Semantic Differential Scale Method Can Reveal Multi-Dimensional Aspects of Mind Perception

Abstract

As humans, we tend to perceive minds in both living and non-living entities, such as robots. From a questionnaire developed in a previous mind perception study, authors found that perceived minds could be located on two dimensions “experience” and “agency.” This questionnaire allowed the assessment of how we perceive minds of various entities from a multi-dimensional point of view. In this questionnaire, subjects had to evaluate explicit mental capacities of target characters (e.g., capacity to feel hunger). However, we sometimes perceive minds in non-living entities, even though we cannot attribute these evidently biological capacities to the entity. In this study, we performed a large-scale web survey to assess mind perception by using the semantic differential scale method. We revealed that two mind dimensions “emotion” and “intelligence,” respectively, corresponded to the two mind dimensions (experience and agency) proposed in a previous mind perception study. We did this without having to ask about specific mental capacities. We believe that the semantic differential scale is a useful method to assess the dimensions of mind perception especially for non-living entities that are hard to be attributed to biological capacities.

Mind perception of God in Japanese children

“…Thus, God might be perceived as having less motivational and emotional experiences but similar cognitive ones compared to a human. The results were replicated in Japanese adults (Takahashi, Ban, & Asada, ).…”

“…We used “hunger,” “fear,” “pleasure” and “anger” (a replacement of “rage”) as the experience factors and “self‐control” (we used child‐friendly expression of self‐control, “gaman”), “remembering” (replacing “memory”), “planning” and “communication” (with examples such as talking) as agency factors. We used the Japanese translation of the terms from a previous study replicating Gray et al () (Takahashi et al, ).…”

Attributing Mind to Groups and Their Members on Two Dimensions

“…To our knowledge, a standardized Japanese scale for mind attribution has not yet been developed; developing such a scale is thus an important issue. That said, recent findings suggest that the multidimensional structure of mind attribution found in Western samples is consistently found in Japan, although a few differences are found between studies (Takahashi et al, 2016; Kamide et al, 2017; Tanibe et al, 2017). Therefore, despite some potential cultural differences, we can say that the concept and measurement of mind attribution have a certain degree of universality.…”

Making inferior alveolar nerve block more comfortable via computer-controlled local anesthetic delivery: A prospective clinical study

“…The device comprises a control unit, hand piece, and foot pedal. It uses a 1.8-ml cartridge syringe that has to be loaded on the device [61213].…”

“…The VAS was used as it offers an extremely high degree of resolution, thereby allowing the subjects to judge even the slightest of differences precisely [15]. The semantic scale was used to record patient comfort because it is proven to reveal multi-dimensional aspects of mind perception [12].…”