The affect-as-information framework posits that affect is embodied information about value and importance. The valence dimension of affect provides evaluative information about stimulus objects, which plays a role in judgment and decisionmaking. Affect can also provide evaluative information about one's own cognitions and response inclinations, information that guides thinking and reasoning. In...

Few people have had as profound an impact on the theory and practice of social and organizational psychology as Kurt Lewin. Though I never knew him personally, I was fortunate during my graduate school years at Harvard’s Social Relations Department in 1949–1950 to have been exposed to Alex Bavelas and Douglas McGregor who, in my mind, embodied Lewin’s spirit totally. As I try to show in this es...

Mental imagery of events in the past or future, and of unpleasant or pleasant events, has been found to lead to spontaneous backward/forward bodily motions. Both time and emotion are represented along a spatial continuum, and activation of these representations seems to be simulated in spontaneous changes in body posture. We performed a conceptual replication and extension of an earlier study b...

Thinking about the representational qualities of maps and models allows one to offer a new perspective on the nature of mindreading. The recent critiques of our dominant paradigms for mindreading, theory theory and simulation theory, by enactivists such as Daniel Hutto reveal a flaw in the standard options for thinking about how we think about others. Views that rely on theorizing or simulation...

Current research in cognitive development shows that people’s reasoning and decisionmaking strategies are deeply grounded in contexts of use. They are situated and thus cannot, as many developmentalists have it be gauged according to logical criteria alone. Two broad empirical approaches can be used to study children’s embodied thinking. On the one hand, we have ethological studies which preser...

The development of a generic international standard on achieving safety of systems based on programmable electronics has been in train for several years. A draft, published in 1995 and referred to as 'IEC 1508', presented the principles embodied in the document, with the result that they began to be influential in sector-specific standards and on the way of thinking about safety. Now IEC 61508,...

Institutions are systematic patterns of shared expectations, taken-for-granted assumptions, accepted norms and routines of interaction that have robust effects on shaping the motivations and behaviour of sets of interconnected social actors. In modern societies, they are usually embodied in authoritatively coordinated organizations with formal rules and the capacity to impose coercive sanctions...

the emotions of others is an essential part of being a socially functioning human. Without it we would not know what actions will most likely make others around us happy versus mad or sad. Our abilities to please friends, placate enemies, inspire our children, and secure cooperation from our colleagues would suffer. For these reasons a truly intelligent human-level AI will need the ability to r...

Glossary Affect The pre-personal capacity for bodies to be affected (by other bodies) and, in turn, affect (other bodies). This capacity for affecting and being affected subsequently defines what a body is and can do. Everyday Life The setting for the routine and mundane, but also improvised and transformative practices. Immanence A concept which seeks to overcome all divisions, dualisms, and c...

On the basis of analysing the theories of object-oriented, topological relation model and non-topological relation model, this paper presents a new spatial data model. The thinking of new data model accords with the theory of spatial organization. It has its own characteristics compared with conventional data model. All of these ideas have been embodied in factual appliance of spatial analysis,...