Emotional strength: A response type, response disposition and organizing principle for emotion experience
We present four hallmarks of emotional strength: (i) openness and vulnerability (ii) emotional responsiveness (iii) self-description using vulnerability-related words (iv) continuing engagement in action. Emotional strength is distinguished from psychological constructs such as mindfulness, emotion regulation, emotion-approach coping, resilience, emotional intelligence, emotion-focused therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy. It is not the point of emotional strength to turn a negative into a positive experience. The skill is to feel deeply into all emotion experience, opening up vulnerability and emotional responsiv...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Toward a postmaterialist psychology: Theory, research, and applications
Discussion section, we argue that the transmission hypothesis of the mind-brain relationship can account for all the evidence presented in this article. We also discuss the emerging postmaterialist paradigm and its potential implications for the evolution of psychology. (Source: New Ideas in Psychology)
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Means and standard deviations, or locations and scales? That is the question!
Publication date: August 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 50Author(s): David Trafimow, Tonghui Wang, Cong WangAbstractAccording to standard experimental practice, researchers randomly assign participants to experimental and control conditions, deeming the experiment “successful” if the means of the two conditions differ in the hypothesized direction. Even for complex experiments, with many conditions, success generally depends on a comparison or contrast of means across conditions. Because the experimental manipulation may change the shape of the distribution, we show that a difference in means, even if larg...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Wrong outside, wrong inside: A social functionalist approach to the uncanny feeling
Publication date: August 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 50Author(s): Antonio Olivera-La RosaAbstractThe “uncanny valley” hypothesis (Mori 1970/2005) states that a near-human looking entity can engender negative feelings in an observer. I analyze the phenomenology of the uncanny feeling, which is largely understudied despite being the dependent variable in empirical studies. Next, I introduce a social functionalist account to the uncanny valley research. I propose that the uncanny feeling is a social response triggered by the perception that something is ambiguously wrong with the “humanness” of the hum...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Confidence intervals, precision and confounding
Publication date: August 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 50Author(s): David TrafimowAbstractAlthough it is well-known that confidence intervals fail to provide the probability that the population parameter of interest is within the computed interval, there nevertheless continues to be widespread support for them. Such support is based on the argument that confidence intervals measure precision; wide intervals indicate less precision whereas narrow intervals indicate more precision. But there are three types of precision; sampling precision, precision of homogeneity, and measurement precision; and confidence int...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
In defense of spatial models of semantic representation
Publication date: August 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 50Author(s): Michael N. Jones, Thomas M. Gruenenfelder, Gabriel RecchiaAbstractRecent semantic space models learn vector representations for word meanings by observing statistical redundancies across a text corpus. A word's meaning is represented as a point in a high-dimensional semantic space, and semantic similarity between words is quantified by a function of their spatial proximity (typically the cosine of the angle between their corresponding vector representations). Recently, Griffiths, Steyvers, and Tenenbaum (2007) demonstrated that spatial models...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
“How do humans make sense?” multiscale dynamics and emergent meaning
Publication date: August 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 50Author(s): Rick Dale, Christopher T. KelloAbstractThe challenges posed by the composite nature of sense-making encourage us to study how that composite is dynamically assembled. In this paper, we consider the computational underpinnings that drive the composite nature of interaction. We look to the dynamic properties of recurrent neural networks. What kind of dynamic system inherently integrates multiple signals across different levels and modalities? We argue below that three fundamental properties are needed: dynamic memory, timescale integration, and...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
A communicative approach to early word learning
Publication date: August 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 50Author(s): Daniel YurovskyAbstractYoung children learn the meanings of thousands of words by the time they can run down the street. Many efforts to explain this rapid development begin by assuming that the computational-level problem being solved is acquisition. Consequently, work in this line has sought to understand how children infer the meanings of words from cues in the communicative signals of the speakers around them. I will argue, however, that this formulation of the problem is backwards: the computational problem is communication, and language...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The fundamental needs underlying social representations
Publication date: December 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 51Author(s): Eric Bonetto, Grégory Lo MonacoAbstractSome theories dealing with the social construction of reality refer to epistemic and affiliative needs. These latter are considered as two fundamental human motives underlying such construction processes. The Social Representations Theory refers instead to more specific functions. Yet, the literature provides numerous evidences of the fulfillment of these two core needs by social representations. The present contribution exposes some of these evidences in order to show the anchoring of the Social Repr...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Toward an interdisciplinary conceptualization of moral injury: From unequivocal guilt and anger to moral conflict and disorientation
This article addresses these questions, drawing on relevant literature from the fields of philosophy and social sciences, and on 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with Dutch veterans, thus contributing to a refined, interdisciplinary concept of moral injury. (Source: New Ideas in Psychology)
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Defining embodied cognition: The problem of situatedness
This article focuses on the notion of situatedness, developing the discussion from the point of view of a computational modeler and roboticist, showing that minor and negligible differences on the definition of the field causes major operational divergences in synthetic models of cognition. A definition of two notions of situatedness are developed a posteriori, that is, by considering epistemological and ontological differences on artificial models. Finally, strengths and weakness of the two approaches are discussed. (Source: New Ideas in Psychology)
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The relationship of psychological construals with well-being
Publication date: December 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 51Author(s): Peter HorvathAbstractThis paper examines the relationships of construals of the properties of psychological distance dimensions with well-being. Construal-Level-Theory (CLT) has identified space, time, social distance, and hypotheticality as psychological distance dimensions. Close objects are construed, or mentally represented, in terms of low-level features. These are concrete, specific, unstructured, and contextualized representations. Distant objects are construed in terms of high-level features. These are abstract, global, coherent, an...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Towards an ecological approach to emotions and the individual differences therein
Publication date: December 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 51Author(s): Rob WithagenAbstractIn the present paper, I aim to develop a Gibsonian approach to our emotional responses to the environment. To that end, the relationships between affordances, emotions, and information will be explored. After laying out Gibson's original concept of affordances as possibilities for action, I sketch a recent view that holds that affordances often invite or solicit actions. It is argued that Dewey's theory of emotions is a natural ally of this concept of inviting affordances. Focusing on the emotions of fear and anger, I wi...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Components of cultural complexity relating to emotions: A conceptual framework
Publication date: December 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 51Author(s): Radek Trnka, Iva Poláčková Šolcová, Peter TavelAbstractMany cultural variations in emotions have been documented in previous research, but a general theoretical framework involving cultural sources of these variations is still missing. The main goal of the present study was to determine what components of cultural complexity interact with the emotional experience and behavior of individuals. The proposed framework conceptually distinguishes five main components of cultural complexity relating to emotions: 1) emotion language, 2) concep...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Did humans evolve to innovate with a social rather than technical orientation?
Publication date: December 2018Source: New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 51Author(s): William von Hippel, Thomas SuddendorfAbstractThe quality and frequency of human technical innovation differentiates us from all other species, and has played a primary role in creating the cognitive niche that we occupy. Yet, despite the centrality of technical innovation to human culture and our daily lives, most people rarely if ever innovate new products. To address this discrepancy we consider our evolutionary history, and how it might have created a species whose members are both highly innovative and highly unlikely to invent new prod...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - July 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
