BACKGROUND: Serotonin transporter promoter genotype appears to increase risk for depression in the context of stressful life events. However, the effects of this genotype on measures of stress sensitivity are poorly understood. Therefore, this study examined whether 5-HTTLPR genotype was associated with negative information processing biases in early childhood. METHOD: Thirty-nine unselected seven-year-old children completed a negative mood induction procedure and a Self-Referent Encoding Task designed to measure positive and negative schematic processing. Children were also genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR gene. (...) RESULTS: Children who were homozygous for the short allele of the 5-HTTLPR gene showed greater negative schematic processing following a negative mood prime than those with other genotypes. 5-HTTLPR genotype was not significantly associated with positive schematic processing. LIMITATIONS: The sample size for this study was small. We did not analyze more recently reported variants of the 5-HTTLPR long alleles. CONCLUSIONS: 5-HTTLPR genotype is associated with negative information processing styles following a negative mood prime in a non-clinical sample of young children. Such cognitive styles are thought to be activated in response to stressful life events, leading to depressive symptoms; thus, cognitive styles may index the "stress-sensitivity" conferred by this genotype. (shrink)

Abela accepts Fine’s account of realism and instrumentalism, but thinks that we can reject the Natural Ontological Attitude by distinguishing the theoretical attempt to make sense of scientific practice from choosing the attitude we bring to the debate, or to science itself. But Abela’s attitudes are vulnerable to Fine’s criticisms of the philosophical positions. However, if we take attitude as contrastive and as full‐blooded enough to lead to different behaviour we can see a gap in Fine’s position. He cannot tell (...) us why it is science that he trusts. When we look more widely, the philosophical positions might be seen as ways of justifying that trust. (shrink)

In spite of the wide variety of approaches to ethics training it is still debatable which approach has the highest potential to enhance professionals’ integrity. The current effort assesses a novel curriculum that focuses on metacognitive reasoning strategies researchers use when making sense of day-to-day professional practices that have ethical implications. The evaluated trainings effectiveness was assessed by examining five key sensemaking processes, such as framing, emotion regulation, forecasting, self-reflection, and information integration that experts and novices apply in ethical decision-making. (...) Mental models of trained and untrained graduate students, as well as faculty, working in the field of physical sciences were compared using a think-aloud protocol 6 months following the ethics training. Evaluation and comparison of the mental models of participants provided further validation evidence for sensemaking training. Specifically, it was found that trained students applied metacognitive reasoning strategies learned during training in their ethical decision-making that resulted in complex mental models focused on the objective assessment of the situation. Mental models of faculty and untrained students were externally-driven with a heavy focus on autobiographical processes. The study shows that sensemaking training has a potential to induce shifts in researchers’ mental models by making them more cognitively complex via the use of metacognitive reasoning strategies. Furthermore, field experts may benefit from sensemaking training to improve their ethical decision-making framework in highly complex, novel, and ambiguous situations. (shrink)

The body of Rabbinic material that has been relied upon for the view that Pharisaism was legalistic points rather toward confidence in God's grace and toward obedience as one's appropriate response.

The process of the formation of new scientific concepts conditioned by scientific and technological progress often has the consequence that many concepts formed in special sciences - such as mathematics, physics, and biology - are immediately introduced by certain authors into the sphere of philosophy.

The strongest argument which convinced adherents of determinism put forward is that the admission of freedom of the will does away with the principle of causality within the sphere of personal existence, and makes human activity incomprehensible. “I understand” and “I explain” mean: I apprehend the presentations of experience in terms of the basic forms of thought, and in this way I assimilate them, I register them in the system of knowledge which makes up my intellectual capital. One of these (...) forms of thought, and one of the very highest importance, is the concept of causality: without it the mind would remain perpetually bemused before an orderless world of phenomena, displaying no rhyme or reason, like the world of magic or that of dreams. If, therefore, freedom of the will excludes a principle on which our intellectual well-being depends so “much, it must be rejected by the philosophical mind and given no place amongst the truths which that mind recognizes. There is a lasting validity in Immanuel Kant's observation:“If we grant that morality necessarily presupposes freedom and if at the same time we grant that speculative reason has proved that such freedom does not allow of being thought, then the former supposition— that made on behalf of morality—would have to give way to this other contention, the opposite of which involves a palpable contradiction.”. (shrink)