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Mental Images (mental + image)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences37%

Selected Abstracts

Formalisation and Use of Experience in Forest Fires Management

JOURNAL OF CONTINGENCIES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2001
Jean-Luc Wybo
This paper presents a study of the learning process in emergency management with an application to forest fire fighting. The first part presents the methodology used to determine the mental image of fire fighting management and to propose a model of representation of the individual experience gained during operations. The second part introduces a method to capitalise experience of fire management, which uses a prototype of GIS application. The third part of the article presents the different types of support that can be provided by a collective memory of individual experience and a reasoning method that includes this experience to provide several levels of support to forest fire managers. This study was undertaken in co-operation with organisations in Canada and Spain. [source]

The Wrong Mental Image of Settlement

NEGOTIATION JOURNAL, Issue 1 2001
Christopher Honeyman
Negotiation participants usually think of "settlement" as the official end of a coflict; the author points out that this mental image is inaccurate in many situations, where a settlement is followed by additional eruptions of conflict. He uses the recent Good Friday peace accord in Northern Ireland as an example of the continuing nature of many conflicts; theorizes as to why we have this incorrect mental image in general; and suggests ways we can present a more accurate representatin of a conflict's life cycle. [source]

Objective emotional assessment of tactile hair properties and their modulation by different product worlds

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COSMETIC SCIENCE, Issue 3 2002
W. Boucsein
Synopsis Tactile properties of cosmetic products constitute weak stimuli and thus can be expected to be easily modified by mental images. In order to enhance an intended positive-emotion-inducing effect of such a product, its experience can be embedded in a certain ,world' that generates a positive emotional imagination. The present study investigated such an influence in 12 males and 12 females, half of each being laymen and experts in sensory assessment. Two product worlds (emotional and technical) and three different hair samples, two of them treated with different shampoos and an untreated one as control, were presented to each subject in counter-balanced order of all six combinations. An objective emotional assessment using a psychophysiological technique developed in an earlier study was applied and compared with a traditional sensory assessment. Among the physiological measures, peripheral blood volume and facial muscular activity were the most sensitive in revealing effects of and interactions between the product worlds and hair samples. A multivariate evaluation of the physiological data revealed three discriminant functions that explained 78.4% of the total variance and enabled a re-classification considerably better than chance. The first discriminant function clearly separated the treated from the untreated hair samples which was not possible by subjective ratings or traditional sensory assessment. The two other discriminant functions comprised a hedonistic and a product world factor. The emotional product world exerted the largest influence in case of the weakest tactile differences between the hair samples, and its influence was larger on laymen than on experts. Gender effects were most prominent in the subjective domain. In conclusion, multivariate psychophysiological methodology is superior to traditional sensory assessment in revealing subtle differences in the tactile perception of cosmetic products. Résumé Les propriétés tactiles des produits cosmétiques constituent de faibles stimuli, de sorte que l'on peut s'attendre à ce qu'elles soient facilement modifiées par des images mentales. Afin d'intensifier l'effet intentionnellement incitant à une émotion positive envers un tel produit, son expérience peut être introduite dans un certain ,environnement' qui engendrerait une imagination émotionelle positive. La présente étude a testé telle influence sur 12 hommes et 12 femmes, la moitié de chaque groupe étant noninitiée et l'autre experte en évaluation sensorielle. Nous avons présentéà chaque sujet, par ordre contrebalancé des six possibilités, deux ,environnements' du produit (émotif et technique), et trois différents échantillons capillaires dont deux où les cheveux étaient traités par différents shampooings, et, pour le contrôle, un échantillon de cheveux nontraités. Nous avons employé une évaluation émotionelle objective par une technique psychophysiologique développée durant une étude précédente et l'avons comparée à une évaluation sensorielle traditionnelle. Parmi les mesures physiologiques, le volume sanguin périphérique et les activités des muscles faciaux étaient exceptionnellement sensibles à manifester les effets des ,environnements' du produit, et des échantillons, ainsi que les interactions entre eux. Une évaluation multivariante des données physiologiques dévoila trois fonctions discriminantes expliquant les 78.4% de l'ensemble de la variance, et permettant une re-classification considérablement meilleure que le hasard. La première fonction discriminante a nettement distingué les échantillons de cheveux traités de ceux nontraités; ce qui n'était pas possible à travers une évaluation subjective ou des mesures sensorielles traditionnelles. Les deux autres fonctions discriminantes comportaient un facteur hédoniste et d'environnement du produit. Dans le cas des plus faibles différences tactiles entre les échantillons capillaires, l'environnement émotif du produit a exercé plus d'influence sur les noninitiés que sur les experts. Les effets du genre humain étaient surtout marquants dans le domaine subjectif. En conclusion, pour dévoiler les subtiles différences dans la perception tactile des produits cosmétiques, la méthodologie psychophysiologique multivariante est supérieure à l'évaluation sensorielle traditionnelle. [source]

Imagining Objects and Imagining Experiences

MIND & LANGUAGE, Issue 4 2002
Paul Noordhof
A number of philosophers have argued in favour of the Dependency Thesis: if a subject sensorily imagines an F then he or she sensorily imagines from the inside perceptually experiencing an F in the imaginary world. They claim that it explains certain important features of imaginative experience, in brief: the fact that it is perspectival, the fact that it does not involve presentation of sensory qualities and the fact that mental images can serve a number of different imaginings. I argue that the Dependency Thesis is false and that, in any event, it does not have the explanatory credentials claimed for it. Some of the features of imaginative experience are incorrectly specified, namely the absence of presentation of sensory qualities. With a more precise idea of what we need to explain, I argue that the explanation should proceed by noting that imagination and perception have phenomenally similar contents and that this is to be explained in terms of the similar kinds of representations in play. I trace the consequences of my discussion for disjunctivist theories of perception, Berkeleian Idealism and the characterisation of knowing what an experience is like. [source]

The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2010
T. M. Luhrmann
ABSTRACT, In this article, we use a combination of ethnographic data and empirical methods to identify a process called "absorption," which may be involved in contemporary Christian evangelical prayer practice (and in the practices of other religions). The ethnographer worked with an interdisciplinary team to identify people with a proclivity for "absorption." Those who seemed to have this proclivity were more likely to report sharper mental images, greater focus, and more unusual spiritual experience. The more they prayed, the more likely they were to have these experiences and to embrace fully the local representation of God. Our results emphasize learning, a social process to which individuals respond in variable ways, and they suggest that interpretation, proclivity, and practice are all important in understanding religious experience. This approach builds on but differs from the approach to religion within the culture-and-cognition school. [source]

Putting the Image Back in Imagination

PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2001
AMY KIND
Despite their intuitive appeal and a long philosophical history, imagery-based accounts of the imagination have fallen into disfavor in contemporary discussions. the philosophical pressure to reject such accounts seems to derive from two distinct sources. First, the fact that mental images have proved difficult to accommodate within a scientific conception of mind has led to numerous attempts to explain away their existence, and this in turn has led to attempts to explain the phenomenon of imagining without reference to such ontologically dubious entities as mental images. Second, even those philosophers who accept mental images in their ontology have worried about what seem to be fairly obvious examples of imaginings that occur without imagery. In this paper, I aim to relieve both these points of philosophical pressure and, in the process, develop a new imagery-based account of the imagination: the imagery model. [source]

Transfer of training emotionally biased interpretations

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 7 2003
Paula T. Hertel
Non-anxious college students first performed a semantic-judgement task that was designed to train either threat-related or threat-unrelated interpretations of threat-ambiguous homographs (e.g. mug). Next they performed an ostensibly separate transfer task of constructing personal mental images for single words, in a series that included new, threat-ambiguous homographs. In two experiments, the number of threat-related interpretations in the transfer task significantly increased following threat-related experience during the training phase, compared to other training conditions. We conclude that interpretive biases typically shown by anxious people can be established in non-anxious students in ways that generalize to novel tasks and materials. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]