The history of ideology and its definition continues to occupy scholars across a range of disciplines. Contrary to the vast volume of earlier work on ideology however, this books provides a challenging new theory of ideology, one that is capable of explaining not only the internal structures of ideologies, but also how ideologies function in society. In formulating theory that is capable of providing the first insights into the internal structures of ideologies while simultaneously explaining how discourse structures may be (...) used in the production and reproduction of ideologies, van Dijk offers a highly important theoretical bridge between the micro and macro structures of society. This book will be essential for all students of discourse studies, communication, social psychology, sociology, and political science. (shrink)

Throughout the years, care ethicists have raised concerns that prevalent definitions of empathy fail to adequately address the problem of otherness. They have proposed alternative conceptualizations of empathy that aim to acknowledge individual differences, help to extend care beyond one’s inner circle, and develop a critical awareness of biases and prejudices. We explore three such alternatives: Noddings’ concept of engrossment, Meyers’ account of broad empathy, and Baart’s concept of perspective-shifting. Based on these accounts, we explain that care ethics promotes a (...) conceptualization of empathy that is radical in its commitment to engage otherness and that is characterized by being: (1) receptive and open, (2) broad and deep in scope, (3) relational and interactive, (4) mature and multifaceted, (5) critical and reflective, (6) disruptive and transformative. This type of empathy is both demanding and rewarding, as it may inspire health professionals to rethink empathy, its challenges, and its contribution to good care and as it may enrich empathy education and professional empathy practices in health care. (shrink)

PurposeTo explore the mindfulness practice, its long-term effects, facilitators and barriers, in clinical clerkship students 2 years after participation in an 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction training.MethodA qualitative study was performed by semi-structured in-depth interviews with 16 clinical clerkship students selected by purposive sampling. Students had participated in a MBSR training 2 years before and were asked about their current mindfulness practice, and the long-term effects of the MBSR training. Thematic analysis was conducted using the constant comparison method. Data saturation was (...) reached after 16 interviews.ResultsMost interviewees were still engaged in regular, predominantly informal, mindfulness practice, although some discontinued mindfulness practice and reported an “unchanged lifestyle.” Three main themes came forward; “focused attention and open awareness” during daily activities as core elements of long-term mindfulness practice; “changes in behavior and coping” that resulted from taking a pause, reflecting, recognizing automatic behavioral patterns and making space for a conscious response; “integration in personal and professional life” by enhanced enjoyment of daily activities, improved work-life-balance and making different career choices. Barriers and facilitators in starting and maintaining mindfulness practice were understanding and intention as “pre-conditions”; practical, personal, and professional factors of students in maintaining practice.ConclusionTwo years after participation in a MBSR training, many interviewees were still engaged in mindfulness practice contributing to both personal and professional changes. In light of the high clerkship demands, MBSR training could be a valuable addition to medical curricula, supporting medical students in developing necessary competencies to become well-balanced professionals. (shrink)

Decision outcomes sometimes result in negative emotions. This can occur when a decision appears to be wrong in retrospect, and/or when the obtained decision outcome does not live up to expectations. Regret and disappointment are the two emotions that are of central interest in the present article. Although these emotions have a lot in common, they also differ in ways that are relevant to decision making. In this article we review theories and empirical findings concerning regret and disappointment. We first (...) discuss how regret and disappointment differ with respect to their antecedent conditions, appraisals, and phenomenology. We also discuss possible behavioural consequences of experiencing these emotions. Next, we consider how the anticipation of regret and disappointment may influence decision making. We use regret and disappointment theory, developed by the economists Bell (1982, 1985), and Loomes and Sugden (1982, 1986, 1987), as a framework for our discussion. Finally, we argue that combining the theoretical approaches and research paradigms of behavioural decision theory with emotion theories will significantly increase our knowledge of antecedents and consequences of emotions. (shrink)

The impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 was the result of a coup of the economically dominant conservative oligarchy against the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores, in power since 2003. The right wing Brazilian media played a crucial role in this coup by manipulating public opinion as well as the politicians who voted against Dilma. In particular, the media of the powerful Globo Corporation, such as O Globo newspaper, and especially Globo’s Jornal Nacional, the pervasive TV news program, systematically (...) demonized and delegitimized Dilma, as well as ex-President Lula and the PT, in their news reports and editorials by selectively associating them with pervasive corruption and attributing the serious economic recession to them. After a summary of this sociopolitical context, and a brief theoretical definition of manipulation, this article examines some of the manipulative strategies of O Globo’s editorials during March and April 2016. (shrink)

Neil Tennant’s core logic is a type of bilateralist natural deduction system based on proofs and refutations. We present a proof system for propositional core logic, explain its connections to bilateralism, and explore the possibility of using it as a type theory, in the same kind of way intuitionistic logic is often used as a type theory. Our proof system is not Tennant’s own, but it is very closely related, and determines the same consequence relation. The difference, however, matters for (...) our purposes, and we discuss this. We then turn to the question of strong normalization, showing that although Tennant’s proof system for core logic is not strongly normalizing, our modified system is. (shrink)

Regret and disappointment have in common the fact that they are experienced when the outcome of a decision is unfavourable: They both concern “what might have been”, had things been different. However, some regret and disappointment theorists regard the differences between these emotions as important, arguing that they differ with respect to the conditions under which they are felt, and how they affect decision making. The goal of the present research was to examine whether and how these emotions also differ (...) with respect to the way in which they are experienced. Participants were asked torecall aninstance of intense regret or disappointment andto indicate what they felt, thought, felt like doing, did, and were motivated to do during this experience (cf. Roseman, Wiest, & Swartz, 1994). Significant differences between regret and disappointment were found in every category. These differences were most pronounced for “action tendencies” (what participants felt like doing) and “emotivations” (what they were motivated to do). These results suggest that the two emotions have differential implications for future behaviour. (shrink)

The Leibniz Center for Law is involved in the project Digitale Uitwisseling Ruimtelijke Plannen [DURP (http://www.vrom.nl/durp); digital exchange of spatial plans] which develops a XML-based digital exchange format for spatial regulations. Involvement in the DURP project offers new possibilities to study a legal area that hasn’t yet been studied to the extent it deserves in the field of Computer Science & Law. We studied and criticised the work of the DURP project and the Dutch Ministry of internal affairs on metadata (...) for regulatory documents, and made an inventory of issues related to legal knowledge representation that it felt were not sufficiently covered by current initiatives in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) field. This inventory was an input to the DURP standardisation effort. In a second phase of the project we extended the METALex XML schema (cf. Boer et al. 2002; Boer et al. 2003) for ‚regular’ legal sources that we developed in the past for geospatial regulatory information, in order to support exchange of spatial regulations, including the associated geospatial information in the form of maps. We developed a prototype application and demonstrated how the spatial planning information in GML can be combined with XML with only minimal changes, using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This paper describes our experiences. (shrink)

We address the differences between schadenfreude and happiness and those between gluckschmerz and anger. We argue that these emotions are largely elicited by distinct interactions of appraisals that trigger distinct emotional responses. Moreover, we discuss both schadenfreude and gluckschmerz in relation to the emotional lexicon of several languages and conclude that these emotions help us to better understand human behaviour.

Women and men towards a new type of leadership In the Netherlands emancipation has had a lot of attention in the last decades of the former century. Nowadays, often is thought the inequality be­tween men and women at the workplace is solved. Nevertheless, despite the high amount of for instance female students, in higher positions in organizations and academies female leaders still are a minority. More important, their qualities to lead are underestimated, as well by men as by themselves. In (...) today’s world, a combination of feminine and masculine leadership is the best way to manage the modern fluid network organizations, and androgyn leaders are highly searched for. (shrink)

We explore why people feel the socially improper emotions of schadenfreude and gluckschmerz. One explanation follows from sentiment relations. Prior dislike leads to both schadenfreude and gluckschmerz. A second explanation relates to concerns over justice. Deserved misfortune is pleasing and undeserved good fortune is displeasing. A third explanation concerns appraisal of the good or bad fortunes of others as creating either benefit or harm for the self or in-group. Especially in competitive situations and when envy is present, gain is pleasing (...) and loss is displeasing. Both emotions have important implications for understanding human relations at the individual and group levels. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured for the animal. Koffka made a sharp distinction between the “behavioural environment” and the “geographical (...) environment”. We show how this distinction picks out the difference between the environment as perceived by an individual organism, and the shared publicly available environment. The ecological psychologist James Gibson was later critical of Koffka for inserting a private phenomenal reality in between animals and the shared environment. Gibson tried to make do with just the concept of affordances in his explanation of molar behaviour. We argue however that psychology as a science of molar behaviour will need to make appeal both to the concepts of shared publicly available affordances, and of the multiplicity of relevant affordances that invite an individual to act. A version of Koffka’s distinction between the two environments remains alive today in a distinction we have made between the field and landscape of affordances. Having distinguished the two environments, we go on to provide an account of how the two environments are related. Koffka suggested that the behavioural environment forms out of the causal interaction of the individual with a pre-existing, ready-made geographical environment. We argue that such an account of the relation between the two environments fails to do justice to the complex entanglement of the social with the material aspects of the geographical environment. To better account for this sociomaterial reality of the geographical environment, we propose a process-perspective on our distinction between the landscape and field of affordances. While the two environments can be conceptually distinguished, we argue they should also be viewed as standing in a relation of reciprocal and mutual dependence. (shrink)

This article explores the role of constitutional thought in Latour’s work on cosmopolitics. It will study his non-modern proposal in the Politics of Nature (2004) and argue for a constitutional rather than political understanding. To address criticisms of being too metaphysical or unpractical, we will work out the notion of a “constitutional ecology of practices” to highlight how different practices such as politics, science, organization, but also law, all contribute to the design of the stage and processes for composing a (...) common world. Special focus will here be placed on the role of “epigrams”: practical models for ordering contributions of different practices or modes in hierarchical relationships. This renders them identifiable, mobilizable, and contestable as cross-cutting models for shaping mutual relations in concrete collaborative settings. The case of the legal regulation of robots will be presented as an example of a cosmopolitical attempt to introduce non-human entities in the common collective. We will here observe the role that epigrams play in framing, ordering and contesting the epistemic contributions of the various practices involved in this innovation ecology. This case will be used to discuss Latour’s proposals and to study non-modern constitutionalism in action. (shrink)

In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of ‘higher’ cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to ‘affordances,’ i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper we develop a process-based account of affordances that includes long-term anticipation within its (...) scope. We present a framework in which situations and their affordances unfold, and can be thought of as continuing a history of practices into a current situational activity. In this activity affordances invite skilled participants to act further. Via these invitations one situation develops into the other; an unfolding process that sets up the conditions for its own continuation. Central to our process account of affordances is the idea that engaged individuals can be responsive to the direction of the process to which their actions contribute. Anticipation, at any temporal scale, is then part and parcel of keeping attuned to the movement of the unfolding situations to which an individual contributes. We concretize our account by returning to the example of anticipation observed in architectural practice. This account of anticipation opens the door to considering a wide array of human activities traditionally characterized as ‘higher’ cognition in terms of engaging with affordances. (shrink)

Empirical research on the emotion disappointment has focused uniquely on disappointments produced by outcomes that are worse than expectations. Introspection suggests that in many cases persons instead of outcomes cause the disappointment. In the present study we therefore argue that the emotion word “disappointment” refers to two different emotional experiences, namely, outcome-related disappointment and person-related disappointment. Results from an empirical study support this distinction by showing that these two types of disappointment differ from each other and from anger and sadness (...) with respect to appraisals and response types. (shrink)

This article is an analytic register of recent European efforts in the making of ‘autonomous’ robots to address what is imagined as Europe’s societal challenges. The paper describes how an emerging techno-epistemic network stretches across industry, science, policy and law to legitimize and enact a robotics innovation agenda. Roadmap is the main metaphor and organizing tool in working across the disciplines and sectors, and in aligning these heterogeneous actors with a machine-centric vision along a path to make way for ‘new (...) kinds’ of robots. We describe what happens as this industry-dominated project docks in a public–private partnership with pan-European institutions and a legislative initiative on robolaw. Emphasizing the co-production of robotics and European innovation politics, we observe how well-known uncertainties and scholarly debates about machine capabilities and human–machine configurations, are unexpectedly played out in legal scholarship and institutions as a controversy and a significant problem for human-centered legal frameworks. European robotics are indeed driving an increase in speculative ethics and a new-found weight of possible futures in legislative practice. (shrink)

In two experiments we demonstrated that a self-evaluation threat intensifies schadenfreude. Moreover, we showed that a self-evaluation threat predicts schadenfreude in both threat-related and threat-unrelated domains and when controlling for feelings of envy and dislike towards the target and evaluations of the misfortune in terms of deservingness. These findings indicate that another's misfortune may be pleasing because it satisfies people's concern for a positive self-view and a sense of self-worth.

One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one values. Indeed, memory is constitutively normative. Theoretical approaches to memory should be sensitive to this normative character. We will argue that traditional views that consider memory as the storing and retrieval of mental content, fail to consider the practices we need for telling the truth about our past. We introduce the Radically Enactive view of Cognition, or REC, as well-placed to recognize the central role of (...) norms in remembering. Crucially, REC construes all remembering as “something we do”, and the most sophisticated forms of remembering as things we collectively do, answerable to socioculturally established practices. On this view our mnemonic performances cannot avoid re-shaping our collective ways of doing and seeing going forward. By REC’s lights therefore, the “is” of memory is “oughty” through and through. (shrink)

A previous study has shown that the degree of trust into others might be biased by inducing either a more “inclusive” or “exclusive” cognitive-control mode. Here, we investigated whether the degree of interpersonal trust can be biased by environmental factors, such as odors, that are likely to impact cognitive-control states. Arousing olfactory fragrances (e.g., peppermint) are supposed to induce a more exclusive, and calming olfactory fragrances (e.g., lavender) a more inclusive state. Participants performed the Trust Game, which provides an index (...) of interpersonal trust by assessing the money units one participant (the trustor) transfers to another participant (the trustee), while being exposed to either peppermint or lavender aroma. All participants played the role of trustor. As expected, participants transferred significantly more money to the alleged trustee in the lavender as compared to the peppermint and no aroma conditions. This observation might have various serious implications for a broad range of situations in which interpersonal trust is an essential element, such as cooperation (e.g., mixed-motives situations), bargaining and negotiation, consumer behavior, and group performance. (shrink)

Imagination is often considered the pinnacle of representational cognition. Looking at the concrete details of imagining in context, this paper aims to contribute to the emerging literature that is challenging this representational view by offering a relational and radically situated alternative. On the basis of observing architects in the process of making an architectural art installation, we show how to consider imagination not as de-contextualized achievement by an individual but as an opening up to larger-scale “affordances,” i.e. the unfolding possibilities (...) for action. We show how the architects coordinate the enactment of multiple affordances across different timescales, from small-scale affordances of picking up a mobile phone to the large-scale affordance of making the installation that takes months to unfold. These affordances get co-determined as they are jointly enacted. It is within this determining process that imagination too finds its place. On our view it is the indeterminacy of multiple affordances unfolding in action simultaneously that can be experienced as imaginative. The indeterminate character of this coordinative process allows activities to widen and open up, letting new possibilities for action enter into them. (shrink)

In this article the relevance of a sociocognitive approach to discourse is shown by presenting a new theory of context, defined as subjective participants’ constructs of communicative situations, and made explicit in terms of mental models - context models - in Episodic Memory. Through a ‘contextual analysis’ of a fragment of one of the ‘Iraq’ speeches by Tony Blair in the British House of Commons, it is shown how such context models control and explain many political aspects of interaction that (...) cannot be accounted for in autonomous approaches to text and talk. Context models thus provide an explicit theory of relevance and the situational appropriateness of discourse, and hence also a basis for theories of style. (shrink)

Radical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the relations they maintain with their surroundings prior to any analytic separation from their environment. They notably avoided separating perception of the material environment from social life. This perspective on perceptual experience was to prove the inspiration for Gibson’s ecological approach to perceptual psychology. Gibson provided a theory of how the direct perception of the organism-environment relation is possible. Central to his account was the notion of a (...) medium for direct perception. However Gibson provided two mutually inconsistent accounts of the medium leading to problems for his radical empiricism. We develop an account of the medium that does justice to ecological psychology’s radical empiricist roots. To complement this account of the medium we detail a usage-based account of information. Together they allow us to propose a novel radical empiricist view of direct perception. We then return to the notion of medium and expand it to include sociomaterial practices. We show how direct perception happens in the midst of social life, and is made possible by an active achieving and maintaining of a pragmatic relation with the environment. (shrink)