Sympathetic magic features strongly in virtually all religious traditions and in folk customs generally. Scholars agree that It is based on the association of ideas perceived as external, mind-independent causal realities, as connections mediating causal influence. Moreover, religious folk believe that this mediation involves forms of supernatural agency. From a psychological perspective, the key question revolves around the principles by which the cognitive system deems some of its content to reference the external world and other content to constitute internal mental (...) forms of activity like thoughts, feelings and attitudes. The paper proposes that the critical factor has to do with the balance between two distinctly different kinds of cognitive content: representations of things (mentation arising in the form of something other than itself), as distinct from registrations referencing the intrinsic phenomenal properties of the mental state itself. The balance between these two determines whether content is perceived as external worldly event or a form of internal mental content. (shrink)

As a first step in involving user emotion in human‐computer interaction, a memory‐based expert system (JANUS; Kearney, 1991) was designed to interpret facial expression in terms of the signaled emotion. Anticipating that a VDU‐mounted camera will eventually supply face parameters automatically, JANUS now accepts manually made measurements on a digitized full‐face photograph and returns emotion labels used by college students. An intermediate representation in terms of face actions (e.g., mouth open) is also used. Production rules convert the geometry into these. (...) A dynamic memory (Kolodner, 1984; Schank, 1982) interprets the face actions in terms of emotion labels. The memory is dynamic in the sense that new emotion labels can be learned with experience. A prototype system has been implemented on a Sun 2/120 system using POPLOG. Validation studies on the prototype suggest that the interpretations achieved are generally consistent with those of college students without formal instruction in emotion signals. (shrink)