Surprise

About: Surprise is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4371 publications have been published within this topic receiving 99386 citations.

Children's prototypic facial expressions during emotion-eliciting conversations with their mothers.

Abstract: Despite theoretical claims that emotions are primarily communicated through prototypic facial expressions, empirical evidence is surprisingly scarce. This study aimed to (a) test whether children produced more components of a prototypic emotional facial expression during situations judged or self-reported to involve the corresponding emotion than situations involving other emotions (termed "intersituational specificity"), (b) test whether children produced more components of the prototypic expression corresponding to a situation's judged or self-reported emotion than components of other emotional expressions (termed "intrasituational specificity"), and (c) examine coherence between children's self-reported emotional experience and observers' judgments of children's emotions. One hundred and 20 children (ages 7-9) were video-recorded during a discussion with their mothers. Emotion ratings were obtained for children in 441 episodes. Children's nonverbal behaviors were judged by observers and coded by FACS-trained researchers. Children's self-reported emotion corresponded significantly to observers' judgments of joy, anger, fear, and sadness but not surprise. Multilevel modeling results revealed that children produced joy facial expressions more in joy episodes than nonjoy episodes (supporting intersituational specificity for joy) and more joy and surprise expressions than other emotional expressions in joy and surprise episodes (supporting intrasituational specificity for joy and surprise). However, children produced anger, fear, and sadness expressions more in noncorresponding episodes and produced these expressions less than other expressions in corresponding episodes. Findings suggest that communication of negative emotion during social interactions-as indexed by agreement between self-report and observer judgments-may rely less on prototypic facial expressions than is often theoretically assumed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Qualitative and Quantitative Effects of Surprise: (Mis)estimates, Rationales, and Feedback-Induced Preference Changes While Considering Abortion

Abstract: Qualitative and Quantitative Effects of Surprise: (Mis)estimates, Rationales, and Feedback-Induced Preference Changes While Considering Abortion Jennifer Garcia de Osuna (jmgdo@berkeley.edu) 1 Michael Ranney (ranney@cogsci.berkeley.edu) Janek Nelson (jamin@socrates.berkeley.edu) University of California, *Graduate School of Education, 4533 Tolman Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720 this general hypothesis about (especially surprising) minimalist interventions––for instance, that a single, germane, critical number may foster conceptual change. Some studies have noted that learning related base rate values (seeds) affects one’s estimates (e.g., about spatial judgments or populations; Brown & Siegler, 1996; Brown, 2002, etc.). While intuitions about real world quantities are often incorrect (Brown, 2002), exposure to base rates increases the accuracy of one’s estimates on closely related topics, and the benefits of such exposure can have lasting effects even months later (Brown & Siegler, 1996). Little is known, though, about the effects of base rate queries and feedback on preference/policy formation and change, so we suggest three “ifs.” 1) If intuitions about real world numbers are often flawed, then they are likely being used to create anomalous or skewed personal policies among people. 2) If feedback can correct these intuitions, such feedback might affect individuals’ policies. 3) If people are generally biased toward evidence (and they are; e.g., Schank & Ranney, 1991), then giving them factual, numeric feedback––say, the U.S. abortion rate, our main example––should affect conceptions and interpretations about the abortion rate, and thus affect both personal policies on abortion and the explanations supplied when justifying their policies. Among other questions, we seek to answer the following: Can supplying factual, numeric information about abortion markedly change one’s abortion policy? Does receiving the actual rate as feedback affect the Points of View (POVs) by which people reason about abortion? Most such POVs (see below), involve moral or ideological reasoning aspects; religion plays a role, as well. (Space constraints prohibit reviewing the vast abortion literature here, e.g., Bernas & Stein, 2001, and we seek to focus on more paradigm- relevant aspects, in any case.) We explore and measure phenomena of these sorts using a novel paradigm, Numerically Driven Inferencing (NDI; Ranney et al, 2001), and one of NDI’s central empirical methods: EPIC (Estimate, Preference, Incorporate, and Change; cf. Lurie & Ranney, 2003, who introduced PEIC and IC as complementary methods). Such analytic frames allow us to study both estimates of, and dynamically changing preferences about, base rates (e.g., Munnich, Ranney, Nelson, Garcia de Osuna & Brazil, 2003). NDI also represents an emerging coherentist framework in which numbers are the “tips of the iceberg” of a person’s thinking about a network of (magnitude-relevant) evidential and hypothetical propositions. A prime aspect of NDI’s paradigmatic novelty is in its elicitation of what people prefer a quantity to be; it is further unique in its analysis of Abstract The Numerically Driven Inferencing (NDI) paradigm, and one of its methods, EPIC (Estimate, Prefer, Incorporate, and Change), are used to study both one’s estimates and the effects of numeric feedback on one’s personal policies (herein, about abortion). Both quantitatively and qualitatively, 92 undergraduates offered estimates and preferences for the legal U.S. abortion rate, explaining and justifying them. After receiving the (usually, quite surprising) true rate as feedback, they provided another (typically changed) preference-and- rationale. Results show that people vastly underestimated the abortion rate, and largely advocated decreases in it––both pre- and post-feedback. Feedback caused most of those who initially wanted no change in the abortion rate both to abandon the status quo and change preference-justifications; after feedback, two thirds of these students preferred a rate decrease, while the rest preferred an increase. Although many researchers hold that belief revision and conceptual change are quite difficult to elicit, these and other results show dramatic effects of simple base rate feedback on policy evaluation. Our findings highlight the importance of having and using data when reasoning about society-engaging topics such as abortion rates. This experiment represents a new way to study numerically-based reasoning that includes the subjective natures of our personal beliefs and social lives. Please answer this question: “As a percentage of the current U.S. population, what is its legal immigration rate?” Does a typical response of 10% (Ranney, Cheng, Garcia de Osuna & Nelson, 2001) sound right? The true value is about thirty- fold less––only 0.3%. Does (or ought) this datum alter your immigration preference––your personal policy––some? Common sense may suggest that beliefs, decisions, and rationales will (or should) change with new information, but literatures from science learning to attitude change (e.g., from evolution or inertia to executions or diversity; Ranney et al., 2001), suggest that people are often unmoved by new data. Classical economics even suggests that preferences are exogenous (e.g., from estimates; Lurie & Ranney, 2003). The Theory of Explanatory Coherence and its models (e.g., ECHO) describe a set of principles that guide belief evaluation and revision. Two such principles are that we (a) weigh evidence more strongly than conjecture, and (b) accept propositions explained more parsimoniously (Ranney & Thagard, 1988; Read & Marcus-Newhall, 1993; Schank & Ranney, 1991; Thagard, 1989). True base rates, then, would seem to represent parsimonious evidence (relative to a host of instances or anecdotes) and thus be (1) weighted heavily in one’s reasoning about an issue and (2) evaluated as quite acceptable. The present paper explores aspects of The order of the first two authors is alphabetical. *For J. Nelson’s address, substitute in “Department of Psychology, 3510 Tolman Hall.”

Surprise and Unexpectedness in Flying: Database Reviews and Analyses

Abstract: This database search and evaluation was performed to ascertain what types of situations pilots consider surprising or unexpected. The purpose of the investigation was to determine if natural categories of events emerge from the existing accident, incident, and event reporting data commensurate with the current operational and research focus concerned with unexpected events and aviation safety. The underlying question was whether the involvement of surprise or unexpectedness in events may be a precursor to a loss of attention, increased workload, or other interruptions of ongoing processes, which may then contribute to an unwanted outcome of a maneuver, or an entire flight as revealed in these database reports. The study was also conducted to facilitate the development of a conceptual framework for the study of unexpected events in aviation.

"Only" as a Mirative Particle

Abstract: It is argued that the semantics of only can be reduced to only being a particle that expresses surprise at the small size of a quantity It follows from the expression of this surprise that the host sentence must define a quantity, ie have an exhaustive interpretation and that the complete sentence weakly presupposes that the quantity would be larger The paper argues that the expression of surprise is the key to the pragmatic properties of only-sentences, suffices for explaining the status of the host (a non-cancellable presupposition) and can be the basis of an account of only if