Imperfect Cognitions

Here is an interview with  Andreas Elpidorou  (University of Louisville) whose book  Propelled! How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Can Lead Us to the Good Life  will be out with Oxford University Press in early 2020. The book focuses on the role of negative emotions and states of discontent in our lives and argues for the counterintuitive claim that boredom, frustration, and anticipation are good for us. LB: To start, how did you become interested in boredom? Are you one of those people who have a propensity to experience boredom frequently? AE: Boredom has been on my mind for years. Although I don’t score high on measures of boredom proneness, I am no stranger to boredom. I experienced its full force almost two decades ago (it’s hard to believe that it’s been so long!) during a phase in my life that seemed to be – while it was unfolding – endless: my mandatory military service. What I remember most vividly from the time that I spent in various ca...

This post is by  Fabrice Teroni , Associate Professor in philosophy at the University of Geneva, and Christine Tappolet , Full Professor in philosophy at the University of Montreal. Try to name as many types of positive emotions as you can. Now do the same for negative emotions. You will probably agree with the often-heard claim that the vocabulary we have at our disposal is especially rich for negative emotions: we distinguish between sadness, fear, disgust, regret, remorse, despair, resentment, indignation, contempt, jealousy, hatred, etc. Many of our everyday discussions turn around these negative emotions, aiming at a better understanding of their causes and moderation of their sometimes devastating effects. That being said, we harbor ambivalent attitudes towards negative emotions; we do not always undergo them reluctantly, for instance. Not only do we think that some situations or objects merit negative emotions, but we also actively pursue them—the aim of many recr...

This post is by Marwa El Zein (pictured above), currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Cognition Group, based in Paris. In this post Marwa summarises her paper ‘ Anxiety Dissociates the Adaptive Functions of Sensory and Motor Response Enhancements to Social Threats ’, co-authored with Valentin Wyart and Julie Grèzes, and published in eLife. I investigate the neural mechanisms of contextual influences during social perceptual decisions. Specifically, my work characterizes behaviorally and neurally how personality traits, past experience, and attention modulate facial perception. In my paper, the adaptive role of moderate anxiety in reacting to social threats is put forward. Neural activity (electroencephalography, EEG) of participants was recorded while they categorized angry and fearful facial emotions. Individual anxiety of participants was assessed thanks to a personality trait questionnaire filled out at the beginning of the experiment (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory). ...

Marion Godman I’m a philosopher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Philosophy of the Social Sciences and the University of Cambridge . I have been exploring the possibility that the human categories employed in psychology and the social sciences are not mere social constructions, but denote something real and epistemically useful to base a science on (or to use philos ophical jargon, ‘natural kinds’). As part of my work I am keen to look more closely at particular case studies that engage scientists. One case that has challenged my realist project is that of cultural syndromes (or culturally bound syndromes). At least on the face of it cultural syndromes hardly seem very scientific or very real. They represent conditions or disorders that do not occur in the human population at large, but instead seems connected to a particular time period and a particular culture. They also involve stories about the body that defy scientific fact. One well-known case in India, ...