Previous findings demonstrate that people often do not feel how they want to feel, supporting the distinction between “actual affect” and “ideal affect.” But are there certain activities that reduce the discrepancy between actual and ideal affect? Based on flow theory and socioemotional selectivity theory, we examined whether the discrepancy between people’s actual and ideal positive affect would be smaller during activities that were more conducive to flow (a state of intense absorption and concentration), pleasant, and familiar. In Study 1, (...) U.S. participants aged 17–79 (N = 393) reported their ideal affect and how they felt during activities with varying degrees of challenges and skills. For both low-arousal positive affect (LAP) and high-arousal positive affect (HAP), participants reported smaller actual-ideal affect discrepancies during flow-conducive activities (when skills matched challenges). Study 2 was a 14-day experience sampling study, in which Hong Kong participants aged 18–83 (Nindividual = 109) reported their momentary actual and ideal affect, and how pleasant and familiar their activities were (Nexperience = 3,815). Greater activity familiarity was associated with smaller discrepancies in actual-ideal LAP, while greater activity pleasantness was associated with smaller discrepancies in actual-ideal HAP. These findings provide insights on the activities that help people achieve their ideal affect more easily. (shrink)

One dark and rainy night, Yuso sexually assaults and tortures Zelan. In escaping from the scene of his crime, he falls heavily and becomes an impotent paraplegic. Instead of treating his fate as divine retribution for his wicked acts, Yuso sees it as sheer bad luck. He shows no remorse for what he has done, and vainly hopes that he will recover his powers, which he now treats as involuntarily hoarded resources to be used on less rainy days. In the (...) presence of others, he pretends that he has turned over a new leaf. He asks for religious and educational books, hoping to make up for his poor education and deprived social background. But he immediately discards them when he is alone in favor of the pornographic magazines which he has bribed a nurse to smuggle in for him. His deception and various obscene acts committed in the hospital are exposed; by the time he comes up for trial, everyone knows that he is still a lustful, sadistic, and unrepentant man. Most retributivists have a sufficient justification for punishing Yuso independently of the social consequences of his punishment. Two features of the case might cause some difficulties. First, Yuso has already experienced considerable suffering and deprivation both before and after his crime, and retributivists might disagree about the relevance of the suffering to his punishment. Secondly, Yuso is unrepentant, and it is unlikely that punishment will change him. This might, as we shall see, create a problem for those who think that the justifying aim of punishment is the moral reform of the offender. (shrink)

What ecological advantages do animals gain by being able to detect, extract and exploit wavelength information? What are the advantages of representing that information as hue qualities? The benefits of adding chromatic to achromatic vision, marginal in object detection, become apparent in object recognition and receiving biological signals. It is argued that this improved performance is a direct consequence of the fact that many animals' visual systems reduce wavelength information to combinations of four basic hues. This engenders a simple categorical (...) scheme that permits a rich amount of sensory information to be rapidly and efficiently employed by cognitive machinery of limited capacity. (shrink)

At 8 a.m. I get in my car and set off for work. At 7:59 a.m., before I started it, my car was at rest; at 8:01 a.m. it is in motion. When a thing is not in motion, it is at rest, and when it is not at rest, it is in motion. But what was the state of the car at 8:00 a.m., as I was starting it? It would be inaccurate to say that it was in motion (...) but it would be inaccurate, also, to say that it was at rest: it was “just starting.” But, if whenever a thing is not in motion it is at rest, the state of “just starting”—or, of course, the comparable state of “just stopping”—must be either a state of motion or a state of rest. Which? (shrink)

In this article C. L. Tsou, of the Institute of Biophysics, Beijing, criticizes the use of the expression I50, the inhibitor concentration to produce 50% inhibition of a particular enzyme as a ‘most unfortunate’ parameter, when screening enzyme inhibitors designed as drugs. Comments on Dr Tsou's point of view will be welcomed from readers.

On October 31, 1994, it was announced that a confidential settlement had been reached in Doe v. Kohn, Nast & Graf, P.C., et al., 862F. Supp. 1310 ). The settlement in ths widely publicized AIDS discrimination case came three weeks after the trial began in the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Nov. 2, 1994, at 10).Plaintiff Doe, an associate employed at Kohn, Nast & Graf, a prominent law firm in Philadelphia, filed an AIDS discrimination case under the (...) Americans with Disabilities Act against his employer claiming that the firm fired him in March 1993 because he was HIV-positive. Doe's complaint also cited claims under ERISA and other Pennsylvania employment laws. (shrink)

Color -order systems highlight certain features of color phenomenology while neglecting others. It is misleading to speak as if there were a single “psychological color space” that might be described by a rather simple formal structure. Criticisms of functionalism based on multiple realizations of a too-simple formal description of chromatic pheno-menal relations thus miss the mark. It is quite implausible that a functional system representing the full complexity of human color phenomenology should be realizable by radically different qualitative states.

At Moore’s time, the main-stream ethical theory is the doctrine that pleasure alone is good as an end as held by the hedonistic utilitarianism. Moore, however, asserts that good, not composed of any parts, is a simple notion and indefinable, and naturalistic ethical theories, in particular hedonistic utilitarianism, interpret intrinsic good as a property of a single natural object---pleasure, which is also the sole end of life, thus violates naturalistic fallacy. Moore seems to believe that there exist things other than (...) pleasure that are also intrinsically good and has searched for them. But Moore has not clearly stated what these things are, nor has he given any justification for why they are intrinsically good. This paper discusses Moore’s arguments and difficulties of utilitarianism. With the subjectivistic utilitarian theory of value, Unified Utilitarian Theory (UTT) discards the classification of value into intrinsic and instrumental and proves to be exempt of all theexisting difficulties with utilitarianism related to pleasure, including naturalistic fallacy, vagueness of pleasure and sole end of life, double counting, etc. (shrink)