Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Daniel Jolley, Lee Shepherd and Anna Maughan. Here they talk about their interesting research on vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, based on their recent paper in Psychology and Health . Daniel Jolley There are different conspiracy theories about vaccines. For example, some conspiracy theories suggest vaccines may be unsafe or ineffective. However, this is being hidden by pharmaceutical companies for profit. Other vaccine conspiracy theories suggest vaccines may be being used to control the population. In our latest research , we looked at what influences these conspiracy beliefs.  In three experimental studies, we explored how fear may influence people’s willingness to receive a vaccine. We also looked at how fear influences anti-vaccine conspiracy beliefs. We initially thought that fear would increase conspiracy beliefs, leading to people being less willing to receive a vaccine. However, the results from the first two studies (Studies 1a an

On the blog today, Kathleen speaks to Alfred Archer and Heidi Maibom about the journal ' Passion ', which was launched relatively recently. Alfred and Heidi are editors-in-chief of the journal.   Alfred Archer   KMH: Could you tell us a little bit about Passion, and its links to EPSSE? AA & HM: Certainly. 2014, The European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE) has been going for ten years now and has grown into a wonderful, lively and welcoming group of scholars working on philosophical issues related to emotions. Several years ago, it was suggested that the society could look into starting its own journal . The main reason for this was that while EPSSE’s members were publishing their work in a range of philosophical and interdisciplinary journals, there was no academic journal dedicated to publishing the kinds of papers that EPSSE members were writing. Between 2017 and 2020 the executive board, then led by Achim Stephan, explored various options for

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic is a research associate at the Moral Injury Lab, University of Virginia and a Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. In this post, she tells us about her new book, Perpetrator Disgust (OUP 2023). What is the significance of our gut feelings? Can they disclose our deep selves or point to a shared human nature? My book identifies and analyzes the phenomenon of “perpetrator disgust”. Across time and cultures, soldiers who participate in war crimes sometimes feel ill. They start to shake, feel nausea and sometimes even retch and vomit. As a philosopher, I’ve been interested in the many moralized interpretations that scholars and journalists have applied to the phenomenon. In a nutshell, many have thought that such reactions demonstrate a sort of bodily morality, a physical revolt against the act being committed. But such interpretations are often wrong, especially when grounded in nativist ideas about morality and human emotions. As an alte

On 5th and 6th January 2023, Alex Grzankowski hosted a hybrid two-day workshop at the University of Birkbeck entitled,  Happiness: Emotion, Mood, or Character Trait.    In the first talk, “Can we be delusional and happy?”, I (Lisa Bortolotti, University of Birmingham) focused on the relationship between being happy and having delusional beliefs. We tend to assume that living in a delusional world is bad epistemically because we lack contact with reality. And it is bad psychologically because believing the delusions can make us feel disconnected and excluded, and depending on the content of the delusion, also stressed and anxious. But things are more complicated than this: delusions can be a response to a crisis that bring about a paralysis of agency, and can help us overcome overwhelming negative emotions, so believing a delusion may lead to temporary happiness. However, the temporary happiness is a stepping stone towards a more permanent state of happiness where connection with the wo

Emotions Brain Forum BrainCircle Italia and BrainCircle Lugano organised a series of events where women scientists presented their work on emotions in various cities from October 2021 to November 2022 (see full itinerary ). The initiative, conceived by Viviana Kasam, was inspired by the work of Nobel Prize winner Rita Levi Montalcini who promoted the work of scientists worldwide and was interested in supporting research on the brain.  Campus Biotech The last stop of the itinerary was Geneva, where on 25th November 2022 the Emotions Forum featured an interdisciplinary programme of talks on the relationship between emotions and cognition, and emotions and behaviour. The event was hosted by the Centre for the Study of Affective Sciences in the stunning Campus Biotech . Eva Illouz , Professor of Sociology in Paris and Jerusalem, discussed the role of emotions in democracy. Eva started from Adorno's idea that fascism is not alien to democracy but is like a worm in the apple: we don&#

This is part of a series of posts on the new journal, Memory, Mind & Media . Today's post is by Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol) and Peter Pomerantsev (Johns Hopkins University). Their forthcoming article ‘Technology and democracy: a paradox wrapped in a contradiction inside an irony’ will be published shortly as part of the journal inaugural collection . Stephan Lewandowsky Numerous indicators suggest that democracy is in retreat globally. Even countries that had been considered stable democracies have recently witnessed events that are incompatible with democratic governance and the rule of law, such as the armed assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 and the unlawful suspension of the British parliament in 2019.  Although the symptoms and causes of democratic backsliding are complex and difficult to disentangle, the Internet and social media are frequently blamed in this context. For example, social media has been identified as a tool of autocrats , and some scholar

In this post Mark Miller (Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, Hokkaido University) reports on a workshop Emotion and Prediction , which was held online on March 31- April 1, 2021.     Emotion permeates all mental life - it reflects our adaptivity, it imbues our activities and our environments with meaning and purpose, and it motivates and modulates our behaviours. We are emotional creatures through and through. While there has been a tremendous amount of work done on this topic, to date an integrative account capable of unifying the various theoretical perspectives and experimental results is still lacking. A recent workshop Emotion and Prediction brought together philosophers, cognitive scientists and machine learning researchers to explore the implications of a leading new framework emerging within computational neuroscience for the study of feelings, emotions and moods. The Predictive Processing (or Active Inference) framework starts from the vision

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic  (Photo ©Dorte_Jelstrup) Today's post is by Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic, who is a postdoc at the Section for Philosophy and Science Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. It has become quite trendy to argue that that it is okay (or maybe even required) to make people feel uncomfortable because of their biases or prejudices. In my new paper in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, The Right to Feel Comfortable: Implicit Bias and the Moral Potential of Discomfort , I discuss this new trend by arguing that there are good reasons (from affective neuroscience) for why we should curb our enthusiasm when it comes to the moral potential of discomfort. It certainly can be justified to call people out for their biased behavior and we need not comfort every display of what I call “awareness discomfort”. But in such situations we shouldn’t expect to be changing the receiver’s moral mindset.  This is the first out of two papers on the feelings of discomfor

Rosa Ritunnano This post is by Rosa Ritunnano, consultant psychiatrist and doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham, reporting from the 21st Annual Conference of the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry (INPP).  The event took place from 22nd-24th October 2019 at the University of Warsaw; it was organised by the Open Seminars in Philosophy and Psychiatry Foundation, with support of the Polish Phenomenological Association and the Phenomenology and Mental Health Network (Collaborating Centre for Values Based Practice, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford). A special thank you note goes to Marcin Moskalewicz (member of the organising committee) for sharing some of photos included in the post.   The INPP conference brought together researchers and professionals working at the interface between Philosophy and Mental Health from 32 countries and provided a lively forum to discuss developments and challenges for the next generation – particularly in

This post is by Anna Ichino, University of Milan. Have you ever visited a Philosophy Museum? I bet not. Apparently, indeed, there aren’t any Philosophy Museums in the world. Or better: there aren’t any yet… But together with my colleagues at the Philosophy Department of the University of Milan we have decided that it is time to build the first one. In this post, I’ll tell you about this exciting project. What we had in mind was not an historically-minded museum collecting relics about the lives and works of important philosophers; but something more dynamic and interactive – built on the model of the best science museums – where philosophical problems and theories become intuitively accessible through a variety of games, activities, experiments, aesthetic experiences, and other such things. Easier to say than to do, no doubt. It’s an ambitious project, and to put it into action we had to proceed gradually. We started with a temporary exhibition, which took place in

This post is written by Tom Cochrane, who is a British philosopher working at Flinders University in Adelaide , Australia. One of his main aims is to draw on facts about psychology to develop insights about the good life.  Tom has worked a lot on emotions and aesthetics. He also has specific interests in mental disorders- including a co-authored article on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder at Mind &Language that readers of this blog may find interesting. My new book The Emotional Mind (2018) is mostly focused on how the various phenomena we associate with the emotions—feelings, behaviours, moods, pain and pleasure, rational cognition, character traits and so on—all fit together. The overall picture I propose is of fundamental concern-regulating routines that get steadily elaborated as new ways to represent information come along. Thus the book starts by outlining the fundamental routines, and then builds on this layer and layer until we reach a pretty complete description