Primary headaches are highly prevalent and represent a major cause of disability in young adults. Neurofeedback is increasingly used in the treatment of chronic pain; however, there are few studies investigating its efficacy in patients with headaches. We report the results of a cross-over sham-controlled study on the efficacy of neurofeedback in the prophylactic treatment of tension-type headache. Participants received ten sessions of infra-low frequency electroencephalographic neurofeedback and ten sessions of sham-neurofeedback, with the order of treatments being randomized. The study (...) also included a basic psychotherapeutic intervention — a psychoeducational session performed before the main study phases and emotional support provided throughout the study period. The headache probability was modeled as a function of the neurofeedback and sham-neurofeedback sessions performed to date. As a result, we revealed a strong beneficial effect of neurofeedback and no influence of the sham sessions. The study supports the prophylactic use of infra-low frequency neurofeedback in patients with TTH. From a methodological point of view, we advocate for the explicit inclusion of psychotherapeutic components in neurofeedback study protocols. (shrink)

On the basis of an interdisciplinary approach linking taxation, marketing, and corporate social responsibility, the present research investigates the effects of media reports on aggressive and responsible corporate tax strategies (CTSs) on corporate success with consumers. By means of two laboratory experiments (N = 150, 360), we analyze the effects of the CTSs on corporate reputation, consumer purchase intention, and the consumer’s willingness to pay. Our results suggest that aggressive CTSs diminish corporate success with consumers, whereas responsible CTSs enhance it. (...) Nevertheless, consumers are not willing to pay a price premium for products sold by responsible tax-planning companies, but rather punish aggressive tax-planning companies through a slightly lower willingness to pay. Finally, consumers’ tax morale and their attitude toward tax avoidance are important moderating variables. Given the growing level of media interest in taxation, our findings are crucial for assessing consumer-related non-tax costs and the benefits of different CTSs. (shrink)

On quantative measures of moral values and value systems that seem to characterize Thai culture.

The increasing focus on disability rights—as found, for instance, in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities —challenges philosophical imaginaries. This article broadens the philosophical imaginary of freedom by exploring the relation of dependence, independence, and interdependence in the lives of people with disabilities. It argues that traditional concepts of freedom are rather insensitive to difference within humanity, and that the lives of people with severe disabilities challenge philosophers to argue and conceptualize freedom not only as independence (...) and interdependence but also as dependence. After tracing this need through a Hegelian understanding, via Julia Kristeva's work on disability, and finally the CRPD, it concludes that a unified solution might not be possible. Hence, it argues that disability issues necessitate philosophical modesty. (shrink)

Adolescents today face the negative outcomes of climate change, and their pro-environmental behavior is crucial to mitigate these negative outcomes. Yet, we know little about what influences adolescents’ pro-environmental behavior. Research shows that people’s biospheric values and environmental self-identity, elicit personal norms to act environmentally friendly, which can induce a wide range of pro-environmental actions. Yet there is no evidence that these factors can influence pro-environmental behavior of adolescents, because this has only been studied for adults. Given that in adolescence, (...) values, identities and moral structures undergo intense development, the question is whether these factors can motivate adolescents to act pro-environmentally. To address this question, we have conducted three studies with adolescents in Lithuania (Study 1: N = 256; Study 2: N = 349; Study 3: N = 905). We found support that adolescents’ biospheric values and environmental self-identity were associated, via personal norms, with a wide range of pro-environmental behaviors, including recycling, environmentally friendly travelling, purchasing environmentally friendly goods and drinking tap water. Based on theory and the current findings, we suggest directions for policies aimed at promoting pro-environmental behavior of adolescents. (shrink)

Der Raum ist ein eminent philosophisches Thema. Denn so selbstverstandlich es ist, dass wir in Raumen und im Raum leben, so unklar ist, was das bedeutet. Wie verhalten sich lebensweltliche Raume zu `dem Raum` uberhaupt? Gibt es bevorzugte Formen der Raumerfahrung? Wie verhalten sich Raum und Zeit zueinander? Was unterscheidet Nahe und Distanz, Bewegung und Aufenthalt?Die Beitrage des vorliegenden Bandes nahern sich der Philosophie des Raumes aus Richtung der Epistemologie, praktischen Philosophie und Asthetik. Dahinter steht die Uberzeugung, dass der Raum (...) nicht allein ein Thema der theoretischen Philosophie sein sollte, sondern Raumphanomene in allen Bereichen der Philosophie relevant sind. Im Zusammenspiel von klassischen und gegenwartigen Positionen ergibt sich ein Uberblick uber die Moglichkeit, eines der unscheinbarsten Phanomene uberhaupt zu thematisieren. Mit Beitragen von: Diego D'Angelo, Jocelyn Benoist, Christian Bermes, Georg Bertram, Steven G. Crowell, David Espinet, Michael N. Forster, Markus Gabriel, Volker Gerhardt, Tobias Keiling, Ole Meinefeld, Nikola Mirkovi'c, Inga Romer, John Sallis, Alexander Schnel. (shrink)

In recent years, the public sector in many countries has had difficulty keeping abreast of social problems due to restricted financial resources and limited organizational capacities. As a consequence, entrepreneurs have started to address social welfare issues that the public sector has been unable to tackle with an innovative approach called social enterprise. The authors present research on the future prospects of social enterprise as a sustainable business model for industrialized countries. As there is a lack of historical and current (...) data, the authors aim to contribute to and structure the debate about the potential of the concept. Therefore, the authors provide initial data from a Delphi survey on the future development of social enterprise in a multistakeholder environment. Experts from academia, business, nongovernmental and governmental organizations, social enterprise investors, and social entrepreneurs evaluated 16 projections for the year 2030. Based on these results, the authors present comprehensive scenarios of four different possible developments of the future of social enterprise in Germany. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A First-Person Analysis Using Third Person-Data as a Generative Method: A Case Study of Surprise in Depression” by Natalie Depraz, Maria Gyemant & Thomas Desmidt. Upshot: Given the claims of Natalie Depraz regarding what she called in 2004 the “practical turn of phenomenology,” I ask the authors how they conceive the research they presented in their 2017 article, particularly regarding transcendental phenomenology.

One of the primary goals of Religious Education is to make students come together with Qur’an text and religious content seamlessly. In order to reach this goal, religious educators usually support students to have the knowledge of the text and sometimes students only memorize the content. But although “knowing” and “memorizing” stages are important for educational processes, they are not functional enough in the long term. For providing a permanent learning, students should also “understand” the text. Besides, students cannot create (...) their own ideas and interpretations by the ways of knowing and memorizing. Because they can achieve to make their “own” senses only by their understanding. For these reasons, setting “understanding” as a goal for RE and defining the bases of an “understanding focused religious education” are an important responsibility of all.There are lots of bases for understanding focused religious education. One of them is “asking question”. Asking question to the religious texts and questioning the content have crucial effects for understanding processes due to their role of being a chance for having a dialogue with the text and its author. Therefore, it is necessary to determine which types of questions are useful for permanent learning and which types of contributions to understanding are limited. In Religious Education which is a social discipline, in order to reveal the meaning, the questions that are convenient to open a field for individual interpretations of the students can be functional. These questions are mostly open-ended questions and high level cognitive questions offering students an opportunity for their ownevaluations. However, students can establish the healthiest communication with Qur’an text and religious content through contextual and existential questions that they will pose to them. (shrink)

Welt und Unendlichkeit sind nicht nur Grundbegriffe der Philosophiegeschichte, sondern stehen auch im Zentrum gegenwartiger Debatten um die Moglichkeit und Grenzen von Metaphysik uberhaupt. Versteht man unter Welt die Gesamtheit dessen, was ist, dann stellt sich die Frage nach dem ontologischen Status dieser Seinstotalitat selbst. Wie, wenn uberhaupt, kann die Existenz der Welt sinnvoll gedacht werden? Der Begriff der Unendlichkeit konturiert und verscharft diese ontologische Frage dadurch, dass wir die Ganzheit namens Welt als unendlich erfahren, d. h. so, dass sie (...) unsere in epistemischer Hinsicht endlichen Weltbezuge grundsatzlich ubersteigt. Mit Welt und Unendlichkeit ist daher ein begrifflicher Spannungsraum eroffnet, bei dem es im wortlichen Sinne ums Ganze geht. Einen der bedenkenswertesten Gegenwartsbeitrage zu dieser durch die Begriffe Welt und Unendlichkeit abgesteckten Grundfrage der Philosophie hat Laszlo Tengelyi (1954-2014) geleistet. Der vorliegende Band versammelt insgesamt elf im Andenken an Laszlo Tengelyi und in Anlehnung an sein letztes Buch Welt und Unendlichkeit. Zum Problem phanomenologischer Metaphysik (2014, 32015) verfasste Beitrage deutscher und ungarischer Philosophinnen und Philosophen. Mit Beitragen von Bianka Boros, Gabor Boros, Michael N. Forster, Markus Gabriel, Anton Friedrich Koch, Csaba Olay, Sebastian Ostritsch, Inga Romer, Sandor Sajo, Andras Schuller und Tamas Ullmann. (shrink)

"--Brian Greene, Columbia University "This book includes material that is intellectually innovative and comes as a surprise even to specialists in the field.

We attempt to clarify the main conceptual issues in approaches to ‘objectification’ or ‘measurement’ in quantum mechanics which are based on superselection rules. Such approaches venture to derive the emergence of classical ‘reality’ relative to a class of observers; those believing that the classical world exists intrinsically and absolutely are advised against reading this paper. The prototype approach (K. Hepp, Helv. Phys. Acta45 (1972), 237–248) where superselection sectors are assumed in the state space of the apparatus is shown to be (...) untenable. Instead, one should couple system and apparatus to an environment, and postulate superselection rules for the latter. These are motivated by the locality of any observer or other (actual or virtual) monitoring system. In this way ‘environmental’ solutions to the measurement problem (H.D. Zeh, Found. Phys.1 (1970), 69–76; W. H. Zurek, Phys. Rev.D26 (1982), 1862–1880 and Progr. Theor. Phys.89 (1993), 281–312) become consistent and acceptable, too. Points of contact with the modal interpretation are briefly discussed. We propose a minimal value attribution to observables in theories with superselection rules, in which only central observables have properties. In particular, the eigenvector-eigenvalue link is dropped. This is mainly motivated by Ockham's razor. (shrink)

Design: Qualitative interview study. Participants: Fifty-nine patients with a family history of cancer who attend a regional cancer genetics clinic in the UK were interviewed about their current and previous research experiences. Findings: Interviewees gave a range of explanations for research participation. These were categorised as social—research participation benefits the wider society by progressing science and improving treatment for everyone; familial—research participation may improve healthcare and benefit current or future generations of the participant’s family; and personal—research participation provides therapeutic or (...) non-therapeutic benefits for oneself. Conclusions: We discuss the distinction drawn between motives for research participation focused upon self and others, and observe that personal, social and familial motives can be seen as interdependent. For example, research participation that is undertaken to benefit others, particularly relatives, may also offer a number of personal benefits for self, such as enabling participants to feel that they have discharged their social or familial obligations. We argue for the need to move away from simple, static, individualised notions of research participation to a more complex, dynamic and inherently social account. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotion regulation comprises attempts to influence when and how emotions are experienced and expressed. It has mostly been conceived of as proactive or reactive, but it may also be retroactive and involve memory. I term such past-oriented activity mnemonic emotion regulation and propose that it involves increasing or decreasing access to or altering the characteristics of a memory. People may increase access to a memory and make it more likely that it will be retrieved in the future, for example by (...) rehearsing a pleasant memory. They may decrease access to a memory and make it less likely that intrusions will be experienced in the future, for example by repeatedly trying to stop an unpleasant memory from being retrieved. Finally, people may alter the characteristics of a memory and change its content or context, for example by replacing a negative impression with a productive interpretation. I discuss how mnemonic emotion regulation may be i... (shrink)

When do two mental items belong to the same life? We could be content with the answer -just when they have certain volitional qualities in common. An affinity is noted between that theory and Berkeley's early doctrine of the self. Some rivals of the volitional theory invoke a spiritual or physical owner of mental items. They run a risk either of empty formality or of causal superstition. Other rivals postulate a non-transitive and symmetrical relation in the set of mental items. (...) They must allow in consequence either for joint ownership of one and the same mental item, or for incompatible simultaneous decisions by one and the same person, or for new forms of death. This makes them disquieting. Another rival invokes a transitive and symmetrical relation defined in terms of co-consciousness. Even that allows for incongruous simultaneities. The volitional theory is free from such disadvantages. (shrink)

Das Vorhandensein bilateraler Asymmetrie bei Organismen ist an und für sich biophysikalisch verständlich. Schwierigkeiten entstehen jedoch beim Versuch die auffallende Ungleichheit in den Häufigkeiten des Vorkommens von Rechts- und Linksasymmetrie biophysikalisch zu deuten. Es werden zwei Möglichkeiten für solch'eine Deutung besprochen. Die eine stützt sich auf die fundamentale Asymmetrie des elektromagnetischen Feldes, und wird als biologisch weniger geeignet angesehen. Die andere, welche dem Verfasser als wahrscheinlicher erscheint, beruht auf der Asymmetrie der organischen Moleküle.L'existence d'une asymétrie bilaterale en général chez des (...) organismes divers n'offre pas de difficulté particulière du point de vue biophysique. Mais les difficultés surgissent quand on tâche de comprendre l'inégalité très prononcée des cas d'asymétrie droite et gauche. Deux possibilités sont discutées dans ce mémoire. L'une repose sur l'asymétrie fondamentale du champs électromagnétique. Cette explication est considérée comme moins probable. Une autre explication qui nous apparaît plus probable, est fondée sur l'asymétrie moléculaire. (shrink)

The sensation of red light falling on your eyes has something in common with the experience of looking at a cartoon in the New Yorker. The phenomenal quality of the sensation and the funniness of the joke are both properties of your subjective take on an external event and both arise in two steps. With sensations, your brain responds to signals from bodily sense organs with an internalized evaluative response; your mind reads this response and represents what it's like as (...) the subjective property of redness. With jokes, the cartoonist creates a clever drawing; your mind takes in the drawing and represents what it's like as the subjective property of funniness. This analogy -- deliberately deflationary -- helps elucidate the nature of phenomenal consciousness and its neural correlates, and exposes the 'hard problem' as a conceptual error. (shrink)

I start with a detailed but partial analysis of a case regarding grade inflation. The case is inspired by the discussion in Crumbley et al. (2010) and its elaboration in Roberts (2016). I supplement the case description by introducing certain facts that are not in the original discussion. The subsequent analysis is based on this enriched case description. I then raise a number of objections against my analysis. An important metaethical, methodological question emerges while responding to these objections. To what (...) extent are characterizations of moral situations and their descriptions independent from moral commitments? Is there a neutral concept of moral relevance? I argue that we do not have a theory-neutral concept of moral relevance, and that case descriptions essentially presuppose moral commitments. From my moral perspective, as this perspective is reflected in the enriched case description I utilize, the original case description of grade inflation already involves utilizing the wrong moral perspective or theory. (shrink)

This article discusses the 2005 OUP biography of Michael Polanyi by William T. Scott and Martin X. Moleski S.J., Michael Polanyi, Scientist and Philosopher . The discussants are N. E. Wetherick, Brian G Gowenlock, and John Puddefoot; Martin X. Moleski, S. J. briefly responds, providing a previously unpulished letter from Polanyi to Reverend Dr. Knox, a Presbyterian mininster.