Toward an Integrative Perspective on Distinct Positive Emotions for Political Action:Analyzing, Comparing, Evaluating, and Synthesizing Three Theoretical Perspectives

Which emotions explain why people engage in political action (e.g., voting, protesting)? To answer this question, theory and research in psychology and political science predominantly focused on distinct negative emotions such as anger. The current article conceptually explores the motivational potential of distinct positive emotions by developing an integrative perspective that specifies which positive emotions can be differentiated (i.e., their form), which function these emotions have, and which implications these have for explaining political action. To this end, I analyze, compare, evaluate, and synthesize three approaches to positive emotions (affective intelligence theory, appraisal theories of emotion, and broaden-and-build theory). This perspective generates new hypotheses for the field to test, including the role played by distinct positive emotions such as joy, inspiration, interest, hope, and pride in motivating political action. I discuss how this perspective may help restore a balance in research on emotions and political action by focusing on the motivational potential of distinct positive emotions

HOW DO CONSUMERS USE SOCIAL SHOPPING WEBSITES? THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL ENDORSEMENTS

Social endorsements are user-generated endorsements of products or services, such as “likes” and personal collections, in an online social platform. We examine the effect of prior social endorsements on subsequent users’ tendency to endorse or examine a product in a social shopping context, where a social platform connect consumers and enable a collaborative shopping experience. This research consists of two parts. In part I, we identify two ways prior social endorsements can affect subsequent user behavior: as a crowd endorsement, which is an aggregate number of endorsements a product receives for anyone who comes across the product, and as a friend endorsement, which is an endorsement with the endorser’s identity delivered only to the endorser’s friends or followers. Using a panel data of 1656 products on a leading social shopping platform, we quantify the relationship between crowd and friend endorsements and subsequent examination (“click”) and endorsement (“like”) of the products, noting that examination is a private behavior while endorsement is a public behavior. Our results are consistent with the identity signaling theory where identity-conscious consumers converge with the aspiration group (the followers) in their public behavior (e.g. endorsement) and diverge from the avoidance groups (the crowd). We also find differences between public and private behaviors. Moreover, the symbolic nature of social shopping platform trumps the traditional dichotomy of symbolic/functional product attributes. Part II of this study seeks to clarify the underlying mechanism through lab experiments. We hypothesize that consumers’ evaluative attitude, specifically the value-expressive type, moderates the relationship between crowd and friend endorsements and a focal user’s product choice. Our initial results of the second study show support for this idea in the cases when the product choice is not obvious

Dynamic Oscillatory Interactions Between Neural Attention and Sensorimotor Systems

The adaptive and flexible ability of the human brain to preference the processing of salient environmental features in the visual space is essential to normative cognitive function, and various neurologically afflicted patient groups report negative impacts on visual attention. While the brain-bases of human attentional processing have begun to be unraveled, very little is known regarding the interactions between attention systems and systems supporting sensory and motor processing. This is essential, as these interactions are dynamic; evolving rapidly in time and across a wide range of functionally defined rhythmic frequencies. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and a range of novel cognitive paradigms and analytical techniques, this work attempts to fill critical gaps in this knowledge. Specifically, we unravel the role of dynamic oscillatory interactions between attention and three sensorimotor systems. First, we establish the importance of sub-second occipital alpha (8 – 14 Hz) oscillatory responses in visual distractor suppression during selective attention (Chapter 1) and their essential role in fronto-parietal attention networks during visual orienting (Chapter 2). Next, we examine the divergent effects of directed attention on multi-frequency primary somatosensory neural oscillations in the theta (4 – 8 Hz), alpha, and beta (18 – 26 Hz) bands (Chapter 3). Finally, we extend these findings to the motor system (Chapter 4), and find that the frontal and parietal beta-frequency oscillations known to support motor planning and execution are modulated equivalently by differing subtypes of attentional interference, whereas frontal gamma (64 – 84 Hz) oscillations specifically index the superadditive effect of this interference. These findings provide new insight into the dynamic nature of attention-sensorimotor interactions in the human brain, and will be the foundation for groundbreaking new studies of attentional deficits in patients with common neurological disorders (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease, HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders, Parkinson’s disease). With an enhanced knowledge of the temporal and spectral definitions of these impairments, new therapeutic interventions utilizing frequency-targeted neural stimulation can be developed

Structural and organisational conditions for the appearance of a functionally integrated organisation in the transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cell

211 p.The concept of functional (or physiological) integration is explanatorily relevant to both biology andphilosophy of biology, but it suffers from two main related problems: first, it is an umbrella termencompassing any causal interdependence of functions, thus being unsuitable for characterisingbiological organisations as physiologic units; secondly, it lacks a unified theoretical framework tounderstand this concept. This PhD thesis aims to investigate the relationship between functionalintegration and biological individuality by studying the nature and the role of physiological integration inone of the major evolutionary transitions: the origin of the eukaryotic cell from the prokaryotic one. Themethodology employed is the so-called ¿organizational approach¿ that combines the descriptive approachof the methodological naturalism with the normative evaluation of the epistemic and practicalconsequences of the theoretical frameworks of life sciences. At the core of this work is the examinationof the physic-chemical and structural-functional conditions that allowed the transformation of aprokaryote into a eukaryotic cell and that determined a very specific kind of functionally integratedorganisation in eukaryotes. The thesis puts forward a theoretical proposal for functional integrationconsisting in the global capacity, enabled by specific spatial constraints, of a biological organisation toperform system-level regulation, spatio-temporal coordination of the parts, and system-levelreproduction. This proposal for functional integration has important consequences for understandingimportant issues of theoretical biology and philosophy of biology, such as biological individuality,biological autonomy, and major transitions in evolution

Structural and organisational conditions for the appearance of a functionally integrated organisation in the transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cell

211 p.The concept of functional (or physiological) integration is explanatorily relevant to both biology andphilosophy of biology, but it suffers from two main related problems: first, it is an umbrella termencompassing any causal interdependence of functions, thus being unsuitable for characterisingbiological organisations as physiologic units; secondly, it lacks a unified theoretical framework tounderstand this concept. This PhD thesis aims to investigate the relationship between functionalintegration and biological individuality by studying the nature and the role of physiological integration inone of the major evolutionary transitions: the origin of the eukaryotic cell from the prokaryotic one. Themethodology employed is the so-called ¿organizational approach¿ that combines the descriptive approachof the methodological naturalism with the normative evaluation of the epistemic and practicalconsequences of the theoretical frameworks of life sciences. At the core of this work is the examinationof the physic-chemical and structural-functional conditions that allowed the transformation of aprokaryote into a eukaryotic cell and that determined a very specific kind of functionally integratedorganisation in eukaryotes. The thesis puts forward a theoretical proposal for functional integrationconsisting in the global capacity, enabled by specific spatial constraints, of a biological organisation toperform system-level regulation, spatio-temporal coordination of the parts, and system-levelreproduction. This proposal for functional integration has important consequences for understandingimportant issues of theoretical biology and philosophy of biology, such as biological individuality,biological autonomy, and major transitions in evolution

Classical conditioned responses to absent tones

BACKGROUND: Recent evidence for a tight coupling of sensorimotor processes in trained musicians led to the question of whether this coupling extends to preattentively mediated reflexes; particularly, whether a classically conditioned response in one of the domains (auditory) is generalized to another (tactile/motor) on the basis of a prior association in a second-order Pavlovian paradigm. An eyeblink conditioning procedure was performed in 17 pianists, serving as a model for overlearned audiomotor integration, and 14 non-musicians. Results: During the training session, subjects were conditioned to respond to auditory stimuli (piano tones). During a subsequent testing session, when subjects performed keystrokes on a silent piano, pianists showed significantly higher blink rates than non-musicians. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest a tight coupling of the auditory and motor domains in musicians, pointing towards training-dependent mechanisms of strong cross-modal sensorimotor associations even on sub-cognitive processing levels