Recent psychological theories of emotion have explicitly focused on modeling the multiplicity of levels of the human emotion system. This increased interest in creating multi-level theories of emotion matches similar efforts in the area of cognitive architectures. In this paper we report our initial work toward integrating a psychological multi-level model of emotions with Brahms, a multi-agent...

The controversy that followed the publication of Bem’s (2011) surprising results had the merit of focusing discussions on the validity of the current paradigm in psychological science. It has been argued that a tendency of journals to avoid publishing null results, in addition to the further extinguishing of null results through questionable researcher practices, is leading to the promulgation ...

Motivational concepts have been central to systematic psychological, behavioral, and social psychological theories over the past century (Berridge, 2004; Cofer & Appley, 1964; Higgins, 1997). Motivational theories have been highly diverse in their nature and focus, but for the most part they have been developed largely from psychological or behavioral data and concepts. This is true even for ho...

Recent theoretical research has argued that multiple psychological theories of categorization are mathematically identical to inference in probabilistic graphical models (a framework developed in statistics and computer science). These results imply that the major extant psychological theories can all be represented mathematically as special cases of inference in (subclasses of) chain graphs, a...

Psychological theories of racial bias assume a pervasive motivation to avoid appearing racist, yet researchers know little regarding laypeople’s theories about what constitutes racism. By investigating lay theories of White racism across both college and community samples, we seek to develop a more complete understanding of the nature of race-related norms, motivations, and processes of social ...

Developmental theories often posit that changes in children's early psychological characteristics will affect much later psychological, social, and economic outcomes. However, tests of these theories frequently yield results that are consistent with plausible alternative theories that posit a much smaller causal role for earlier levels of these psychological characteristics. Our article explore...

This chapter aims to provide an overview of existing computational (mechanistic) models of cognition in relation to the study of consciousness, on the basis of psychological and philosophical theories and data. It examines various mechanistic explanations of consciousness in existing computational cognitive models. Serving as an example for the discussions, a computational model of the consciou...

In this article, I investigate a special type of argument regarding the role of development in theorizing about psychological processes and cognitive capacities. Among the issues that developmental psychologists study, discovering the ontogenetic trajectory of mechanisms or capacities underpinning our cognitive functions ranks highly. The order in which functions are developed or capacities are...