In bad taste: evidence for the oral origins of moral disgust.

In common parlance, moral transgressions "leave a bad taste in the mouth." This metaphor implies a link between moral disgust and more primitive forms of disgust related to toxicity and disease, yet convincing evidence for this relationship is still lacking. We tested directly the primitive oral origins of moral disgust by searching for similarity in the facial motor activity evoked by gustatory distaste (elicited by unpleasant tastes), basic disgust (elicited by photographs of contaminants), and moral disgust (elicited by unfair treatment in an economic game). We found that all three states evoked activation of the levator labii muscle region of the face, characteristic of an oralnasal rejection response. These results suggest that immorality elicits the same disgust as disease vectors and bad tastes.

Human and computer recognition of facial expressions of emotion.

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence suggests that the human brain contains facial expression recognition detectors specialized for specific discrete emotions. However, some human behavioral data suggest that humans recognize expressions as similar and not discrete entities. This latter observation has been taken to indicate that internal representations of facial expressions may be best characterized as varying along continuous underlying dimensions. To examine the potential compatibility of these two views, the present study compared human and support vector machine (SVM) facial expression recognition performance. Separate SVMs were trained to develop fully automatic optimal recognition of one of six basic emotional expressions in real-time with no explicit training on expression similarity. Performance revealed high recognition accuracy for expression prototypes. Without explicit training of similarity detection, magnitude of activation across each emotion-specific SVM captured human judgments of expression similarity. This evidence suggests that combinations of expert classifiers from separate internal neural representations result in similarity judgments between expressions, supporting the appearance of a continuous underlying dimensionality. Further, these data suggest similarity in expression meaning is supported by superficial similarities in expression appearance.

Perceiving individuals and groups: expectancies, dispositional inferences, and causal attributions.

Two experiments investigated differences in forming impressions of individual and group targets. Experiment 1 showed that when forming an impression of an individual, perceivers made more extreme trait judgments, made those judgments more quickly and with greater confidence, and recalled more information than when the impression target was a group. Experiment 2 showed that when participants were forming an impression of an individual, expectancy-inconsistent behaviors spontaneously triggered causal attributions to resolve the inconsistency; this was not the case when the impression target was a group. Results are interpreted as reflecting perceivers' a priori assumptions of unity and coherence in individual versus group targets.

Torsional Splittings in the Band nu9 + nu4 - nu4 of Ethane.

Torsional splittings of the C2H6 hot band nu9 + nu4 - nu4 have been determined based on measurements taken with the Kitt Peak National Observatory Fourier transform spectrometer with .0025 cm-1 resolution. The measured splittings range from -.2347 cm-1 (the sign is relative to that of the observed splitting in the nu9 band of C2H6) to .0682 cm-1, with a standard deviation of the observed splittings of .0251 cm-1. The splittings can be explained as a result of xy Coriolis interaction of nu9 + nu4 with the excited torsional states taunu4, with the major effect arising from the "forbidden" interaction with the nearly degenerate state 5nu4final sigma = 2. The rms error of the predicted splittings is .00422 cm-1, if parameters determined from theory and previous work are used, and is .00217 cm-1, if small refinements to the parameters are made based on the measured splittings themselves. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

Forward calculation for interferometers: method and validation.

An approach to approximating the instrument response for an unapodized interferometer is presented. The approach comprises functions that are local enough in frequency space (no more than five wave numbers) that one can use the Planck function at a single frequency to calculate the radiance at a given frequency and atmospheric pressure level, and it is well behaved (transmittances change monotonically from 1.0 to 0.0), so existing transmittance calculation procedures can be used. It is faster than calculating radiances at a high resolution, doing a Fourier transform, and then doing a second transform, and it produces brightness temperatures that agree with exact values to better than the 0.01 K that is due to errors in the approximation. The approach is accurate enough and fast enough to be used for calculating unapodized radiances from an interferometer. It also can be used to calculate transmittances as well as radiances.

Effects of water-emission anisotropy on multispectral remote sensing at thermal wavelengths of ocean temperature and of cirrus clouds.

The assumption of blackbody emission (emissivity, 1.0) for a calm ocean surface can lead to significant underestimates of the sea-surface temperature (SST) derived from IR radiometric data. Taking the optical properties of the atmosphere as known, we calculate the errors stemming from the blackbody assumption for cases of a purely absorbing or a purely scattering atmosphere. It is observed that for an absorbing atmosphere the errors in SST are always reduced and are the same whether measurements are made from space or at any level in the atmosphere. As for atmospheric scattering, the SST errors are slightly reduced when one is viewing from large zenith angles but are slightly enhanced when one is viewing from the zenith. The inferred optical thickness tau of an absorbing layer can be in error under the blackbody assumption by a Deltatau of 0.01-0.08, while the inferred optical thickness of a scattering layer can be in error by a larger amount, Deltatau of 0.03-0.13. The error Deltatau depends only weakly on the actual optical thickness and on the viewing angle, but it is rather sensitive to the wavelength of the measurement. In the absence of steep slopes in the wave-slope distribution, directional emissivities are essentially unchanged by sea state when one is viewing from or near the zenith. When one is viewing from moderately large zenith angles (such as 507 degrees ), however, the departures in the directional emissivities from blackbody emission can be much larger under perturbed sea state than under calm conditions.

Spectral band passes for a high precision satellite sounder.

Atmospheric temperature soundings with significantly improved vertical resolution can be obtained from carefully chosen narrow band-pass measurements in the 4.3-microm band of CO(2) by taking advantage of the variation of the absorption coefficients, and thereby the weighting functions, with pressure and temperature. A set of channels has been found in the 4.2-microm region that is capable of yielding about 2-km vertical resolution in the troposphere. The concept of a complete system is presented for obtaining high resolution retrievals of temperature and water vapor distribution, as well as surface and cloud top temperatures, even in the presence of broken clouds.