The present paper zooms in on levels of pragmatic awareness and the range stereotypical presuppositions as appearing one specific text, i.e. Soldier’s Handbook to Iraq. This text was made available 1st infantry division US Army when they proceeded Iraq 2003. In mixed-methods study we demonstrate that handbook systematically uses what Beukeboom Burgers (2019) call ‘biased language’ is cohesively...

The aim of this paper was to study whether real angry faces do capture attention to the extent of overcoming the inhibition of return (IOR) effect and whether the anxiety level of participants modulates this effect by stressing biases toward threatening stimuli. With this purpose, participants categorized the emotional valence of face targets in a standard spatial cueing procedure suitable to m...

Expressive speech acts are one of the five basic categories of speech acts identified by Searle (1976). Expressives remain underresearched, though select categories of expressive speech acts, especially offering thanks and compliments, have received more extensive attention. An overall classification of expressive speech acts on the basis of corpus data has not yet been carried out. The current...

According to cognitive and neural theories of emotion, attentional processing of innate threat stimuli, such as angry facial expressions, is prioritised over neutral stimuli. To test this hypothesis, the present study used a modified version of the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm to investigate the effect of emotional face stimuli on the attentional blink (AB). The target stimu...

Self-initiated voluntary acts, such as pressing a button, are preceded by a negative electrical brain potential, the Bereitschaftspotential (BP), that can be recorded over the human scalp using electroencephalography (EEG). Up to now, the BP required to initiate voluntary acts has only been recorded under well-controlled laboratory conditions. It is thus not known if this form of brain activity...

The recognition of threatening faces is important for making social judgments. For example, threatening facial features of defendants could affect the decisions of jurors during a trial. Previous neuroimaging studies using faces of members of the general public have identified a pivotal role of the amygdala in perceiving threat. This functional magnetic resonance imaging study used face photogr...