ontogenesis, cultural socialization affects emotion development in various ways, not all of which depend on internalization of cultural meanings as emphasized in some earlier social constructionist accounts. Construction also operates over the moment-by-moment time-scale of real-time (...) interpersonal interactions, as emotions adjust to the constraints and affordances of immediate cultural environments. Claims that emotions are constructed, and that social processes contribute to their construction, are no longer contestable. Now the project is to specify how these processes operate and what materials they use. (shrink)

The idea that cybernetics can throw light on problems connected with thinking and learning is now a familiar one. Psychologists who are concerned with these problems often make use of cybernetic analogies, and some cyberneticians claim that their science provides an answer to philosophical problems about the nature of thought. On this last topic a great deal has been written recently; but it is comparatively seldom that it is suggested that cybernetics can be applied to problems of aesthetics. On the (...) face of it, the mere idea of such an application might well seem absurd. Cybernetics, it will be said, is by definition the study of certain types of machines, and what light can possibly be thrown by such a study on questions which concern the nature of art? But even the strangest-sounding questions can prove enlightening, and in a recent broadcast talk Dr. F. H.George thought it worth while to ask whether a machine could create a work of art. This paper isdevoted to the development, and criticism, of some of the points which he made. (shrink)

This paper presents a new approach to the demarcation of social emotions, based on their dependence on social appraisals that are designed to assess events bearing on social concerns. Previous theoretical attempts to characterize social emotions are compared, and their inconsistencies highlighted. Evidence for the present formulation is derived from theory and research into links between appraisals and emotions. Emotions identified as social using our criteria are also shown to bring more consistent consequences for social behavior than nonsocial emotions. We (...) conclude by considering ways of validating and refining our classification. (shrink)

This article examines science books for children, a genre that has been neglected both in studies of science discourse and in studies of literature for children. It compares this genre to two other science genres, textbooks and popular science articles, and finds great similarities between science textbooks and science books for children, both in terms of register and cultural values. As a result of these similarities, it suggests that science books for children are valuable in providing access to textbook literacy, (...) which is highly prized in the later school years. (shrink)

Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether "moral judgments" are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of moral judgments within three moral areas: (physical) harm, dishonesty, and (sexual) disgust. We found that the judgment ofmoral wrongness was subserved by distinct neural systems for each of the different moral areas and that these differences (...) were much more robust than differences in wrongness judgments within a moral area. Dishonest, disgusting, and harmful moral transgression recruited networks of brain regions associated with mentalizing, affective processing, and action understanding, respectively. Dorsal medial pFC was the only region activated by all scenarios judged to be morally wrong in comparison with neutral scenarios. However, this region was also activated by dishonest and harmful scenarios judged not to be morally wrong, suggestive of a domain-general role that is neither peculiar to nor predictive of moral decisions. These results suggest that moral judgment is not a wholly unified faculty in the human brain, but rather, instantiated in dissociable neural systems that are engaged differentially depending on the type of transgression being judged. (shrink)

A social partner’s emotions communicate important information about their motives and intentions. However, people may discount emotional information that they believe their partner has regulated with the strategic intention of exerting social influence. Across two studies, we investigated interpersonal effects of communicated guilt and perceived strategic regulation in trust games. Results showed that communicated guilt mitigated negative effects of trust violations on interpersonal judgements and behaviour. Further, perceived strategic regulation reduced guilt’s positive effects. These findings suggest that people take emotion-regulation (...) motives into account when responding to emotion communication. (shrink)

This book offers a complete rethink of the institutional limits and possibilities of deliberative democracy and legitimacy. Examining several unresolved problems at the core of deliberative democratic theory, this volume will be vital reading for deliberative democratic theorists and public policy makers.

Professor Parkinson's book on Spinoza's theory of knowledge makes a serious attempt to consider this theme in isolation. The author argues that an understanding of this particular theory is a prerequisite to any understanding of Spinoza's theory of ethics or his metaphysical views. The text also discusses Spinoza's interests, especially the influence of science on the development of his thought, and ultimately provides a critical account of the philosopher's methodology, theory of truth, and theory of differing kinds of knowledge.

This article integrates arguments and evidence from my 2019 monograph Heart to Heart: How Your Emotions Affect Other People. The central claim is that emotions operate as processes of relation alignment that produce convergence, complementarity, or conflict between two or more people’s orientations to objects. In some cases, relation alignment involves strategic presentation of emotional information for the purpose of regulating other people’s behaviour. In other cases, emotions consolidate from socially distributed reciprocal adjustments of cues, signals, and emerging actions without (...) any explicit registration or communication of emotional meaning by parties to the exchange. The relation-alignment approach provides a fresh perspective on issues relating to emotion’s interpersonal, intragroup, and organizational functions and clarifies how emotions are regulated for social purposes. (shrink)

This article discusses contemporary social psychological approaches to the social relations and appraisals associated with specific emotions; other people’s impact on appraisal processes; effects of emotion on other people; and interpersonal emotion regulation. We argue that single-minded cognitive perspectives restrict our understanding of interpersonal and group-related emotional processes, and that new methodologies addressing real-time interpersonal and group processes present promising opportunities for future progress.

This paper is concerned with some limitations of the vignette methodology used in contemporary appraisal research and their implications for appraisal theory. We focus on two recent studies in which emotional manipulations were achieved using textual materials, and criticise the investigators' apparent implicit assumption that participation in everyday social reality is somehow comparable to reading a story. We take issue with three related aspects of this cognitive analogy between life and its narrative representation, by arguing that emotional reactions in real (...) life are not necessarily mediated by symbolic processes, that people are involved participants of real life rather than neutral observers, and that in real life people's evaluations and emotions are typically part of an ongoing dialogue rather than the expression of a soliloquy. Results from these studies of emotional vignettes therefore tend to overestimate the importance of constructive, abstract, and individualistic processes in the everyday causation of social emotions. In real life, people do not necessarily have to calculate, transform, or internally represent the meaning of the dynamic situation in order to make emotional sense of what is happening to them in the social world. (shrink)

Recent studies have used self-report methods to defend a close associative or causal connection between appraisal and emotion. The present experiments used similar procedures to investigate remembered experiences of reasonable and unreasonable anger and guilt, and of nonemotional other-blame and selfblame. Results suggest that the patterns of appraisal reported for reasonable examples of emotions and for situations where there is a near absence of emotion may be highly similar, but that both may differ significantly from the appraisal profiles reported for (...) unreasonable examples of the same emotions. Further, relevant appraisals were not always identified by participants as the most influential determinants of guilt and anger. These findings demonstrate either that the relationship between certain appraisals and emotions is less consistent than implied in some contemporary versions of appraisal theory, or that there are problems with the validity of existing questionnaire-based measures of the variables in question. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes processes potentially contributing to interpersonal anxiety transfer, including object-directed social appraisal, empathic worry, and anxiety contagion, and reviews evidence for their operation. We argue that these anxiety-transfer processes may be exploited strategically when attempting to regulate relationship partners’ emotion. More generally, anxiety may serve as either a warning signal to other people about threat (alerting function) or an appeal for emotional support or practical help (comfort-seeking function). Tensions between these two interpersonal functions may account for mutually incongruent (...) interpersonal responses to expressed anxiety, including mistargeted interpersonal regulation attempts. Because worry waxes and wanes over time as a function of other people's ongoing reactions, interpersonal interventions may help to alleviate some of its maladaptive consequences. (shrink)

Drawing on research reviewed in this special section, the present article discusses how various contextual factors impact on production and decoding of emotion-related facial activity. Although emotion-related variables often contribute to activation of prototypical “emotion expressions” and perceivers can often infer emotional meanings from these facial configurations, neither process is invariant or direct. Many facial movements are directed towards or away from events in the shared environment, and their effects depend on these relational orientations. Facial activity is not only a (...) medium for descriptive representation of internal affective states, but also a means of adjusting to, and operating on, external objects, and of influencing other people’s appraisals of those objects. (shrink)

According to Brehm's intensity of emotion theory, if an emotion has motivational properties, its intensity should be non-monotonically affected by factors similar to those determining the intensity of motivational states. These factors are called deterrents. In the case of emotion, one category of deterrents consists of factors that can potentially interfere with feeling the emotion, such as reasons for not feeling the emotion. Two experiments were carried out to examine whether happiness is a motivational state and, thus, if its intensity (...) is non-monotonically determined by the importance of reasons for not feeling happy. We expected happiness to be reduced by a low importance reason for not feeling happy, to remain high in the presence of a moderately important reason, and to be reduced or eliminated by a very important reason. Both experiments supported the cubic function that results from these expectations, and when the results of the two studies were combined, each of the individual legs of the cubic function was found to be reliable along with the cubic function itself. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

Does appraisal co-ordinate emotional responses? Are emotions usually reached via mental representations of relational meaning? This comment considers alternative causal routes in order to assess the centrality of appraisal in the explanation of emotion. Implicit and explicit meaning extraction can certainly help steer the course of emotion-related processes. However, presupposing that appraisals represent the driving force behind all aspects of emotion generation leads to inclusive formulations of appraisal or restrictive formulations of emotion.