Three Poems Touching on Desire

Desire, Reward, Feeling: Commentary on Three Faces of Desire

The three faces of desire are, in a nutshell, that desires are motivating, that satisfying desires is usually pleasurable, and that desires determine what will count as rewards and punishments. Schroeder's view of how these knit together goes like this. Pleasure and displeasure are a result of desires so cannot be what desire consists in. We can desire without being motivated and vice-versa; th...

Touching moments: desire modulates the neural anticipation of active romantic caress

A romantic caress is a basic expression of affiliative behavior and a primary reinforcer. Given its inherent affective valence, its performance also would imply the prediction of reward values. For example, touching a person for whom one has strong passionate feelings likely is motivated by a strong desire for physical contact and associated with the anticipation of hedonic experiences. The pre...

On Touching Triangle Graphs

In this paper, we consider the problem of representing graphs by triangles whose sides touch. We present linear time algorithms for creating touching triangle representations for outerplanar graphs, square grid graphs, and hexagonal grid graphs. The class of graphs with touching triangle representations is not closed under minors, making characterization difficult. We do show that pairs of vert...

Mystic Poems, Poems of Enlightment

Desire and Desire Regulation

A good deal of people’s waking time is, more or less directly, spent thinking about and dealing with desire. There is no question that desires are often benign, functional, and evolutionary adaptive for the individual. However, there are cases where desire stands in conflict with important (selfregulatory) goals or (moral) values. Prime examples include the exsmoker who, upon seeing other peopl...