No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Suasive speech: A stronger affective defense of rhetoric and the politics of cognitive poetics
Abstract
A review of empirical data on involuntary affective responses to ‘rhetorical’ speech establishes the need to reexamine Jean-Jacques Rousseau's so-called ‘Weak Defense of Rhetoric,’ which considers rhetorical tropes to be dangerous because they seduce the body. Evaluating empirical findings also challenges Richard Lanham's ‘Strong Defense,’ which dismisses Rousseau and rejects any condemnation of ‘rhetorical speech’ in asserting that all utterances are already rhetorical insofar as they are contextual and selective. Ultimately, experimental psychology and neuroscience studies give good reason to adopt a new, Stronger Affective Defense of Rhetoric, one that prioritises the body and its degrees of affectability, embracing Rousseau's idea that democratic deliberation must be concerned with how the body is intimately and often automatically moved by rhetorical speech.
... Later developments of RST include the Linguistic Discourse Model and Discourse Grammar (Prüst, Scha, and van den Berg, 1994;Scha and Polanyi, 1988;Polanyi et al., 2004as cited in Zeevat, 2011 with the focus on grammar, and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Lascarides and Asher, 1993;Lascarides, 2003, 2013), which uses RRs to model the semantics/pragmatics interface. 9 For a more general discussion of rhetoric in communication see Nida (1990), and for an analysis of rhetoric in neuroscience literature see Gruber (2016). ...
In the literature on tautologies it is assumed that the context plays a major role in their interpretation. We provide an analysis of contexts in which tautologies are encountered in the framework of the theories of discourse structure. We examine a collection of tautol-ogies made from proper names (TPNs) referring to famous personalities, and show that, contrary to the predictions made in previous analyses, i) TPNs can receive a wide variety of interpretations and hence can participate in any kind of rhetorical relation; and ii) TPNs are not necessarily specialized in the evocation of an evaluative attitude.
... Real democracy is the object of a moral desire. I place myself among those who make a strong "affective defence of rhetoric" in the politics of cognitive poetics (Gruber, 2016). Gruber refers to the recent neuroscientific literature of rhetoric demonstrating the physiological effects and affects elicited by spoken language. ...
It is argued that literacy and democracy interact in dynamic reciprocity. Their mutual influences may be either positive or negative: they are negative when literacy, unequally distributed, is reduced to mere skills (even if these are highly sophisticated), rather than conducive to free, argumentative and critical thinking, inspired by humanist values. Furthermore, in the case of pseudo-democracy, when elections said to be free replace well-informed public debate and collective decision-making, as well as the people’s control over such decisions. The development of a democratic intentionality is claimed to be the key to reversing the current tendency to a negative dynamic. The paper also describes and discusses the historical development and present situation of literacy and democracy worldwide, their impact throughout human history and, at an individual level, the impact of literacy acquisition/development on the mind and brain.
The concept of enthymeme has been discussed by rhetoricians and communication scholars. However, researchers have not been able to come to a clear understanding about its meaning, function, and how it works within the rhetorical, persuasive processes. This article identifies the meaning of the concept and explain how enthymemes work. The article also distinguishes the enthymeme from its logical counterpart – syllogism – and explains how its primary source is doxastic, rather than epistemic, knowledge.
Sabit cərəyan mühərrikinin sürətinin idarə edilməsinin Matlab/simulink və arduino platformasında reallaşdırılması
Our world’s climate is changing. The ramifications of the current ecological age and the possibility of habitation in – if not strictly post-apocalyptic – very different living conditions than the present, has spurned a pressing need to address our place in a more-than–human frame. A disjuncture between the urgency for concrete action on climate change and the actions of a political class unconvinced and/or slow to move has catalysed the need for action and collaboration across disciplines. The article draws on several creative projects as a springboard for environmental discourse. Notably, it discusses British artist Kate Pattison’s work on glaciers, Eve Mosher’s High Water Line project, and a work involving a local urban river system. Environmental communication transmitted through artmaking may speak to the problem of inaction in a way that employs soft persuasion and affective poetics. This article intimates artmaking can be a type of activism through enchantment, which has the potential to awaken personal and communities’ interests, and thereby encourage them to consider a more eco-centrically holistic future.
В сборнике представлены статьи Международной научно-практической конференции «Наука и инновации в XXI веке», которая проходила 29 июня 2021 г. в Андижанском институте экономики и строительства. Издание адресовано научным работникам, преподавателям высших и средних учебных заведений, докторантам, обучающимся. Статьи публикуются в авторской редакции.
Se as emoções são fenómenos sociais e culturais e se se encontram intimamente ligadas à forma como pensamos e sentimos, a retórica, enquanto condutora da alma ou psicagogia – devem contemplar a possibilidade persuasiva das emoções, não enquanto meros recursos complementares da argumentação e do raciocínio lógico, mas como recursos fundamentais que se autonomizaram no processo de persuasão. Definimos a retórica afetiva como o uso dos meios afetivos de persuasão visando induzir a cooperação em seres que, pela sua natureza, respondem não apenas a símbolos mas às emoções que esses símbolos geram.
Tal como a Retórica no-lo ensina, as emoções (pathos) estão no centro do discurso persuasivo. A racionalidade argumentativa da retórica não exclui as emoções como elemento fundamental do processo persuasivo. Primeiro, porque razão e emoção andam a par no que diz respeito ao raciocínio e à tomada de decisão, tal como demonstrado por vários estudos de Neurociência e de Psicologia Social. Em segundo lugar, porque a própria persuasão envolve uma modalidade emocional paralela a uma modalidade estritamente formal ou dita “racional”.
O presente artigo salienta algumas das principais formas emotivas que pontuam os discursos de natureza persuasiva, como o da publicidade: o uso da sugestão, a utilização de linguagem figurada e conotativa, ou ainda a concentração sobre as necessidades e desejos do auditório. Além dessas, destacam-se, ainda, um conjunto de efeitos emocionais relativos, quer ao auditório, quer ao orador.
Embora este elencar de formas emotivas não se pretenda exaustivo, a enumeração de procedimentos emocionais nos discursos publicitários oferece-nos um preliminar esboço do alcance e consequências práticas da persuasão emocional.
This visual study of Kumar, a drag comedian from Singapore, examines aspects of political semiotics on aging in Singapore. As a digital record of performing arts, the YouTube-video (Nur Fasihah 2012, http://buttonsinthebread.com/2012/06/29/happy-ever-laughter/) shows footage of Kumar poking fun at Toh Yi Drive residents’ initial reactions to a government-proposed nursing home construction in their estate. The thunderous laughter from the floor suggests that Kumar manages successfully his comedic connection with a primarily English-speaking audience. Based on the audio-visual segment, this discussion identifies the discursive variables underpinning the incisive twists in Kumar’s onstage comical repertoire.
A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, aesthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialised journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott & Jacobs, 2011). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives.
The rhetorical figure of the incrementum, or scale, can help to account for how autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been gendered as male, especially in Simon Baron-Cohen’s "Extreme Male Brain" theory. The incrementum occurs when female, male, and autistic brains are placed along a scale according to systemizing and empathizing abilities. This double hierarchy reinforces popular beliefs about sex and gender, drawing on the cultural resources of hi-tech culture, the service economy, and geekiness. In so doing, these theories overlook other important aspects of ASD, including alternative theories, the presence of autistic women and girls, and the needs and interests of autistic people themselves.
Studies on rhetorical features of language have reported both enhancing and adverse effects on ease of processing. We hypothesized that two explanations may account for these inconclusive findings. First, the respective gains and losses in ease of processing may apply to different dimensions of language processing (specifically, prosodic and semantic processing) and different types of fluency (perceptual vs. conceptual) and may well allow for an integration into a more comprehensive framework. Second, the effects of rhetorical features may be sensitive to interactions with other rhetorical features; employing a feature separately or in combination with others may then predict starkly different effects. We designed a series of experiments in which we expected the same rhetorical features of the very same sentences to exert adverse effects on semantic (conceptual) fluency and enhancing effects on prosodic (perceptual) fluency. We focused on proverbs that each employ three rhetorical features: rhyme, meter, and brevitas (i.e., artful shortness). The presence of these target features decreased ease of conceptual fluency (semantic comprehension) while enhancing perceptual fluency as reflected in beauty and succinctness ratings that were mainly driven by prosodic features. The rhetorical features also predicted choices for persuasive purposes, yet only for the sentence versions featuring all three rhetorical features; the presence of only one or two rhetorical features had an adverse effect on the choices made. We suggest that the facilitating effects of a combination of rhyme, meter, and rhetorical brevitas on perceptual (prosodic) fluency overcompensated for their adverse effects on conceptual (semantic) fluency, thus resulting in a total net gain both in processing ease and in choices for persuasive purposes.
Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Reading is not only ‚cold’ information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such ‚hot’ reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies.
This essay reflects on the last 100 years of sensation in the journal to figure out where and when scholars in the field have concerned themselves with sensuous activity, how that activity is seen to interact with language, knowledge, and speech. The past can serve to some extent as a “rough guide,” showing gaps and leaps as well as modeling specific approaches.
This article pilots a study in statistical genre analysis, a mixed-method approach for (a) identifying conventional responses as a statistical distribution within a big data set and (b) assessing which deviations from the conventional might be more effective for changes in audience, purpose, or context. The study assesses pharmaceutical sponsor presentations at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug advisory committee meetings. Preliminary findings indicate the need for changes to FDA conflict-of-interest policies.
This article examines how mirror neuron research from the neurosciences is incorporated by the field of group analysis and made to fit within the history and practices of the field. The approach taken is from science and technology studies’ discussion of “translation” across actor-networks. The article ends with the suggestion that a translation analysis indicates good reason for rhetoric and writing scholars to consider “multiple ontologies” and to understand neurodisciplinary work as invention.
We investigated the interplay between arousal and valence in the early processing of affective words. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words organized in an orthogonal design with the factors valence (positive, negative, neutral) and arousal (low, medium, high) in a lexical decision task. We observed faster reaction times for words of positive valence and for those of high arousal. Data from ERPs showed increased early posterior negativity (EPN) suggesting improved visual processing of these conditions. Valence effects appeared for medium and low arousal and were absent for high arousal. Arousal effects were obtained for neutral and negative words but were absent for positive words. These results suggest independent contributions of arousal and valence at early attentional stages of processing. Arousal effects preceded valence effects in the ERP data suggesting that arousal serves as an early alert system preparing a subsequent evaluation in terms of valence.
Recent neuroscience initiatives (including the E.U.'s Human Brain Project and the U.S.'s BRAIN Initiative) have reinvigorated discussions about the possibilities for transdisciplinary collaboration between the neurosciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. As STS scholars have argued for decades, however, such inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations are potentially fraught with tensions between researchers. This essay build on such claims by arguing that the tensions of transdisciplinary research also exist within researchers' own experiences of working between disciplines - a phenomenon that we call "disciplinary double consciousness" (DDC). Building on previous work that has characterized similar spaces (and especially on the Critical Neuroscience literature), we argue that "neuro-collaborations" inevitably engage researchers in DDC - a phenomenon that allows us to explore the useful dissonance that researchers can experience when working between a "home" discipline and a secondary discipline. Our case study is a five-year research project in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) lie detection involving a transdisciplinary research team made up of social scientists, a neuroscientist, and a humanist. In addition to theorizing neuro-collaborations from the inside-out, this essay presents practical suggestions for developing transdisciplinary infrastructures that could support future neuro-collaborations.
Rapid responses to emotional words play a crucial role in social communication. This study employed event-related potentials
to examine the time course of neural dynamics involved in emotional word processing. Participants performed a dual-target
task in which positive, negative and neutral adjectives were rapidly presented. The early occipital P1 was found larger when
elicited by negative words, indicating that the first stage of emotional word processing mainly differentiates between non-threatening
and potentially threatening information. The N170 and the early posterior negativity were larger for positive and negative
words, reflecting the emotional/non-emotional discrimination stage of word processing. The late positive component not only
distinguished emotional words from neutral words, but also differentiated between positive and negative words. This represents
the third stage of emotional word processing, the emotion separation. Present results indicated that, similar with the three-stage
model of facial expression processing; the neural processing of emotional words can also be divided into three stages. These
findings prompt us to believe that the nature of emotion can be analyzed by the brain independent of stimulus type, and that
the three-stage scheme may be a common model for emotional information processing in the context of limited attentional resources.
What features of a poem make it captivating, and which cognitive mechanisms are sensitive to these features? We addressed these questions experimentally by measuring pupillary responses of 40 participants who listened to a series of Limericks. The Limericks ended with either a semantic, syntactic, rhyme or metric violation. Compared to a control condition without violations, only the rhyme violation condition induced a reliable pupillary response. An anomaly-rating study on the same stimuli showed that all violations were reliably detectable relative to the control condition, but the anomaly induced by rhyme violations was perceived as most severe. Together, our data suggest that rhyme violations in Limericks may induce an emotional response beyond mere anomaly detection.
The Musical Emotional Bursts (MEB) consist of 80 brief musical executions expressing basic emotional states (happiness, sadness and fear) and neutrality. These musical bursts were designed to be the musical analog of the Montreal Affective Voices (MAV)-a set of brief non-verbal affective vocalizations portraying different basic emotions. The MEB consist of short (mean duration: 1.6 s) improvisations on a given emotion or of imitations of a given MAV stimulus, played on a violin (10 stimuli × 4 [3 emotions + neutral]), or a clarinet (10 stimuli × 4 [3 emotions + neutral]). The MEB arguably represent a primitive form of music emotional expression, just like the MAV represent a primitive form of vocal, non-linguistic emotional expression. To create the MEB, stimuli were recorded from 10 violinists and 10 clarinetists, and then evaluated by 60 participants. Participants evaluated 240 stimuli [30 stimuli × 4 (3 emotions + neutral) × 2 instruments] by performing either a forced-choice emotion categorization task, a valence rating task or an arousal rating task (20 subjects per task); 40 MAVs were also used in the same session with similar task instructions. Recognition accuracy of emotional categories expressed by the MEB (n:80) was lower than for the MAVs but still very high with an average percent correct recognition score of 80.4%. Highest recognition accuracies were obtained for happy clarinet (92.0%) and fearful or sad violin (88.0% each) MEB stimuli. The MEB can be used to compare the cerebral processing of emotional expressions in music and vocal communication, or used for testing affective perception in patients with communication problems.
Previous research suggests that emotional prosody processing is a highly rapid and complex process. In particular, it has been shown that different basic emotions can be differentiated in an early event-related brain potential (ERP) component, the P200. Often, the P200 is followed by later long lasting ERPs such as the late positive complex. The current experiment set out to explore in how far emotionality and arousal can modulate these previously reported ERP components. In addition, we also investigated the influence of task demands (implicit vs. explicit evaluation of stimuli). Participants listened to pseudo-sentences (sentences with no lexical content) spoken in six different emotions or in a neutral tone of voice while they either rated the arousal level of the speaker or their own arousal level. Results confirm that different emotional intonations can first be differentiated in the P200 component, reflecting a first emotional encoding of the stimulus possibly including a valence tagging process. A marginal significant arousal effect was also found in this time-window with high arousing stimuli eliciting a stronger P200 than low arousing stimuli. The P200 component was followed by a long lasting positive ERP between 400 and 750 ms. In this late time-window, both emotion and arousal effects were found. No effects of task were observed in either time-window. Taken together, results suggest that emotion relevant details are robustly decoded during early processing and late processing stages while arousal information is only reliably taken into consideration at a later stage of processing.
This study investigates the spatiotemporal brain dynamics of emotional information processing during reading using a combination of surface and intracranial electroencephalography (EEG). Two different theoretical views were opposed. According to the standard psycholinguistic perspective, emotional responses to words are generated within the reading network itself subsequent to semantic activation. According to the neural re-use perspective, brain regions that are involved in processing emotional information contained in other stimuli (faces, pictures, smells) might be in charge of the processing of emotional information in words as well. We focused on a specific emotiondisgustwhich has a clear locus in the brain, the anterior insula. Surface EEG showed differences between disgust and neutral words as early as 200 ms. Source localization suggested a cortical generator of the emotion effect in the left anterior insula. These findings were corroborated through the intracranial recordings of two epileptic patients with depth electrodes in insular and orbitofrontal areas. Both electrodes showed effects of disgust in reading as early as 200 ms. The early emotion effect in a brain region (insula) that responds to specific emotions in a variety of situations and stimuli clearly challenges classic sequential theories of reading in favor of the neural re-use perspective.
Pupil dilation is a useful, noninvasive technique for measuring the change in cognitive load. Since it is implicit and nonverbal, it is particularly useful with preverbal or nonverbal participants. In cognitive psychology, pupil dilation is most often measured by corneal reflection eye-tracking devices. The present study investigates the effect of gaze position on pupil size estimation by three common eye-tracking systems. The task consisted of a simple object pursuit situation, as a sphere rotated around the display screen. Systematic errors of pupil size estimation were found with all three systems. Implications for task-elicited pupillometry, especially for gaze-contingent studies such as object tracking or reading, are discussed.
Neuroscience research findings yield fascinating new insights into human cognition and communication. Rhetoricians may be attracted to neuroscience research that uses imaging tools (such as fMRI) to draw inferences about rhetorical concepts, such as emotion, reason, or empathy. Yet this interdisciplinary effort poses challenges to rhetorical scholars. Accordingly, research in neurorhetorics should be two-sided: not only should researchers question the neuroscience of rhetoric (the brain functions related to persuasion and argument), but they should also inquire into the rhetoric of neuroscience (how neuroscience research findings are framed rhetorically). This two-sided approach can help rhetoric scholars to use neuroscience insights in a responsible manner, minimizing analytical pitfalls. These two approaches can be combined to examine neuroscience discussions about methodology, research, and emotion, and studies of autism and empathy, with a rhetorical as well as scientific lens. Such an approach yields productive insights into rhetoric while minimizing potential pitfalls of interdisciplinary work.
Risk is perceived and acted on in 2 fundamental ways. Risk as feelings refers to individuals' fast, instinctive, and intuitive reactions to danger. Risk as analysis brings logic, reason, and scientific deliberation to bear on risk management. Reliance on risk as feelings is described with "the affect heuristic." The authors trace the development of this heuristic across a variety of research paths. The authors also discuss some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts how people perceive and evaluate risk, and, more generally, how it influences all human decision making. Finally, some important implications of the affect heuristic for communication and decision making pertaining to cancer prevention and treatment are briefly discussed.
Japanese listeners rated the expression of joy, anger and sadness in Japanese, Western, and Hindustani music. Excerpts were also rated for tempo, loudness, and complexity. Listeners were sensitive to the intended emotion in music from all three cultures, and judgments of emotion were related to judgments of acoustic cues. High ratings of joy were associated with music judged to be fast in tempo and melodically simple. High ratings of sadness were associated with music judged to be slow in tempo and melodically complex. High ratings of anger were associated with music judged to be louder and more complex. The findings suggest that listeners are sensitive to emotion in familiar and unfamiliar music, and this sensitivity is associated with the perception of acoustic cues that transcend cultural boundaries.
Studies of the link between music and emotion have primarily focused on listeners' sensitivity to emotion in the music of their own culture. This sensitivity may reflect listeners' enculturation to the conventions of their culture's tonal system. However, it may also reflect responses to psychophysical dimensions of sound that are independent of musical experience. A model of listeners' perception of emotion in music is proposed in which emotion in music is communicated through a combination of universal and cultural cues. Listeners may rely on either of these cues, or both, to arrive at an understanding of musically expressed emotion. The current study addressed the hypotheses derived from this model using a cross-cultural approach. The following questions were investigated: Can people identify the intended emotion in music from an unfamiliar tonal system? If they can, is their sensitivity to intended emotions associated with perceived changes in psychophysical dimensions of music? Thirty Western listeners rated the degree of joy, sadness, anger, and peace in 12 Hindustani raga excerpts (field recordings obtained in North India). In accordance with the raga-rasa system, each excerpt was intended to convey one of the four moods or "rasas" that corresponded to the four emotions rated by listeners. Listeners also provided ratings of four psychophysical variables: tempo, rhythmic complexity, melodic complexity, and pitch range. Listeners were sensitive to the intended emotion in ragas when that emotion was joy, sadness, or anger. Judgments of emotion were significantly related to judgments of psychophysical dimensions, and, in some cases, to instrument timbre. The findings suggest that listeners are sensitive to musically expressed emotion in an unfamiliar tonal system, and that this sensitivity is facilitated by psychophysical cues.
Sensorimotor areas activate to action- and object-related words, but their role in abstract meaning processing is still debated.
Abstract emotion words denoting body internal states are a critical test case because they lack referential links to objects.
If actions expressing emotion are crucial for learning correspondences between word forms and emotions, emotion word–evoked
activity should emerge in motor brain systems controlling the face and arms, which typically express emotions. To test this
hypothesis, we recruited 18 native speakers and used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain
activation evoked by abstract emotion words to that by face- and arm-related action words. In addition to limbic regions,
emotion words indeed sparked precentral cortex, including body-part–specific areas activated somatotopically by face words
or arm words. Control items, including hash mark strings and animal words, failed to activate precentral areas. We conclude
that, similar to their role in action word processing, activation of frontocentral motor systems in the dorsal stream reflects
the semantic binding of sign and meaning of abstract words denoting emotions and possibly other body internal states.
Recent research has suggested that music and language processing share neural resources, leading to new hypotheses about interference in the simultaneous processing of these two structures. The present study investigated the effect of a musical chord's tonal function on syntactic processing (Experiment 1) and semantic processing (Experiment 2) using a cross-modal paradigm and controlling for acoustic differences. Participants read sentences and performed a lexical decision task on the last word, which was, syntactically or semantically, expected or unexpected. The simultaneously presented (task-irrelevant) musical sequences ended on either an expected tonic or a less-expected subdominant chord. Experiment 1 revealed interactive effects between music-syntactic and linguistic-syntactic processing. Experiment 2 showed only main effects of both music-syntactic and linguistic-semantic expectations. An additional analysis over the two experiments revealed that linguistic violations interacted with musical violations, though not differently as a function of the type of linguistic violations. The present findings were discussed in light of currently available data on the processing of music as well as of syntax and semantics in language, leading to the hypothesis that resources might be shared for structural integration processes and sequencing.
Pupillary responses have been shown to be sensitive to both task load and emotional content. We investigated the interplay of these factors in the processing of single words that varied in emotional valence and arousal. Two tasks of different cognitive load, uninstructed reading and a lexical decision task, were employed, followed by an unannounced recognition task. Reaction times were faster and incidental memory performance was better for high-arousing than for low-arousing words. In contrast to previous findings for pictures and sounds, high-arousing words elicited smaller pupillary responses than low-arousing words; these effects were independent of task load, which increased pupil diameter. Therefore, emotional arousal attributed to words does not mandatorily activate the autonomic nervous system, but rather works on a cognitive level, facilitating word processing.
By some definitions of power if an agent A deliberately induces a change of behaviour (including belief-change) in another person B then A can be said to have the power to induce that change in behaviour. In ‘Power and Persuasion’ I examine what this means for deliberation. Does it mean that debate is simply a power game? I argue that the power of persuasion does not necessarily derive from force or domination. What matters in debate where belief-change takes place are the grounds of that belief change. If evidence and reason induces belief change, rather than rhetorical force, then domination has not necessarily operated. I discuss this claim with regard to the nature of ‘veracity conditions’ involving two connected elements: common reasons for belief and the intentions of the agent inducing belief change in another person. Emotion is often contrasted with ‘cold rationality’. It might seem that if agent B’s behaviour (and beliefs) are changed through emotional appeals by A then this would count as a power relationship. Indeed such emotional appeals are part-and-parcel of elements of the rhetorical force and strategies of agents that I argue often constitute power relations. However in this paper I argue that not all influence through emotion constitutes a power relationship. It is a mistake to see ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ as two ontologically separate phenomenon. To be sure, emotion can cloud judgement and some decisions are best made in calm frames of mind. One can regret actions made in anger for example; but one can also regret decisions made in a calm frame of mind. In personal relations, hiding one’s true feelings can often lead to loss from both agents. After the set-up, the first part of the paper discusses the nature of ‘emotion’ and its relationship to ‘reason’. The second part of the paper then examines the role of emotion in personal relations. It follows the logical structure of the argument of ‘Power and Persuasion’ suggesting ‘veracity conditions’ for the causal power of emotion in interpersonal relations. It suggest that where emotions are engaged in behaviour they do not constitute a power relation between an agent A and a person B when the directing or constraining emotions have ‘common cause’ and the emotional appeal is not being used strategically by the inducing agent A. The paper concludes with some comments on what this means in personal, social and political environments.
Lexical decision and word-naming experiments were conducted to examine influences of emotions in visual word recognition. Emotional states of happiness and sadness were induced with classical music. In the first two experiments, happy and sad participants (and neutral-emotion participants in Experiment 2) made lexical decisions about letter-strings, some of which were words with meanings strongly associated with the emotions happiness, love, sadness, and anger. Emotional state of the perceiver was associated with facilitation of response to words categorically related to that emotion (i.e. happy and sad words). However, such facilitation was not observed for words that were related by valence, but not category, to the induced emotions (i.e. love and anger words). Evidence for categorical influences of emotional state in word recognition was also observed in a third experiment that employed a word-naming task. Together the results support a categorical emotions model of the influences of emotion in information processing (Niedenthal, Setterlund, & Jones, 1994). Moreover, the result of the word-naming experiment suggests that the effects of emotion are evident at very early stages in cognitive processing.
Commonsense beliefs about the mind are routinely operative in human discourse, where they serve as prolific resources from which to generate discourse/understanding while often remaining in what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the realm of the undiscussed.” As a study of how mind-related beliefs serve as a resource for rhetorical invention, this essay (1) provides insight into an important and pervasive category of doxastic beliefs and (2) brings into focus the powerful undertow of doxa’s routine discursive work. It does so, in part, by analyzing Dr. Benjamin Spock’s best-selling child-rearing manual, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, together with reactions it elicited from readers. These show how mind-related beliefs can generate discourse while being suppressed in the discursive iteration, resulting in fragments, enthymemes, implications, and presences/absences. Moreover, published in multiple editions over many years, Spock’s book demonstrates the inventional implications of historical changes in widely shared beliefs about the mind.
Whereas semantic, logical, and narrative features of verbal humor are well-researched, phonological and prosodic dimensions of verbal funniness are hardly explored. In a 2 × 2 design we varied rhyme and meter in humorous couplets. Rhyme and meter enhanced funniness ratings and supported faster processing. Rhyming couplets also elicited more intense and more positive affective responses, increased subjective comprehensibility and more accurate memory. The humor effect is attributed to special rhyme and meter features distinctive of humoristic poetry in several languages. Verses that employ these formal features make an artful use of typical poetic vices of amateurish poems written for birthday parties or other occasions. Their metrical patterning sounds “mechanical” rather than genuinely “poetic”; they also disregard rules for “good” rhymes. The processing of such verses is discussed in terms of a metacognitive integration of their poetically deviant features into an overall effect of processing ease. The study highlights the importance of nonsemantic rhetorical features in language processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)
Rhetoricians have tried to develop a better understanding of the connection between words and things, but these attempts often employ a logic of representation that undermines a full examination of materiality and the complexity of scientific practice. A logic of articulation offers a viable alternative by focusing attention on the linkages between the competing material, social, and rhetorical registers in which scientific knowledge is produced and discovered. An examination of extant criticism of Dean Hamer's “gay gene” study illustrates the utility of articulation theory as a guide to the rhetorical criticism of science.
During a series of protests in Hong Kong about a leadership transition widely perceived to give Mainland China greater political influence, the Hong Kong Museum of History held a Special Exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors of Xian, China. Sponsored by “The Leisure and Cultural Service Department,” the exhibit featured the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty who ushered in “an epoch-making era in Chinese history that witnessed the unification of China” (Museum Exhibition). This essay explores the multi-media aspects of the exhibit, arguing that encounters with dramatic music and fully immersive digital experiences are examples of an embodied, affective form of constitutive rhetoric. Put differently, the museum’s multi-media elements demonstrate how Maurice Charland’s theory of a constitutive rhetoric can be informed by recent work on affect and can provide one point from which to engage affect theory and the “affective dimension of politics.”
Recent studies provide promising methodological advances in the use of pupillometry as on-line measurement of cognitive processes and show that visual attention allocation, mind-wandering, mental imagery, and even rhyme expectations can influence the size of the human pupil.
When does the human language processor take on semantic commitments? This question has two parts: (1) for what class of semantic decisions will the processor make a decision rather than leaving the developing interpretation vague or unspecified?; and (2) at what point during sentence analysis will a decision be made if insufficient information is available to guarantee an accurate decision? Neither question has been answered (or even posed in a fully explicit general form) in the psycholinguistic literature. We recorded readers' eye movements in a study designed to explore these questions. The data indicated that delaying the presentation of disambiguating information until after the occurrence of an ambiguous target lengthened fixation times for words with multiple meanings (the concrete vs. abstract meaning of ball, ring), but not for words with multiple senses (the concrete vs. abstract sense of library, poem). This finding is taken as initial support for the view that semantic commitments are minimized, occurring only when mutually incompatible choices are presented by the grammar or when forced by the need to maintain consistency between the interpretation of the current phrase and any already processed contextual material. However, decisions forced by either of these circumstances occur immediately with associated effects appearing in the eye movement record long before the end of the sentence.
According to a two-step account of the mere-exposure effect, repeated exposure leads to the subjective feeling of perceptual fluency, which in turn influences liking. If so, perceptual fluency manipulated by means other than repetition should influence liking. In three experiments, effects of perceptual fluency on affective judgments were examined. In Experiment 1, higher perceptual fluency was achieved by presenting a matching rather than nonmatching prime before showing a target picture. Participants judged targets as prettier if preceded by a matching rather than nonmatching prime. In Experi- ment 2, perceptual fluency was manipulated by figure-ground contrast. Stimuli were judged as more pretty, and less ugly, the higher the con- trast. In Experiment 3, perceptual fluency was manipulated by presen- tation duration. Stimuli shown for a longer duration were liked more, and disliked less. We conclude (a) that perceptual fluency increases liking and (b) that the experience of fluency is affectively positive, and hence attributed to positive but not to negative features, as reflected in a differential impact on positive and negative judgments. 0
This paper presents a neuroscientific study of aesthetic judgments on written texts. In an fMRI experiment participants read a number of proverbs without explicitly evaluating them. In a post-scan rating they rated each item for familiarity and beauty. These individual ratings were correlated with the functional data to investigate the neural correlates of implicit aesthetic judgments. We identified clusters in which BOLD activity was correlated with individual post-scan beauty ratings. This indicates that some spontaneous aesthetic evaluation takes place during reading, even if not required by the task. Positive correlations were found in the ventral striatum and in medial prefrontal cortex, likely reflecting the rewarding nature of sentences that are aesthetically pleasing. On the contrary, negative correlations were observed in the classic left frontotemporal reading network. Midline structures and bilateral temporo-parietal regions correlated positively with familiarity, suggesting a shift from the task-network towards the default network with increasing familiarity.
Rhetoric-composition's recurring captivation with emergent brain research is sustained not only by the persuasive visual rhetoric of neuroscientific research but also by the conceptual and terministic overlaps that exist between the fields of rhetoric-composition and neuroscience. While these overlaps suggest ways research in brain science can usefully contribute to work in our field, they also instigate seductively simple “solutions” to the “problem” of epistemological uncertainty. Our neurorhetorical methodology preempts the reductive uptake of neuroscientific research while simultaneously motivating a cross-disciplinary reciprocity conducive to the goals of rhetorical inquiry and responsible writing pedagogy.
A quantitative, coordinate-based meta-analysis combined data from 354 participants across 22 fMRI studies and one positron emission tomography (PET) study to identify the differences in neural correlates of figurative and literal language processing, and to investigate the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in figurative language processing. Studies that reported peak activations in standard space contrasting figurative vs. literal language processing at whole brain level in healthy adults were included. The left and right IFG, large parts of the left temporal lobe, the bilateral medial frontal gyri (medFG) and an area around the left amygdala emerged for figurative language processing across studies. Conditions requiring exclusively literal language processing did not activate any selective regions in most of the cases, but if so they activated the cuneus/precuneus, right MFG and the right IPL. No general RH advantage for metaphor processing could be found. On the contrary, significant clusters of activation for metaphor conditions were mostly lateralized to the left hemisphere (LH). Subgroup comparisons between experiments on metaphors, idioms, and irony/sarcasm revealed shared activations in left frontotemporal regions for idiom and metaphor processing. Irony/sarcasm processing was correlated with activations in midline structures such as the medFG, ACC and cuneus/precuneus. To test the graded salience hypothesis (GSH, Giora, 1997), novel metaphors were contrasted against conventional metaphors. In line with the GSH, RH involvement was found for novel metaphors only. Here we show that more analytic, semantic processes are involved in metaphor comprehension, whereas irony/sarcasm comprehension involves theory of mind processes.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393212003090
This article reviews research examining the fading affect bias (FAB): The finding that the intensity of affect associated with negative autobiographical memories fades faster than affect associated with positive autobiographical memories. The FAB is a robust effect in autobiographical memory that has been replicated using a variety of methods and populations. The FAB is linked to both cognitive and social processes that support a positive view of the self. Accordingly, we speculate that one function of the FAB may be to induce individuals to be positive and action-oriented so that they may better face and master life challenges. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
It is hard to imagine a field as different from sociology as neuroscience. The differences in theory, method, tradition, and
practice could readily breed antagonism between any two fields. However, it is just because of these differences that neuroscience
has been able to present important findings about covert brain processes that can expand sociological theory. Traditionally,
sociological social psychology has focused on self-consciousness and language as primary mechanisms of human adaptation. This
focus might be appropriate to the cerebral image of the human animal, but neuroscience has produced evidence that emotional
capacities underlie the intelligence implied by this image and indeed make it possible (Carter and Pasqualini 2004; Damasio
1994).
Darwin’s (1871) observation that evolution has produced in us certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct that lack any obvious basis in individual utility is a useful springboard from which to clarify the role of emotion in moral judgment. The problem is whether a certain class of moral judgments is “constituted” or “driven by” emotion (Greene 2008, p. 108) or merely correlated with emotion while being generated by unconscious computations (e.g., Huebner et al. 2008). With one exception, all of the “personal” vignettes devised by Greene and colleagues (2001, 2004) and subsequently used by other researchers (e.g., Koenigs et al. 2007) in their fMRI and behavioral studies of emotional engagement in moral judgment involve violent crimes or torts. These studies thus do much more than highlight the role of emotion in moral judgment; they also support the classical rationalist thesis that moral rules are engraved in the mind.
Psychophysiological and neuroscience studies of emotional processing undertaken by investigators at the University of Florida Laboratory of the Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention (CSEA) are reviewed, with a focus on reflex reactions, neural structures and functional circuits that mediate emotional expression. The theoretical view shared among the investigators is that expressed emotions are founded on motivational circuits in the brain that developed early in evolutionary history to ensure the survival of individuals and their progeny. These circuits react to appetitive and aversive environmental and memorial cues, mediating appetitive and defensive reflexes that tune sensory systems and mobilize the organism for action and underly negative and positive affects. The research reviewed here assesses the reflex physiology of emotion, both autonomic and somatic, studying affects evoked in picture perception, memory imagery, and in the context of tangible reward and punishment, and using the electroencephalograph (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), explores the brain's motivational circuits that determine human emotion.