Showing papers on "Surprise published in 2016"

Surprise disrupts cognition via a fronto-basal ganglia suppressive mechanism

Abstract: Surprising events markedly affect behaviour and cognition, yet the underlying mechanism is unclear. Surprise recruits a brain mechanism that globally suppresses motor activity, ostensibly via the subthalamic nucleus (STN) of the basal ganglia. Here, we tested whether this suppressive mechanism extends beyond skeletomotor suppression and also affects cognition (here, verbal working memory, WM). We recorded scalp-EEG (electrophysiology) in healthy participants and STN local field potentials in Parkinson's patients during a task in which surprise disrupted WM. For scalp-EEG, surprising events engage the same independent neural signal component that indexes action stopping in a stop-signal task. Importantly, the degree of this recruitment mediates surprise-related WM decrements. Intracranially, STN activity is also increased post surprise, especially when WM is interrupted. These results suggest that surprise interrupts cognition via the same fronto-basal ganglia mechanism that interrupts action. This motivates a new neural theory of how cognition is interrupted, and how distraction arises after surprising events.

Differentiating what is humorous from what is not.

Abstract: After 2.5 millennia of philosophical deliberation and psychological experimentation, most scholars have concluded that humor arises from incongruity. We highlight 2 limitations of incongruity theories of humor. First, incongruity is not consistently defined. The literature describes incongruity in at least 4 ways: surprise, juxtaposition, atypicality, and a violation. Second, regardless of definition, incongruity alone does not adequately differentiate humorous from nonhumorous experiences. We suggest revising incongruity theory by proposing that humor arises from a benign violation: something that threatens a person's well-being, identity, or normative belief structure but that simultaneously seems okay. Six studies, which use entertainment, consumer products, and social interaction as stimuli, reveal that the benign violation hypothesis better differentiates humorous from nonhumorous experiences than common conceptualizations of incongruity. A benign violation conceptualization of humor improves accuracy by reducing the likelihood that joyous, amazing, and tragic situations are inaccurately predicted to be humorous. (PsycINFO Database Record

Multivoxel Pattern Analysis Does Not Provide Evidence to Support the Existence of Basic Emotions

Abstract: Saarimaki et al. (2015) published a paper claiming to find the neural "fingerprints" for anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise using multivariate pattern analysis. There are 2 ways in which Saarimaki et al.'s interpretation mischaracterizes their actual findings. The first is statistical: a pattern that successfully distinguishes the members of one category from the members of another (with an accuracy greater than that which might be expected by chance) is not a "fingerprint" (i.e., an essence); it is an abstract, statistical summary of a variable population of instances. The second way in which Saarimaki et al.'s interpretation mischaracterizes their results is conceptual: their findings do not actually meet the specific criteria for basic emotion theory. Instead, their findings are more consistent with a theory of constructed emotion. In our view, Saarimaki et al. is elegant in method and important in that it demonstrates empirical support for a theory of emotion that relies on population thinking; it is also an example of how essentialism-the belief that all instances of a category possesses necessary features that define what is, and what is not, a category member-contributes to a fundamental misunderstanding of the neural basis of emotion.

Multiple paths to customer delight: the impact of effort, expertise and tangibles on joy and surprise

Abstract: Purpose Historically, firms have dedicated an abundance of resources in the pursuit of customer satisfaction and its corresponding favorable consequences. However, research indicates that customer satisfaction may not necessarily result in the outcomes pursued. This paper aims to focus on the concept of customer delight and explore antecedents and consequences of interest to the service firm. More specifically, the proposed model explores the linkages of employee effort, employee expertise and the firm’s tangibles to customer surprise and joy which in turn lead to customer delight and per cent of budget spent. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from a grocery store. The hypothesized relationships were tested using structural equation modeling. Findings Results from this study yield new insights into the dual pathways leading to customer delight through joy and surprise. That is, joy and tangibles lead to both joy and surprise, whereas expertise leads to joy alone. Both joy and surprise are completely mediated through delight to per cent of budget spent. Interestingly, higher frequency customers experience a stronger relationship from joy to delight. Research limitations/implications The findings have implications for the ongoing debate on the viability of customer delight and extending the theoretical understanding of why customer delight represents such a powerful force in the service environment. Practical implications By providing specific variables that impact both joy and surprise, management can develop tactics to develop delight initiatives. Originality/value This is the first study proposing multiple paths to customer delight. Further, this is the first study to link needs based and disconfirmation into a single model.

Surprise Search: Beyond Objectives and Novelty

Abstract: Grounded in the divergent search paradigm and inspired by the principle of surprise for unconventional discovery in computational creativity, this paper introduces surprise search as a new method of evolutionary divergent search. Surprise search is tested in two robot navigation tasks and compared against objective-based evolutionary search and novelty search. The key findings of this paper reveal that surprise search is advantageous compared to the other two search processes. It outperforms objective search and it is as efficient as novelty search in both tasks examined. Most importantly, surprise search is, on average, faster and more robust in solving the navigation problem compared to objective and novelty search. Our analysis reveals that surprise search explores the behavioral space more extensively and yields higher population diversity compared to novelty search.

Perception of basic emotions in music: Culture-specific or multicultural?

Abstract: The perception of basic emotions such as happy/sad seems to be a human invariant and as such detached from musical experience. On the other hand, there is evidence for cultural specificity: recognition of emotional cues is enhanced if the stimuli and the participants stem from the same culture. A cross-cultural study investigated the following research questions: (1) How are six basic universal emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise) perceivable in music unknown to listeners with different cultural backgrounds?; and (2) Which particular aspects of musical emotions show similarities and differences across cultural boundaries? In a cross-cultural study, 18 musical segments, representing six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise) were presented to subjects from Western Europe (Germany and Norway) and Asia (South Korea and Indonesia). Results give evidence for a pan-cultural emotional sentience in music. However, there were distinct cultural, emotion and item...

Surprise, Sensemaking, and Success in the First College Year: Black Undergraduate Men's Academic Adjustment Experiences.

Abstract: BackgroundMuch has been written about Black undergraduate men's out-of-class engagement and social experiences, identity development, participation in intercollegiate athletics, and college enrollm...

The temporal dynamics of surprise

Abstract: Guided by a temporal dynamics perspective, we review and integrate theories and empirical evidence on surprise. We conceptualize surprise as the initial response to unexpected events, which should be differentiated from subsequent states that occur after people had time to make sense of the unexpected outcome. To understand the nature of surprise, it is therefore important to take time into account. Following this, a review of immediate cognitive correlates of surprise shows that irrespective of the valence of the outcome, the initial responses are the same. Moreover, the temporal dynamics perspective reconciles seemingly contradictory findings regarding the valence of surprise, such that studies that focus on surprise while it happens (initial interruption) support the notion that it feels relatively negative, whereas studies that focus on states after cognitive mastering show that subsequent experiential states depend on the valence of the outcome.

Novelty biases attention and gaze in a surprise trial

Abstract: While the classical distinction between task-driven and stimulus-driven biasing of attention appears to be a dichotomy at first sight, there seems to be a third category that depends on the contrast or discrepancy between active representations and the upcoming stimulus, and may be termed novelty, surprise, or prediction failure. For previous demonstrations of the discrepancy-attention link, stimulus-driven components (saliency) may have played a decisive role. The present study was conducted to evaluate the discrepancy-attention link in a display where novel and familiar stimuli are equated for saliency. Eye tracking was used to determine fixations on novel and familiar stimuli as a proxy for attention. Results show a prioritization of attention by the novel color, and a de-prioritization of the familiar color, which is clearly present at the second fixation, and spans over the next couple of fixations. Saliency, on the other hand, did not prioritize items in the display. The results thus reinforce the notion that novelty captures and binds attention.

A Tough Act to Follow: Contrast Effects in Financial Markets

Abstract: A contrast effect occurs when the value of a previously-observed signal inversely biases perception of the next signal. We present the first evidence that contrast effects can distort prices in sophisticated and liquid markets. Investors mistakenly perceive earnings news today as more impressive if yesterday’s earnings surprise was bad and less impressive if yesterday’s surprise was good. A unique advantage of our financial setting is that we can identify contrast effects as an error in perceptions rather than expectations. Finally, we show that our results cannot be explained by a key alternative explanation involving information transmission from previous earnings announcements.

Culture in mediated interaction: Political defriending on Facebook and the limits of networked individualism

Abstract: During the 2014 Gaza war, Facebook became a central arena for moral/political boundary work for Israeli users, resulting in unusually high rates of politically motivated tie dissolution. Cultural criteria were thus applied to restructure and symbolically cleanse social networks. We analyze Facebook’s visibility-structures, interview data, and public posts to explore this phenomenon. Studying Facebook interaction reveals cultural mechanisms used offline to sustain heterogeneous social networks and facilitate interaction despite differences – group style differentiation between circles, differential self-presentation, and constructing imagined homogeneity – whose employment is impeded by Facebook’s material design. This case of materiality-informed value homophily introduces materiality to the sociological understanding of the interrelations between culture and network structure. Interviewees reported dissolving ties following their shock and surprise at the political views and sacrilegious expression styles of their Facebook friends. We demonstrate that their shock and surprise derived from Facebook’s design, which converges life-spheres and social circles and thwarts segregation of interactions, group styles, and information. Rather than disembedding individuals from groups within the ‘networked-individualism,’ it makes individuals accountable for their statements towards all their social circles. In dramatic times, this collapse of segregation between life-spheres, affiliation circles, and group styles conjures Durkheimian sociability and symbolic cleansing despite commitment to pluralism.

The Rhetoric of Translingualism

Abstract: The arc of moral composition studies is long, King might say, but it bends toward translingualism.1 I would agree insofar as the term translingualism galvanizes the multidimensional repudiation of monolingual curriculums and yields praxis informed by an understanding that language and language standards are situational, political, arbitrary, and palimpsestic. If, as Vygotsky indicates, a "word is a microcosm of human consciousness" (153), then it is also a microcosm of human history. Every utterance contains tracings of migration, mixing, negotiation, or conquest. Stories have been programmed into our languages just as they have been stamped into our genes. Moreover, translingualism incorporates the view that all language users, or languagers, are perpetually producing and experimenting with multiple varieties of language. Thus, translingualists grasp that the institutional enactment of language standards is repressive in some cases and restrictive in all.Yet I imagine that proponents of translingualism will still have to grapple with the question of how much language prescriptiveness they are comfortable with-lest they assert "none at all" and, as they work in political arenas in which they assess students, seem to evade politics, the last thing a self-respecting translingualist wants to be caught doing. It also appears to me that continual revisiting and reworking of several other concepts of language and difference are necessary to forge a stronger narrative about translingualism. In addition to talk about student language rights, I am concerned on this occasion with the flattening of language differences, the notion of language as an abstraction, the danger of translingualism becoming an alienating theory for some scholars of color, and deeper study of powerfully translanguaging students.As is evident from reading essays such as John Trimbur's discussion in this issue of the 1974 CCCC "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (SRTOL), the resolution remains a touchstone in composition studies for progressive language campaigns. But as I have suggested elsewhere, the language rights of ethnic assemblages, most prominently African Americans, were the issue and not the language rights of students conceived as individuals (Gilyard 95). No vision was expressed claiming, for example, "my own idiosyncratic thing" as a language that should be honored in schools. Rather, a particular political problem, the harsh penalizing of students who were firmly tethered linguistically to an institutionally discredited heritage, was being addressed. The representative students at the heart of the students' right work of earlier decades were not the idealized ones at the heart of the present translingualist conception. The latter students are more shifting and unpredictable, heterogeneous and fluid, as we all are. They are not the minority others numerically but are the majority not-others occupying the default position, the norm, and are being hindered, at the very least, by gatekeepers. They are less the repressed indigenous ethnics overdetermined by dialect and more the polyglot products of contemporary global dispersion.None of this depiction is objectionable. A good cause needs a good symbol. I advocate, however, that this symbol needs to be highlighted more and needs its specific hardships detailed. Perhaps numerous accounts in this vein exist of which I am unaware. That would be no surprise. My current impression, though, is that the translanguaging subject generally comes off in the scholarly literature as a sort of linguistic everyperson, which makes it hard to see the suffering and the political imperative as clearly as in the heyday of SRTOL. In other words, if translanguaging is the unqualified norm, then by definition it is something that all students, including high achievers, perform. So what problem is there to address? If the answer is that every translanguaging student, regardless of educational success, could stand to be better educated with respect to the inner workings of the discourses and power dynamics that impact their lives, then the project of translingualism is indistinguishable from other species of critical pedagogy. …

The Importance of Suspense and Surprise in Entertainment Demand: Evidence from Wimbledon

Abstract: This paper empirically examines how suspense and surprise affect the demand for entertainment. We use a tennis tournament, the Wimbledon Championships, as a natural laboratory. This setting allows us to both operationalize suspense and surprise by using the audience's beliefs regarding the outcome of the match and observe the demand for live entertainment using TV audience figures. Our match fixed effects estimates of 8,563 minute-by-minute observations from 80 men's singles matches between 2009 and 2014 show that both suspense and surprise are drivers of media entertainment demand. In general, surprise seems to be more important in this regard than suspense, and both factors matter more during a match's later moments. We discuss important implications for the design of entertainment content to maximize entertainment demand.

Beyond pleasure and pain: Facial expression ambiguity in adults and children during intense situations.

Abstract: According to psychological models as well as common intuition, intense positive and negative situations evoke highly distinct emotional expressions. Nevertheless, recent work has shown that when judging isolated faces, the affective valence of winning and losing professional tennis players is hard to differentiate. However, expressions produced by professional athletes during publicly broadcasted sports events may be strategically controlled. To shed light on this matter we examined if ordinary people's spontaneous facial expressions evoked during highly intense situations are diagnostic for the situational valence. In Experiment 1 we compared reactions with highly intense positive situations (surprise soldier reunions) versus highly intense negative situations (terror attacks). In Experiment 2, we turned to children and compared facial reactions with highly positive situations (e.g., a child receiving a surprise trip to Disneyland) versus highly negative situations (e.g., a child discovering her parents ate up all her Halloween candy). The results demonstrate that facial expressions of both adults and children are often not diagnostic for the valence of the situation. These findings demonstrate the ambiguity of extreme facial expressions and highlight the importance of context in everyday emotion perception. (PsycINFO Database Record

Affect and the archive, archives and their affects: an introduction to the special issue

Abstract: Affect and the Archive, Archives and their Affects: An Introduction to the Special Issue In recent decades, affect (both as a verb and as a noun) has become a major focus of fields as diverse as psychology and psychoanalysis, neuroscience and critical theory. There is no singular cross-cutting definition of affect. It may, for example, be approached clinically, phenomenologically, or critically. One goal of this special issue, therefore, has been to draw together and elucidate some of these different disciplinary understandings and point to their potential for research and practice in the archival field. Arguing that emotions are innate at all evolutionary levels and in all animals, including humans, psychologist Robert Plutchik's influential classification approach identified eight primary emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust and joy. He represented these emotions, their intensity, the relationships between them, and the ways in which they can co-occur to form derivative emotions on his ‘Wheel of Emotions’ (1980; 2001). His approach has generated a rich continuing research engagement around the affective and the human psyche. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on Silvan Tompkins’ psychobiology of differential affects drew from critical and cultural theory as well as from the sciences. Her research is often identified as seminal in precipitating interest in affect on the part of cultural theorists. These scientific and cultural theory approaches do come together in works such as Sedgwick’s; however, the genealogy of the study of affect in the humanities and social sciences is distinct from that in the more clinical and scientific fields. Since the 1990s, in what has been dubbed ‘the affective turn,’ cultural theorists of affect have presented alternatives to the psychoanalytic approach to affect. They assert that affects, emotions and feelings are legitimate and powerful objects of critical scholarly inquiry and exist in fraught relation to each other. By contrast, in other disciplinary and professional spaces the terms ‘affect,’ ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’ may be used with much less discursive tension or definitional precision, and even interchangeably. Notwithstanding such differences and divergences, many of these fields are increasingly engaging not only with the record or the Archive as theoretical constructs, but also with actual records and archives. Another goal for this special issue, therefore, has been to begin to probe what the archival field might offer that would cross-inform understandings of and debates about the nature, role and effects of affect in such diverse fields as psychology, neuroscience and critical theory. The archival field historically has had a central preoccupation with the actual and the tangible. Many practitioners and theorists continue to evince a profound distrust of stances that seem less than objective and of aspects relating to records and archives that invoke affective responses. And yet, in recent years a growing number of authors in the archival literature have been focusing on some of the emotions represented on Plutchik’s Wheel (e.g., sadness, trust) and/or engaging with treatments of affect emanating out of such fields as cultural studies, gender studies, Indigenous studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, psychology and trauma studies (e.g., Adami 2009; DiVeglia 2010; Caswell in press; Caswell and Cifor in press; Caswell, Cifor and Ramirez in press; Cifor in press; Caswell and Gilliland 2015; Carbone 2015; Faulkhead 2008; Gilliland 2014 and 2015; Halilovich 2013 and 2014; Harris 2014;

Naomi Sykes: Beastly Questions. Animal Answers to Archaeological Issues

Abstract: Having been a long-time admirer of Naomi Sykes’ work, and in particular of her ground-breaking and influential The Norman Conquest: A Zooarchaeological Perspective (2007), it was no surprise to fin...

TSentiment: On gamifying Twitter sentiment analysis

Abstract: Social media platforms contain interesting information that can be used to directly measure people' feelings and, thanks to the use of communication technologies, also to geographically locate these feelings. Unfortunately, the understanding is not as easy as one may think. Indeed, the large volume of data makes the manual approach impractical and the diversity of language combined with the brevity of the texts makes the automatic approach quite complicated. In this paper, we consider the gamification approach to sentimentally classify tweets and we propose TSentiment, a game with a purpose that uses human beings to classify the polarity of tweets (e.g., positive, negative, neutral) and their sentiment (e.g., joy, surprise, sadness, etc.). We created a dataset of more than 65,000 tweets, we developed a Web-based game and we asked students to play the game. Obtained results showed that the game approach was well accepted and thus it can be useful in scenarios where the identification of people' feelings may bring benefits to decision making processes.

Responses to Critiques on Machine Learning of Criminality Perceptions (Addendum of arXiv:1611.04135)

Abstract: In November 2016 we submitted to arXiv our paper "Automated Inference on Criminality Using Face Images". It generated a great deal of discussions in the Internet and some media outlets. Our work is only intended for pure academic discussions; how it has become a media consumption is a total surprise to us. Although in agreement with our critics on the need and importance of policing AI research for the general good of the society, we are deeply baffled by the ways some of them mispresented our work, in particular the motive and objective of our research.

The importance of suspense and surprise in entertainment demand: Evidence from Wimbledon☆

Abstract: This paper empirically examines how suspense and surprise affect the demand for entertainment. We use a tennis tournament, the Wimbledon Championships, as a natural laboratory. This setting allows us to both operationalize suspense and surprise by using the audience's beliefs regarding the outcome of the match and observe the demand for live entertainment using TV audience figures. Our match fixed effects estimates of 8563 minute-by-minute observations from 80 men's singles matches between 2009 and 2014 show that both suspense and surprise are drivers of media entertainment demand. In general, surprise seems to be more important in this regard than suspense, and both factors matter more during a match's later moments. We discuss important implications for the design of entertainment content to maximize entertainment demand.

Area studies and geography: Trajectories and manifesto

Abstract: We introduce the following set of essays on reformatting the relationship between area studies and geography and reflect on our individual and collective negotiation of this relationship. This leads us to revisit some key area studies’ controversies and agendas, notably strategies for comparison. Drawing on the work of Benedict Anderson and other comparatively minded scholars, we advocate staging comparisons in terms of difference/similarity, expectancy/surprise, present/past and familiarity/strangeness.

Three-Year-Olds Express Suspense when an Agent Approaches a Scene with a False Belief.

Abstract: Research on early false belief understanding has entirely relied on affect-neutral measures such as judgments (standard tasks), attentional allocation (looking duration, preferential looking, anticipatory looking), or active intervention. We used a novel, affective measure to test whether preschoolers affectively anticipate another's misguided acts. In two experiments, 3-year-olds showed more expressions of suspense (by, e.g. brow furrowing or lip biting) when they saw an agent approach a scene with a false as opposed to a true belief (Experiment 1) or ignorance (Experiment 2). This shows that the children anticipated the agent's surprise and disappointment when encountering reality. The findings suggest that early implicit knowledge of false beliefs includes anticipations of the affective implications of erring. This vital dimension of beliefs should no longer be ignored in research on early theory of mind.

Distinction between fear and surprise: an interpretation-independent test of the perceptual-attentional limitation hypothesis

Abstract: The perceptual-attentional limitation hypothesis posits that the confusion between emotional facial expressions of fear and surprise may be due to their visual similarity, with shared muscle movements. In Experiment 1 full face images of fear and surprise varying as a function of distinctiveness (mouth index, brow index, or both indices) were displayed in a gender oddball task. Experiment 2, in a similar task, directed attention toward the eye or mouth region with a blurring technique. The current two studies used response time and event-related potentials (ERP) to test the perceptual-attentional limitation hypothesis. While ERP results for Experiment 1 suggested that individuals may not have perceived a difference between the emotional expressions in any of the conditions, response time results suggested that individuals processed a difference between fear and surprise when a distinctive cue was in the mouth. With directed attention in Experiment 2, ERP results indicated that individuals were cap...

Sensemaking following surprise in the cockpit--a re-framing problem

Abstract: Re-framing is the process by which a person "fills the gap" between what is expected and what has been observed, that is, to try and make sense of what is going on following a surprise. It is an active and adaptive process guided by expectations, which are based on knowledge and experience. In this article, surprise situations in cockpit operations are examined by investigating the re-framing process. The results show difficulties that pilots have in re-framing following surprise, including the identification of subtle cues and managing uncertainties regarding automated systems, coping with multiple goals, tasks and narrow time frames and identifying an appropriate action. A crew-aircraft sensemaking model is presented, outlining core concepts of re-framing processes and sensemaking activities. Based on the findings, three critical areas are identified that deserve further attention to improve pilot abilities to cope with unexpected events; (1) identification of what enables and obstructs re-framing, (2) training to build frames and develop re-framing strategies and (3) control strategies as part of the re-framing process.