Although movement has long been recognized as expressing emotion and as an agent of change for emotional state, there was a dearth of scientific evidence specifying which aspects of movement influence specific emotions. The recent identification of clusters of Laban movement components which elicit and enhance the basic emotions of anger, fear, sadness and happiness indicates which types of movements can affect these emotions (Shafir et al., 2016), but not how best to apply this knowledge. This perspective paper lays (...) out a conceptual groundwork for how to effectively use these new findings to support emotional resiliency through voluntary choice of one’s posture and movements. We suggest that three theoretical principles from Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) can guide the gradual change in movement components in one’s daily movements to somatically support shift in affective state: (A) Introduce new movement components in developmental order; (B) Use LMA affinities-among-components to guide the expansion of expressive movement range and (C) Sequence change among components based on Laban’s Space Harmony theory to support the gradual integration of that new range. The methods postulated in this article have potential to foster resiliency and provide resources for self-efficacy by expanding our capacity to adapt emotionally to challenges through modulating our movement responses. (shrink)

Novelty is a pivotal player in cognition, and its contribution to superior memory performance is a widely accepted convention. On the other hand, mnemonic advantages for familiar information are also well documented. Here, we examine the role of experimental distinctiveness as a potential explanation for these apparently conflicting findings. Across two experiments, we demonstrate that conceptual novelty, an unfamiliar combination of familiar constituents, is sensitive to its experimental proportions: Improved memory for novelty was observed when novel stimuli were relatively rare. (...) Memory levels for familiar items, in contrast, were completely unaffected by experimental proportions, highlighting their insensitivity to list-based distinctiveness. Finally, no mnemonic advantage for conceptual novelty over familiarity was observed even when novel stimuli were extremely rare at study. Together, these results imply that novel and familiar items are processed via partially distinct mechanisms, with novelty not providing a mnemonic advantage over familiarity. (shrink)

The cheater-detection (CD) hypothesis suggests that people who otherwise perform poorly on the Wason selection task perform well when the task is couched in cheater-detection contexts. We report three studies with new selection problems that are similar to the originals but that question the CD hypothesis. The first two studies document a pattern heretofore attributed to CD mechanisms, namely good performance with “regular” rules and inferior performance with “switched” rules, all in problems that lack a cheater-detection context. The final study (...) finds an interaction: not only is good performance elicited on non-CD problems, but poor performance is found in the context of CD problems. Performance on the selection task cannot be predicted based on the presence or absence of cheater-detection contexts, which brings into question the need to invoke a specialised cheater-detection module. (shrink)

Evaluative contexts can be stressful, but relatively little is known about how different individuals who vary in responses to self-evaluation make emotion regulatory choices to cope in these situations. To address this gap, participants who vary in self-esteem gave an impromptu speech, rated how they perceived they had performed on multiple evaluative dimensions, and subsequently chose between disengaging attention from emotional processing and engaging with emotional processing via changing its meaning, while waiting to receive feedback regarding these evaluative dimensions. According (...) to our framework, distraction can offer stronger short-term relief than reappraisal, but, distraction is costly in the long run relative to reappraisal because it does not allow learning from evaluative feedback. We predicted and found that participants with lower self-esteem react defensively to threat of failure by seeking short-term relief via distraction over the long-term benefit of reappraisal, as perceived failure increases. Implications for the understanding of emotion regulation and self-esteem are discussed. (shrink)

Was Joseph de Maistre a conservative thinker?; an actor who might at any time switch roles with his alleged British counterpart Edmund Burke in a show called “Reactions to the French Revolution”? Or was de Maistre (as Sir Isaiah Berlin saw him) a milestone on mankind’s rush to the “Age of Unreason” in general, and to the Nazi folly in particular? To answer this controversy, Professor Michael Shafir called on the witness’ stand an unexpected expert in conservatism and the (...) folly of revolutions: Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. Using as evidence before the court Caragiale’s famous farce “Master Leonida Facing Reaction”, this exercise in literary counterfactualism demonstrates, according to Shafir, the fig of reason and faith is too small to cover the wastelands of unreason and Social-Darwinist-like psychopathology. (shrink)

Post-communist East-Central Europe is witnessing a clash of memories focused on its recent past. Whereas Western memory is constructed around the “politics of regret” and responsibility-assumption vis-à-vis the Holocaust, Eastern memory focuses to a large extent on responsibility-attribution for the trauma of communist rule. These are comparable traumatic experiences, but due to different “cognitive mapping” and different mnemonic social frameworks, Eastern memory has produced a post-mnemonic framework that allows for a creeping justification of interwar Radical Right ideologies; for the transmogrification (...) some of their standard-bearers into anti-communist heroes and martyrs; and the obfuscation World War II history. In some countries, religion and its past representatives are used for the same purpose. (shrink)

This paper grew as a continuation of [Sh462] but in the present form it can serve as a motivation for it as well. We deal with the same notions, all defined in 1.1, and use just one simple lemma from there whose statement and proof we repeat as 2.1. Originally entangledness was introduced, in [BoSh210] for example, in order to get narrow boolean algebras and examples of the nonmultiplicativity of c.c-ness. These applications became marginal when other methods were found and (...) successfully applied (especially Todorčevic walks) but after the pcf constructions which made their début in [Sh-g] and were continued in [Sh462] it seems that this notion gained independence.Generally we aim at characterizing the existence of strong and weak entangled orders in cardinal arithmetic terms. In [Sh462, §6] necessary conditions were shown for strong entangledness which in a previous version was erroneously proved to be equivalent to plain entangledness. In §1 we give a forcing counterexample to this equivalence and in §2 we get those results for entangledness (certainly the most interesting case). A new construction of an entangled order ends this section. In §3 we get weaker results for positively entangledness, especially when supplemented with the existence of a separating point (Definition 2.2). An antipodal case is defined in 3.10 and completely characterized in 3.11. Lastly we outline in 3.12 a forcing example showing that these two subcases of positive entangledness comprise no dichotomy. The work was done during the fall of 1994 and the winter of 1995. The second author proved Theorems 1.2, 2.14, the result that is mentioned in Remark 2.11 and what appears in this version as Theorem 2.10(a) with the further assumptionden(I)θ< μ. The first author is responsible for waving off this assumption (actually by showing that it holds in the general case), for Theorems 2.12 and 2.13 in Section 2 and for the work which is presented in Section 3. (shrink)

Post-communist anti-Semitism in Romania and elsewhere in East Central Europe is not necessarily driven by the same motivations. Basically, each of the categories I employ in the taxonomy (updating earlier endeavors) acts out of a different motivation and has a different temporal orientation. What they all share, however, is precisely the attempt to respond to the need to produce what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community,” in albeit significantly different positive terms of reference. A distinction is made between the following (...) taxonomic categories of “producers” of anti-Semitism: a) “Selfexculpatory nostalgic anti-Semitism;” b) “Self-propelling anti-Semitism”; c) “Neo-populist mercantile anti-Semitism”: d) “Utilitarian anti-Semitism”; e) “Reactive anti-Semitism; and, finally, f) “Vengeance anti-Semitism.&rdquo. (shrink)

Day-to-day life is inundated with attempts to control emotions and a wealth of research has examined what strategies people use and how effective these strategies are. However, until more recently, research has often neglected more basic questions such as whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions (i.e. emotion regulation choice). In an effort to identify what we know and what we need to know, we systematically reviewed studies that examined potential determinants of whether and how people choose to (...) regulate their emotions. Eighteen determinants were identified across 219 studies and were categorised as being affective, cognitive, motivational, individual or social-cultural in nature. Where there were sufficient primary studies, meta-analysis was used to quantify the size of the associations between potential determinants and measures of whether and how people choose to regulate their emotions. Based on the findings, we propose that people’s decisions about whether and how to regulate their emotions are determined by factors relating to the individual doing the regulating, the emotion that is being regulated, and both the immediate situation and the broader social context in which the regulation is taking place. (shrink)

We advance a model of human probability judgment and apply it to the design of an extrapolation algorithm. Such an algorithm examines a person's judgment about the likelihood of various statements and is then able to predict the same person's judgments about new statements. The algorithm is tested against judgments produced by thirty undergraduates asked to assign probabilities to statements about mammals.

Establishing reasonable, prior distributions remains a significant obstacle for the construction of probabilistic expert systems. Human assessment of chance is often relied upon for this purpose, but this has the drawback of being inconsistent with axioms of probability. This article advances a method for extracting a coherent distribution of probability from human judgment. The method is based on a psychological model of probabilistic reasoning, followed by a correction phase using linear programming.

The Israel–Palestine conflict is one of the most tenacious and polarizing conflicts in the world and, according to some analysts, one that is seemingly impossible to solve given the current input v...

The disjunction effect (Tversky & Shafir, 1992) occurs when decision makers prefer option x (versus y) when knowing that event A occurs and also when knowing that event A does not occur, but they refuse x (or prefer y) when not knowing whether or not A occurs. This form of incoherence violates Savage's (1954) sure-thing principle, one of the basic axioms of the rational theory of decision making. The phenomenon was attributed to a lack of clear reasons for accepting (...) an option (x) when subjects are under uncertainty. Through a pragmatic analysis of the task and a consequent reformulation of it, we show that the effect does not depend on the presence of uncertainty, but on the introduction of non-relevant goals into the text problem, in both the well-known Gamble problem and the Hawaii problem. (shrink)

Scarcity acts as a mental burden that disrupts how people process information and make decisions (Mullainathan and Shafir in Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2013; Mani et al. Science 342:976–980, 2013). In this study, we replicated Mani et al.’s (Science 342:976–980, 2013) experimental design to explore whether scarcity also taxes Colombian high school students’ mental bandwidth. In a lab-in-the-field experiment, we tested how 417 high school students from high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in (...) Bogotá, Colombia, responded to different scarcity situations. Students were first presented with hypothetical scenarios of harsh or soft scarcity. Next, participants had to solve a series of tasks that measured higher cognitive functions (i.e. Raven’s Progressive Matrices, Cognitive Reflection Task and questions to assess their Delay Discounting value) and had to explain how they would solve the scarcity situation. As opposed to Mani et al. (Science 342:976–980, 2013), we did not find that scarcity taxed individuals’ mental bandwidth, neither their cognitive nor executive functions. We found that low-SES individuals, under the harsh scarcity condition, displayed more empathic attributes than high-SES individuals. Taken together, the results of this study show the importance of replication in different cultures and environments. (shrink)

The disjunction effect (Tversky and Shafir in Psychol Sci 3:305–309, 1992) occurs when decision makers prefer option x (versus y) when knowing that event A occurs and also when knowing that event A does not occur, but they refuse x (or prefer y) when not knowing whether or not A occurs. This form of incoherence violates Savage’s (Cognition 57:31–95, 1954) sure-thing principle, one of the basic axioms of the rational theory of decision-making. The phenomenon was attributed to a lack (...) of clear reasons for accepting an option (x) when the subjects are under uncertainty. Through a pragmatic analysis of the task and a consequent reformulation of it, we show that the effect does not depend on the presence of uncertainty, but on the introduction into the text-problem of a non-relevant goal. (shrink)