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From infancy, children show heightened interest in events that are impossible or improbable, relative to likely events. Do young children represent impossible and improbable events as points on a continuum of possibility, or do they instead treat them as categorically distinct? Here, we compared 2-and 3-y- old children's learning (N = 335) following nearly identical events that were equi-probable, improbable, or impossible. We found that children learned significantly better following impossible than possible events, no matter how unlikely. We conclude that young children distinguish between the impossible and the merely improbable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective and cognitive processes may be jointly researched to better understand mathematics learning, paying special interest to emotions related to knowledge acquisition. However, it remains necessary to explore these processes in studies linked to the education of pre-service mathematics teachers. This study aims to characterize epistemic emotions in different practices linked to the practice of mathematics teaching: problem-solving, anticipating what would happen with the students and reflecting on classroom implementation. It considers the theory of Mathematical Working Spaces to describe the mathematical and cognitive dimensions generated by epistemic emotions, paying special attention to the cognition-affect interaction and the workspace created. The results indicate that the epistemic emotions of the pre-service mathematics teachers associated with the distinct practices were different. Differences are observed in the interaction between emotions and cognitive epistemic actions, depending on whether the pre-service mathematics teachers analyze them within the framework of their own solving or anticipate them in their students. This reveals how personal work relates to what is considered to be suitable for students. Specifically, certain antecedents and consequences have been specified for the emotions of surprise and boredom in relation to the characteristics of the optimization problems and the cognitive activity of the subject when solving them. These results highlight the need to enhance the education of pre-service mathematics teachers through training that helps regulate their epistemic emotions and model effective strategies for regulating their own emotions and those of their students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore in detail the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of two understudied discourse markers of Upper Austrian German: ma indicates surprise, while geh indicates a discrepancy between speaker and addressee. In terms of their context of use, these discourse markers, which are restricted to turn-initial position are — at first sight — similar to the sentence-internal discourse particles leicht and doch. It is shown that these four markers display systematic similarities and differences, which invites the conclusion that their distribution is regulated by grammatical knowledge. An analysis in terms of Wiltschko's (2021) Interactional Spine Hypothesis is developed according to which ma and geh are interactional pro-forms (ProGroundP) which mark a reaction to the speaker's or the addressee's current epistemic state, respectively. In contrast, leicht and doch are analysed as (covertly) associating with the head of the grounding phrases thereby indicating whether or not the propositional content is in the interlocutor's ground. • Introduces new generalizations regarding some discourse markers in Austrian German. • Develops syntactic analysis that captures distribution, interpretation, and context of use of these discourse markers. • Supports the framework of the interactional spine hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The frontal eye field (FEF) plays a well-established role in the control of visual attention. The strength of an FEF neuron’s response to a visual stimulus presented in its receptive field is enhanced if the stimulus captures spatial attention by virtue of its salience. A stimulus can be rendered salient by cognitive factors as well as by physical attributes. These include surprise. The aim of the present experiment was to determine whether surprise-induced salience would result in enhanced visual-response strength in the FEF. Toward this end, we monitored neuronal activity in two male monkeys while presenting first a visual cue predicting with high probability that the reward delivered at the end of the trial would be good or bad (large or small) and then a visual cue announcing the size of the impending reward with certainty. The second cue usually confirmed but occasionally violated the expectation set up by the first cue. Neurons responded more strongly to the second cue when it violated than when it confirmed expectation. The increase in the firing rate was accompanied by a decrease in spike-count correlation as expected from capture of attention. Although both good surprise and bad surprise induced enhanced firing, the effects appeared to arise from distinct mechanisms as indicated by the fact that the bad-surprise signal appeared at a longer latency than the good-surprise signal and by the fact that the strength of the two signals varied independently across neurons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mysterious consumption items represent products that are chosen or purchased without knowing the exact nature of the product(s). In contrast to the widely accepted notion of uncertainty aversion, the present research shows that consumers prefer uncertainty over certainty in the context of mysterious consumption. Across a variety of products (stress balls, ice cream, songs, teas, snacks, hotel rooms, masks, rental cars), participants preferred mysterious consumption items over non-mysterious consumption items of equal expected value. The value of mysterious consumption lies at least in part in the uncertainty about the nature of the outcome among objectively similar outcomes. Specifically, the uncertainty around horizontally differentiated outcomes (i.e. outcomes that differ as a matter of taste) in the case of mysterious consumption focuses consumers on the positive side of uncertainty: the opportunity to be surprised. The preference for uncertainty is not observed when the possible outcomes are vertically differentiated (i.e. outcomes that differ in objective superiority, as is the case in existing demonstrations of uncertainty) or when horizontal uncertainty is reduced to a degree that diminishes the ability to be surprised. The findings reconcile literatures on surprise and uncertainty aversion and help explain mysterious consumption as a substantive phenomenon in the marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how unexpected exogenous events, labelled as suprises , affect the utility of experience goods reported in online rating systems. Using over 300,000 reviews of accommodation services listed on Booking.com, the research investigates whether online ratings capture the impact of surprises related to meteorological conditions and whether they create additional biases in service evaluation. The study finds that sudden changes in weather conditions have a significant impact on experienced utility, with the effect varying based on the direction of the surprise. Additionally, in line with the hedonic adaption theory, we find that the duration of consumption moderates the surprise effect, reducing its impact on reported utility. • Online reviews signal product/service quality. • External factors may influence consumers' quality assessments. • We perform an empirical analysis of unexpected externalities on experience goods evaluations. • Positive/negative surprises have asymmetric impacts on reported utility. • Surprise effects on utility are moderated by the consumption span. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we offer some reflections on the concept of surprise by questioning its place and role in the practice of analytic processes. After discussing some elements related to the preconditions for surprise to occur in the analytic framework, in particular the dialectic between predictability and unpredictability, we examine the particularities of the mental state that favors states of surprise by drawing on the notions of »negative capability« and »selected fact«. We would like to propose a typology of moments of surprise that may be encountered in the analytical framework and that reveals their heterogeneous and polymorphic dimensions. Surprise can indeed vary in its temporality and intensity and can be experienced by both the analyst and the analysand separately or together. Surprise thus appears as an expression of unconscious meaning according to a reorganization of its relation to defense mechanisms such as splitting or repression. It could also maintain variable relationships with other sensory impressions such as astonishment, horror, and disconcerting strangeness. We further propose to consider surprise as an essential feature of the symbolization process to which the analyst pays particular attention. From this perspective, it appears as an expression of an encounter with the unexpected at the interface between the inside and the outside, between pleasure and displeasure, which is why it is so central to the work of psychic integration. It therefore occupies an essential place in analytic work and is catalyzed by the occurrence of transference and free association. Finally, the article concludes with some thoughts on surprise at the intersection of psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and epistemology, drawing in particular on Karl Friston’s work on the Bayesian brain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short article is divided into two parts. The first part explains how the concept of ›surprise‹ is understood in theoretical neuroscience today. The second part shows how remarkably closely the modern neuroscientific conception of the brain maps onto Freud’s classical metapsychological model of the mind. It shows also how the modern concepts expand upon some of Freud’s original concepts. The essential mechanism of surprise is that it reduces confidence in an existing belief about the world, and that this brings the belief in question to consciousness. However, special considerations apply to repressed unconscious beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research exploring the role of belief dynamics for consumers in the entertainment industry has largely ignored the fact that emotional reactions are a function of the content and a consumer's disposition towards certain protagonists. By analyzing 19 m tweets in combination with in-play information for 380 football matches played in the English Premier League we contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we present a setting for testing how belief dynamics drive behavior which is characterized by several desirable features for empirical research. Second, we present an approach for detecting fans and haters of a club as well as neutrals via sentiment revealed in Tweets. Third, by looking at behavioral responses to the temporal resolution of uncertainty during a game, we offer a fine-grained empirical test for the popular uncertainty-of-outcome hypothesis in sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers and psychologists sometimes categorize emotions like surprise and curiosity as specifically epistemic. Is there some reasonably unified and interesting class of emotions here? If so, what unifies it? This paper proposes and defends an evaluative account of epistemic emotions: What it is to be an epistemic emotion is to have fittingness conditions that distinctively involve some epistemic evaluation. We argue that this view has significant advantages over alternative proposals and is a promising way to identify a limited and interesting class of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this article, we address the issue concerning the gestural patterns in expressing surprise and disapproval across various languages and cultures. The results obtained so far point to an interesting, and in a sense rather surprising, uniformity. We consider two types of special questions: counter-expectational questions expressing surprise and surprise-disapproval questions, i.e., sentences expressing surprise with a negative orientation, and adopt an experimental design involving sentence repetition and spontaneous production. We focus on the realization of these sentences in Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, which we compare with the results previously obtained for Italian and replicated for Neapolitan, Spanish and German. Our research is based on the Minimalist theoretical framework developed by Chomsky and scholars in the tradition of generative grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors quantify the relative importance of beliefs-based suspense and surprise measures in the entertainment preferences of viewers of Twitch, the largest online video game streaming platform. Using detailed viewership and game statistics data from broadcasts of tournaments of a popular video game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the authors compute measures of suspense and surprise for a rational viewer. They then develop and estimate a stylized utility model that underlies viewers' decisions to both join and leave a game stream. The method used enables the authors to causally identify the direct effect of suspense and surprise on viewers' utilities, separating it from other sources of entertainment value (e.g., team skill) and from indirect/supply-side effects (e.g., word of mouth, advertising). The authors show that suspense enters a viewer's utility but find little evidence of the effect of surprise. The magnitudes imply that a one-standard-deviation increase in round-level suspense decreases the probability of leaving a stream by.27 percentage points. The authors find no detectable effect of suspense and surprise on the decision to join a stream, ruling out indirect effects. Variation in suspense levels explains 9.2% of the observed range of the evolution of a stream's viewership. The authors use these estimates to evaluate counterfactual game and platform designs. They show that historical updates to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game rules have increased tournament viewership by 4.1%, that rules can be further modified to increase viewership, and that alternative platform designs that inform joining users of games' scores will additionally increase overall viewership by 1.3%. Together, these results illustrate the value of the authors' method as a general tool that content producers and platforms can use to evaluate and design media products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In the classical information theoretic framework, information “value” is proportional to how novel/surprising the information is. Recent work building on such notions claimed that false news spreads faster than truth online because false news is more novel and therefore surprising. However, another determinant of surprise, semantic meaning (e.g., information’s consistency or inconsistency with prior beliefs), should also influence value and sharing. Examining sharing behavior on Twitter, we observed separate relations of novelty and belief consistency with sharing. Though surprise could not be assessed in those studies, belief consistency should relate to less surprise, suggesting the relevance of semantic meaning beyond novelty. In two controlled experiments, belief-consistent (vs. belief-inconsistent) information was shared more despite consistent information being the least surprising. Manipulated novelty did not predict sharing or surprise. Thus, classical information theoretic predictions regarding perceived value and sharing would benefit from considering semantic meaning in contexts where people hold pre-existing beliefs.

Generally, beauty has been regarded as an outward expression of elegance and harmony, providing visual pleasure and evoking a sense of aesthetic enjoyment. However, in recent years, a phenomenon called "ugly-cute" has emerged, challenging the conventional standards of beauty by embracing a form of "ugliness" to enhance its appeal. The reasons and mechanisms behind this phenomenon remain largely unexplored so far. This study aims to investigate the role of emotions, such as pleasure, humor, and surprise, in the relationship between ugly-cute characteristics and attractiveness. The findings reveal that general beauty directly generates attractiveness by eliciting pleasurable emotions, whereas ugly-cute memes achieve attractiveness by inducing pleasurable emotions through the mediation of humor. Furthermore, while both "ugly" and "ugly-cute" memes evoke a sense of surprise, that elicited by ugly-cute memes is accompanied by a humorous response, thereby enhancing their attractiveness, whereas the "ugly" memes fail to evoke humor and lack attractiveness. Finally, we discuss the potential implications and practical value of the current research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we aimed to demonstrate how incidental surprise impacts individuals' risk-taking behavior. Previous empirical studies have shown that incidental surprise can influence risk-taking behavior, but the psychological mechanisms behind this phenomenon have not been explored. Based on the appraisal tendency framework, we propose that surprise affects individuals' risk-taking behavior by influencing their level of pleasantness and risk perception. To test our hypothesis, we conducted a study with 79 participants, comparing their pleasantness, risk perception, and risk-taking behavior under different emotions. Our findings strongly indicate that pleasantness and risk perception jointly contributed to a chain mediation effect when positive (negative) surprise prompted participants to become more (less) willing to take risks. Additionally, we also discovered that the effect of negative surprise on risk-taking behavior was moderated by individuals' risk attitudes. Risk-seeking individuals were less affected by negative surprise than risk-averse ones. Overall, this study sheds light on the psychological mechanisms underlying the impact of incidental surprise on individuals' risk-taking behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wounds teach us what we were vulnerable to and what vulnerabilities we may yet bear. But wounds are often met with doubt and disbelief, suggesting that their lessons may be hard to learn. Through an analysis of advocacy movements to believe victims of sexual assault set in conversation with Caravaggio's Incredulity of Thomas, this paper argues for an understanding of vulnerability as part of a process of learning from wounds that is sometimes marked by emotional incredulity, an expression of doubt or denial of what one knows to be true because of the way its realization feels. Emotional incredulity in these circumstances is not a denial of vulnerability that pretends to mastery, but one that expresses the challenge of learning, together, how much we do not know of ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional theories frame curiosity as an intrinsic motivation to obtain information to resolve uncertainty. Recent empirical breakthroughs challenge this perspective and reframe curiosity in terms of the learning process itself: curiosity is sustained when individuals perceive improvements in their performance and actively engage in the process of learning. Unlike previous research, which remained agnostic about the change of curiosity over time, the learning progress framework provides insights into the temporal dynamics of curiosity, shedding light on its fluctuations based on the extent of learning progress individuals make. By integrating the desire to obtain information with the drive to make learning progress, we offer a unified account of curiosity. What drives our curiosity remains an elusive and hotly debated issue, with multiple hypotheses proposed but a cohesive account yet to be established. This review discusses traditional and emergent theories that frame curiosity as a desire to know and a drive to learn, respectively. We adopt a model-based approach that maps the temporal dynamics of various factors underlying curiosity-based exploration, such as uncertainty, information gain, and learning progress. In so doing, we identify the limitations of past theories and posit an integrated account that harnesses their strengths in describing curiosity as a tool for optimal environmental exploration. In our unified account, curiosity serves as a 'common currency' for exploration, which must be balanced with other drives such as safety and hunger to achieve efficient action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While certain musical genres and songs are widely popular, there is still large variability in the music that individuals find rewarding or emotional, even among those with a similar musical enculturation. Interestingly, there is one Western genre that is intended to attract minimal attention and evoke a mild emotional response: elevator music. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that elevator music consistently elicits low pleasure and surprise. Participants reported elevator music as being less pleasurable than music from popular genres, even when participants did not regularly listen to the comparison genre. Participants reported elevator music to be familiar even when they had not explicitly heard the presented song before. Computational and behavioral measures of surprisal showed that elevator music was less surprising, and thus more predictable, than other well‐known genres. Elevator music covers of popular songs were rated as less pleasurable, surprising, and arousing than their original counterparts. Finally, we used elevator music as a control for self‐selected rewarding songs in a proof‐of‐concept physiological (electrodermal activity and piloerection) experiment. Our results suggest that elevator music elicits low emotional responses consistently across Western music listeners, making it a unique control stimulus for studying musical novelty, pleasure, and surprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we introduce a formalism to highlight the role of decision‐making implicit in the setup of early warning systems (EWSs) and its consequences with respect to loss avoidance for end users. The formalism, a close relative of the cost/loss approach, combines EWS verification scores with traditional expressions of risk from the point of view of the user. This formalism articulates in mathematical format many well‐known issues surrounding EWS usage, offering a conceptual anchor for concepts that otherwise may seem to wobble among the multidisciplinary perspectives participating in the EWS chain. This decision model is visually represented in a variation of the popular "performance diagram" used in forecast and warning verification. Our diagram adds to this the perspective of a generic user, in an effort to gain insight into how choices made regarding EWS settings may determine which users benefit from warnings and which do not. Although these results are based on a conceptual model, they are useful to better understand the actual benefits experienced by users and to highlight aspects that may temper unrealistic expectations on EWSs. The recent United Nations initiative to extend EWSs for natural hazards to all nations within 5 years will make EWSs more common and more public. The approach proposed here can be a tool to promote greater transparency and improve the necessary dialog between warning issuers and users in order to reduce loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed to test the assumption that cognitive conflict constitutes part of the mechanism underlying the arousal of epistemic emotions. Specifically, the study investigated potential activation of epistemic emotions (surprise, confusion, curiosity, and wonder) due to cognitive conflict. One hundred fifty-two undergraduate students participated in the study. The tasks were 12 decision-making scenarios depicting dilemmas faced by autonomous (self-driving) cars, such as crossing over or avoiding an obstacle, that may have implications for pedestrians crossing a road. The tasks differed in the implications of the conflicting alternatives. Participants were asked to choose 1 of 2 response options in each scenario and then report, on a 4-point Likert-type scale, their feelings of difficulty and confidence regarding their response and their epistemic emotions. Scenarios posing high cognitive conflict resulted in increased levels of epistemic emotions compared with easily resolved conflicting scenarios. However, the various epistemic emotions followed different patterns of arousal, with confusion being the most affected emotion and surprise being the least affected one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Germany's response to the Russo-Ukrainian war continues to be intensely scrutinised, with much attention focusing on the Zeitenwende debate and Berlin's reluctance to pull its weight in NATO, we know little about how Germany anticipated the outbreak of war. The picture that has emerged is one of significant surprise among German policymakers when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Germany's foreign intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) has been criticised for failing to issue strong warnings, whereas BND officials have argued that their warnings went unheeded. This article contributes to discussions of what intelligence producers and policymakers could have been expected to know by exploring how selected external experts in Germany warned about a Russian attack on Ukraine. By reconstructing open expert assessments of the emerging crisis between 1 November 2021 and 23 February 2022, this article finds that researchers in German think tanks and academia provided a steady flow of timely, accurate and convincing warnings. The findings suggest that external experts are especially well positioned to uncover structural vulnerabilities that threatening actors can exploit, discuss politically inconvenient trends, and offer actionable warnings. This adds to discussions of how external expertise can support intelligence production and crisis decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of deception in military operations has been a key tactic throughout history, and the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive provides a fascinating case study in the art of deception in warfare. This essay delivers an in-depth analysis of the various deceptive tactics employed during the counteroffensive, including concealment of troop maneuvers, misinformation campaigns, and feint attacks. By examining these tactics in detail, the study aims to shed light on the effectiveness of deception in current military operations and to draw lessons for future operations planning. The approach of the case study presented facilitated a comprehensive understanding of how deception was used in the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive, while also facilitating the identification and confirmation of key enduring principles, types, and methods of deception employed by the military forces involved. The essay also sets the stage for discussing the particularities of military deception from a theoretical point of view and how it was employed in the operation, but also its impact on the outcome of the Kharkiv campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to explain why governments are surprised when extreme weather, pandemics and migration crisis hit their own country despite their good knowledge of these global threats. With the help of the contingency concept, the article explores the reasons behind these surprises by introducing a new category of threats that complements the ones in the existing literature on surprise. It adds the concept of 'known--corporally unknown' threats to the list of known-unknowns, unknown-unknowns as a way to emphasize the difference between abstract knowledge of 'facts and figures' (of e.g., global warming) and the acquiring of knowledge through personal, bodily experience (tangere) (of flooding and draughts). The article demonstrates how Swedish decision-makers--despite their good scientific knowledge and warning signals from abroad--were surprised by the migration crisis of 2015 and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 because they had not been in direct touch with massive flows of refugees or pandemics of that scale before. The article ends by discussing new ways of acquiring knowledge about global threats for a deeper, corporally anchored, preparedness for the surprises and contingencies to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The auditory oddball is a mainstay in research on attention, novelty, and sensory prediction. How this task engages subcortical structures like the subthalamic nucleus and substantia nigra pars reticulata is unclear. We administered an auditory OB task while recording single unit activity (35 units) and local field potentials (57 recordings) from the subthalamic nucleus and substantia nigra pars reticulata of 30 patients with Parkinson's disease undergoing deep brain stimulation surgery. We found tone modulated and oddball modulated units in both regions. Population activity differentiated oddball from standard trials from 200 ms to 1000 ms after the tone in both regions. In the substantia nigra, beta band activity in the local field potential was decreased following oddball tones. The oddball related activity we observe may underlie attention, sensory prediction, or surprise-induced motor suppression.

The article is based on a study carried out as part of the Long-Term Organizational Development Plan project by the Center for Security and Military-Strategic Studies of the University of Defense entitled "Armed Conflict". As part of the study, the issue of strategic surprise was analyzed and assessed, the aim of which was to find causal mechanisms and connections between the security of state defense and the phenomenon of surprise in the conditions of the 21st century. The article deals with the issue of surprise and its impact on state defense security. It describes strategic surprise as a principled aspect with implications and impacts on state defense. It examines the issue of surprise as a principle of military art in the context of contemporary strategic thinking.

The relevance of studying the processes of religious consciousness comes from the importance to ensure more coordinated interaction of scientific communities in intercultural communication. The PRC remains one of the key partners of the Russian Federation and partnership requires deeper understanding of the counterpart. This paper analyses social phenomena classified as miracles in Russian and Chinese cultures from the perspective of intercultural communication. To achieve this goal, the authors 1) highlight key theoretical approaches to the study of the semantics of miracle; 2) systematize the available data on key concepts and denotations of the semantics of miracle in Russian culture and supplement existing approaches; 3) establish the key features of the semantics of miracle in Chinese culture; 4) outline approaches to creating a sketch of a universal semantic model of a miracle as an invariant of two cultures; 5) identify the capabilities and boundaries of this model. The research materials included corpuses of national folklore traditions, legal documents, literary and theological works, and scientific (mainly religious) studies. The methodological framework was formed by the approach of N. Luhmann, who defined religion as a variety of forms of the universal anthropological phenomenon of observing of the unknown. Distinguishing descriptions of the first (naive), second (expert) and third (philosophical-synthetic) order, represented by the corresponding languages L1, L2 and L3, allowed to identify the terms traditionally related to the sphere of religion (L1) and to trace their descriptions (L2) and reflection in L1 and L2 within the framework of philosophical and theological writings (L3). As a result, several historically specific interpretations of the concept and the denotations behind it have been identified. They include both universal similarity and local features determined by the historical development of Russian and Chinese societies. For Russia, these features are inextricably linked with the influence of Christianity, where a distinction is made between elitist theological forms and mass believes, often referred to as superstitions. The main lexemes marking the miraculous in Chinese are 奇迹 (qíjì), reflecting the phenomenon of the amazing, surprising; 神迹 (shénjì), applied to the miraculous, God-like, spiritual, but not witches or sorcerers; 妙 (miào) as an aesthetic perception of a miracle, including an incomprehensible mystery; 灵 (líng) marks the supernatural, emanating from the earthly principle yin, therefore associated with folk witchcraft and sorcery. It has been established that in both Russian and Chinese culture, miracle is always combined with a certain worldview (L1), with a complex of ontological statements (L2). Experts (L3) typically turn to the prism of religious disciplines and/or teachings that analyze the correspondence of worldview, ontological constructs and lived religious experience. The sketch of the universal semantic field that makes up the intersecting concepts of Russian and Chinese cultures, obtained as a result of the research, needs further clarification by turning to the sociology of religion and the psychology of religion.

Salient but irrelevant information often captures our attention. To quantify attentional capture in the lab, participants typically complete dozens or hundreds of trials that contain salient distractors. However, presenting distractors frequently may also incidentally introduce a secondary task-set to resist distraction. In everyday life, we typically encounter distractions once, not dozens of times, creating a disconnect between capture in the lab and in the world. Here, we had a simple but important question: how large is capture when participants encounter a salient distractor for the very first time? We used a larger-than-typical sample size combined with a single capture trial (Exp 1 N = 970, Exp 2 N = 1,025), and found that initial capture was ∼9x–15x larger than the average size of capture in typical laboratory tasks (∼370–580 ms). We also found evidence that initial capture was modulated by long- and short-term stimulus history, consistent with emerging theories about how history shapes attention. Our results suggest that participants are surprisingly successful at ignoring distractors in the lab, and that “one-shot” estimates may better reflect the full cost of capture by salient distractors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Previous research has shown that experiencing motion stimuli negatively impacts cognitive performance. Objective: In the current study, we investigate whether this impact relates to Type-II spatial disorientation (SD), to motion stimulus magnitude, or to an interaction of these factors. Method: Stimuli for participants (n = 23) consisted of Earth-vertical yaw rotations on a rotating chair in a completely darkened room. In the surprise condition, the stimulus started with subthreshold acceleration, followed by suprathreshold deceleration to a non-zero velocity, inducing a sensation of rotation that is opposite to the actual rotation revealed when the lights were switched on. In the no-surprise condition, the same changes in velocity were used, but starting from (almost) zero velocity, which induced a sensation of rotation in the same direction as the actual rotation. Participants performed a self-paced arithmetic task and measurement of their cognitive performance started after the environment was revealed. Stimulus magnitude was operationalized through higher or lower peak suprathreshold deceleration. Results: The results revealed that counting speed decreased significantly when participants were surprised, constituting a large effect size. The proportion of counting errors likewise increased significantly when participants were surprised, but only in the high-magnitude condition. Application: The findings suggest that surprise caused by the recognition of SD has an involuntary disruptive effect on cognition, which may impact performance of piloting tasks. These results are relevant when modeling motion stimuli effects on performance, and when developing SD awareness training for pilots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers. It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker's expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project investigates the intonation of canonical (information-seeking) and non-canonical wh-in-situ echo questions conveying repetition and surprise in Northern Peninsular Spanish. Data from 14 female participants were collected via a contextualised elicitation task. The following correlates were examined: (i) the melodic curve of the wh-in-situ question, (ii) the nuclear peak (in Hz), (iii) the wh-tonal range (i.e. the difference between the lowest nuclear Low and the highest boundary High), and (iv) the nuclear contour. Results show that all wh-in-situ questions investigated display similar melodic curves and nuclear contours, but canonical questions have significantly lower nuclear peaks and wh-tonal ranges than non-canonical questions. Echo-repetition and echo-surprise questions also differ in nuclear peak and wh-tonal range. We propose a tentative analysis, whereby canonical in-situ questions have a final H% boundary tone, in contrast to non-canonical questions, which have an extra-High (upstepped) final boundary tone (¡H%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many firms employ marketing tactics, such as surprise boxes, buy-and-reveal deals, random price promotions, and teaser advertisements, in which some information is intentionally undisclosed. Research has examined some of these initiatives, using a broad but often disconnected set of terms, theories, and methods, which we examine and integrate in this conceptual review paper. To lend coherence to the literature and offer a unifying framework for informing marketing practice, we (1) conceptualize these tactics as part of a broader phenomenon referred to as "uncertainty marketing" and define its boundaries, (2) propose and demonstrate that the range of uncertainty marketing tactics can be classified across three types (assortment, promotional, and innovation tactics) and along two core dimensions (stakes and opacity), and (3) examine how firms can obtain a favorable consumer response, thereby deriving testable propositions about consumers' baseline interest in uncertainty marketing tactics and the factors that can affect this interest. We then discuss the implications of applying this framework in practice and close by offering a prioritized agenda for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's recommender systems are criticized for recommending items that are too obvious to arouse users' interests. Therefore, the research community has advocated some "beyond accuracy" evaluation metrics such as novelty, diversity, and serendipity with the hope of promoting information discovery and sustaining users' interests over a long period of time. While bringing in new perspectives, most of these evaluation metrics have not considered individual users' differences in their capacity to experience those "beyond accuracy" items. Open-minded users may embrace a wider range of recommendations than conservative users. In this article, we proposed to use curiosity traits to capture such individual users' differences. We developed a model to approximate an individual's curiosity distribution over different stimulus levels. We used an item's surprise level to estimate the stimulus level and whether such a level is in the range of the user's appetite for stimulus, called Comfort Zone. We then proposed a recommender system framework that considers both user preference and their Comfort Zone where the curiosity is maximally aroused. Our framework differs from a typical recommender system in that it leverages human's Comfort Zone for stimuli to promote engagement with the system. A series of evaluation experiments have been conducted to show that our framework is able to rank higher the items with not only high ratings but also high curiosity stimulation. The recommendation list generated by our algorithm has a higher potential of inspiring user curiosity compared to the state-of-the-art deep learning approaches. The personalization factor for assessing the surprise stimulus levels further helps the recommender model achieve smaller (better) inter-user similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407 had a fatal crash in New York due to an aircraft aerodynamic stall. Previous reports had placed the actions of the crew as the cause of the incident; however, this work provides a sociotechnical systems analysis of the events that led up to the fatal accident. An Accimap analysis provides a top‐down systemic analysis of Flight 3407, considering the high‐level governmental and regulatory agencies involvement. An online survey with 47 airline pilots provides a bottom‐up review of pilots' perceptions and decision‐making in response to aerodynamic stall events. Combining the two approaches generates a holistic approach to managing aerodynamic stall events. Analysis of Flight 3407 identified contributory factors within the higher regulatory and company levels. Furthermore, questions of appropriate training were raised by the pilots within the survey results regarding the immediate response to a stall event which commonly affords a startle and/or surprise response. The impact of "startle and surprise" on the pilots' response to this situation was identified as a key area to focus on, with design and training recommendations provided. We consider these within the context of recent training recommendations in the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a challenge to Basic Emotion theories, Ortony suggested in a recent article that the existence of affect-free surprise means that surprise is not necessarily valenced and therefore arguably not an emotion. In an article in response, Neta and Kim argued that surprise is always valenced and therefore is an emotion, with apparent cases of affect-free surprise actually being cases of the cognitive state of unexpectedness rather than surprise. We view Neta and Kim's position as resting on an idiosyncratic stipulation of word usage. We further suggest that rejecting affect-free surprise by appealing to examples of affect-laden surprise has no bearing on whether surprise is always valenced, and propose that when surprise appears to be affect-laden the locus of the experienced valence is a co-occurring emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A controversy over the distinction between curiosity and situational interest has recently resurfaced. Nonetheless, empirical research comparing the two is noticeably lacking. Aims: We attempted to fill this gap and provide much‐needed evidence of the distinction between curiosity and situational interest by examining the antecedents and consequences of the two constructs. Methods: We assessed enjoyment, novelty, uncertainty and surprise as potential antecedents and information seeking, individual interest, career intention and achievement as potential outcomes of curiosity and situational interest among 219 Korean sixth graders in the domain of science. Results: Of the hypothesized antecedents, enjoyment during science class related most strongly to students' situational interest in science, whereas novelty in science class related most strongly to students' science curiosity. Uncertainty and surprise in science class related to only science curiosity and not situational interest in science. Among the outcomes considered, situational interest in science related to only students' individual interest in science. In comparison, science curiosity related significantly to all science outcomes measured in this study. Science curiosity also significantly mediated the relationships between the antecedents and outcomes in science. Conclusions: Together, these results support the distinction between curiosity and situational interest and suggest different ways to promote each motivation construct depending on desired outcomes in the science classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploratory behaviors are central to the study of curiosity, since they allow us to infer an otherwise hidden state of being curious from quantitative, experimental observations. Reactive orienting behaviors reflect a fundamental form of curiosity and are driven by the immediate novelty and/or surprise of stimuli. Operant tasks probe curiosity by offering experimental subjects explicit action choices to collect information, in a manner that is either neutral or costly/useful with regards to overall gains/losses. Recently developed computational models of curiosity, based on intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning, describe different expressions of curiosity in a unified theoretical framework. Curiosity refers to the intrinsic desire of humans and animals to explore the unknown, even when there is no apparent reason to do so. Thus far, no single, widely accepted definition or framework for curiosity has emerged, but there is growing consensus that curious behavior is not goal-directed but related to seeking or reacting to information. In this review, we take a phenomenological approach and group behavioral and neurophysiological studies which meet these criteria into three categories according to the type of information seeking observed. We then review recent computational models of curiosity from the field of machine learning and discuss how they enable integrating different types of information seeking into one theoretical framework. Combinations of behavioral and neurophysiological studies along with computational modeling will be instrumental in demystifying the notion of curiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article bridges a gap in the study of Aristophanic humour by better demonstrating how individual jokes (in this case, the para prosdokian 'contrary to expectation' joke) contribute to the wider comic scenes in which they are embedded. After analysing ancient and modern explanations and examples of para prosdokian jokes, this paper introduces the concept of 'comic bit', a discrete unit of comedy that builds humour around a central premise, and establishes how para prosdokian jokes contribute to comic bits in a way that recent theories of para prosdokian cannot account for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability as a vital purchase criterion in sustainable consumption contexts is often biased by misguided information. In this context, we investigate the hindsight bias, i.e., consumers think in hindsight that they knew what would happen all along, may lead consumers to think they evaluated attributes of unsustainable or sustainable products correctly all the time while they did not, devaluating downstream marketing variables. This paper experimentally investigates the hindsight bias by manipulating information about a products' sustainability. We focus on two perspectives about hindsight biases, namely, marketing and psychology, to explore the interaction of surprise and sustainability. In a set of two online studies (Study 1: n = 300; Study 2: n = 461), we found a group‐based hindsight bias for high‐involvement, unsustainable products (Study 1) and individual hindsight biases for low‐involvement, unsustainable and sustainable products (Study 2). Contributing to both, mostly separately researched perspectives, we conclude that neither is predominantly correct. Instead, both perspectives jointly determine why consumers evaluate products differently. Confronted with surprising, sustainable information about unsustainable products causes a hindsight bias that increases purchase intention and word of mouth. In contrast, surprising, unsustainable information about sustainable products show opposed effects. Implications for marketing practice show when product information can unintentionally cause greenwashing and how product information should be communicated to underline a product's sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides first evidence on how belief dynamics are driving entertainment utility and consequently the demand for sports across markets by analyzing minute-by-minute audience data of UEFA Champions League (UCL) games televised in the UK and the Spanish market during a full (pre-COVID) cycle of broadcasting rights. Overall, we find that suspense and surprise are the main drivers of demand in both markets while shock only has marginal effects in the Spanish market. Interestingly, we find a combined impact of suspense and surprise in the UK market that is of similar magnitude as reported in a previous study for English Premier League matches in the UK. In the Spanish market, however, the combined impact is considerably larger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between pragmatics and the other components of grammar. Specifically, it aims to determine whether pragmatics is a distinct module of grammar coming into play at some point in the derivation process to connect the sentence with the context. The conclusion is that, based on the phenomena considered in this work, pragmatics rather than being a separate module, is distributed in the various components. It is shown in fact that the context immediately intervenes at the representative level to yield the correct syntax to be fed to the sensorimotor system on one side, and to the conceptual one on the other. The empirical focus of the article is on a specific type of questions in Italian, namely surprise and surprise-disapproval questions, because they are most sensitive to pragmatic factors. The syntactic, prosodic, and gestural components of these constructions will be examined, highlighting their most important characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic has fuelled indignation. People have been indignant about the breaking of lockdown rules, about the mistakes and deficiencies of government pandemic policies, about enforced mask-wearing, about vaccination programmes (or lack thereof), about lack of care with regards vulnerable individuals, and more. Indeed, indignation seems to have been particularly prevalent on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, where indignant remarks are often accompanied by variations on the hashtag #WTF?! In this paper, I explore indignation's distinctive character as a form of moral anger, in particular suggesting that what is characteristic of indignation is not only that it discloses moral injustices but betrays our disbelief at the very occurrence of the offence. Having outlined the character of indignation, I consider how the structure of indignation impacts how we do, respond to, and receive indignation. I explore indignation in action, so to speak, in the context of Covid-19, with a particular emphasis on how indignation occurs 'on the internet'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]