ABSTRACT: Affect is considered by most contempo-rary theories to be postcognitive, that is, to occur only after considerable cognitive operations have been ac-complished. Yet a number of experimental results on preferences, attitudes, impression formation, and de-_ cision making, as well as some clinical phenomena, suggest that affective judgments may be fairly inde-pendent of, and precede in time, the sorts of percep-tual and cognitive operations commonly assumed to be the basis of these affective judgments. Affective re-actions to stimuli are often the very first reactions of the organism, and for lower organisms they are the dominant reactions. Affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding, are made with greater confidence than cognitive judg-

Happiness is generally considered to be an ultimate goal in life; virtually everybody wants to be happy. The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 takes it as a self-evident truth that the “pursuit of happiness” is an “unalienable right”, comparable to life and liberty. It follows that economics is – or should be – about individual happiness. In particular, the question is how do economic growth, unemployment and inflation, as well as institutional factors such as good governance, affect individual well-being? In addition to this intrinsic interest, there are three major reasons for economists to consider happiness. The first is economic policy. At the micro-level, it is often impossible to make a Pareto-optimal proposal, because a social action entails costs for some individuals. Hence an evaluation of the net effects, in terms of individual utilities, is needed. On an aggregate level, economic policy must deal with trade-offs, especially those between unemployment and

Virtual reality (VR) is typically defined in terms of technological hardware. This paper attempts to cast a new, variable-based definition of virtual reality that can be used to classify virtual reality in relation to other media. The defintion of virtual reality is based on concepts of "

www.bcs-hci.org.uk Find out what happened at HCI2004 Interacting with … music aeroplanes petrol pumps Published by the British HCI Group • ISSN 1351-119X 1

Abstract not found

What working memory is for Citation for published version: Logie, RH 1997, 'What working memory is for ' Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol 20, no. 1, pp. 28. Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer

…Truth [is] being involved in an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline…truth is not in the conclusions so much as in the process of conversation itself…if you want to be in truth you must be in conversation. Parker Palmer

researchers have long wished to build robots and their cousins called agents that seem to think feel and live These are creatures with whom you d want to share some of your life as with a companion or a social pet For instance in his

in terms? One tradition in Western thought has viewed emotions as disorganized interruptions of mental activity, so potentially disruptive that they must be controlled. Writing in the first century B.C., Publilius Syrus stated, "Rule your feelings, lest your feelings rule you " [1}.

in the daily work environments. Awareness may lead to informal interactions, spontaneous connections, and the development of shared cultures-all important aspects of maintaining working relationships which are denied to groups distributed across multiple sites.