Antoni Gomila

University of the Balearic Islands | UIB · Department of Psychology

Empathy is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that plays a crucial role in human social interactions. Recent developments in social neuroscience have provided valuable insights into the neural underpinnings and bodily mechanisms underlying empathy. This methodology often prioritizes precision, replicability, internal validity, and confound contr...

While a standard procedure in mental health internment facilities, physical restraint, as an extreme form of coercion in mental health, has been claimed to be abolished. Three sorts of arguments have been provided: an argument from dignity, and argument from informed consent, and a consequentialism argument. In this chapter we discuss these argumen...

Se presentan las ideas centrales y la estructura del libro de Diana I. Pérez y Antoni Gomila Social Cognition and the Second Person in Human Interaction (Routledge, 2021).

Abordamos aquí los diferentes comentarios críticos sobre las ideas centrales del libro Social Cognition and the Second Person in Human Interaction. En primer lugar, aclaramos algunos aspectos de la propuesta: la relación entre las interacciones de la segunda persona y las expresiones corporales de los estados psicológicos atribuidos y el papel que...

¿Está la democracia en crisis, sitiada, secuestrada, en retroceso? ¿O está, por el contrario, salvando puntuales achaques, más viva, aceptada y reivindicada que nunca? Cuando se repasan los diagnósticos actuales, suele prevalecer la mirada pesimista; se diría que, ni fría ni caliente, la democracia está a 0 grados. Sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, se...

Este libro, editado por Pablo Quintanilla, Carla Mantilla y Paola Cépeda, es el resultado de un ingente número de horas de estudio y discusión realizado por los integrantes del Grupo Interdisciplinario de Investigación Mente y Lenguaje, entre los años 2010 y 2013. El libro está conformado por dos partes principales. En la primera parte, los miembro...

Networks in biology have provided a powerful tool to describe and study very complex biological processes and systems such as animal societies. Social network analysis allows us to assess different processes occurring in animal groups. In the current study, we use this approach to investigate how conflict dynamics and post-conflict interactions sha...

The love that we feel for our friends plays an essential role in both our moral motivation to act towards them; and in our moral obligations towards them, that is, in our special duties. We articulate our proposal as a reply to Stephen Darwall’s second-person proposal, which we take to be a contemporary representative of the Kantian view. According...

Building on the discussion between Stephen Darwall and Michael Tomassello, we propose an alternative evolutionary account of moral motivation in its two-pronged dimension. We argue that an evolutionary account of moral motivation must account for the two forms of moral motivation that we distinguish: motivation to be partial, which is triggered by...

In this paper, the old view of self-knowledge as a practical achievement is vindicated. Constitutivism, the view that connects self-knowledge to the rational agency, thus taking a step towards this practical dimension, is discussed first. But their assumption of an epistemic asymmetry that privileges self-knowledge is found mistaken. The practical...

Emotional contagion, the emotional state‐matching of an individual with another, seems to be crucial for many social species. In recent years evidence on emotional contagion in different animal species has accumulated. However, despite its adaptative advantages and its presumed simplicity, the study and direct demonstration of this phenomenon prese...

“Dance” has been associated with many psychophysiological and medical health effects. However, varying definitions of what constitute “dance” have led to a rather heterogenous body of evidence about such potential effects, leaving the picture piecemeal at best. It remains unclear what exact parameters may be driving positive effects. We believe tha...

El desarrollo empírico del programa neo-whorfiano ha sido muy fructífero en la última década. En este trabajo se resumen las investigaciones más notables dentro de este programa, y se discuten sus resultados, para tratar de establecer qué versión de la hipótesis relativista es la que resulta vindicada. Se argumenta que la conclusión que se deriva d...

The aim of this study was to investigate the moral reasoning and moral conflict in patients of the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-frontotemporal dementia (ALSFTD) spectrum. Ten ALS patients without cognitive impairment, 10 ALS patients with cognitive or behavioral impairment, 10 ALSFTD patients and 23 controls were examined with neuropsychological a...

Research in the last 15 years has challenged the idea that false belief attribution develops at 4 years of age. Studies with indirect false belief tasks contend to provide evidence of false belief attribution in the second year of life. We review the literature on indirect false belief tasks carried out in infants using looking and active helping p...

In this paper, we take Darwall’s analytical project of the second-person standpoint as the starting point for a naturalistic project about our moral psychology. In his project, Darwall contends that our moral notions constitutively imply the perspective of second-personal interaction, i.e. the interaction of two mutually recognized agents who make...

In the classical Turing test, participants are challenged to tell whether they are interacting with another human being or with a machine. The way the interaction takes place is not direct, but a distant conversation through computer screen messages. Basic forms of interaction are face-to-face and embodied, context-dependent and based on the detect...

La permanencia de los objetos, la capacidad de representar objetos ocultos, no se ha evaluado ampliamente en los cetáceos y la evidencia disponible es contradictoria. Aunque se cree que los delfines nariz de botella (Tursiops truncatus) están dotados de las capacidades cognitivas necesarias para aprobar pruebas complejas de permanencia de objetos,...

Evidence obtained with new experimental paradigms has renewed the debate on the development of theory of mind in general and false belief ascription in particular. Namely, several studies contend to prove that infants already have the capacity to attribute false beliefs. The aim of the current meta-analysis is to review and summarize the empirical...

Emotional contagion is a phenomenon that has attracted much interest in recent times. However, the main theory, mimicry theory, fails to properly address its many facets. In particular, we will focus on two shortcomings: the elicitation of emotional contagion is not context-independent, and there can be cases of emotional contagion without motor mi...

A new way to study and represent early syntactic development is introduced that offers a promising avenue to improve on standard cumulative approaches to language learning. The analysis is inspired by complex network theory and explores an important issue in psycholinguistics: how children combine words syntactically. To this end, the article explo...

In this paper we discuss Prinz’s Kantian arguments in “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?” (2011). They purport to show that empathy is not necessary for morality because it is not part of the capacities required for moral competence and it can bias moral judgment. First, we show that even conceding Prinz his notions of empathy and moral competence...

Although bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) are known for being a highly social species that live in complex societies that rely on coalition formation and cooperative behaviours, experimental studies on prosocial behaviour in this species are scarce. Helping others reach their goals (instrumental helping) is considered as an example of proso...

In this paper, we will address the question of the impact of the second person perspective of psychological attribution on the traditional problem of knowing other minds. With that purpose in mind, we will introduce the notion of a second-personal perspective of mental attribution within the context of the classical problem of other minds, and disc...

The community of Pygmies settled in Vyegwa-Gika provides an exceptional case study to test the role of trust in the evolution of altruism. The Vyegwa-Gika Pygmies were forced to migrate from rainforests to the savanna, changing quickly their environment, culture, and socioeconomic situation. Despite the high level of poverty they suffer in this new...

Forms for the givers and recipients (in the French language). (DOCX)

We studied 2 groups of workers from Oaxaca (Mexico) with different levels of income and education to investigate the role that the affective‐based psychological mechanism of personal trust, as evolutionarily acquired, plays on group cooperation. We measured trust levels through some questionnaires and cooperative behaviour through an iterated priso...

We show that externalization is a feature not only of moral judgment, but also of value judgment in general. It follows that the evolution of externalization was not specific to moral judgment. Second, we argue that value judgments cannot be decoupled from the level of motivations and preferences, which, in the moral case, rely on intersubjective b...

There has been a controversy on the moral import of music and art in general. On the one hand, the moralist view contends that there is some sort of link between art and morality, even if the way to specify this link may be highly diverse. It comprises most of the classical views of art, from Schiller's view of the role of artistic education in mor...

Evidence obtained with new experimental paradigms has renewed the debate on the development of theory of mind (ToM). In particular, several studies contend that false belief ascription is already present in infants. In this review, we compile all the evidence about spontaneous-response false belief tasks (FBT) in children younger than 2 years old....

This paper provides an integrative review of neuroscientific and biobehavioral evidence about the effects of dance on the individual across cultural differences. Dance moves us, and many derive aesthetic pleasure from it. However, in addition—and beyond aesthetics—we propose that dance has noteworthy, deeper neurobiological effects. We first summar...

One of the first sources of information in psychological and psychiatric practice is language. Language can inform us about possible cognitive impairments, but also about atypical cognitive development. An example of the former is the logopenic progressive aphasia, attributed to either Alzheimer’s disease or to frontotemporal lobar degeneration. An...

While empathy is a century-old psychological concept, its study in non-human animals has become the focus of much recent scientific interest, as it promises to provide the clues to understand the evolutionary origins of our social and moral nature. A review of the comparative study of empathy is thus timely to complement and constrain anthropocentr...

Evidence obtained with new experimental paradigms has renewed the debate on the development of theory of mind. In particular, several studies contend that false belief ascription is already present in infants. In the present review, we compile all the evidence about spontaneous-response false belief tasks in children younger than 2 years old. The a...

Research has consistently shown that people consider harmful side effects of an action more intentional than helpful side effects. This phenomenon is known as the side-effect effect (SEE), which refers to the influence of moral considerations in judgments of intentionality and other non-moral concepts. There is an ongoing debate about how to explai...

Reducing energy consumption has become a matter of increasing concern for electric vehicle owners. EcoDriver is a project funded by the European Commission, searching for new eco-driving solutions for reducing energy consumption in private and public transport. EcoDriver's main purpose is to teach efficient driving strategies and facilitate drivers...

En Sentir, desear, creer: Una aproximación filosófica a los conceptos psicológicos, Diana Pérez se plantea una empresa ambiciosa, análoga a la de Ryle en The Concept of Mind: dar cuenta de manera integral de la ontología, la epistemología, la semántica y, en parte, la psicología de los conceptos de los diversos estados y procesos psicológicos. La a...

According to Rowlands, personhood in nonhuman animals calls for a unified mental life and pre-reflective self-awareness provides this. The concept of “person” is fuzzy. Any attempt to define it with necessary and sufficient conditions faces the problem of borderline cases satisfying only some of the conditions to varying degrees. We ask about the i...

Several researchers, mainly guided by children’s dual performance in false belief tasks, have suggested that humans have two systems for attributing beliefs and other mental states. We analyze whether and to what extent a dual process account makes sense for false belief attribution and which approach, if any, best explains the empirical evidence....

Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis constitutes an influential position among those that relate the evolution of human cognition and sociality. In this work, we first present the essentials of the theory and discuss the paleoanthropological and social evidence claimed to support it. We also point out its shortcomings, which have to do with the general...

Object permanence, the ability to represent hidden objects, has not been extensively assessed in cetaceans. Dolphins were tested in a series of object permanence tasks. Our preliminary results suggest that they are able to succeed in this type of tasks but only if they have previous visual experience with the movements of the objects.

We examine the cultural group selection (CGS) hypothesis in light of our fieldwork in Northern Ghana and Oaxaca highly multiethnic regions. Our evidence fails to corroborate two central predictions of the hypothesis: that the cultural group is the unit of evolution and that cultural homogenization is to be expected as the outcome of a selective pro...

The present study shows how motor expertise increases individuals' sensitivity to others' affective body movement. This enhanced sensitivity is evident in the experts' behavior and physiology. Nineteen affective movement experts (professional ballet dancers) and 24 controls watched 96 video clips of emotionally expressive body movements while they...

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6271/375.e-letters

After raising some doubts for cultural group selection as an explanation of prosocial religiosity, we propose an alternative that views it as a “greenbeard effect.” We combine the dynamic constraints on the evolution of greenbeard effects with Iannaccone's (1994) account of strict sects. Our model shows that certain social conditions may foster cre...

During the last decade, a renewed interest in linguistic relativism has given rise to an exponentially growing body of literature concerning the influence of language on cognition. The current concern is not whether language influences cognition, but rather how much, and to what extent. After briefly characterizing Whorf's linguistic relativism, th...

The upper-east and northern regions of Ghana offers a unique opportunity to study the influence of evolutionary social dynamics in making cooperation possible, despite cultural differences. These regions are occupied by several distinct ethnic groups, in interaction, such as the Kussasi, Mamprusi, Bimoba, Konkomba, and Fulani. We will report our fi...

A cross-cultural analysis of trust and cooperation networks in Northern Ghana (NGHA) and Oaxaca (OAX) was carried out by means of ego networks and interviews. These regions were chosen because both are inhabited by several ethnic groups, thus providing a good opportunity to test the cultural group selection hypothesis. Against the predictions of th...

It is well established that emotional responses to stimuli presented to one perceptive modality (e.g., visual) are modulated by the concurrent presentation of affective information to another modality (e.g., auditory)—an effect known as the cross-modal bias. However, the affective mechanisms mediating this effect are still not fully understood. It...

Resumen El presente trabajo, realizado en algunos distritos del norte de Ghana como Bawku-este, Garu-Tampane y Bunkpurugu-Yunguo, trata de servir de ejemplo de cómo a través del emprendimiento social los sujetos organizan las redes sociales que resultan más eficaces para adaptarse a su entorno a través de la cultura. En Ghana conviven alrededor de...

In this paper we present a new methodology which, while allowing for anonymous interaction, it also makes possible to compare decisions of cooperating or defecting when playing games within a group, according to whether or not players personally trust each other. The design thus goes beyond standard approaches to the role of trust in fostering coop...

We propose a revised set of moral dilemmas for studies on moral judgment. We selected a total of 46 moral dilemmas available in the literature and fine-tuned them in terms of four conceptual factors (Personal Force, Benefit Recipient, Evitability and Intention) and methodological aspects of the dilemma formulation (word count, expression style, que...

The present work shows how an empirical study of language ontogeny can be accommodated within biological theory. Several analyses of linguistic corpora of first language acquisition have been represented by means of networks. The results show in each corpus a combination of linear and non-linear growth of both words and syntactic links. Four langua...

Dance stimuli have been used in experimental studies of (i) how movement is processed in the brain; (ii) how affect is perceived from bodily movement; and (iii) how dance can be a source of aesthetic experience. However, stimulus materials across—and even within—these three domains of research have varied considerably. Thus, integrative conclusions...

Background / Purpose: Following claims of a universal human preference for curved shapes (1), we devised a two-alternative forced choice task that would allow us to test the said preference among different cultures.Here we present the first, preliminary, results obtained from two different samples; one consisting of Ghanaian locals, and the other...

Several theories within different disciplines emphasize the role of trust in fostering cooperation in human social life. Despite differences, the core of these notions of trust is affectively motivated loyalty, which makes the individuals feel mutually committed and willing to accept vulnerability because of positive expectations about each other's...

It is generally assumed that moral realism requires a determined world, so that moral judgments can also be determined. From this point of view, genuine moral dilemmas, where two alternative judgments are equally well-grounded, would be a counter-example for moral realism. In this paper I argue against such a challenge to moral realism. Starting fr...

RESUMENEn esta contribución pretendemos reivindicar la necesidad de tener en cuenta las relaciones de confianza a la hora de tratar de entender la evolución de la cooperación. En este artículo, tras motivar el interés de tener en cuenta el papel de la confianza en la evolución de la cooperación, revisamos el concepto de confianza, como una actitud...

In this paper we contend that trust has to be taken into account to explain the evolution of human cooperation. After showing that current models within evolutionary game theory overlook the role of trust, we offer our understanding of this concept, as a complex attitude that involves affective filiations and normative expectations, and put forward...

This chapter directs the influence and relevance of language on thoughts. Though there has been no outlined domain on how exactly language effects cognitive architecture, the chapter critically studies five most relevant positions that have attracted defenders, critics since twentieth century to contemporary proposals. It discuses relativism, cogni...

This chapter explores the question of linguistic influence over non-verbal process like— perception, navigation, or memory. It discusses the challenge of finding an appropriate task to measure such influences by “four initial phases,” (which were distinguished by scientific research in 1969), color term saga (Initial Phase, Second phase, Third phas...

This chapter explores relationship between thought and language calling in question arguments and grounds that make or add on to the perception of language as cognitive system. This relationship can be studied through two approaches: “rational nativism” and “massive modularity.” They discus language “peripheral” restricted purely for communicative...

In extension of “language as a representational tool kit,” this chapter discusses the processed effect of language. It emphasizes over parts of language that are just taken for granted or are connected with the general distinction- “automatic” and “controlled” processes, its unfortunate choice of words. Hence, the purpose of the chapter is just to...

This chapter reviews the study that points out the difference any language makes to human brain considering different ideas and thinking like: abstract thinking, propositional thinking, and controlled thinking as they are exclusive to verbal minds. It denies the idea of language being critical for abstract concepts and discusses language as a repre...

This chapter argues on the basis of various evidences reviewed and on conclusions of how a language shapes cognition. It gives alternative explanations and defines role of language, co-relation between them, and how linguistic development may bootstrap cognitive development. It also explains what sort of cognitive architecture can best accommodate...

Language has been argued to exhibit a complex system behavior. In our approach, the syntactic relations of dependency between words have been represented as networks. In a previous study, two English infants’ corpora of utterances were analyzed longitudinally, offering a view of the ontogeny of syntax. Abrupt changes were detected in the growth pat...

The declared goal of this paper is to fill this gap: “... cognitive systems research needs questions or challenges that define progress. The challenges are not (yet more) predictions of the future, but a guideline to what are the aims and what would constitute progress.” – the quotation being from the project description of EUCogII, the project for...

We discuss the discovery of technologies involving knotted netting, such as textiles, basketry, and cordage, in the Upper Paleolithic. This evidence, in our view, suggests a new way of connecting toolmaking and syntactic structure in human evolution, because these technologies already exhibit an "infinite use of finite means," which we take to cons...

The “systematicity argument” has been used to argue for a classical cognitive architecture (Fodor in The Language of Thought. Harvester Press, London, 1975, Why there still has to be a language of thought? In Psychosemantics, appendix. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 135–154, 1987; Fodor and Pylyshyn in Cognition 28:3–71, 1988; Aizawa in The systematicity...

Invited papers from PT-AI 2011. - Vincent C. Müller: Introduction: Theory and Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence - Nick Bostrom: The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced Artificial Agents - Hubert L. Dreyfus: A History of First Step Fallacies - Antoni Gomila, David Travieso and Lorena Lobo: Wherein is Human...

In this paper I raise the issue of how to build autonomous agents with a moral sense. I distinguish between service robots and really autonomous agents, and argue that for the former a control structure based on moral principles might suffice, while autonomy is linked to moral emotions, the reactive attitudes that embody our understanding of morali...

This chapter explores whether current interest in an embodied, embedded approach to cognition should be carried out as an alternative only to abstract symbols, while keeping most of cognitivism, or rather as a proper alternative to cognitivism. It emphasizes the shortcomings and risks of a cognitivist version of the embodied meaning approach, favou...

Ten years ago, the hegemonic idea was that language was a kind of independent module within the mind, a sort of "print-out" of whatever cognitive activity was taking place, but without any influence whatsoever in that activity. While this view is still held, evidence amassed in the last 10 years suggests another view of their inter-relationships, e...

Ten years ago, the hegemonic idea was that language was a kind of independent module within the mind, a sort of "print-out" of whatever cognitive activity was taking place, but without any influence whatsoever in that activity. While this view is still held, evidence amassed in the last 10 years suggests another view of their inter-relationships, e...

In this chapter we raise some of the moral issues involved in the current development of robotic autonomous agents. Starting from the connection between autonomy and responsibility, we distinguish two sorts of problems: those having to do with guaranteeing that the behavior of the artificial cognitive system is going to fall within the area of the...

We argue that Anderson's "massive redeployment hypothesis" (MRH) needs further development in several directions. First, a thoroughgoing criticism of the several "embodied cognition" alternatives is required. Second, the course between the Scylla of full holism and the Charybdis of structural-functional modularism must be plotted more distinctly. T...

Against the usual confrontation between a first-person point of view and a third-person point of view of mental attribution, as exclusive and exhaustive possibilities, this paper contends that a different, genuine, alternative standpoint exists: a second-person perspective. The specific domain of this perspective is spontaneous and reciprocal attri...

2009 año Darwin / Sociedad Española de Biología Evolutiva