In this article we tackle the core question of machine emotion research – “Can machines have emotions?” – in the context of “social robots”, a new class of machines designed to function as “social partners” for humans. Our aim, however, is not to provide an answer to the question “Can robots have emotions?” Rather we argue that the “robotics of emotion” moves us to reformulate it into a different one – “Can robots affectively coordinate with (...) humans?” Developing a series of arguments relevant to theory of emotion, philosophy of AI, and the epistemology of synthetic models, we argue that the answer to this different question is positive, and that it lays grounds for an innovative ethical approach to emotional robots. This ethical project, which we introduced elsewhere as “synthetic ethics”, rejects the diffused ethical condemnation of emotional robots as “cheating” technology. Synthetic ethics focuses not on an ideological refusal, but on the concrete sustainability of the emerging mixed human-robot social ecologies. On this basis, in contrast to a purely negative ethical approach to social robotics it promotes an analytical case by case ethical inquiry into the type of human flourishing that can result from human-robot affective coordination. (shrink)

We propose a sociodynamic model of emotions, in which emotions are seen as dynamic systems that emerge from the interactions and relationships in which they take place. Our model does not deny that emotions are biologically constrained, yet it takes seriously that emotions are situated in specific contexts. We conceive emotions as largely functional to the sociocultural environment in which they occur; this is so because sociocultural environments foster the emergence of emotions that positively (...) contribute to social cohesion. The role of the social context includes actual, online shaping—affordances, constraints, and reward structures—and thus goes beyond merely providing the content of cognitive representations (e.g., goals, concepts). (shrink)

Vigil's socio-relational framework of sex differences in emotional expressiveness emphasizes general sex differences in emotional responding, but largely ignores the social context in which emotions are expressed. There is much empirical evidence showing that sex differences in emotion displays are flexible and a function of specific social roles and demands, rather than a reflection of evolutionary-based social adjustments.

Resumen El reconocimiento facial es una tecnología que se ha utilizado para el control de la población a fin de combatir los efectos de la pandemia por COVID-19. Sin embargo, esta tecnología se utiliza hace bastante tiempo en muchos ámbitos del quehacer económico, social y político. Este trabajo analiza el reconocimiento fa cial entendida como la captura de micro expresiones faciales mediante la cual se puede medir y evaluar emociones con el fin de vigilar movimiento, predecir com portamientos y (...) anticipar intenciones de compra y de voto. Nuestro objetivo es revisar los enfoques teóricos que sustentan esta tecnología que ha devenido en una nueva oportunidad de negocio, para proponer después algunas reflexiones éticas derivadas.Facial recognition is a technology that is used to control people in order to fight the impacts of COVID-19. However, this technology has been used formany years in many economical, social and political areas. This work provides an analysis of the new business based on technologies of facial micro-expressions recognition. By means of this procedure, the involved companies measure and evaluate emotions with the aim of monitoring the movement, predicting behaviors, intentions of purchase and vote, between other applications. Our purpose is to check the theoretical suppositions that sustain this business, to propose later some ethical derivative reflections. (shrink)

This chapter describes a perspective on emotion, according to which emotions are: 1. Designed to function in a social context: an emotion is often an act of relationship reconfiguration brought about by delivering a social signal; 2. Forms of skillful engagement with the world which need not be mediated by conceptual thought; 3. Scaffolded by the environment, both synchronically in the unfolding of a particular emotional performance and diachronically, in the acquisition of an emotional repertoire; 4. (...) Dynamically coupled to an environment which both influences and is influenced by the unfolding of the emotion We draw heavily on ‘transactional’ accounts of emotion proposed by some contemporary psychologists. Although these authors do not, to our knowledge, conceive their work as a contribution to the ‘situationist’ literature that is the focus of this volume, we contend that their proposals constitute a fairly exact, affective parallel to situationist ideas about cognition. The primary aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that a situated approach to emotion already exists and is backed by a substantial experimental literature. (shrink)

In our everyday interactions we easily and effortlessly perceive emotions in others’ facial expressions and bodily behavior. How do we do that? Philosophers and psychologists have long argued about the fundamentals of emotion perception and the debate is far from settled. While some insist on the sufficiency of the morphological information contained in facial expressions, others construe the objects of emotion perception as more complex, comprising multimodal information such as touch, tone of voice, body postures, and so on. Others, (...) in turn, have gone so far as to deny that there is a pre-given object in emotion perception in the first place, so that processes of emotion perception must be conceptualized as emergent and co-constructed phenomena in contexts of social interaction. The purpose of this paper is to argue that John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of emotions can help us make significant theoretical advancements in the understanding of emotion perception, according to which emotions are coordinated modes of behavior that we enact with others in the contexts of social interactions. In this picture, perceiving emotions is a matter of participating in a joint activity of socio- affective coordination. This theory allows us to apprehend important insights about emotion perception that appear in these contemporary debates, while at the same time avoiding their pitfalls. (shrink)

While numerous studies have examined the relationships between facial actions and emotions, they have yet to account for the ways that specific spontaneous facial expressions map onto emotional experiences induced without expressive intent. Moreover, previous studies emphasized that a fine-grained investigation of facial components could establish the coherence of facial actions with actual internal states. Therefore, this study aimed to accumulate evidence for the correspondence between spontaneous facial components and emotional experiences. We reinvestigated data from previous research which secretly (...) recorded spontaneous facial expressions of Japanese participants as they watched film clips designed to evoke four different target emotions: surprise, amusement, disgust, and sadness. The participants rated their emotional experiences via a self-reported questionnaire of sixteen emotions. These spontaneous facial expressions were coded using the Facial Action Coding System, the gold standard for classifying visible facial movements. We corroborated each facial action that was present in the emotional experiences by applying stepwise regression models. The results found that spontaneous facial components occurred in ways that cohere to the their evolutionary functions based on the rating values of emotional experiences (e.g., the inner brow raiser might be involved in the evaluation of novelty). This study provided new empirical evidence for the correspondence between each spontaneous facial component and first-person internal states of emotion as reported by the expresser. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to reveal the function of the concept of Infāq, which is included in the terminology of the Qurʾān itself, in social assistance and solidarity. Poverty has always been one of the social problems from past to present. Although it is analyzed differently in each society via different criteria, poverty generally refers to the condition in which a person lacks the basic necessities for a minimum living standard. Unfortunately, millions of people starve for (...) basic biological and social needs such as nutrition, shelter, education, health, and even water. This is a shame for the humanity. There are both international and national charities working to reduce the misery and poverty. However, due to socio-economic and structural problems such as globalization, disproportion in income distribution, unemployment, overpopulation, economic crises, lack of social security systems, and wars, poverty rises gradually and it is still one of the major social problems needed to be solved. Islam which is the last one of Abrahamic religions and its holy book Qurʾān consider social cooperation and solidarity pretty important within the context of Infāq and hold the believers responsible for the organization of social life. Infāq is an umbrella concept in the Qurʾān, referring to all expenses and cooperation in the name of Allah and it is one of the main qualities of believers. Infāq, which includes other forms of cooperation such as obligatoryalms (zakāt) and charity (ṣadaqā), enables a person to share his tangible values with those who have worse life conditions than himself. In this way, the Quran aims to promote human relations and thereby enhancement and peace in the society. In other words, Infāq aims to eliminate social injustice which refers to social and economic inequalities, to protect the economically weak people against the difficulties in life, and thereby, to maintain economic and social stability. Helping the needy is a powerful path toward having spiritual peace, removing selfish feelings, and keeping emotional wellbeing. People with good mental health will be able to build more humane relationships with others. It is obvious that Infāq would play an important role inbuilding a sense of fellowship and trust. A wealth of person who shares his wealth with the poor will be deemed legitimate by the needy people. Thus, the needy people would be freed from negative feelings and behaviors such as jealousy, incapacity, hatred, bullying, and hostility, and feel a sense of fellowship and gratitude towards those who have better life conditions. One of the most important reasons for robbery, extortion, purse-snatching, and etc., which are currently occurring more frequently, is economic deprivation. Considering the fact that this kind of incidents takes place more frequently in poor countries than developed ones, it is obvious that Infāq has a strategic role in fulfilling the basic needs of the needy. Poverty might be linked to violence, which might end up with murder. Infāq which is divine cooperation approach would take an important role in fighting against criminal incidents that cause fear and indignation. Moreover, the Quran does not specify any certain economic condition to be able to do Infāq, and thereby, it makes people with various economic abilities become a part of the social cooperation. As everyone would take care of people who are relatively worse off, interindividual trust will be strengthen and circle of cooperation will be expanded. According to the Qurʾān, people’s all goods and possessions actually belong to Allah. People are just the trustees of this wealth. Allah grants as much wealth as He wills to whomever He wills. While the rich is responsible for sharing their wealth with the needy, the poor is responsible for bearing the troubles caused by poverty with patience and endeavoring to make money in a halal way. Unless Infāq is done in order to please Allah, it does not have any significance in the presence of Allah. The reason why people have different material living conditions is that both the poor and the rich are subject to test. Thus, they would get rewards for hereafter besides the sustaining of social unity and solidarity. Allah is the only warrantor of the tangible and spiritual wealth gained in return for Infāq. (shrink)

Recent empirical and philosophical research challenges the view that reason and emotion necessarily conflict with one another. Philosophers of science have, however, been slow in responding to this research. I argue that they continue to exclude emotion from their models of scientific reasoning because they typically see emotion as belonging to the context of discovery rather than of justification. I suggest, however, that recent work in epistemology challenges the authority usually granted the context distinction, taking a socially inflected (...) reliabilism as my example. Intersubjectively stable emotions may play a reliable role in the formation, which for the reliabilist also means the justification, of scientific beliefs. (shrink)

Emotions are engagements with a continuously changing world of social relationships. In the present article, we propose that emotions are therefore best conceived as ongoing, dynamic, and interactive processes that are socially constructed. We review evidence for three social contexts of emotion construction that are embedded in each other: The unfolding of emotion within interactions, the mutual constitution of emotion and relationships, and the shaping of emotion at the level of the larger cultural context. Finally, (...) we point to interdependencies amongst these contexts of construction and discuss future directions of a constructionist perspective. (shrink)

Studies of human development have taken an ethnographic turn in the 1990s. In this volume, leading anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists discuss how qualitative methodologies have strengthened our understanding of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development, and of the difficulties of growing up in contemporary society. Part 1, informed by a post-positivist philosophy of science, argues for the validity of ethnographic knowledge. Part 2 examines a range of qualitative methods, from participant observation to the hermeneutic elaboration of texts. In Part 3, ethnographic (...) methods are applied to issues of human development across the life span and to social problems including poverty, racial and ethnic marginality, and crime. Restoring ethnographic methods to a central place in social inquiry, these twenty-two lively essays will interest everyone concerned with the epistemological problems of context, meaning, and subjectivity in the behavioral sciences. (shrink)

This article applies Paul Tillich's existentialist analysis of the human predicament, particularly what it means to exist and to be fallen, to social media. I argue that social media heightens feelings of alienation and estrangement, supporting this claim with evidence from empirical research in psychiatry and communication studies. Thus, I offer an application of a Tillichian approach to an area of culture previously unexamined in this way. I identify three primary ways in which social media exacerbates existentialist (...) emotional states: social media allows us to construct artificial versions of ourselves through the use of filters and photo editing software; it provides the means to quantify social approval in groups the size of which the human brain has not evolved for; it extends the size of our social networks but decreases the quality of interactions. Social media is yet to receive significant philosophical or theological engagement despite its prevalence, particularly within younger generations. I argue that this is a mistake – philosophy has a duty to engage with such a ubiquitous feature of modern life. (shrink)

This article explores egg freezing experiences of women in Turkey. Since 2014, it has been legal in Turkey to use egg freezing technology for ageing women, while it was previously allowed only for disease-related purposes. In cooperation with a private fertility clinic in Istanbul, the authors conducted 21 interviews with older, single women who held either professional or managerial positions and who were undergoing or had undergone the procedure. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of these interviews, the authors explore the (...) social context in which women postpone motherhood and decide to freeze their eggs. The study also looks at the women’s emotional responses to ageing that were triggered by the experience of egg freezing and their narratives of empowerment as a result of the procedure. (shrink)

Education and cognition research today generally recognize the tri-dimensional nature of reasoning processes as involving cognitive, social and emotional phenomena. However, there is so far no theoretical framework articulating these three dimensions from a descriptive perspective. This paper aims at presenting a first model of how group emotions work in collective reasoning, and specifies their social and cognitive functions. This model is inspired both from a multidisciplinary literature review and our extensive previous empirical work on an international (...) corpus of videotaped student debates. The cognitive function of emotions is defined in reference to the process of schematization and associated emotional framing. On the other hand, the social function of emotions refers to recognition-oriented behaviors that correspond to engagement into specific types of group talk, implying specific politeness rules or face-preservation systems. We believe that our multi-dimensional and multi-level approach to group reasoning, which mostly employs a linguistic perspective, can be applied to a diversity of contexts. We hope it will serve as a basis for further discussion on the role of emotions in reasoning among the interdisciplinary community of argumentation studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art in Social Studies: Exploring the World and Ourselves with RembrandtIftikhar Ahmad (bio)IntroductionRembrandt’s art lends itself as a fertile resource for teaching and learning social studies. His art not only captures the social studies themes relevant to the Dutch Golden Age, but it also offers a description of human relations transcending temporal and spatial frontiers. Rembrandt is an imaginative storyteller with a keen insight for minute (...) details. His narrative of the culture, society, economy, geography, and contemporary events of seventeenth-century Dutch life is as vivid and perceptive as a historian’s eloquent text. How people lived in community, how the city of Amsterdam functioned, how important religion was to people, how diverse and cosmopolitan the culture was, how interdependent the world was in the seventeenth century, and what the social and civic ideals of the Dutch people were during the Golden Age—Rembrandt’s paintings, etchings, and drawings neatly organize these and other social studies themes into visual messages. More importantly, our appreciation and interpretation of Rembrandt’s work helps us learn about not just Dutch society and culture of four hundred years ago but also about ourselves. The passion, emotions, conflicts, and inspirations of his subjects are essentially human and eternal, arousing empathy in every generation and cross-section of society. In this article I look at Rembrandt’s art for the purpose of teaching and learning social studies in our contemporary interdependent world—a world that is chronologically and geographically distant from the Dutch Golden Age but in many respects shares its enduring values, norms, ideals, pursuits, challenges, and possibilities. To do so, I employ a conceptual lens—the curriculum thematic strands of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)—to examine Rembrandt’s art in order to explore life and make meaning of the story that is being told about the human condition, and to seek out its relevance to ourselves and [End Page 19] our world in the early twenty-first century. Although Rembrandt’s oeuvre is extensive, including the diverse genres of self-portraits, group portraits, drawings, etchings, landscapes, and religious themes, for our limited purpose I have selected only those works that, in my judgment, correspond with the following seven of the ten thematic curriculum strands of the NCSS:CultureTime, Continuity, and ChangePeople, Places, and EnvironmentIndividual Development and IdentityProduction, Distribution, and ConsumptionGlobal ConnectionsCivic Ideals and PracticesThese thematic curriculum strands are derived from the foundational disciplines of the social sciences and humanities such as anthropology, history, geography, sociology, political science, psychology, economics, philosophy, and law, but they are conceptually interrelated.1 For example, culture is a core concept in anthropology but it is also relevant to Time, Continuity, and Change, which is the main concept in the history discipline. Similarly, culture is relevant to the theme of People, Places, and Environment, which is the central focus of geography. More importantly, since social studies is about human experiences, there is a general consensus among the social studies educators that classroom teachers should draw content knowledge not just from the social sciences as mentioned here but from wide sources “to construct curricular experiences enabling students to actively relate new knowledge to existing understanding.”2 That is to say all fields of knowledge that are related to human civilization and that help in developing students’ skills in reflective thinking, decision making, and problem solving are relevant to social studies education. Those fields also include art. Rembrandt’s art is especially relevant because his themes are universal and the social, political, and economic contexts in which he created his work—globalization, individualism, and free enterprise—are more or less similar to our age.It needs to be mentioned that by looking at Rembrandt’s art from the social studies perspective it is not my intention to strip his work of its aesthetic scope and value. On the contrary, by looking at Rembrandt in the social studies classroom I seek to humanize social studies education itself. That [End Page 20] is to say I wish to step back from the conventional view of social studies to feel free from the bonds of traditionalism and discover, describe, analyze... (shrink)

This study compares the coverage of coping strategies and emotions portrayed in news regarding COVID-19 by The New York Times in the U.S. and People’s Daily of China via social media. By employing corpus assisted discourse analysis to scrutinize the text corpora, our study uncovered prominent keywords and themes. Findings indicate that a comprehensive range of themes relating to coping strategies was more common in People’s Daily while a relatively smaller number of themes was apparent in The New (...) York Times. In terms of emotions exhibited in the news coverage, positive emotions such as cheer, gratitude, and good wishes predominated in People’s Daily whereas in The New York Times, negative emotions in the form of fears and anxiety were salient. The differences are explained with reference to the political context intertwined with the news environment and prior experiences in handling epidemics, with practical implications. (shrink)

Increasing rates of obesity have fueled interest in the factors underlying food choice. While epidemiological studies report that disadvantaged social groups exhibit a higher incidence of obesity, causal evidence for an effect of social contexts on food choice remains scarce. To further our knowledge, we experimentally investigated the effect of disadvantageous social context on food choice in healthy, non-dieting participants. We used three established experimental methods to generate social contexts of different valence in controlled laboratory (...) settings: (i) receiving varying amounts of money in a Dictator Game (DG; n = 40), (ii) being included or excluded in a Cyberball Game (CBG; n = 35), and (iii) performing well, average, or poorly in a response time ranking task (RTR; n = 81). Following exposure to a particular social context, participants made pairwise choices between food items that involved a conflict between perceived taste and health attributes. In line with previous research, stronger dispositional self-control, greater cognitive control of eating behavior, and lower external eating (all assessed via questionnaires) were associated with healthier food choices. As expected, being treated unfairly in the DG, being excluded in the CBG, and performing poorly in the RTR led to negative emotions. However, we did not find an effect of the induced social context on food choice in any of the experiments, even when taking into account individual differences in participants' responses to the social context. Our results suggest that-at least in controlled laboratory environments-the influence of disadvantageous social contexts on food choice is limited. (shrink)

Some common conceptions of Buddhist meditative practice emphasize the elimination of emotion and desire in the interest of attaining tranquility and spiritual perfection. But to place too strong an emphasis on this is to miss an important social element emphasized by major figures in the Mahāyāna and Chan/Zen Buddhist traditions who are critical of these quietistic elements and who stress instead an understanding of an enlightenment that emphasizes enriched sociality and flexible readiness to engage, and not avoid, life's fluctuations (...) in fortune and essential impermanence. It is argued here that these criticisms of quietism are bolstered by recent advances in the philosophy and psychology of the emotions that highlight the role of emotions in framing the context of decision making—that is, in sorting out the relevant from the irrelevant, identifying salience, and directing decisions when uncertainty prevents definitive judgment. This research makes clearer why self-liberation is fundamentally a matter of liberation from judgmental habit and inflexibility, and lends support to a view of enlightenment that emphasizes compassionate engagement with others. It also provides for a more plausible picture of the cognitive transformation involved in liberation and sheds light on the rationale for certain traditional Chan and Zen teaching tactics, such as those involving koan introspection. (shrink)

Facial emotion recognition (FER) deficits interfere with interpretation of social situations and selection of appropriate responses. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms are independently associated with social difficulties and might exacerbate the influence of deficient FER, because children with ADHD symptoms have fewer compensatory resources in social situations when they misinterpret emotions. Very few studies have tested this hypothesis in a community context, where child ADHD symptoms vary on a continuum. The current study extended this work by (...) utilising a community sample (N = 87) of boys and girls in middle childhood (M = 7.83 years) and testing for moderation of FER effects separately by ADHD symptom type (ADHD-I = inattentive, H = hyperactive/impulsive, C = combined) using linear regression. While lower FER was associated with more social problems, this relationship was qualified by the presence of ADHD symptoms. Specifically, only children with relatively high ADHD symptoms in our community sample showed this inverse relationship, which was clearest among children with elevated ADHD-C or ADHD-I symptoms. No gender differences were observed. These results support our primary hypothesis, extend prior findings to boys and girls in the community, and have implications for understanding how ADHD symptoms and FER influence youth social deficits. (shrink)

Critical aspects in the field of education are currently related to low levels of socioemotional competences and high rates of school dropouts. However, there are no standard practices or guidelines for helping countries to assess and train social and emotional competences. To overcome this limitation, the project Learning to be (L2B) aims to propose a comprehensive model of the assessment and development of social and emotional competences that bring together policymakers, researchers, teachers, school authorities and learners from different (...) participating countries: Finland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain. The project attempts to create an international framework for regulating activities and supporting teachers working on the social and emotional competences of the students and to provide tools which can be used across countries. The aim of the paper is to describe how L2B has been developed in Spain by analyzing the contributions of the international framework and extracting the specific needs in the Spanish context. Specifically, we describe two products of the project: a) the process for creating a toolkit, a tool focused on creating activities and materials for helping teachers develop social and emotional competences of students and b) the results of an exploratory study in Spain in which social and emotional competences are assessed and compared to the international framework. First, we explain the definition of social and emotional competences used for creating the toolkit. Second, we analyze responses of Spanish students to questionnaires administered before applying the toolkit in the schools. The paper describes social and emotional competences in Spain and evaluates the overlap between relevant variables in Spain and those used for developing the toolkit, the international tool. Specific needs in Spain are discussed, as well as the contribution of the project for promoting the improved development of students’ social and emotional competences, improving learning outcomes and stronger social cohesion in schools and local communities, as well as the utility of the results for creating new educational policies. (shrink)

The mental and emotional dimensions of climate change are increasingly concerning as extreme events become more frequent and severe, ecosystem destruction advances, and people become more aware of climate impacts and injustices. Research on climate emotions has rapidly advanced over the last decade with growing evidence illustrating that climate emotions can impact health, shape climate action, and ought to be considered in climate change communication, education, and engagement. This paper explores, describes, and discusses climate emotions in the (...) context of Canada’s Provincial North: a vast region characterized by a vulnerability to climate change, remoteness, political marginalization, diverse Indigenous populations, and economies/livelihoods tied to resource extraction. Using postal survey data collected in two Provincial North communities, we aim to describe climate emotions experienced in the context of Canada’s Provincial North, including relationships among specific emotions; and examine if socio-demographic variables show a relationship with climate emotions. Results show high levels of emotional response to climate change overall, with worry and frustration as those emotions reported by the highest percentage of participants. We also find significant difference in climate emotions between men and women. A methodological result was noted in the usefulness of the Climate Emotion Scale, which showed high reliability and high inter-item correlation. A notable limitation of our data is its’ underrepresentation of Indigenous peoples. The findings contribute to a greater understanding of climate emotions with relevance to similar settings characterized by marginalization, vulnerability to climate change, urban islands within vast rural and remote landscapes, and economies and social identities tied to resource extraction. We discuss our findings in relation to the literature and outline future research directions and implications. (shrink)

Yet these forces are largely ignored by a professional bioethics that concentrates on the theoretical justification of decisions.The original essays in this ...

Many authors acknowledge that people share emotions in various social contexts. However, the deeper role of social relationships for shared emotions is poorly understood. I argue that shared emotions are affected by the social relationships in which they emerge. Moreover, shared emotions help people to bond. In order to do so, emotional experiences involve an intentional component that tracks the state of our social relationships. I introduce some new terminology that helps us (...) to clearly distinguish between different kinds of emotional phenomena. I propose to use the term social-relational emotions for emotions the subcomponents of which interact across individuals. I borrow from Helm the distinction between the target, the formal object and the focus of an emotion. By drawing insights from relationship science in general and relational models theory in particular, I elaborate on and explore the idea that shared emotions track social relationships as their foci. Sharing an emotion is experienced as rewarding even when the shared emotion itself is not a pleasant one, because it makes people feel “closer” to one another. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overcome stalemates and informational bubbles, (...) partially due to prevalence of anti-social emotions. It is tempting to see emotions as being the cause of the problem of online verbal aggression and bullying. However, we argue that social media are actually designed in a predominantly rationalistic way, because of the reliance on text-based communication, thereby filtering out social emotions and leaving space for easily expressed antisocial emotions. Based on research on emotions that sees these as key ingredients to moral interaction and deliberation, as well as on research on text-based versus non-verbal communication, we propose a richer understanding of emotions, requiring different designs of online deliberation platforms. We propose that such designs should move from text-centred designs and should find ways to incorporate the complete expression of the full range of human emotions so that these can play a constructive role in online deliberations. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of emotional and affectively toned discourse in biomedical engineering researchers’ accounts of their problem solving practices. Drawing from our interviews with scientists in two laboratories, we examine three classes of expression: explicit, figurative and metaphorical, and attributions of emotion to objects and artifacts important to laboratory practice. We consider the overall function of expressions in the particular problem solving contexts described. We argue that affective processes are engaged in problem solving, not as simply tacked onto (...) reasoning but as integral to it. The examples we present illustrate the close relation of emotion to problem solving and experimentation; they also implicate social and cultural dimensions of emotion expression. The analysis underscores a need to consider emotional expression to be intimately and importantly tied to the cognitive achievements and social negotiations of laboratory practices. (shrink)

The subject of this article is to compare and analyze the meanings of the sentiments in Spinoza’s Ethica and sheng yi sim’s The change of humans. The problem of emotion in modern society is an important social problem. In this atmosphere, Spinoza is attracting attention. Modern society emphasizes desire and emotion rather than reason. Emotions should now be viewed from a positive perspective, not a negative view. The study of emotion in the 20th century was largely dominated by (...) cultural theory. Emotions, like languages, are culturally transmitted and learned. According to modern language philosophical insights, language constitutes experience, not reflection. If this language philosophical insight is correct, then the role of language is crucial in understanding and experiencing emotions. Language has a temporal and spatial context. Language has historicity and sociality. In order to understand the emotional aspects of what is happening in our society, we must understand the historical and social context of the emotional expressions in our language. The emotional expression in our language has our own East Asian history. In this regard, it is necessary to study our language, which is different from Western studies, in historical context. In order to understand our emotions in the historical and social context of a language other than the West, we are paying attention to sheng yi sim’s The change of human, the literature of the period of the 17th-18th century Joseon Dynasty, similar to that of Spinoza. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Philosophy of Emotion in Buddhist Philosophy (and a Close Look at Remorse and Regret)Maria HeimIt is an honor to guest-edit a special issue for the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy for its inaugural issue, and even more to be invited to write a somewhat longer article than is typically the privilege of the guest editor. It was thought that something of a broader statement of the state of the (...) field in this emerging subfield of philosophy might itself be useful in situating current work and aspirations for future endeavors.That the study of emotions in Buddhist philosophy is still in its infancy is somewhat surprising given that Buddhist texts offer 2,500 years of exceedingly fine-grained analyses and reflections on experience.1 It could be that scholars have been thrown off by the word "emotion" itself, given that the English term does not map easily onto Buddhist categories. No single term in any Buddhist language does exactly what "emotion" does. Of course, "emotion" does not map precisely onto premodern Western categories of experience (affections, passions, sentiments, and so on) either, and has a notably shallow history even in European contexts, dating in something like its current usage only to the early nineteenth century (see Dixon 2003 for this history). And if "emotion" fits only awkwardly with Buddhist categories, it should occasion no surprise that many of the debates and dichotomies preoccupying Western philosophy on emotions—is emotion affective or cognitive? Physical or mental? Socially constructed or universal? Are emotions feelings? Evaluations? Motivations?—ill fit the debates and discussions that Buddhist texts offer about experience. The modern [End Page 2] Western categories and terms of the discussion may well inhibit Buddhist philosophical participation in these debates.I have found that this predicament is best met by calling into question the putative universalism of the English term and the assumption that "emotion" names a natural or ontological category. Increasingly, philosophers and neuroscientists are casting doubt on the notion that emotion is a natural kind (Rorty 2004; Griffiths 2004; Barrett 2006, 2017). That emotion is not easy to distinguish from feelings, motives, moods, and propositional attitudes, and that lists of emotions, when elaborated, seem hardly to fall into a generic family of phenomena, suggesting that its boundaries and borders are not carved in nature. This has implications for how "emotions" are to be studied in the lab, as Lisa Feldman Barrett suggests; the natural-kind view "underlies the major questions, the experimental designs, and the interpretation of empirical findings that characterize emotion research as a domain of scientific inquiry," even while the empirical evidence increasingly suggests that this view is the "result of an error of arbitrary aggregation" (Barrett 2006). For reasons piling up in the empirical literature, it is coming to look less and less likely that the English term emotion carves nature at the joints.2This situation can help us shake free of "emotion" early on, even if we may not be able to part entirely with it. A special issue on "the philosophy of emotion" gestures toward the kinds of phenomena these papers take up, even if they vary in the extent to which they find "emotion" to be analytically useful when interpreting Buddhist texts. Indeed, stepping away from assumptions of English-language universalism clears the deck for looking at very different, but no less meticulous and reflective, ways of carving up experiences of the very sort we do get in Buddhist texts. The way forward, in my view, is to permit English words like emotion, affect, and feeling to open the door to the kinds of phenomena we might want to investigate. We can at the same time resist tightly defining what these English terms mean, defending the borders around them, or closely tethering Buddhist conceptions to them. Working with Buddhist categories and meta-categories suggests ways to treat experiences that are, from the ground up, different than the modern West. These in turn can interrupt its supposed universalism and offer fresh questions and interventions.For example, Emily McRae's paper in this issue on kleśas—dysfunctional mental states—offers a Buddhist intervention for how philosophers might reconfigure and aggregate experience differently... (shrink)

Arguments in favor of legalized assisted suicide often center on issues of personal privacy and freedom of choice over one's body. Many disability advocates assert, however, that autonomy arguments neglect the complex sociopolitical determinants of despair for people with disabilities. Specifically, they argue that social approval of suicide for individuals with irreversible conditions is discriminatory and that relaxing restrictions on assisted suicide would jeopardize, not advance, the freedom of persons with disabilities to direct the lives they choose. This paper (...) examines the idea promoted by some proponents of assisted suicide that it is reasonable to be depressed about one's diminished quality of life in cases of irreversible illness or disability and, therefore, such depression should not call into question the individual's competence to request assistance in dying. The concept of rational depression is defined and examined in the context of: four real-life cases involving individuals with disabilities who requested assistance in dying; a set of criteria commonly applied to decision-making to determine rationality; and research bearing on the emotional status of people with disabilities. It is concluded that although disability is associated with particular socially mediated stressors, there is no theoretical or empirical evidence to indicate that depression and its role in the right to die is dynamically different, more natural, or more reasonable for disabled people than for non-disabled people. (shrink)

The article talks about the postmodern approach to studying the problem of reflexive competence of future specialists, requires a comprehensive analysis of the organization and content of the educational process in higher education institutions. The postmodern concept of professional reflection and personal reflexivity of students is highlighted, it determines the ratio of these formations as unique individual phenomena, their influence on the formation and manifestation of professional and professional competence at the creative-professional, cognitive and personal-motivational levels. The concept of reflectivity (...) of the future specialist is specified. The structure of professional reflection of students is specified. The value of pedagogical practice for the development of professional reflection in future professionals from the standpoint of the postmodern approach is emphasized. The model of formation and development of personal-professional reflectivity in future specialists at the competence, cognitive, personal-motivational, emotional and evaluative-behavioral levels is presented. (shrink)

This chapter argues that emotion recognition is a skill. A skill perspective on emotion recognition draws attention to underappreciated features of this cornerstone of social cognition. Skills have a number of characteristic features. For example, they are improvable, practical, and flexible. Emotion recognition has these features as well. Leading theories of emotion recognition often draw inadequate attention to these features. The chapter advances a theory of emotion recognition that is better suited to this purpose. It proposes that emotion recognition (...) involves scripts. Emotion scripts describe how people are likely to behave in different emotional contexts. Scripts can be improved with the addition of richer social knowledge, they are practical in that they describe and guide social interaction, and they are flexible because they must accommodate the fact that emotions have different behavioral impact depending on the agents involved and the circumstances at play. Learning to recognize emotions through scripts qualifies as a skill. (shrink)

The book covers such topics as social-emotional learning (SEL) within the context of programs, standards, usage in school accountability, assessments, equity, strategies, culture, and distance learning.

Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure takes sociology in a new direction. It examines key aspects of social structure by using a fresh understanding of emotions categories. Through that synthesis emerge new perspectives on rationality, class structure, social action, conformity, basic rights, and social change. As well as giving an innovative view of social processes, J. M. Barbalet's study also reveals unappreciated aspects of emotions by considering fear, resentment, vengefulness, shame, and confidence (...) in the context of social structure. While much has been written on the social consequences of excessive or pathological emotions, this book demonstrates the centrality of emotions to routine operations of social interaction. Dr Barbalet also re-evaluates the nature of social theory, for once the importance of emotions to social processes becomes clear, the intellectual constitution of sociology, and therefore its history, must be rethought. (shrink)

Feeling Power is a bold and provocative book whose breadth of inquiry is stunning. Author Megan Boler sets out to rescue emotions from their devalued and obscure political status by showing that they are both a site of social control and also a site for political resistance. She situates her inquiry within the context of education, convinced that classrooms, especially within higher education, constitute significant locations of social and political struggle. -/- Boler takes the reader on (...) a wide-ranging interdisciplinary exploration where she analyzes various discourses to show how emotions get visibly and invisibly addressed in education and how emotions reflect particular historical, cultural, and social arrangements. Her broad conception of emotion resonates with philosophical accounts that view emotions as (partially) cognitive as well as with accounts that give emotions a role in moral judgments and ethical reasoning. -/- In Part I, Boler builds upon the work of feminist theorists, such as Elizabeth Spelman (1989, 1991), Alison Jaggar (1989), Sandra Bartky (1990), and Sue Campbell (1997), and uses key concepts drawn from poststructural theorists to develop a theoretical framework for revealing and explicating the myriad ways in which the "politics of emotion," shaped by different scholarly disciplines, functions in public education to enforce social control of the nation's citizens. Through astute, gender-sensitive historical critiques of the mental hygiene and character education movements, and a close analysis of Daniel Goleman's (1995) contemporary notion of emotional intelligence, Boler shows how we are taught to internalize and enact emotional rules, and roles, that serve to maintain society's particular stratifications of gender, race, and class. The chapters on emotional intelligence and the emotional literacy curricula founded on this concept are, I think, among the best in the book. Together they constitute a persuasive example of the power of Boler's method of discourse analysis. (shrink)

During the pandemic of Covid-19, internet-based communication became for many the primary, or only, means of interaction with others, and it has been argued that this had a host of negative effects on emotional and mental health. However, some people with a lived experience of mental ill-health also perceived improvements to their wellbeing during the period in which social activities were moved online. In this paper, I explore the possibility that some of these improvements are due to the partial (...) “disembodiment” of emotions facilitated by internet-mediated interaction. In particular, I consider the phenomenology of social anxiety and how it may be impacted upon by encountering others primarily through the medium of internet-enabled technology. I will start by reconstructing a phenomenological account of social anxiety to which disruptions of bodily experience are central. I will then move to consider how the experiential dynamics that are particularly prominent in social anxiety can be weakened when communicating with others via video calls, instant messages, and social media more broadly. I will suggest that this is the case due to the diminished visibility of the body online, and the higher degree of control and agency over one’s experience that can be exercised in this context. Finally, I will argue that the weakening of social anxiety through internet-mediated contact exemplifies some of the processes which are key to emotion regulation more widely, thus suggesting that communication and interaction online could have a positive effect on a wider range of affective disturbances. (shrink)

Although action and perception are central components of our interactions with the external world, the most recent experimental investigations also support their implications in the emotional, decision-making, and goal ascription processes in social context. In this article, we review the existing literature supporting this view and highlighting a link between reach-to-grasp motor actions and social communicative processes. First, we discuss the most recent experimental findings showing how the social context subtly influences the execution of object-oriented (...) motor actions. Then, we show that the kinematic characteristics of object-oriented motor actions are modulated by the actor’s social intention. Finally, we demonstrate that naïve observers can implicitly take advantage of these kinematic effects for their own motor productions. Considered together, these data are compatible with the embodied cognition framework stating that cognition, and in our case social cognition, is grounded in knowledge associated with past sensory and motor experiences. Keywords: perception; motor action; social intention; embodiment; kinematics. (shrink)

With rapid growth in Far Eastern economies (in particular China’s), it is becoming imperative to understand the culturally driven ethical-value underpinnings of the management processes in this region of the world. In this study, we propose a broadened version of Hofstede’s and others’ conception of Confucian dynamics anchored in his teachings preserved in the Lunyu (or Analects), which form the foundation of individual-social moral interactions. Based on a content analysis of these Analects via a qualitative software, NVivo, we identified (...) six work-based values (Leadership Attributes, Appropriate Conduct, Authority Protocol, Governance Policies, Long term Orientation and Collegiality and Teamwork) and six life-based values (Virtuousness and Appropriate Behavior, Handling Life’s Emotions, Learning and Teaching, Parent/Elder Relationship, Friendship and Worship) of the society, prescribed by Confucius in his Analects. These factors are further analyzed and mapped in the context of the three Confucian ethical dimensions (Yi or Righteousness, Li or Propriety, and Ren or Benevolence and Unbounded). The business implications of the results and directions for future research are finally discussed. (shrink)

Algorithms increasingly make managerial decisions that people used to make. Perceptions of algorithms, regardless of the algorithms' actual performance, can significantly influence their adoption, yet we do not fully understand how people perceive decisions made by algorithms as compared with decisions made by humans. To explore perceptions of algorithmic management, we conducted an online experiment using four managerial decisions that required either mechanical or human skills. We manipulated the decision-maker, and measured perceived fairness, trust, and emotional response. With the mechanical (...) tasks, algorithmic and human-made decisions were perceived as equally fair and trustworthy and evoked similar emotions; however, human managers' fairness and trustworthiness were attributed to the manager's authority, whereas algorithms' fairness and trustworthiness were attributed to their perceived efficiency and objectivity. Human decisions evoked some positive emotion due to the possibility of social recognition, whereas algorithmic decisions generated a more mixed response – algorithms were seen as helpful tools but also possible tracking mechanisms. With the human tasks, algorithmic decisions were perceived as less fair and trustworthy and evoked more negative emotion than human decisions. Algorithms' perceived lack of intuition and subjective judgment capabilities contributed to the lower fairness and trustworthiness judgments. Positive emotion from human decisions was attributed to social recognition, while negative emotion from algorithmic decisions was attributed to the dehumanizing experience of being evaluated by machines. This work reveals people's lay concepts of algorithmic versus human decisions in a management context and suggests that task characteristics matter in understanding people's experiences with algorithmic technologies. (shrink)

The Creativity in Health and Care Workshops programme was a series of investigative workshops aimed at interrogating the subject of creativity with an over-arching objective of extending the understanding of the problems and possibilities of applying creativity within the health and care sector workforce. Included in the workshops was a concept analysis, which attempted to gain clearer understanding of creativity and innovation within this context. The analysis led to emergent theory regarding the central importance of aesthetics, emotion and empathetic (...) imagination to the generation of creative and innovative outcomes that have the capacity to promote wellbeing in the health and social care workforce. Drawing on expertise in the field, this paper outlines the concept analysis and subsequent reflection. (shrink)

The relationship between emotion comprehension and social competence from very young ages has been addressed in numerous studies in the field of developmental psychology. Emotion knowledge in childhood seems to have its roots in the conversations and explanations children hear about what emotions are and how to manage them. Given that behavioral interventions often do not achieve medium-term improvements or generalization to other contexts, this study evaluates the results of an intervention using the Thinking Emotions program. This (...) program uses Philosophy for Children as the work format and is based on the idea that reflection and dialogue among peers is one of the most effective ways to interiorize significant knowledge. The program was applied during one school year in two preschool classrooms . Comparisons of the pre- and post-treatment measures of the control and experimental groups show significant improvements in emotion comprehension and social competence in the 5-year-old children and improvements related to social competence in the 4-year-olds. (shrink)

Drawing on 49 oral-history interviews with Scottish family business owner-managers, six key-informant interviews, and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary study analyses the decline of kinship-based connections and the emergence of new kinds of elite networks around the 1980s. As the socioeconomic context changed rapidly during this time, cooperation built primarily around literal family ties could not survive unaltered. Instead of finding unity through bio-legal family connections, elite networks now came to redefine their ‘family businesses’ in terms of affectively loaded ‘family (...) values’ such as loyalty, care, commitment, and even ‘love’. Consciously nurturing ‘as-if-family’ emotional and ethical connections arose as a psychologically effective way to bring together network members who did not necessarily share pre-existing connections of bio-legal kinship. The social-psychological processes involved in this extension of the ‘family’ can be understood using theories of the moral sentiments first developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. These theories suggest that, when the context is amenable, family-like emotional bonds can be extended via sympathy to those to whom one is not literally related. As a result of this ‘progress of sentiments’, one now earns his/her place in a Scottish family business, not by inheriting or marrying into it, but by performing family-like behaviours motivated by shared ethics and affects. (shrink)