scholarly journals It Loves Me, It Loves Me Not

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 402-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Nyholm ◽  
Lily Eva Frank ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Emotional Bonds ◽  
Sex Robots ◽  
Emotional Vulnerability ◽  
Human Tendency ◽  
Meaningful Relationships ◽  
Do So

Drawing on insights from robotics, psychology, and human-computer interaction, developers of sex robots are currently aiming to create emotional bonds of attachment and even love between human users and their products. This is done by creating robots that can exhibit a range of facial expressions, that are made with human-like artificial skin, and that possess a rich vocabulary with many conversational possibilities. In light of the human tendency to anthropomorphize artefacts, we can expect that designers will have some success and that this will lead to the attribution of mental states to the robot that the robot does not actually have, as well as the inducement of significant emotional responses in the user. This raises the question of whether it might be ethically problematic to try to develop robots that appear to love their users. We discuss three possible ethical concerns about this aim: first, that designers may be taking advantage of users’ emotional vulnerability; second, that users may be deceived; and, third, that relationships with robots may block off the possibility of more meaningful relationships with other humans. We argue that developers should attend to the ethical constraints suggested by these concerns in their development of increasingly humanoid sex robots. We discuss two different ways in which they might do so.

scholarly journals Propositionalism and Questions that do not have Correct Answers

Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Felappi
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Do So

AbstractAs the label suggests, according to propositionalism, each intentional mental state, attitude or event is or involves a relation to a proposition. In this paper, I will discuss a case that seems prima facie not to be accountable for by propositionalism. After having presented the case, I will show why it is different from others that have been discussed in the literature as able to show that propositionalism cannot be correct. I will then consider what the propositionalist can say to fix the problem and I will show that no strategy that is genuinely propositionalist seems promising. I will not conclude that propositionalism is doomed. But I will show that if propositionalism can account for our case at all, it can only do so by losing its main appeal, i.e. its elegance and simplicity. But then propositionalism seems to have lost its advantage with respect to its obvious alternative, i.e. a pluralist account according to which mental states, attitudes and events are not all homogeneously relations to propositions, but rather our mental life should be accounted for in terms of a plurality of kinds of relata.

Evidence from young children regarding emotional responses to music

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 581-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven John Holochwost ◽  
Carroll E. Izard
Keyword(s):  
Pilot Study ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Emotional Response ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Future Research

AbstractJuslin & Västfjäll (J&V) propose a theoretical framework of how music may evoke an emotional response. This commentary presents results from a pilot study that employed young children as participants, and measured musically induced emotions through facial expressions. Preliminary findings support certain aspects of the proposed theoretical framework. The implications of these findings on future research employing the proposed framework are discussed.

scholarly journals “Yay! Yuck!” Toddlers use incongruent emotions to reason about hidden objects

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Sierra Smith-Flores ◽  
Lisa Feigenson
Keyword(s):  
Early Development ◽  
Present Experiment ◽  
Single Agent ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Single Stimulus ◽  
Developmental Trajectory ◽  
Infants And Toddlers ◽  
The World ◽  
Do So

Infants show impressive sensitivity to others’ emotions from early on, attending to and discriminating different facial emotions, using emotions to decide what to approach or avoid, and recognizing that certain objects and events are likely to produce certain emotional responses. But do infants and toddlers also recognize more abstract features of emotions—features that are not tied to any one emotion in particular? Here we examined the development of the higher order expectation that emotions are more or less mutually exclusive, asking whether young children recognize that people generally do not express two conflicting emotions towards a single stimulus. We first asked whether 26-month old toddlers can use an agent’s incongruent versus congruent emotional responses (“Yay! Yuck!” versus “Yay! Wow!”) to reason about how many objects were hidden in a box. We found that toddlers inferred that incongruent emotions signaled the presence of two numerically distinct objects (Experiment 1). This inference relied on the incongruent emotions being produced by a single agent; when two different agents gave two incongruent emotional responses, toddlers did not assume that two objects must be present (Experiment 2). Finally, we examined the developmental trajectory of this ability. We found that younger, 20-month olds failed to use incongruent emotions to individuate objects (Experiment 3), although they readily used incongruent novel labels to do so (Experiment 4). Our results suggest that by 2-years of age, children use higher order knowledge of emotions to make inferences about the world around them, and that this ability undergoes early development.

scholarly journals Incrementality and intention-recognition in utterance processing

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Gregoromichelaki ◽  
Ruth Kempson ◽  
Matthew Purver ◽  
Gregory J. Mills ◽  
Ronnie Cann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Predictive Model ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Intention Recognition ◽  
Dialogue Modelling ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Dynamic Syntax ◽  
Do So

Ever since dialogue modelling first developed relative to broadly Gricean assumptions about utter-ance interpretation (Clark, 1996), it has remained an open question whether the full complexity of higher-order intention computation is made use of in everyday conversation. In this paper we examine the phenomenon of split utterances, from the perspective of Dynamic Syntax, to further probe the necessity of full intention recognition/formation in communication: we do so by exploring the extent to which the interactive coordination of dialogue exchange can be seen as emergent from low-level mechanisms of language processing, without needing representation by interlocutors of each other’s mental states, or fully developed intentions as regards messages to be conveyed. We thus illustrate how many dialogue phenomena can be seen as direct consequences of the grammar architecture, as long as this is presented within an incremental, goal-directed/predictive model.

Hypocrisy and Consequentialism

Utilitas ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eldon Soifer ◽  
Béla Szabados
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Do So

Consequentialism has trouble explaining why hypocrisy is a term of moral condem-nation, largely because hypocrites often try to deceive others about their own selfishness through the useof words or deeds which themselves have good consequences. We argue that consequentialist attempts to deal with the problem by separating the evaluation of agent and action, or by the directevaluation of dispositions, or by focusing on long-term consequences such as reliability and erosion of trust, all prove inadequate to the challenge. We go on to argue, however, that a version of consequentialism which values the fulfilment of desires, rather than mental states, is able to explain why hypocrisy is generally wrong, and indeed can do so better than its Kantian rivals.

Why Do I Feel Like This?

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Arellano ◽  
Javier Varona ◽  
Francisco J. Perales
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Virtual Characters ◽  
The World

One of the milestones in creation of virtual characters is the achievement of believability, which can be done through the representation of emotions using behaviours, voice, or facial expressions. To know which emotions to elicit in a variety of situations it is necessary to have a framework for reasoning, which is why context representation is important when creating synthetic emotions. It provides a description of what is occurring around the character, eliciting different emotions in the same situation or the same emotions in different situations. The novelty of this work is the representation of context, not only as events in the world, but also as the internal characteristics of the character, which when related with the events, give believable emotional responses.

scholarly journals Real-time inference of mental states from facial expressions and upper body gestures

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tadas Baltrusaitis ◽  
Daniel McDuff ◽  
Ntombikayise Banda ◽  
Marwa Mahmoud ◽  
Rana el Kaliouby ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Upper Body
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