Before discussing different kinds of emotions,let us briefly talk about how researchers measure bodily processes and action or behavior,and how this relates to what we do in our daily lives when we observe emotions in others.

    Bodily processes can be directly measured by means of a polygraph.When a polygraph is skillfully used to compare how we react bodily with what we are saying,it is called a “lie detector”.Bodily processes can also be measured indirectly.This is what we do when we observe someone blushing (脸红).However,we are not always aware of what bodily processes respond to.

    Measuring action or behavior is the other way researchers assess the emotions.For example,one measure of fear of snakes is how close a person will go to the snake.Another procedure is to have a person tell how afraid he is,or how he feels.In this way,researchers have developed the so－called “fear thermometer” to assess a person's fear.In our everyday living,we do very much the same thing.Only not too systematically,we react to what a person does, what he says,how he says it,and how he looks.Is he smiling? Is his voice trembling? We put all this observations together to infer what a person is feeling.

    However, we do not always act as we feel.Sometimes we do things that we don't feel like doing.Sometimes we say we feel one way and then we act another.Actors,for example,successfully learn to “make believe” emotions,or learn to hide them.Thus we cannot always tell what a person is feeling by what he says or by what he does.

    For the brave in the army, being sent away from home is just part of the duty. However, it's never easy especially for those with children. So, when I found out I was going to stay in South Korea for a year, I was nervous about how my five children, particularly my eldest daughter Abigail, would take the news since it meant I wouldn't be home to see her graduate from high school.

    To my surprise, Abigail told me not to worry and even suggested we make the news known among family members. "We've been lucky you haven't had to be sent abroad yet. Anyway, we can get connected through the Internet. See me on your phone." Abigail said. She stepped into many of my roles when I was gone. I wanted to find a way to thank her and show her how proud I was of her. I started planning the special surprise when my request to return home a few weeks earlier to attend Abigail's graduation ceremony(典礼) was approved.

    When my time in South Korea finally came to an end, I flew home, and stayed in a hotel. On Abigail's graduation day, I hid in an office behind the stage waiting until I heard her name called. I just kept thinking "Don't cry. Don't trip in your heels. Don't fall over." At last! Abigail was up on stage. I slipped up behind her, whispered in her ear, and around she turned! "I was just thinking, like, 'You aren't supposed to be here. What? What? How?' It was the biggest shock... I'm pretty sure my dad made people he didn't even know cry. Emotional for everyone." Abigail cried.

    You know what followed: embraces, kisses, tears, laughs, flowers, wishes...; aren't they what a family have in store?

    The haunting paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, on show in the final leg of a travelling tour that has already attracted thousands of visitors in Hamburg and the Hague, may come as a surprise to many. Few outside the Nordic(北欧的) world would recognize the works of this Finnish artist who died in 1946. More people should. The 120 works have at their core 20 self-portraits, half the number she painted in all. The first, dated 1880, is of a wide-eyed teenager eager to absorb everything. The last is a sighting of the artist's ghost-to-be.

    Prematurely gifted, Schjerfbeck was 11 when she entered the Finnish Art Society's drawing school. “The Wounded Warrior in the Snow”, a history painting, was bought by a private collector and won her a state travel grant when she was 17. Schjerfbeck studied in Paris, went on to Pont-Aven, Brittany, where she painted for a year, then to Tuscany, Cornwall and St Petersburg. During her 1887 visit to St Ives, Cornwall, Schjerfbeck painted “The Convalescent”. A child wrapped in a blanket sits supported up in a large wicker(柳条编制的) chair, toying with a sprig(小枝条). The picture won a bronze medal at the 1889 Paris World Fair and was bought by the Finnish Art Society. To a modern eye it seems almost sentimental(感伤的) and is made up for only by the somewhat astonished, sad expression on the child's face, which may have been inspired by Schjerfbeck's early experiences. At four, she fell down a flight of steps and never fully recovered.

    In 1890, Schjerfbeck settled in Finland. Teaching exhausted her, she did not like the works of other local painters, and she was further isolated when she took on the care of her mother. “If I allow myself the freedom to live an isolated life”, she wrote, “then it is because it has to be that way.” In 1902, Schjerfbeck and her mother settled in the small, industrial town of Hyvinkaa, 50 kilometres north of Helsinki. Isolation had one desired effect for it was there that Schjerfbeck became a modern painter. She produced still lives and landscapes but above all moody yet sharp portraits of her mother, local school girls, women workers in town.

    “I have always searched for the dense depths of the soul, which have not yet been discovered by humans themselves”, she wrote, “where everything is still unconscious -- there one can make the greatest discoveries.” She experimented with different kinds of underpainting, scraped and rubbed, made bright rosy red spots; doing whatever had to be done to capture the subconscious — her own and that of her models. In 1913, Schjerfbeck was rediscovered by an art dealer and journalist, Gosta Stenman. Once again she was a success.

    BA0059 to Cape Town

    BRITISH AIRWAYS

    27^th AUGUST

    Dear customer,

    I am sorry for the disruption(扰乱) to your journey today. When flying Morocco, your aircraft changed its course and flew to Barcelona due to a medical emergency. As a result, the cabin crew are legally out of flying hours to continue on to Cape Town. The service has therefore returned to Heathrow Airport, London to allow for a change of crew.

    Your new departure time will be 18:00 on 28^th August, arriving in Cape Town at 06:40 on 29^th August.

    We have arranged rooms for you to stay at the Renaissance Hotel. Breakfast, lunch and a three-minute telephone call will also be provided for you.

    We suggest that you take your hold luggage with you when you go to the hotel. For your transport to the hotel, you will need to make your way to bus stop 15. This is located outside the main Terminal (航站楼) building.

    Transport back to Heathrow Terminal 4 has been arranged at 14:15 on 28^th August. Check-in will be available at Zone A from 15:00. Passengers travelling in First or Club World may check in at Zone D.

    I again apologize for the inconvenience and frustration you have been caused. I can assure you we are doing our best to make your wait as comfortable and brief as possible. Thank you very much for your understanding.

    Yours faithfully,

    Reg Harper

    Customer Service Duty Manager

    PO Box 10 Heathrow Airport

    Hounslow Middlesex TW6 2JA

    Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture known as a classic, struggling to see why it is famous? If so, you've probably thought about the question a psychologist, James Cutting, asked himself: How does a work of art come to be considered great?

    The direct answer is that some works of art are just great: of inner superior quality. The paintings that win prime spots in galleries, get taught in classes are the ones that have proved their artistic value over time. If you can't see they're superior, that's your problem. But some social scientists have been asking questions of it, raising the possibility that artistic canons(名作目录)are little more than old historical accidents.

    Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological pattern known as the "mere­exposure effect" played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league. Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch(直觉). Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings canonical, included in art­history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group liked the canonical ones best. Cuttings students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.

    Cutting believes his experiment casts light on how canons are formed. He reproduced works of impressionism today bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. Their preferences given to certain works made them more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in collections. And the fame passed down the years. The more people were exposed to, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics added to their popularity. After all, it's not just the masses who tend to rate what they see more often more highly. Critics' praise is deeply mixed with publicity. "Scholars", Cutting argues, "are no different from the public in the effects of mere exposure."

    The process described by Cutting show a principle that the sociologist Duncan Watts calls "cumulative advantage": once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more popular still. A few years ago, Watts had a similar experience to Cutting's in another Paris museum. After queuing to see the "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre, he came away puzzled: why was it considered so superior to the three other Leonardos, to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention?

    When Watts looked into the history of "the greatest painting of all time", he discovered that, for most of its life, the "Mona Lisa" remained in relative obscurity. In the 1850s, Leonardo da Vinci was considered no match for giants of Renaissance art like Titian and Raphael, whose works were worth almost ten times as much as the "Mona Lisa" It was only in the 20th century that "Mona Lisa rocketed to the number­one spot. What brought it there wasn't a scholarly re­evaluation, but a theft. In 1911 a worker at the Louvre walked out of the museum with the "Mona Lisa" hidden under his coat. Parisians were shocked at the theft of a painting to which, until then, they had paid little attention. When the museum reopened, people queued to see it. From then on, the "Mona Lisa "came to represent Western culture itself.

    The intrinsic (本质的) quality of a work of art is starting to seem like its least important attribute. But perhaps it's more significant than our social scientists admit. Firstly, a work needs a certain quality to reach the top of the pile. The "Mona Lisa" may not be a worthy world champion but it was in the Louvre in the first place, and not by accident. Secondly, some objects are simply better than others. Read "Hamlet" after reading even the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and the difference may strike you as unarguable.

    A study suggests that the exposure effect doesn't work the same way on everything, and points to a different conclusion about how canons are formed. Great art and mediocrity (平庸)can get confused, even by experts. But that's why we need to see, and read, as much as we can. The more were exposed to the good and the bad, the better we are at telling the difference.

    Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people were always in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experienced ill fortune. I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky. Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research. Over the years I have interviewed them, monitored their lives and had them take part in various experiments.

    In one of the experiments, I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, asking them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper, saying, "Tell the experimenter you have seen this and you will win $50." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

    Unlucky people are generally more nervous than lucky people, and this anxiety affects their ability to notice the unexpected. As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to gatherings concentrating on finding their perfect partners and miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.

    Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. My research eventually showed that lucky people are skilled at noticing opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition (直觉), are open to new experiences, and adopt a never-say-die attitude that transforms bad luck into good luck.