Feeling good, approaching the positive.

Introduction: Approach and avoidance behaviors have been extensively studied in cognitive science as a fundamental aspect of human motivation and decision-making. The Approach-Avoidance Bias (AAB) refers to the tendency to approach positive stimuli faster than negative stimuli and to avoid negative stimuli faster than positive ones. Affect and arousal in involved individuals are assumed to play a crucial role in the AAB but many questions in that regard remain open.

On the Role of Loopholes in Polite Communication: Linking Subjectivity and Pragmatic Inference.

Existing proposals on the attenuating uses of indirect, negated expressions (e.g., to mean ) agree that speakers exploit indirectness for pragmatic purposes but differ on the underlying sources they attribute to these uses.

Face Management and Negative Strengthening: The Role of Power Relations, Social Distance, and Gender.

Negated gradable adjectives often convey an interpretation that is stronger than their literal meaning, which is referred to as 'negative strengthening.' For example, a sentence like 'John is not kind' may give rise to the inference that . Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives ('not kind' to mean ) than negative adjectives ('not mean' to mean ).

Scalar Diversity, Negative Strengthening, and Adjectival Semantics.

Previous research has demonstrated great variability in the rates of scalar inferences across different triggers (Doran et al., 2009; van Tiel et al., 2016).

Intonation and Pragmatic Enrichment: How Intonation Constrains Ad Hoc Scalar Inferences.

Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker's intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English.

Familial sinistrals avoid exact numbers.

We report data from an internet questionnaire of sixty number trivia. Participants were asked for the number of cups in their house, the number of cities they know and 58 other quantities. We compare the answers of familial sinistrals--individuals who are left-handed themselves or have a left-handed close blood-relative--with those of pure familial dextrals--right-handed individuals who reported only having right-handed close blood-relatives.