The aim of this study was to develop explosive strength in the lower limbs of students by implementing an experimental functional training program using Aqua-Fit equipment, specifically targeting university students enrolled in non-sports-related academic programs. This study was conducted over 14 weeks, structured: the first week of the initial test, 12 weeks of training, and the last week of the final test. A total of 40 students, aged 19-25, specializing in general medicine, participated in functional training sessions as part of (...) their physical education classes, conducted twice a week over 12 weeks, with one 60-minute session per week. The evaluation focused on the Squat Jump test on both the right and left leg, using OptoJump technology, quantifying parameters such as contact time, flight time, jump height, power, and student progress. The results indicated a statistically significant p<0.05 improvement in all test parameters: maximum contact time, maximum flight time, maximum jump height, and maximum power. The most remarkable progress was observed in the jump height parameter for both the right and left leg. The Cohen’s d values were all < 0.8, indicating a very large effect size, demonstrating the effectiveness of the experimental training program using Aqua Fit equipment. The findings suggest that the functional training program utilizing Aqua-Fit equipment contributes to improving lower limb strength parameters. (shrink)

Mini-football, a dynamic sport, demands a blend of motor skills and peak physical abilities such as acceleration, deceleration, jumping, and directional changes, often executed with high intensity. Many technical skills, including passing, dribbling, ball control, and shooting, are performed using only one foot, underscoring the importance of balance in player performance. Given its role in stabilizing movements and optimizing coordination, balance training is crucial for enhancing technical proficiency in mini-football. The present study aimed to enhance balance in senior mini-football players (...) through a 12-week experimental training program utilizing Blazepod technology. 20 senior mini-football players participated in an experimental intervention, where specific proprioceptive exercises targeting balance were integrated into training sessions twice per week. The study used the Y Balance Test to assess balance improvements in multiple movement directions. The results revealed a statistically significant improvement in balance performance across all test parameters. The most significant progress was observed in the forward direction for the right foot and the backward-right direction for the left foot. These findings not only validate the effectiveness of balance training using innovative technologies but also provide practical insights for coaches and practitioners in the field of sports training, inspiring them to adopt modern training methodologies to enhance the performance levels of mini-football players. (shrink)

With the growth of neuroscience research, new neuroscience and society (NeuroX) fields like neuroethics, neurolaw, neuroarchitecture, neuroeconomics, and many more have emerged. In this article we report on lessons learned about mentoring students in the interdisciplinary space of neuroscience and society. We draw on our experiences with the recently launched Dana Foundation Career Network in Neuroscience & Society. This resource supports educators and practitioners mentoring students aiming to apply neuroscience in diverse fields beyond medicine and biomedical science. Through our (...) programming, we identified three key lessons: (1) students are interested in exploring a wide range of neuroscience and society intersections; (2) outreach to underserved institutions generates avenues for students to join NeuroX conversations; and (3) by offering free access to online NeuroX resources and a network of subject-matter experts, the Career Network joins many partners helping to bridge the gap between neuroscience and society. (shrink)

This article claims that attempts to define the language of new media as a unique linguistic phenomenon face problems stemming from a definition of language that takes knowledge of linguistic rules to be essential for understanding. I suggest that Davidson's later philosophy of language, as outlined in his 1986 paper 'A nice derangement of epitaphs', and especially his rejection of traditional definitions of language and understanding, offers an enlightening and important insight to the question of how understanding is achieved by (...) the LNM. Although preceding the digital era, I argue that Davidson's redefinition of linguistic understanding as not necessarily rule dependent enables us to better understand our linguistic time in general and the LNM in particular. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt, whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated by admirers who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and Nietzschean theme (...) of a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics.Villa's book, however, is much more than a mere correction of misinterpretations of a major thinker's work. Rather, he makes a persuasive case for Arendt as the postmodern or postmetaphysical political theorist, the first political theorist to think through the nature of political action after Nietzsche's exposition of the death of God. After giving an account of Arendt's theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, Villa shows how Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions they drew from their critiques. The result is a wide-ranging discussion not only of Arendt and Heidegger, but of Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Habermas, and the entire question of politics after metaphysics. (shrink)

To describe phenomena that occur at different time scales, computational models of the brain must incorporate different levels of abstraction. At time scales of approximately 1/3 of a second, orienting movements of the body play a crucial role in cognition and form a useful computational level embodiment level,” the constraints of the physical system determine the nature of cognitive operations. The key synergy is that at time scales of about 1/3 of a second, the natural sequentiality of body movements can (...) be matched to the natural computational economies of sequential decision systems through a system of implicit reference called deictic in which pointing movements are used to bind objects in the world to cognitive programs. This target article focuses on how deictic bindings make it possible to perform natural tasks. Deictic computation provides a mechanism for representing the essential features that link external sensory data with internal cognitive programs and motor actions. One of the central features of cognition, working memory, can be related to moment-by-moment dispositions of body features such as eye movements and hand movements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Atonement, Justice, and Peace: The Message of the Cross and the Mission of the Church by Darrin W. Snyder Belousek, and: Restorative Justice: Theories and Practices of Moral Imagination by Amy LevadDana ScopatzReview of Atonement, Justice, and Peace: The Message of the Cross and the Mission of the Church DARRIN W. SNYDER BELOUSEK Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. 668 pp. $55.00Review of Restorative Justice: Theories and Practices of (...) Moral Imagination AMY LEVAD El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2012. 300 pp. $80.00In Atonement, Justice, and Peace and Restorative Justice, the authors advocate for a restorative conception of justice, which they oppose to the “normal” retributive concept. Amy Levad draws on Aristotle and the virtue ethics tradition to write about “moral imagination” and restorative justice. Darrin Belousek uses Thomas Kuhn’s language to write about a “paradigm shift” in our understanding of theological themes relevant to restorative justice. Both contrast the restorative imagination or paradigm with a retributive one, although Levad also contrasts restoration with rehabilitation. Levad limits her study to restorative justice as [End Page 214] practiced in the criminal justice system, while Belousek expands his work to consider the Bible, theology, and multiple issues in society and in the church.Levad begins her book by discussing Aristotle’s idea of justice as equity, which she points out requires more discernment from judicial decision makers than it requires the algorithmic application of laws. In order for them to enact justice as equity, she argues, decision makers need a “vivid and expansive” moral imagination. Toward this end, she brings together two traditions: Aristotelian virtue ethics and modern literature on moral imagination. At the heart of her work is an ethnographic study intended to determine whether there are practices of restorative justice that can foster such a vivid and expansive moral imagination. After observing and interviewing participants in restorative justice programs in Colorado, Levad examined the narratives, metaphors, and symbols they used in order to determine whether and how they demonstrated a distinctively restorative moral imagination. Because the scope of her study was limited, and because she had difficulty getting a wide spectrum of roles involved in restorative justice to participate in the study, Levad’s results are more suggestive than conclusive. She acknowledges that we cannot generalize from them; although she draws on research methods from sociology and criminology, her findings do not meet their standards of evidence. Thus, the book’s greatest value lies in the recommendations it makes for further study. Empirical studies of the effectiveness of restorative justice practices have tended to focus on either reducing recidivism or the satisfaction of participants with the process. Levad brings to the fore two questions that have so far not been explored in previous research. First, how do restorative justice practices affect the moral imagination? And second, what effect might those practices have on ethical discernment? Her book takes some hopeful initial steps in addressing those questions.Although Levad writes as a Christian ethicist, she did not explicitly incorporate theological reflection into her study of state-sponsored programs. Belousek, by contrast, takes on an explicitly theological project of evaluating how interpretations of the significance of the cross of Jesus interact with such things as support for capital punishment, just war, and market economics. Since Belousek’s book is wide-ranging, this review will concentrate on the task it has in common with Levad’s book: that of reconceptualizing justice.In a fashion parallel to Levad’s use of Aristotle’s notion of justice as equity, which sometimes departs from strict legal justice, Belousek cites Paul’s vision of God’s justice “irrespective of” or “apart from” the law (372). Belousek begins by linking penal-substitutionary atonement theory to capital punishment, just war, and exchange economy in a single “paradigm,” arguing that they are all under-girded by what he calls the “Retributive Principle” (28). He then challenges this paradigm’s appropriateness for Christianity on biblical and doctrinal grounds. After examining arguments in favor of penal-substitutionary atonement in detail—drawing on the works of J. I. Packer and Thomas Schreiner, among [End Page 215] others—he turns to the scriptures cited in support... (shrink)

A somewhat fictionalized account of several interpretations of implication is presented together with comparisons between classical, modal, tense, and intuitionistic logics.

Benardete paradoxes involve infinite collections of Grim Reapers, assassins, demons, deafening peals, or even sentences. These paradoxes have recently been used in arguments for finitist metaphysical theses such as temporal finitism, causal finitism, and discrete views of time. Here we develop a new finite Benardete-like paradox. We then use this paradox to defend a companions in guilt argument that challenges recent applications of patchwork principles on behalf of the aforementioned finitist arguments. Finally, we develop another problem for those applications by (...) examining the notion of exact duplication. (shrink)

This Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical ideas and political theories of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). As a survivor of the Holocaust, Arendt's life informed her work exploring the meaning and construction of power, evil, totalitarianism, and direct democracy. Through insightful readings of Arendt's best-known works, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Life of the Mind (1978), Dana Villa traces the importance of Arendt's ideas for today's reader. In so doing, Villa explains how Arendt gained world-wide fame with (...) the publication of Origins, and went on to have a distinguished career as a political theorist and public intellectual. A sometimes controversial figure, Arendt is now recognised as one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century and her works have become an acknowledged part of the Western canon of political theory and philosophy"--From the publisher. (shrink)

Many critics bemoan the lack of civic engagement in America. Tocqueville's ''nation of joiners'' seems to have become a nation of alienated individuals, disinclined to fulfill the obligations of citizenship or the responsibilities of self-government. In response, the critics urge community involvement and renewed education in the civic virtues. But what kind of civic engagement do we want, and what sort of citizenship should we encourage? In Socratic Citizenship, Dana Villa takes issue with those who would reduce citizenship to (...) community involvement or to political participation for its own sake. He argues that we need to place more value on a form of conscientious, moderately alienated citizenship invented by Socrates, one that is critical in orientation and dissident in practice. Taking Plato's Apology of Socrates as his starting point, Villa argues that Socrates was the first to show, in his words and deeds, how moral and intellectual integrity can go hand in hand, and how they can constitute importantly civic--and not just philosophical or moral--virtues. More specifically, Socrates urged that good citizens should value this sort of integrity more highly than such apparent virtues as patriotism, political participation, piety, and unwavering obedience to the law. Yet Socrates' radical redefinition of citizenship has had relatively little influence on Western political thought. Villa considers how the Socratic idea of the thinking citizen is treated by five of the most influential political thinkers of the past two centuries--John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. In doing so, he not only deepens our understanding of these thinkers' work and of modern ideas of citizenship, he also shows how the fragile Socratic idea of citizenship has been lost through a persistent devaluation of independent thought and action in public life.Engaging current debates among political and social theorists, this insightful book shows how we must reconceive the idea of good citizenship if we are to begin to address the shaky fundamentals of civic culture in America today. (shrink)

Dana Sawyer unpacks the philosophy-spirituality of Huxley, Watts, and Dass (as well as contemporaries, including Mirabai Starr and Richard Rohr) in ways readers will find intriguing, creating an original view of human nature, revealing why this mystical understanding of the world is called "perennial." During the 1960s and '70s, "Perennial Philosophy" was the most popular theory regarding what the world's mystical traditions held in common, and it was touted as the best platform for understanding the nature of human consciousness, (...) including how to expand it therapeutically with meditation, yoga, and psychedelic drugs. Consequently, books by Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Huston Smith, Stanislav Grof, Frances Vaughan, Ram Dass, and other Perennialists were widely available and sold like hotcakes. However, during the '80s, their shared perspective fell out of fashion. The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded corrects several common errors while providing a short, up-to-date overview of the general perspective. The goal is to reveal the continued relevance of Perennial Philosophy during this time of psychedelic renaissance, when many are seeking ways to interpret their experiences, with an engaging narrative free of philosophical shop talk. The result is a demonstration of how Perennial Philosophy applies to all who are interested in self-realization. This book will appeal to the millions today who are involved with mindfulness meditation, hatha yoga, Transcendental Meditation, Tibetan Buddhism, Kabbalah, Zen, Sufism, Shamanic drumming, Christian Centering Prayer, or their own DIY approaches to spiritual awakening. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's rich and varied political thought is more influential today than ever before, due in part to the collapse of communism and the need for ideas that move beyond the old ideologies of the Cold War. As Dana Villa shows, however, Arendt's thought is often poorly understood, both because of its complexity and because her fame has made it easy for critics to write about what she is reputed to have said rather than what she actually wrote. Villa (...) sets out to change that here, explaining clearly, carefully, and forcefully Arendt's major contributions to our understanding of politics, modernity, and the nature of political evil in our century.Villa begins by focusing on some of the most controversial aspects of Arendt's political thought. He shows that Arendt's famous idea of the banality of evil--inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann--does not, as some have maintained, lessen the guilt of war criminals by suggesting that they are mere cogs in a bureaucratic machine. He examines what she meant when she wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism, explaining that she believed Nazi and Soviet terror served above all to reinforce the totalitarian idea that humans are expendable units, subordinate to the all-determining laws of Nature or History. Villa clarifies the personal and philosophical relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, showing how her work drew on his thought while providing a firm repudiation of Heidegger's political idiocy under the Nazis. Less controversially, but as importantly, Villa also engages with Arendt's ideas about the relationship between political thought and political action. He explores her views about the roles of theatricality, philosophical reflection, and public-spiritedness in political life. And he explores what relationship, if any, Arendt saw between totalitarianism and the "great tradition" of Western political thought. Throughout, Villa shows how Arendt's ideas illuminate contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and democracy and how they deepen our understanding of philosophers ranging from Socrates and Plato to Habermas and Leo Strauss.Direct, lucid, and powerfully argued, this is a much-needed analysis of the central ideas of one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. (shrink)

(2007). The Act of Lawyering and the Art of Communication: An Essay on Families-in-Crisis, the Adversarial Tradition, and the Social Work Model. Legal Ethics: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 176-192.

The Rei(g)n of Rule is a study of rules and their role in language. Rules have dominated the philosophical arena as a fundamental philosophical concept. Little progress, however, has been made in reaching an accepted definition of rules. This fact is not coincidental. The concept of rule is expected to perform various, at times conflicting, tasks. Analyzing key debates and rule related discussions in the philosophy of language I show that typically rules are perceived and defined either as norms or (...) as conventions. As norms, rules perform the evaluative task of distinguishing between correct and incorrect actions. As conventions, rules describe how certain actions are actually undertaken. As normative and conventional requirements do not necessarily coincide, the concept of rule cannot simultaneously accommodate both. The impossibility to consistently define rule has gone unnoticed by philosophers, and it is in this sense that rule has also blocked philosophical attempts to explain language in terms of rules.". (shrink)

Christianity has recently undergone historic demographic and cultural shifts: it has expanded significantly in the global south while declining in the west. In an age of World Christianity, these changes bring diversity and competition, and renewed Christian witness. The global context for the faith reveals unavoidable tensions between missional expansion and the call to be one in Christ Jesus. Amid plurality and rapid changes in identity, Christians are challenged to re-appropriate the classic marks of the church – one, holy, catholic, (...) and apostolic. Engagement with all four marks, reframed for the contemporary situation, will help to maintain the creative tension between mission and unity, to connect Christians across geography and generations, and to forge a common vision of salvation in an interconnected world. (shrink)

In present cultural debate, the theme of biodiversity is considered one of the most important topic because it does not treat only the variety of living forms but it includes also the value of itself and its preservation. Analysing a lot of its peculiar aspects we take conscious about uniqueness of life and relationship with other fields of knowledge: science, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, politics. This essay focus especially on the origin of life, the processes of morphogenesis in living forms and (...) appearing of “aesthetics” qualities in biological world. The relation between biodiversity and aesthetic can help to understand the origin of human aesthetic sense. (shrink)

Bioart emerges as a response to worrying changes in living forms produced by genetic engineering. Indeed, bioartists focus their attention on artistic exploration of biotechnologies and related ethical issues. Their main goal was to inform the public about dangerous genetic engineering techniques, like cloning, inter- and intraspecies experiments, reproductive technologies, genotype and phenotype reprogramming, hybridization techniques, and many others. The paradox lies in the fact that bioartists, in collaboration with scientists, use the same abovementioned techniques and create in laboratory unique (...) living beings with original aesthetic aspects. The use of living organisms for creative or recreational purposes inevitably causes serious cultural and bioethical debates. In this context emerges the concept of contingency linked with living forms, biotech art, and aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Freight transportation plays a critical role in improving company performance in the modern manufacturing industry. To reduce costs, companies must take advantage of the use of large vehicles. It caused fewer deliveries, but inventory costs and degradation quality are high. One of the joint economic lot size problems in supply chain is Integrated Single-Vendor Single-Buyer Inventory Problem. This study developed the I-SVSB-IP model that considers raw materials’ exponential quality degradation and transportation costs. The objective function of this research was to (...) maximize the Joint Total Profit. Three decision variables used were inventory cycle time, raw material ordering frequency, and frequency of delivery of finished products to buyers. This study proposed a sophisticated Chimp Optimization Algorithm procedure to solve the I-SVSB-IP problem. A case study on the food industry in Indonesia was presented to optimize the I-SVSB-IP. The results showed that the ChOA procedure had produced an optimal solution compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm. This study also demonstrated a sensitivity analysis of decision and transportation variables to cost, revenue, and JTP. The results show that increasing transport frequency of ordering raw materials and finished products to buyers enhances the total cost and reduces joint total profit. In addition, increasing the rate of quality degradation of raw materials reduces JTP. (shrink)

Culture-independent high-throughput sequencing has provided unprecedented insights into microbial ecology, particularly for Earth’s most ubiquitous and diverse inhabitants – the viruses. A plethora of methods now exist for amplifying the vanishingly small amounts of nucleic acids in natural viral communities in order to sequence them, and sequencing depth is now so great that viral genomes can be detected and assembled even amid large concentrations of non-viral DNA. Complementing these advances in amplification and sequencing is the ability to physically link fluorescently (...) labeled viruses to their host cells via high-throughput flow sorting. Sequencing of such isolated virus–host pairs facilitates cultivation-independent exploration of the natural host range of viruses. Within the next decade, as these technologies become widespread, we can expect to see a systematic expansion of our knowledge of viruses and their hosts. (shrink)

Animate vision systems have gaze control mechanisms that can actively position the camera coordinate system in response to physical stimuli. Compared to passive systems, animate systems show that visual computation can be vastly less expensive when considered in the larger context of behavior. The most important visual behavior is the ability to control the direction of gaze. This allows the use of very low resolution imaging that has a high virtual resolution. Using such a system in a controlled way provides (...) additional constraints that dramatically simplify the computations of early vision. Another important behavior is the way the environment “behaves‘. Animate systems under real-time constraints can further reduce their computational burden by using environmental cues that are perspicuous in the local context. A third source of economy is introduced when behaviors are learned. Because errors are rarely fatal, systems using learning algorithms can amortize computational cost over extended periods. Further economies can be achieved when the learning system uses indexical reference, which is a form of dynamic variable binding. Animate vision is a natural way of implementing this dynamic binding. (shrink)

The cerebral cortex is a rich and diverse structure that is the basis of intelligent behavior. One of the deepest mysteries of the function of cortex is that neural processing times are only about one hundred times as fast as the fastest response times for complex behavior. At the very least, this would seem to indicate that the cortex does massive amounts of parallel computation.This paper explores the hypothesis that an important part of the cortex can be modeled as a (...) connectionist computer that is especially suited for parallel problem solving. The connectionist computer uses a special representation, termed value unit encoding, that represents small subsets of parameters in a way that allows parallel access to many different parameter values. This computer can be thought of as computing hierarchies of sensorimotor invariants. The neural substrate can be interpreted as a commitment to data structures and algorithms that compute invariants fast enough to explain the behavioral response times. A detailed consideration of this model has several implications for the underlying anatomy and physiology. (shrink)

Much attention has been focused in recent years on the ethical acceptability of physicians receiving gifts from drug companies. Professional guidelines recognize industry gifts as a conflict of interest and establish thresholds prohibiting the exchange of large gifts while expressly allowing for the exchange of small gifts such as pens, note pads, and coffee. Considerable evidence from the social sciences suggests that gifts of negligible value can influence the behavior of the recipient in ways the recipient does not always realize. (...) Policies and guidelines that rely on arbitrary value limits for gift-giving or receipt should be reevaluated. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility is a collection of 33 articles by leading international scholars on the topic of moral responsibility and its main forms, praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. The articles in the volume provide a comprehensive survey on scholarship on this topic since 1960, with a focus on the past three decades. Articles address the nature of moral responsibility - whether it is fundamentally a matter of deserved blame and praise, or whether it is grounded anticipated good consequences, such (...) as moral education and formation, or whether there are different kinds of moral responsibility. They examine responsibility for both actions and omissions, whether responsibility comes in degrees, and whether groups such as corporations can be responsible. The traditional debates about moral responsibility focus on the threats posed from causal determinism, and from the absence of the ability to do otherwise that may result. The articles in this volume build on these arguments and appraise the most recent developments in these debates. Philosophical reflection on the personal relationships and moral responsibility has been especially intense over the past two decades, and several articles reflect this development. Other chapters take up the link between blameworthiness and attitudes such as moral resentment and indignation, while others explore the role that forgiveness and reconciliation play in personal relationships and responsibility. The range of articles in this volume look at moral responsibility from a range of perspectives and disciplines, explaining how physics, neuroscience, and psychological research on topics such as addiction and implicit bias illuminate the ways and degrees to which we might be responsible. (shrink)

With the continual development of artificial intelligence and smart computing in recent years, quantitative approaches have become increasingly popular as an efficient modeling tool as they do not necessitate complicated mathematical models. Many nations have taken steps, such as transitioning to online schooling, to decrease the harm caused by coronaviruses. Inspired by the demand for technology in early education, the present research uses a radial basis function neural network modeling technique to predict preschool instructors’ technology usage in classes based on (...) recognized determinant characteristics of technology acceptance. In this regard, this study utilized the RBFNN approach to predict preschool teachers’ technology acceptance behavior, based on the theory of planned behavior, which states that behavioral achievement, in our case the actual technology use in class, depends on motivation, intention and ability, and behavioral control. Thus, this research design is based on an adapted version of the technology acceptance model with eight dimensions: D1. Perceived usefulness, D2. Perceived ease of use, D3. Perceived enjoyment, D4. Intention to use, D5. Actual use, D6. Compatibility, D7. Attitude, and D8. Self-efficacy. According to the TAM, actual usage is significantly predicted by the other seven dimensions used in this research. Instead of using the classical multiple linear regression statistical processing of data, we opted for a NN based on the RBF approach to predict the actual usage behavior. This study included 182 preschool teachers who were randomly chosen from a project-based national preschool teacher training program and who responded to our online questionnaire. After designing the RBF function with the actual usage as an output variable and the other seven dimensions as input variables, in the model summary, we obtained in the training sample a sum of squares error of 37.5 and a percent of incorrect predictions of 43.3%. In the testing sample, we obtained a sum of squares error of 14.88 and a percent of incorrect predictions of 37%. Thus, we can conclude that 63% of the classified data are correctly assigned to the models’ dependent variable, i.e., actual technology use, which is a significant rate of correct predictions in the testing sample. This high significant percentage of correct classification represents an important result, mainly because this is the first study to apply RBFNN’s prediction on psychological data, opening up a new interdisciplinary field of research. (shrink)

Abstract: Each affective state has distinct motor-expressions, sensory perceptions, autonomic, and cognitive patterns. Panksepp (1998) proposed seven neural affective systems of which the SEEKING system, a generalized approach-seeking system, motivates organisms to pursue resources needed for survival. When an organism is presented with a novel stimulus, the dopamine (DA) in the nucleus accumbens septi (NAS) is released. The DA circuit outlines the generalized mesolimbic dopamine-centered SEEKING system and is especially responsive when there is an element of unpredictability in forthcoming rewards. (...) We propose that when the outcome of this interaction is unexpected or unanticipated then Panksepp’s “cognitive or expectancy reset” mechanism involving the cognitive dissonance would yield the subjective emotion of surprise. In order to appropriately react to the environment’s stimuli one needs fundamental processes that would enable one to distinguish between what is novel and what has been already experienced, as well as the different degrees of novelty. Novel events are those whose essential features of the representation (visceral and perceptual) are altered and being discrepant provoke more sustained attention. Novelty arises from salient and arousing events and the organism experiences surprise, as coming out of a habitual state. In this framework, we shall look at established theories of emotions and propose a different approach to their taxonomy. (shrink)