The ‘naturalistic’ fallacy: Leveraging the power of media to drive cognition

So-called “naturalistic” stimuli have risen in popularity in cognitive, social, and affective psychology and neuroscience over the last 15 years. However, a critical property of these stimuli is frequently overlooked: Media—like film, television, books, and podcasts—are fundamentally not natural. They are deliberately crafted products meant to elicit particular human thought, emotion, and behavior. Given the rich history of scholarship on media as an art and science, subsuming media stimuli under the term “naturalistic” in psychological and brain sciences is inaccurate and obfuscates the advantages that media stimuli offer because they are artificial. Here, we argue for a more informed approach to adopting media stimuli in naturalistic paradigms. We empirically review how researchers currently describe and justify their choice of stimuli for a given experiment and present strategies to improve rigor in the stimulus selection process. We assert that experiencing media should be considered a task akin to any other experimental task(s), and explain how this shift in perspective will compel more nuanced and generalizable research using these stimuli. Throughout, we offer theoretical and practical knowledge from multidisciplinary media research to raise the standard for the treatment of media stimuli in psychological and neuroscientific research.

Affective shifts: mood, emotion and well-being

It is a familiar feature of our affective psychology that our moods ‘crystalize’ into emotions, and that our emotions ‘diffuse’ into moods. Providing a detailed philosophical account of these affective shifts, as I will call them, is the central aim of this paper. Drawing on contemporary philosophy of emotion and mood, alongside distinctive ideas from the phenomenologically-inspired writer Robert Musil, a broadly ‘intentional’ and ‘evaluativist’ account will be defended. I argue that we do best to understand important features of these affective shifts–which I document across this paper–in terms of intentional and evaluative aspects of the respective states of moods and emotion. At same the time, the account is pitched at the phenomenological level, as dealing with affective shifts primarily in terms of moods and emotions as experiential states, with respect to which it feels-like-something to be undergoing the relevant affective experience. The paper also applies the intentional-evaluative model of affective shifts to anxiety in more detail, developing the idea that certain patterns of affective shift, particularly those that allow for a kind of ‘emotional release’, can contribute to a subject’s well-being.

Face Perception In Tetrastable Visual Awareness

This article combines monocular rivalry with binocular rivalry in one setting. Astonishingly, this combination allows the human subjects to be visually aware about four different stable perceptions. Namely, they are aware of the two human faces, the vase, the duck, and the rabbit face in one setting. The visual awareness was stable with almost no mixed percepts. This experiment is a good measure of tetrastable visual perception for affective psychology and neuroscience, because it considers the perception of faces.

Rules, perception and emotion: When do institutions determine behaviour?

This paper seeks to answer the question of what psychological preconditions must exist for institutions to determine behaviour and order our societies. We defend the notion that institutional theory may gain from such a contribution. We introduce a new theory of the mind as a network structure within which the psychological process operates to integrate insights from cognitive and affective psychology into institutional theory. We discover that institutions must be expressed as rules in mental networks which guide thinking and behaviour, be embedded within a cognitive apparatus such that they are called to mind by perception to so guide thinking and behaviour and be anchored to emotion such that they are endowed with urgency in order for them to have a hold on individual behaviour. From this theory we derive definite predictions, as well as policy insights.

Identifying the representational structure of affect using fMRI

The events we experience day to day can be described in terms of their affective quality: some are rewarding, others are upsetting, and still others are inconsequential. These natural distinctions reflect an underlying representational structure used to classify the affective quality of events. In affective psychology, many experiments model this representational structure with two dimensions, using either the dimensions of valence and arousal, or alternatively, the dimensions of positivity and negativity. Using an fMRI dataset, we show that these affective dimensions are not strictly linear combinations each other, and show that it is critical that all four dimensions be used to examined the data. Our findings include (1) a gradient representation of valence anatomically organized along the fusiform gyrus, and (2) distinct subregions within bilateral amygdala tracking arousal versus negativity. Importantly, these patterns would have remained concealed had either of the prevailing 2-dimensional approaches been adopted a priori.

Sensory in Psychology Branding

With the rapid growth of information communication technology, tangible benefit is considered to be the critical element in communicating brand and building long lasting relationship. This paper attempts to establish the connection between sensory attributes of human to cognitive and affective elements that consequently lead to the brand loyalty. The data is collected by using self-reported questionnaire to the respondents who had stayed in the selected Five-star hotels in Kuala Lumpur. It is concluded that human senses were significant and positively influence the decision to stay loyal with the Five-star hotel brand. Keywords: Sensory, cognitive, affective, psychology. eISSN 2514-7528 © 2018. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.

The Philosophical Enquiry: Science of the Passions, 1757

This chapter focuses on Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Philosophical Enquiry takes up the thread of preoccupations that absorbed him throughout his twenties. It begins with an exploration of the classical theory of mixed emotions, focusing on Aristotle's signature categories of pity and terror. It proceeds to elucidate the affective psychology of manners, probing the feeling of exhilaration unleashed by pride and the instinct for subordination based on fear. Challenging the deist assumptions of a number of predecessors, Burke argues for the dependence of moral taste on duty. In the process, he articulates the reliance of ethics on religion, and traces the origins and development of superstition. The work also recapitulates Burke's antipathy to stoicism, along with his response to the leading moralists of the age, above all the writings of Hutcheson, Mandeville, and Berkeley, as well as Dubos, Condillac, Hume, and Smith. Although the Enquiry is not a comprehensive treatise in moral philosophy, it provides access to Burke's theory of human nature as it sets about accounting for uniform features of the mind.