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 ...

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 post is by Peter Langland-Hassan, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, who is presenting his new book, Explaining Imagination (OUP 2020). The book is available as a free open access download , thanks to a TOME grant from the University of Cincinnati. Peter Langland-Hassan  We won’t understand what imagination is—we won’t be able to explain imagination—until we can write a recipe for making it out of parts we already understand. My book, Explaining Imagination , is a compendium of such recipes. What ingredients do they feature? On my telling, they are other familiar mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, decisions, and intentions. In different combinations and contexts, they constitute cases of imagining. The idea that imagination can be reduced to other kinds of mental states in this way is at odds with what most (maybe all) other philosophers have had to say about imagination. According to the orthodox view, if we list a person’...

The Royal College of Psychiatrists hosted its  Faculty of Neuropsychiatry Annual Conference on 13-14 September 2018 in London. I was fortunate to attend the first day and I am going to report on some of the interesting talks I listened to. In the first session speakers focused on neuroscience for psychiatrists, and Paul Johns, author of Clinical Neuroscience , addressed the functional anatomy of the human amygdala. The amygdala is constantly looking out for dangers and helps us evaluate the emotional significance of events. It facilitates social interactions as it enables us to read other people's minds. Further, the amygdala is involved in learning and episodic memory for important events. It is responsible for an implicit emotional memory of negative events to help us avoid adverse stimuli. The amygdala is for assessing environmental cues to determine the adequate response to threats. So patients without the amygdala are fearless but it is possible to experimentall...

Amy Hardy (pictured above) is a Research Clinical Psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London and Psychology Lead for Posttraumatic Stress in Psychosis in the Psychosis Clinical Academic Group, South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.  In this post, Amy describes a paper  published in the journal  Schizophrenia Bulletin  by the Psychosis Research Partnership that supports the causal role of childhood victimisation in psychosis by demonstrating how understandable reactions to trauma contribute to psychotic experiences. We know there is a relationship between trauma and psychosis, and research is unraveling the puzzle of how they are linked. Findings point towards childhood victimisation playing a causal role in psychotic experiences, at least for some people. For example, trauma has been shown to occur before the onset of psychosis, trauma severity is associated with the magnitude of psyc...

On 18th January Beth Hannon at the Forum for European Philosophy organised a public event at the London School of Economics, " Emotions: Do they control us? ". The event featured Tali Sharot (University College London) as chair and Giovanna Colombetti, Benedetto De Martino and myself as speakers. I am reporting some of the discussion we had here. If you want to listen to the whole event, there is a podcast free to download as well. I was the first speaker, and I talked about how emotions did get a bad press among philosophers embracing rationalism. Starting with Plato, who thought that the soul could be in harmony only when reason was in charge of drives and appetites, through to Descartes who studied emotions in depth and concluded that it was easy for them to lead us astray. To challenge the idea that emotions only have a disruptive role to play, I relied on two milestones of the recent thought on emotions, Damasio's somatic marker theory according to which emot...