Science and Community: Ending Obesity Improving Health (S&C) aimed to reduce obesity in Houston by developing community partnerships to identify research priorities and develop a sustainable obesity reduction program. Partnership members were recruited from S&C events and invited to participate in in‐depth interviews to gain insight into obesity prevalence, causes, and solutions. Members (n = 22) completed a 60–90‐min in‐depth interview. The interview guide consisted of 30 questions about pressing health problems in the community, potential solutions to health problems and (...) obesity and how the environment has impacted obesity and health behaviors in the community. Interviewees (n = 12 women and 10 men) were mostly Hispanic/Latino (n = 9) and African American (n = 7). Common problems identified were childhood obesity, balancing a healthy diet and physical inactivity. Interviewees identified obesity as a major problem in their communities and cited access to quality food and physical activity resources as both a problem and a solution. Additional emergent themes focused on solutions, including increasing awareness and education, coordinated efforts among organizations and using an ecologic approach to combat obesity. Community insight gleaned from this study may be used to enhance relevance and sustainability of programs developed to reduce obesity and suggests possible avenues for participatory research and intervention. (shrink)

Anticipated nostalgia is a new construct that has received limited empirical attention. It concerns the anticipation of having nostalgic feelings for one’s present and future experiences. In three...

A series of structural constitutional arguments lodged in multiple cases against Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) authorities to negotiate prescription drug prices via the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act threaten the legitimacy of CMS program and federal agency powers.

Evidence-based medicine has beendefined as the conscientious and judicious useof current best evidence in making clinicaldecisions. This paper will attempt to explicatethe terms ``conscientious'''' and ``judicious''''within the evidence-based medicine definition.It will be argued that ``conscientious'''' and``judicious'''' represent virtue terms derived fromvirtue ethics and virtue epistemology. Theidentification of explicit virtue components inthe definition and therefore conception ofevidence-based medicine presents an importantstarting point in the connection between virtuetheories and medicine itself. In addition, aunification of virtue theories andevidence-based medicine will illustrate theneed for (...) future research in order to combinethe fields of virtue-based approaches andclinical practice. (shrink)

This collection of essays is a genuinely interdisciplinary exploration of the changing relationship of pedagogy, technology, and human beings in contemporary educational and cultural settings. The authors draw upon the most recent theoretical developments in education, the arts, the human body, and technology to interrogate changing pedagogical practices both inside and beyond educational institutions. Their focus on new forms of cultural exchange constitutes a radical re-thinking of the nature of pedagogical events beyond the boundaries of the traditional educational disciplines.

In a dynamic term of the United States Supreme Court in 2021-2022 a series of critical cases raise manifold changes and impacts on individual and communal health through 10 key areas ranging from abortions to vaccinations.

As the United States emerges from the worst public health threat it has ever experienced, the Supreme Court is poised to reconsider constitutional principles from bygone eras. Judicial proposals to roll back rights under a federalism infrastructure grounded in states’ interests threaten the nation’s legal fabric at a precarious time. This column explores judicial shifts in 3 key public health contexts — reproductive rights, vaccinations, and national security — and their repercussions.

Spatial experience in childhood is a factor in the development of spatial abilities. In this study, we assessed whether American and Faroese participants’ (N = 246, Mage = 19.31 years, 151 females) early spatial experience and adult spatial outcomes differed by gender and culture, and if early experience was related to adult performance and behavior. Participants completed retrospective reports on their childhood spatial experience, both large-scale (permitted childhood range size) and small-scale (Lego play). They also completed assessments of their current (...) large-scale spatial behavior (navigational strategy) and small-scale ability (mental rotation task, MRT). We replicated earlier results showing better MRT performance among males and more reliance by males on orientation navigational strategies, although males and females reported similar ranges as children. However, there were cross-cultural differences, with Faroese having larger childhood ranges, less reliance on route strategies, better MRT scores, and a smaller gender difference in MRT. Larger permitted childhood ranges were associated with reduced use of route strategies for navigation in adulthood, and greater Lego play in childhood predicted better MRT performance as adults. There was also some evidence supporting relationships across spatial scales, with more Lego play predicting an orientation style of navigation and larger childhood ranges predicting better performance on the MRT, although the latter was not independent of country. In sum, we observed an association in both cultures between large-scale childhood experience and large-scale behavior in adulthood, small-scale experience in childhood and adult small-scale performance, and some associations between experience and behavior across spatial scales. (shrink)

In a “mixed bag” 2023-2024 session, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions both favorable and antithetical to public health and safety. Taking on tough constitutional issues implicating gun control, misinformation, and homelessness, the Court also avoided substantive reviews in favor of procedural dismissals in key cases involving reproductive rights and government censorship.

Among the morass of critical issues impacting the results of the midterm elections in 2022 were core public health issues related to health care access, justice, and reforms. Collectively, voters’ communal health and safety concerns dominated outcomes in key races which may shape national, state, and local legal approaches to protecting the public’s health in the modern era.

A deluge of state “anti-equity” legislative bills seek to reverse prevailing trends in diversity, equity, and inclusion; withdraw protections of LGBTQ+ communities; and deny access to gender-based care for trans minors and adults. While the political and constitutional fate of these acts is undetermined, profound impacts on patients and their providers are already affecting the delivery of health care and public health services.

In another tumultuous term of the United States Supreme Court in 2022-2023 a series of critical cases implicate instant and forthcoming changes in multiple fronts that collectively shift the national public health law and policy environment.

Two experiments are reported that employed think-aloud methods to test predictions concerning relevance effects and rationalisation processes derivable from Evans' (1996) heuristic-analytic theory of the selection task. Evans' account proposes that card selections are triggered by relevance-determining heuristics, with analytic processing serving merely to rationalise heuristically cued decisions. As such, selected cards should be associated with more references to both their facing and their hidden sides than rejected cards, which are not subjected to analytic rationalisation. Experiment 1 used a standard (...) selection-task paradigm, with negative components permuted through abstract conditional rules. Support was found for all heuristic-analytic predictions. This evidence was shown to be robust in Experiment 2, where "select - don't select" decisions were enforced for all cards. Both experiments also clarify the role played by secondary heuristics in cueing the consideration of hidden card values during rationalisation. We suggest that whilst Evans' heuristic-analytic model and Oaksford and Chater's (e.g., 2003) optimal data selection model can provide compelling accounts of our protocol findings, the mental models theory fares less well as an explanation of our full dataset. (shrink)

This book brings together scholars from a variety of epistemological perspectives to explore the multiple ways in which sexuality does indeed matter in the arena of public education.

Logic-Based Therapy and Consultation (LBTC) employs the use of guiding virtues—productive thought patterns and beliefs- through the use of shame-attacking exercises. Many transgender individuals experience dysphoria, which involves an extremely negative rating of oneself due to the mismatch they experience with their internal identity and bodily construction. This results from several kinds of emotional reasoning, like damning the world for being bigoted and hateful, or feeling trapped and unable to push through these struggles due to the awfulness of these experiences. (...) The aim of this paper is first, to provide an expansive account of these issues while highlighting the emotional reasoning of these issues through the lens of LBTC, and second, to explicate effective remedies and shame-attacking exercises for common transgender issues. (shrink)

Contemporary semantic theories can be classified along two dimensions: (i) the way and time-course in which contextual factors influence sentence truth-conditions; and (ii) whether and to what extent comprehension involves sensory, motor and emotional processes. In order to explore this theoretical space, our ERP study investigates the time-course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic component of a noun (the function of the object to which the noun refers to, e.g., a funnel is generally used to pour liquids into (...) containers) and an ad-hoc affordance contextually induced by the situation described in the discourse. We found that, if preceded by a neutral discourse context, a verb incongruent with the noun’s telic component as in “She uses the funnel to hang her coat” elicited an enhanced N400 compared to a congruent verb as in “She uses the funnel to pour water into a container”. However, if the situation introduced in the preceding discourse induced a new function for the object as an ad-hoc affordance (e.g., the funnel is glued to the wall and the agent wants to hang the coat), we observed a crossing-over regarding the direction of the N400 effect: comparing the ad-hoc affordance-inducing context with the neutral context, the N400 for the incongruent verb was significantly reduced, whereas the N400 for the congruent verb was significantly enhanced. We explain these results as a consequence of the incorporation of the contextually triggered ad-hoc affordance into the meaning of the noun. Combining these results with an analysis of semantic similarity values between test sentences and contexts, we argue that one possibility is that the incorporation of an ad-hoc affordance may be explained on the basis of the mental simulation of concurrent motor information. (shrink)

Bioethics has made remarkable progress as a scholarly and applied field. A mere fledgling in the 1960s, it is now firmly established in hospitals, medical schools, and government agencies and boasts a number of professional associations and a handsome collection of journals.

This article deploys a Bourdieusian framework to analyse the process of how children are located in, and attached to, families. The focus is on children whose placement is problematic for some reason (such as adoption, egg and semen donation, surrogacy and so on). Through a detailed examination of four case studies in which the placement of children is disputed, I show how notions of embodied spaces (such as the womb) are part of the repertoire of arguments used for establishing claims (...) as to the appropriate placing of such children. However, I also show how the significance of such spaces is relative to the importance attached to other spaces (e.g. geographical, domestic, metaphorical). The analysis demonstrates the usefulness of Bourdieu’s central concepts but also shows how those concepts might be both supplemented and challenged. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2 (2002) 189-191 [Access article in PDF] Listening, Acting, and the Quest for AlternativesA Response to Charland and Bracken Erica Lilleleht The challenge is not to replace one certitude... with another but to cultivate an attention to the conditions under which things become 'evident,'... ceasing to be objects of our attention and therefore seeming fixed, necessary, and unchangeable. (Rabinow on Foucault 1997, p. XIX) (...) I do not know whether it must be said today that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty. (Foucault 1997, p. 319) IN RESPONDING TO MY PAPER, Bracken and Charland raise a number of interesting points. Through discussing Tuke's York Retreat (Charland) and Foucault's "regimes of truth" (Bracken), the character of moral treatment, the value of a Foucauldian analysis, the importance of listening (as well as its limits), and the necessity of taking action are all raised as important issues when considering the history and current status of psychiatry. In my response, I shall focus on the latter two issues, namely, the possibility of listening and the necessity of action. I will make the argument that although action can, and often should, follow listening, having action as its necessary (and immediate) goal brings with it a set of pressures and practices that can render both experiences difficult, if not impossible.First, let me share my understanding of Bracken and Charland's main theses and arguments. For Patrick Bracken, the main purpose of any critique, but particularly a critique of current psychiatric practice, is to present readers with a new way of listening and understanding. It should, to paraphrase Bracken, open things up for deeper analysis. The Foucault he is listening to, then, is a man in whose "hands history becomes philosophy". This transformation is important because as it occurs new "discursive spaces" open up, thereby presenting readers of his work with new voices (e.g., patients, less-than-famous psychiatrists, priests). This incursion of the new does not necessarily, however, invalidate the old. Bracken substantiates this by making the important point that Foucault did not simply reject Enlightenment reason (an old and highly persistent voice), but rather "challenged the idea that we have to choose to be for or against" it. Bracken further points out that listening to these voices, [End Page 189] old or new, is never a completely "clean" practice. In Bracken's words, "there is no neutral, asocial or apolitical vantage point from [which] we can judge the validity of one position over the other." This means that in listening to the "other" (as patient, friend, argument, or psychiatric practice) we must maintain a kind of double consciousness, one in which we attend to this other voice while at the same time being aware that neither of us are speaking from within a neutral, clean space (devoid of political, social, and/or cultural pressures or implications). Maintaining this kind of awareness is difficult for obvious reasons. In mental health practice and for Bracken, however, this difficulty can be worthwhile if it results in formerly silent participants having "their voice heard in debates about service development and the nature of progress."Although I doubt Louis Charland would disagree with the idea that listening is important, he does take the function of critique one step further. Specifically for Charland, critiques of psychiatric practice, past and particularly present, should result in the identification of alternative solutions. Failing to do so can indicate that the critique "borders on a lack of depth." If one extends this assertion about my analysis to Foucault's own work, we find that Charland is not alone. For example, Hoy, in his introduction to his edited Foucault: A Critical Reader (1992), states that "Foucault's continued refusal to specify either a prescription or a prognosis for social illnesses he diagnoses suggests to some readers that genealogy is as unserious and irresponsible as archeology" (p. 7). This point emerges... (shrink)

The distinctive experiences of multiracial people have been underexplored in philosophy. For instance, it is not uncommon for a multiracial person to anticipate or encounter racial denials. A racial denial occurs when a person’s assertion of their racial identity, e.g. “I am Black,” is challenged or called into doubt. While monoracial individuals can generally assert their race without being challenged (e.g. “I am Black” or “I am White”), a multiracial person may be met with the rejoinder, “You aren’t really Black” (...) or “You aren’t really White.” Utilizing Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice, this essay argues that some racial denials arise because our existing racial vocabulary has gaps, and that these gaps can be traced to unjust origins. Ultimately, this essay’s aim is threefold. First, it aims to understand the nature of racial denials. Second, it demonstrates that attending to the lives multiracial people can yield important insights into race and epistemic injustice. Third, by focusing on multiracial experience, this essay aims to redress — in a limited way — the marginalization of multiracial lives within philosophical theory. (shrink)

Classical temples in ancient Greece show two deterministic illusionistic principles of architecture, which govern their functional design: geometric proportionalism and a set of illusion-strengthening rules in the proportionalism's stochastic margin. Animal morphology, in its mechanistic-deductive revival, applies just one architectural principle, which is not always satisfactory. Whether a Greek Classical situation occurs in the architecture of living structure is to be investigated by extreme testing with deductive methods.Three deductive methods for explanation of living structure in animal morphology are proposed: the (...) parts, the compromise, and the transformation deduction. The methods are based upon the systems concept for an organism, the flow chart for a functionalistic picture, and the network chart for a structuralistic picture, whereas the optimal design serves as the architectural principle for living structure. These methods show clearly the high explanatory power of deductive methods in morphology, but they also make one open end most explicit: neutral issues do exist. (shrink)

This paper draws from the turnover and emotions literatures to explore how job embeddedness, in the context of abusive supervision, can impact job frustration, citizenship withdrawal, and employee deviance. Results indicate that employees with abusive supervisors were more likely to be frustrated with their jobs and engage in more deviance behaviors. And yet, the relationship between abusive supervision and job frustration was moderated by job embeddedness such that the relationship was weaker and negative for those higher in job embeddedness and (...) stronger and positive for those lower in job embeddedness. In other words, contrary to our original predictions, individuals who were more embedded in their jobs with an abusive supervisor were actually less likely to experience job frustration or engage deviance behaviors. Important implications for management research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Henry Leonard and Karel Lambert first introduced so-called presupposition-free (or just simply: free) logics in the 1950’s in order to provide a logical framework allowing for non-denoting singular terms (be they descriptions or constants) such as “the largest prime” or “Pegasus” (see Leonard [1956] and Lambert [1960]). Of course, ever since Russell’s paradigmatic treatment of definite descriptions (Russell [1905]), philosophers have had a way to deal with such terms. A sentence such as “the..