Melissa Dahl, “This is Awkward”

If you've spent any time with a young(ish) person in the last decade or so, you've likely heard them use one word to describe a wide variety of things. Leaving voicemails, dating in the Tinder era, making friends as an adult, professional networking, using Skype or other video chat services -- all of these things are "awkward." It's an ill-defined feeling, but in my upcoming book for Penguin/Random House, I am attempting to craft a better understanding of it. My working definition holds that the feeling of awkwardness arises from uncertainty, self-consciousness, and other-consciousness -- any one of these things, or any combination of the three, can result in an awkward moment. In this presentation, I’ll explain my understanding of the emotion, including how it relates to intriguing theories such as the Piaget-trained Phillippe Rochat’s “irreconcilable gap,” and why you should make an earnest effort to make peace with your high school awkwardness. If you know what awkwardness is, you’ll be better able to withstand it when it arises. You might also, as I have through my research, learn to love it.

 

James Danckert, “Boredom and goal pursuit: can performance on foraging tasks explain boredom?”

Boredom has been described as a failure to engage with the world – a failure that is felt as an aggressively dissatisfying experience. We wanted to explore the possibility that boredom arises from a mismatch between current goals or desires and the actions taken to pursue them. We developed a range of foraging tasks as behavioural assays of boredom and found that boredom was highest in those individuals for whom there was a mismatch in the actions taken within the task environment and their preferred goal pursuit style. We propose that highly boredom prone individuals feel the need to find the ‘perfect’ thing to engage with – a need that counterintuitively paralyses the simultaneous desire to ‘get on with it’.

 

Guy Dove, “Understanding the role of boredom in Autism Spectrum Disorder"

Abstract coming soon

 

Andreas Elpidorou, “The Moral Dimensions of Boredom”

Despite the impressive progress that has been made on both the empirical and conceptual fronts of boredom research, there is one facet of boredom that has received remarkably little attention. This is boredom’s relationship to morality. The aim of this paper is to explore the moral dimensions of boredom and to argue that boredom proneness is a morally relevant personality trait. The presence of boredom proneness hinders our capacity to flourish and in doing so hurts our prospects for a moral life.

 

Shaun Gallagher, “Grief, anxiety and authenticity”  

Against the paradigmatic existential conception of individual authenticity (Heidegger, Sartre), which focuses on the experience of anxiety, I propose a relational model of authenticity associated with the experience of grief.  In this respect I discuss ongoing debates concerning the DSM-V’s dropping of the bereavement exclusion and the classification of grief as a disorder associated with depression. I find in Merleau-Ponty some resources that help to distinguish between grief and depression.

 

Bennett Helm, “A Holistic Solution to the Problem(s) of Gratitude”

Two traditional problems for understanding gratitude involve whether gratitude requires that one's benefactor intend to benefit one and whether gratitude is incompatible with the beneficence being obligatory. I argue that we can solve these problems affirmatively by understanding gratitude to be essentially embedded within interpersonal, rational patterns of other reactive attitudes. For, as I have argued elsewhere, such patterns of reactive attitudes constitute communities of respect, within which members normally respect the standing each other has as bound by certain norms and the authority each has to hold each other responsible to those norms. Thus, gratitude not only holds one's benefactor responsible for notably upholding or exceeding certain norms; it calls on others to feel approbation and on the benefactor herself to feel self-approbation. Consequently, whether or not the benefactor was required to act in this way, what matters for the appropriateness of gratitude is whether she acted at least in part out of respect. Moreover, whether this is so might be made determinate only by the her response to the gratitude itself---by whether she takes up the "call" of gratitude for mutual respect. In this way, gratitude like trust can be an invitation to fellowship with another.

 

Michelle Mason, “Contempt: At the Limits of Reactivity”

Despite recent interest among philosophers and psychologists, contempt remains theoretically and empirically neglected relative to related phenomena. In this talk, I survey recent philosophical and empirical work on contempt to provide background on the current state of play. I then defend a taxonomy that locates contempt among what philosopher P.F. Strawson (1962) famously dubbed the “reactive attitudes.” More specifically, I defend conceptualizing contempt as a moral attitude, which in its reactive form is elicited by norm violations that threaten to provoke both social ostracism and nonreactive contempt – the latter being an emotionally toned residue attitude toward another appraised as unworthy of participation in moral community with us.

 

Henrike Moll, “What Toddlers’ Feelings of Suspense Can Tell Us About their Understanding of the Mind” Suspense is the tension that an observer feels when she has crucial knowledge that an agent, whom she observes, is lacking. In a series of experiments, we tested if suspense can be induced in young children between 2 and 3 years of age. The aim was to use expressions of suspense as indicators that toddlers can represent or grasp an agent’s false expectations and misrepresentations of reality. The findings were that children expressed more tension (biting their lip, furrowing their brow, etc.) when they watched the agent approach reality with false expectations compared to when the agent had either no specific or correct expectations. I will discuss the significance of these results for theories about humans’ capacity to identify with others and take their perspectives on the world.

 

Jesse Prinz, “Wow! The Nature of Wonder and Its Role in Human Life”

Wonder was once regarded as an extremely important emotion—the most fundamental according to Descartes, and the basis of philosophy, according Plato and Aristotle.  It is said to have fallen out of favor with the Enlightenment, and it rarely appears on basic emotions lists today.  New theoretical and empirical work, however, is leading to a revival of interest.  This presentation offers an analysis of wonder, and argues for its importance in three of the institutions that are most distinctive of our species: art, science, and religion.

 

Jen Cole Wright, “Humility: Bringing Epistemic and Ethical Alignment to Our Emotions”

What does it mean to be humble? Elsewhere we have argued that humility is the experience of oneself in relation to all else (everything and everyone). More specifically, it is a state of epistemic and ethical alignment: “epistemic” because it is the experience of oneself, at any given moment, within the context of one’s full existence (e.g., experiencing oneself as a finite, fragile, and fallible being, part of something vast, both spatially and temporally, and magnificent) and “ethical” because it is the corresponding experience of “all else”, in which we encounter the needs and interests of other morally relevant beings as they are—as worthy of attention and concern as your own. In this talk, I will explore the upshot of this account for the experience and expression of various emotions, specifically other-oriented “moral” emotions.