Adam M. Croom

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Visiting Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University

Slurs possess interesting linguistic properties and so have recently attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers of language. For instance the racial slur nigger is explosively derogatory, enough so that just hearing it mentioned can leave one feeling as if they have been made complicit in a morally atrocious act. (Jennifer Hornsby has su...

In “Flourish,” Martin Seligman maintained that the elements of well-being consist of “PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.” Although the question of what constitutes human flourishing or psychological well-being has remained a topic of continued debate among scholars, it has recently been argued in the li...

By age 6, children typically share an equal number of resources between themselves and others. However, fairness involves not merely that each person receive an equal number of resources ("numerical equality") but also that each person receive equal quality resources ("quality equality"). In Study 1, children (N = 87, 3-10 years) typically split fo...

Is shadowboxing an effective form of functional exercise? What physiological and morphological changes result from an exercise program based exclusively on shadowboxing for 3 weeks? To date, no empirical research has focused specifically on addressing these questions. Since mixed martial arts (MMA) is the fastest growing sport in the world, and sin...

Student comments about cognitive science courses I've taught at Case Western Reserve University, UC Merced, and UC Berkeley

Tracking citations to my work and connecting research. Publications: 28 | Citations: 1,668 | h-index: 17 | i10-index: 20. Last updated: August 4, 2024.

Slurs are generally considered the most offensive terms in a language, but how do slurs communicate the negative content or force that they generally do? How do slurs differ from words of other kinds, and how does the use of slurs impact the cognition, emotion, and social status of users and targets? Given that slurs are generally used for negative...

A survey of the fundamental methods, findings, and theories that attempt to understand the human mind from a neuroscientific standpoint. The course provides the student with background knowledge of brain processes underlying such psychological phenomena as consciousness, sensation, perception, thought, language, and voluntary action. Since many fie...

The martial arts have been practiced for thousands of years and today mixed martial arts remains the fastest growing sport in the world. I am delighted to invite you to submit your best empirical and theoretical work on martial arts to this special issue. The goal for this special issue is to showcase exemplary work on martial arts from multiple di...

COGSCI N1 001: Introduction to Cognitive Science (UC Berkeley, Summer 2023D, Syllabus)

COGSCI 146 001: Music, Language, and Cognition (UC Berkeley, Summer 2023D, Syllabus)

PSYC 312: Experimental Methods in Cognitive Psychology (Bethany College, Fall 2023, Syllabus)

PSYC 312: Experimental Methods in Cognitive Psychology (Bethany College, Fall 2023, Syllabus)

We're hiring a full-time Visiting Assistant Professor! This may be converted to a Tenure-Track position based on fit and performance. Psychology is the largest major at Bethany and the ideal fit will help us cover clinical and health psych, stats, research methods. Email for info! Apply on HigherEdJobs: https://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/details...

Does martial arts practice contribute to psychological well-being in professional martial artists? If so, what are the specific ways that martial arts practice accomplishes this? It has been a long-standing and widely held belief that martial arts practice can contribute to psychological well-being, however, there has been a lack of empirical resea...

How do humans generate novel yet well-formed sentences and songs? It is truly remarkable that humans are endowed with the ability to speak and sign new sentences, formulate and think new thoughts, and compose and perform new and beautiful works of art. What are the neural and cognitive mechanisms that help make these marvelous aspects of human life...

COGSCI 190 002: Music, Language, and Cognition (UC Berkeley, Fall 2022, Syllabus)

Some philosophers argue that martial arts training is maladaptive, contributes to psychological illness, and provides a social harm, whereas others argue that martial arts training is adaptive, contributes to psychological wellness, and provides a social benefit. This debate is important to scholars and the general public since beliefs about martia...

I have peer-reviewed 145 submissions for 88 scholarly journals and received the Top Peer Reviewer in the Arts and Humanities Award from Publons [updated June 7, 2022]. https://publons.com/researcher/195705/adam-m-croom/peer-review

COGSCI N1 001: Introduction to Cognitive Science (UC Berkeley, Summer 2022A, Syllabus)

COGSCI 190 004: Slurs and Stereotypes (UC Berkeley, Summer 2022D, Syllabus)

SPRK 001 26: The Machine Learning Age (UC Merced, Spring 2022, Syllabus)

COGS 180 01: Syntax (UC Merced, Spring 2022, Syllabus)

COGS 180 02: Embodied Approaches to Mind and Language (UC Merced, Spring 2022, Syllabus)

COGS 180 04: Sign Language Science (UC Merced, Summer 2021, Syllabus)

COGS 180 03: Mathematical Cognition (UC Merced, Summer 2021, Syllabus)

COGS 149 01: Music, Language, and Cognition (UC Merced, Fall 2021, Syllabus)

COGS 180 01: Slurs and Stereotypes (UC Merced, Spring 2021, Syllabus)

Slurs: The Semantics, Pragmatics, and Cognition of Derogation and Appropriation (Ph.D. thesis, 2020)

Slurs (e.g. gook, chink) are linguistic expressions that are primarily used and understood to derogate certain group members for their descriptive features (e.g. their sex, ethnicity) and are often considered to be the most offensive of all natural language expressions. Although recent research has illuminated several important facts about slurs -...

In a recent study on indirect reports, Capone (2010) discussed how several leading pragmatic accounts have maintained that utterance-interpretation incorporates social information such that socio-cultural defaults are taken into account in a final interpretation (e.g., Jaszczolt 2005a). Croom (2013a) has for example discussed how different in-group...

Welcome to this special issue of Language Sciences on slurs. The collection in this issue consists of 21 original research articles from seasoned scholars and exceptional students across the humanities and social sciences. These scholars come from backgrounds in linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, and here they investi...

For some time now moral psychologists and philosophers have ganged up on Aristotelians, arguing that results from psychological studies on the role of character-based and situation-based influences on human behavior have convincingly shown that situations rather than personal characteristics determine human behavior. In the literature on moral psyc...

Coreferentialism refers to the common assumption in the literature that slurs (e.g. faggot) and descriptors (e.g. male homosexual) are coreferential expressions with precisely the same extension. For instance, Vallee (2014) recently writes that “If S is an ethnic slur in language L, then there is a non-derogatory expression G in L such that G and S...

This special issue of Journal of Poetry Therapy focuses on the use of poetry and other forms of expressive writing to explore the transformative experiences of military veterans, and so in this article I discuss how the use of poetry, hip-hop, and philosophy positively influenced my life while I was serving in the United States Air Force (USAF) fro...

In “Flourish,” the psychologist Martin Seligman proposed that psychological well-being consists of “PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.” Although the question of what constitutes flourishing or psychological well-being has been long debated among scholars, the recent literature has suggested that a parad...

Slurs such as spic, slut, wetback, and whore are linguistic expressions that are primarily understood to derogate certain group members on the basis of their descriptive attributes (such as their race or sex) and expressions of this kind have been considered to pack some of the nastiest punches natural language affords. Although prior scholarship o...

Auditory Neuroscience: Making Sense of Sound is an excellent new book written by Jan Schnupp, Israel Nelken, and Andrew King that offers an engagingly comprehensive introduction to auditory neuroscience. For this book the authors have decided to drop the standard neuroscience textbook strategy of organizing their discussion around anatomical struct...

This article provides a critical analysis of the situationist challenge against Aristotelian moral psychology. It first outlines the details and results from four paradigmatic studies in psychology that situationists have heavily drawn upon in their critique of the Aristotelian conception of virtuous characteristics, including studies conducted by...

In “The Semantics of Racial Slurs,” an article recently published in Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations, Hedger (2012) draws upon Kaplan’s (1999) distinction between descriptive and expressive content to argue that slurs are expressions with purely expressive content. Here I review the key considerations presented by Hedger (2012) in suppo...

The question of what constitutes and facilitates mental health or psychological well-being has remained of great interest to martial artists and philosophers alike, and still endures to this day. Although important questions about well-being remain, it has recently been argued in the literature that a paradigmatic or prototypical case of human psyc...

Since at least 2008 linguists and philosophers of language have started paying more serious attention to issues concerning the meaning or use of racial epithets and slurs. In an influential article published in The Journal of Philosophy, for instance, Christopher Hom (2008) offered a semantic account of racial epithets called Combinatorial External...

Aesthetic non-cognitivists deny that aesthetic statements express genuinely aesthetic beliefs and instead hold that they work primarily to express something non-cognitive, such as attitudes of approval or disapproval, or desire. Non-cognitivists deny that aesthetic statements express aesthetic beliefs because they deny that there are aesthetic feat...

In Flourish, the positive psychologist Seligman (2011) identifies five commonly recognized factors that are characteristic of human flourishing or well-being: (1) “positive emotion,” (2) “relationships,” (3) “engagement,” (4) “achievement,” and (5) “meaning” (p. 24). Although there is no settled set of necessary and sufficient conditions neatly cir...

Non-cognitivists claim that thick concepts can be disentangled into distinct descriptive and evaluative components and that since thick concepts have descriptive shape they can be mastered independently of evaluation. In Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, John McDowell uses Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations to show that such a non-cogni...

In §201 of Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein puts forwards his famous “rule-following paradox.” The paradox is: how can one follow in accord with a rule – the applications of which are potentially infinite – when the instances from which one learns the rule and the instances in which one displays that they have learned the rule are...

Non-cognitivists claim that thick concepts can be disentangled into distinct descriptive and evaluative components and that since thick concepts have descriptive shape they can be mastered independently of evaluation. In Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, John McDowell uses Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations to show that such a non-cogni...

Racial epithets are terms used to characterize people on the basis of their race, and are often used to harm the people that they target. But what do racial epithets mean, and how do they work to harm in the way that they do? In this essay I set out to answer these questions by offering a pragmatic view of racial epithets, while contrasting my posi...