Search results for: illusions

Authors: Martina Kaufmann, Thomas Goetz, Anastasiya A. Lipnevich, Reinhard Pekrun

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Positive emotions have been shown to benefit from optimistic perceptions, even if these perceptions are illusory. The current research investigated the impact of illusions of control on positive emotions. There is empirical evidence showing that people are more emotionally attentive to losses than to gains. Hence, we expected that, compared to gains, losses in illusory control would have a stronger impact on positive emotions. The results of two experimental studies support this assumption: Participants who experienced gains in illusory control showed no substantial change in positive emotions. However, positive emotions decreased when they perceived a loss in illusory control. These results suggest that a loss of illusory control (but not a gain thereof) mediates the impact of the situation on individuals’ positive emotions. Implications for emotion theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords: cognitive appraisal, control, illusions, optimism, positive emotions

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Authors: Agata M. Kołodziejczyk, Mateusz Harasymczuk, Pierre-Yves Girardin, Lucie Davidová

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Subjective time perception implies connection to cognitive functions, attention, memory and awareness, but a little is known about connections with homeostatic states of the body coordinated by circadian clock. In this paper, we present results from experimental study of subjective time perception in volunteers performing physical activity on treadmill in various phases of their circadian rhythms. Subjects were exposed to several time illusions simulated by programmed timing systems. This study brings better understanding for further improvement of of work quality in isolated areas. 

Keywords: biological clock, light, time illusions, treadmill

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Authors: Shalini Attri

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Silence has been 'scriptured' in women within dominating social structures, as the modes of speaking and behaving which deny women free investiture to language. A woman becomes the product of ideological constructions as language substantiates andro-centric bias. Constrained from writing/speaking in the public sphere, women have traditionally been confined to expressing themselves in writing private poetry, letters or diaries. The helplessness of a woman is revealed in the ways in which she is expected to speak a language, which, in fact, is man-made. There are visible binaries of coloniser- colonised; Western-Eastern; White-Black, Nature-Culture, even Male-Female that contribute significantly to our understanding of the concept of representation and its resultant politics. Normally, an author is labeled as feminist, humanist, or propagandist and this process of labeling correspond to a sense of politics besides his inclination to a particular field. One cannot even think of contemporary literature without this representational politics. Thus, each and every bit of analysis of a work of literature demands a political angle to be dealt with. Besides literature, the historical facts and manuscripts are also subject to this politics. The image of woman as someone either dependent on man or is exploited by him only provides half the picture of this representational politics. The present paper is an attempt to study Panchali’s (Draupadi of Mahabharata) voiceless articulation and her representation as a strong woman in Chitra Divakurani’s The Palace of Illusions.

Keywords: politics, representation, silence, social structures

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Authors: Katya E. Manalastas

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This thesis is a dialogue with Freud about vulnerability and any forms of transience we encounter in life. This study argues that Freud’s Ethics of Finitude, which is framed within the psychoanalytic context, is a critical theory about how human beings fail to become what they are because of their attachment to their illusions—to their visions of perfection and immortality. Freud’s Ethics of Finitude positions itself between our detachment to ideals and recognition of our own death through our loved one. His texts portray the predicament of the finite individual who suffers from feelings of guilt and anxiety because of his failure to live up to the demands of his idealistic civilized society. The civilized society has overestimated men’s susceptibility to culture. It imposes excessive sublimation, conformity to rigid moral ideals, and instinctive repression to manage human aggression. However, by doing this, civilization becomes a main source of men’s suffering. The lack of instinctive freedom will result in a community of tamed but unhappy people. Civilization has also constructed theories and measures to rule out death and pain from the realities of life. Therefore, a man lives his life repressing his instincts and ignorant of his own mortality. For Freud, war and neurosis are just few of the consequences of a civilization that imprisons the individual from cultural hypocrisy instead of giving more play to truthfulness. The occurrence of Great War destroyed our pride in the attainments of civilization and let loose the hostile impulses within us which we thought had been totally eradicated by means of instinctive repression and sublimation. War destroyed most of the things that we had loved and showed us the impermanence of all the things that we had deemed perfect and everlasting. This chaotic event also revealed the damaging impact of our attachment to past values that no longer bind us; our futile attempts to escape suffering; and our refusal to confront the painfulness of loss and mourning. With this given backdrop, this study launches Freud’s Ethics of Finitude—which culminates not in the submission of an individual to the unquestioned authority nor in the blind optimism and love for illusory happiness but in the pedagogy of mourning which brings forth the authentic education of man towards the truth about himself. His Ethics of Finitude is a form of labor in and through which the individual steps out of the realm of illusions and ideals that hinder him to confront his imperfections and accept the difficulties of existence. Through his analysis of the Great War, Freud seeks to awaken in us our ability to evaluate the way we see ourselves and to live our lives with death in mind. His Ethics of Finitude leads us to the fulfillment of our first duty as a living being, which is to endure life. We can only endure life if we are prepared to die and let go.

Keywords: critical theory, ethics of finitude, psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud

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Authors: A. Hadj Taieb, H. Ennouri

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The current study aimed to investigate the effect that optical illusion garments have on a woman’s self-perception of her own body shape. First, we created different optical illusion garment by using color contrasts. Second, a short survey based on visual perception is addressed to women in order to compare the different optical illusion garments to determine if they met the established 'ideal' body shape. A ‘visual analysis method’ was used to investigate the clothing models with optical illusions. The theories in relation with the optical illusion were used through this method. The effects of the optical illusion of color contrast on body shape in the fashion sector were tried to be revealed.

Keywords: optical illusion, color contrasts, body image perception, self-esteem

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Authors: K. A. Tharanga, K. H. H. Damayanthi

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Perception is an epistemological concept discussed in Philosophy. Perception, in other word, vision, is one of the ways that human beings get empirical knowledge after five senses. However, we face innumerable problems when achieving knowledge from perception, and therefore the knowledge gained through perception is uncertain. what we see in the external world is not real. These are the major issues that we face when receiving knowledge through perception. Sometimes there is no physical existence of what we really see. In such cases, the perception is relative. The following frames will be taken into consideration when perception is analyzed illusions and delusions, the figure of a physical object, appearance and the reality of a physical object, time factor, and colour of a physical object.seeing and knowing become vary according to the above conceptual frames. We cannot come to a proper conclusion of what we see in the empirical world. Because the things that we see are not really there. Hence the scientific knowledge which is gained from observation is doubtful. All the factors discussed in science remain in the physical world. There is a leap from ones existence to the existence of a world outside his/her mind. Indeed, one can suppose that what he/she takes to be real is just anmassive deception. However, depending on the above facts, if someone begins to doubt about the whole world, it is unavoidable to become his/her view a scepticism or nihilism. This is a certain reality.

Keywords: empirical, perception, sceptisism, nihilism

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Authors: K. A.Tharanga, K. H. H. Damayanthi

Abstract:

Perception is an epistemological concept discussed in Philosophy. Perception, in other word, vision, is one of the ways that human beings get empirical knowledge after five senses. However, we face innumerable problems when achieving knowledge from perception, and therefore the knowledge gained through perception is uncertain. what we see in the external world is not real. These are the major issues that we face when receiving knowledge through perception. Sometimes there is no physical existence of what we really see. In such cases, the perception is relative. The following frames will be taken into consideration when perception is analyzed illusions and delusions, the figure of a physical object, appearance and the reality of a physical object, time factor, and colour of a physical object. seeing and knowing become vary according to the above conceptual frames. We cannot come to a proper conclusion of what we see in the empirical world. Because the things that we see are not really there. Hence the scientific knowledge which is gained from observation is doubtful. All the factors discussed in science remain in the physical world. There is a leap from ones existence to the existence of a world outside his/her mind. Indeed, one can suppose that what he/she takes to be real is just a massive deception. However, depending on the above facts, if someone begins to doubt about the whole world, it is unavoidable to become his/her view a scepticism or nihilism. This is a certain reality.

Keywords: empirical, perception, sceptisism, nihilism

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Authors: Jason Clarke, Michaela Porubanova, Angela Mazzoli, Gulsah Kut

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What accounts for our perception that time inexorably passes in one direction, from the past to the future, the so-called arrow of time, given that the laws of physics permit motion in one temporal direction to also happen in the reverse temporal direction? Modern physics says that the reason for time’s unidirectional physical arrow is the relationship between time and entropy, the degree of disorder in the universe, which is evolving from low entropy (high order; thermal disequilibrium) toward high entropy (high disorder; thermal equilibrium), the second law of thermodynamics. Accordingly, our perception of the direction of time, from past to future, is believed to emanate as a result of the natural evolution of entropy from low to high, with low entropy defining our notion of ‘before’ and high entropy defining our notion of ‘after’. Here we explored this proposed relationship between entropy and the perception of time’s arrow. We predicted that if the brain has some mechanism for detecting entropy, whose output feeds into processes involved in constructing our perception of the direction of time, presentation of violations to the expectation that low entropy defines ‘before’ and high entropy defines ‘after’ would alert this mechanism, leading to measurable behavioral effects, namely a disruption in duration perception. To test this hypothesis, participants were shown briefly-presented (1000 ms or 500 ms) computer-generated visual dynamic events: novel 3D shapes that were seen either to evolve from whole figures into parts (low to high entropy condition) or were seen in the reverse direction: parts that coalesced into whole figures (high to low entropy condition). On each trial, participants were instructed to reproduce the duration of their visual experience of the stimulus by pressing and releasing the space bar. To ensure that attention was being deployed to the stimuli, a secondary task was to report the direction of the visual event (forward or reverse motion). Participants completed 60 trials. As predicted, we found that duration reproduction was significantly longer for the high to low entropy condition compared to the low to high entropy condition (p=.03). This preliminary data suggests the presence of a neural mechanism that detects entropy, which is used by other processes to construct our perception of the direction of time or time’s arrow.

Keywords: time perception, entropy, temporal illusions, duration perception

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Authors: Edoardo Schinco

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Studying the Marxist intellectual tradition, it is possible to verify that there were numerous cases of philosophical regression, in which the important achievements of detailed studies have been replaced by naïve ideas and previous misunderstandings: one of most important example of this tendency is related to the question of ideology. According to a common Enlightenment approach, the ideology is essentially not a reality, i.e., a factor capable of having an effect on the reality itself; in other words, the ideology is a mere error without specific historical meaning, which is only due to ignorance or inability of subjects to understand the truth. From this point of view, the consequent and immediate practice against every form of ideology are the rational dialogue, the reasoning based on common sense, in order to dispel the obscurity of ignorance through the light of pure reason. The limits of this philosophical orientation are however both theoretical and practical: on the one hand, the Enlightenment criticism of ideology is not an historicistic thought, since it cannot grasp the inner connection that ties an historical context and its peculiar ideology together; moreover, on the other hand, when the Enlightenment approach fails to release people from their illusions (e.g., when the ideology persists, despite the explanation of its illusoriness), it usually becomes a racist or elitarian thought. Unlike this first conception of ideology, Gramsci attempts to recover Marx’s original thought and to valorize its dialectical methodology with respect to the reality of ideology. As Marx suggests, the ideology – in negative meaning – is surely an error, a misleading knowledge, which aims to defense the current state of things and to conceal social, political or moral contradictions; but, that is precisely why the ideological error is not casual: every ideology mediately roots in a particular material context, from which it takes its reason being. Gramsci avoids, however, any mechanistic interpretation of Marx and, for this reason; he underlines the dialectic relation that exists between material base and ideological superstructure; in this way, a specific ideology is not only a passive product of base but also an active factor that reacts on the base itself and modifies it. Therefore, there is a considerable revaluation of ideology’s role in maintenance of status quo and the consequent thematization of both ideology as objective force, active in history, and ideology as cultural hegemony of ruling class on subordinate groups. Among the Marxists, the French philosopher Louis Althusser also gives his contribution to this crucial question; as follower of Gramsci’s thought, he develops the idea of ideology as an objective force through the notions of Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). In addition to this, his philosophy is characterized by the presence of structuralist elements, which must be studied, since they deeply change the theoretical foundation of his Marxist thought.

Keywords: Althusser, enlightenment, Gramsci, ideology

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Authors: Stuart Noel

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In a streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams presents Blanche DuBois, a most complex and intriguing character who often uses prestige language to project the image of an upper-class speaker and to disguise her darker and complicated self. She embodies various fascinating and contrasting characteristics. Like New Orleans (the locale of the play), Blanche represents two opposing images. One image projects that of genteel, Southern charm and beauty, speaking formally and using prestige language and what some linguists refer to as “hypercorrection,” and the other image reveals that of a soiled, deteriorating façade, full of decadence and illusion. Williams said on more than one occasion that Blanche’s use of such language was a direct reflection of her personality and character (as a high school English teacher). Prestige language is an exaggeratedly elevated, pretentious, and oftentimes melodramatic form of one’s language incorporating superstandard or more standard speech than usual in order to project a highly authoritative individual identity. Speech styles carry personal identification meaning not only because they are closely associated with certain social classes but because they tend to be associated with certain conversational contexts. Features which may be considered to be “elaborated” in form (for example, full forms vs. contractions) tend to cluster together in speech registers/styles which are typically considered to be more formal and/or of higher social prestige, such as academic lectures and news broadcasts. Members of higher social classes have access to the elaborated registers which characterize formal writings and pre-planned speech events, such as lectures, while members of lower classes are relegated to using the more economical registers associated with casual, face-to-face conversational interaction, since they do not participate in as many planned speech events as upper-class speakers. Tennessee Williams’s work is characteristically concerned with the conflict between the illusions of an individual and the reality of his/her situation equated with a conflict between truth and beauty. An examination of Blanche DuBois reveals a recurring theme of art and decay and the use of prestige language to reveal artistry in language and to hide a deteriorating self. His graceful and poetic writing personifies her downfall and deterioration. Her loneliness and disappointment are the things so often strongly feared by the sensitive artists and heroes in the world. Hers is also a special and delicate human spirit that is often misunderstood and repressed by society. Blanche is afflicted with a psychic illness growing out of her inability to face the harshness of human existence. She is a sensitive, artistic, and beauty-haunted creature who is avoiding her own humanity while hiding behind her use of prestige language. And she embodies a partial projection of Williams himself.

Keywords: American drama, prestige language, Southern American literature, Tennessee Williams

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Authors: Ani Kojoyan

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The Syrian refugee crisis has been a matter of worldwide concern during the recent years. And though refugees’ problems are contextualized in terms of time and space, the refugee crisis still remains a global issue to discuss. Since the start of the conflict, Armenia has welcomed thousands of Syrian refugees too. Taking into consideration Armenia’s current socio-economic and geopolitical situation, the flow of refugees is a challenge both for the country and for refugees themselves. However, these people are not simply refugees from Syria, they are Syrian-Armenian refugees; people whose ancestors were survivals of the Armenian Genocide, perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks in 1915, people whose ancestors became refugees a century ago in Syria and now, ironically, a century later they follow their ancestors’ paths, turning into refugees themselves in their historical homeland, facing various difficulties, among them socio-economic, socio-ideological, and identity and gender issues, the latter being the main topic of discussion in the present paper. The situation presented above makes us discuss certain questions within this study: how do Syrian-Armenian refugees define themselves and their status? Which are their gender roles in the socio-economic context? How do social and economic challenges re-shape Syrian-Armenian women refugees’ identities? The study applies qualitative research methods of analysis, which includes semi-structured and in-depth interviews with 15 participants (18-25, 26-40 age groups), and two focus group works, involving 8 participants (18-35 age group) for each focus group activity. The activities were carried out in October 2016, Yerevan, Armenia. The study also includes Secondary Data Analysis. In addition, in order to centralize refugee women’s experiences and identity issues, the study adopts a qualitative lens from a feminist standpoint position. It is based on the assumption that human activity structures and limits understanding, and that the distorted comprehension of events or activities has emerged from the male-oriented dominant judgement which can be discovered through uncovering the understanding of the situation from women’s activity perspectives. The findings suggest that identity is dynamic, complex, over-changing and sensitive to time and space, gender and class. The process of re-shaping identity is even more complicated and multi-layered and is based on internal and external factors, conditioned by individual and collective needs and interests. Refugees are mostly considered as people who lost their identity in the past since they have no longer connection anywhere and try to find it in the present. In turn, female refugees, being a more vulnerable class, go through more complicated identity re-formulating discourse negotiations. They stand between the borders of the old and new, borders of lost and re-found selves, borders of creating and self-fashioning, between illusions and the challenging reality. Particularly, refugee women become more sensitive within the discourses of the private and the public domains: some of them try to create a ‘new-self’, creating their space in a new society, whereas others try to negotiate their affective/emotional labour within their own family domains.

Keywords: feminist standpoint position, gender, identity, refugee studies, Syrian-Armenian women refugees

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Authors: Christine Wiesenthal

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This paper asks how to read a particularly vexed and complicated life writing text. For over half a century, the wartime journals of Ruth Andreas Friedrich (1901-1977) circulated as among a handful of more or less authoritative and “authentic” first-hand accounts of German resistance under Hitler. A professional journalist, Andreas Friedrich is remembered today largely through her publications at the war’s end, which appeared in English as Berlin Underground (published by Henry Holt in 1947), just before their publication in Germany as Der Schattenmann “The Shadow Man” (also in 1947). A British edition by the now obscure Latimer House Limited (London) followed in 1948; it is based closely on but is not identical to, the Henry Holt American edition, which in turn differs significantly from its German counterpart. Both Berlin Underground and Der Schattenmann figure Andreas-Friedrich as a key figure in an anti-fascist cell that operated in Berlin under the code name “Uncle Emil,” and provide a riveting account of political terror, opportunism, and dissent under the Nazi regime. Recent scholars have, however, begun to raise fascinating and controversial questions about Andreas-Friedrich’s own writing/reconstruction process in compiling the journals and about her highly selective curatorial role and claims. The apparent absence of any surviving original manuscript for Andreas-Friedrich’s journals amplifies the questions around them. Crucially, so too does the role of the translator of the English editions of Berlin Underground, the enigmatic June Barrows Mussey, a subject that has thus far gone virtually unnoticed and which this paper will focus on. Mussey, a prolific American translator, simultaneously cultivated a career as a professional magician, publishing a number of books on that subject under the alias Henry Hay. While the record indicates that Mussey attempted to compartmentalize his professional life, research into the publishing and translation history of Berlin Underground suggests that the two roles converge in the fact of the translator’s invisibility, by effacing the traces of his own hand and leaving unmarked his own significant textual interventions, Mussey, in effect, edited, abridged, and altered Andreas Friedrich’s journals for the second time. In fact, it could be said that while the fictitious “Uncle Emil” is positioned as “the shadow man” of the German edition, Mussey himself also emerges as precisely that in the English rendering of the journals. The implications of Mussey’s translation of Andreas Friedrich’s journals are one of the most important un-examined gaps in the shadowy publishing history of Berlin Underground, a history full of “tricks” (Mussey’s words) and illusions of transparency. Based largely on archival research of unpublished materials and methods of close reading and comparative analysis, this study will seek to convey some preliminary insights and exploratory work and frame questions toward what is ultimately envisioned as an experimental project in poetic historiography. As this work is still in the early stages, it would be especially welcome to have the opportunity provided by this conference to connect with a community of life writing colleagues who might help think through some of the challenges and possibilities that lie ahead.

Keywords: women’s wartime diaries, translation studies, auto/biographical theory, politics of life writing

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