Childhood adversity is associated with altered or dysregulated stress reactivity; these altered patterns of physiological functioning persist into adulthood. Evidence from both preclinical animal models and human neuroimaging studies indicates that early life experience differentially influences stressor-evoked activity within central visceral neural circuits proximally involved in the control of stress responses, including the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN), bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and amygdala. However, the relationship between childhood adversity and the (...) resting-state connectivity of this central visceral network remains unclear. To this end, we examined relationships between childhood threat and childhood socioeconomic deprivation, the resting-state connectivity between our regions of interest (ROIs), and affective symptom severity and diagnoses. We recruited a transdiagnostic sample of young adult males and females (n= 100; mean age = 27.28,SD= 3.99; 59 females) with a full distribution of maltreatment history and symptom severity across multiple affective disorders. Resting-state data were acquired using a 7.2-min functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) sequence; noted ROIs were applied as masks to determine ROI-to-ROI connectivity. Threat was determined by measures of childhood traumatic events and abuse. Socioeconomic deprivation (SED) was determined by a measure of childhood socioeconomic status (parental education level). Covarying for age, race and sex, greater childhood threat was significantly associated with lower BNST-PVN, amygdala-sgACC and PVN-sgACC connectivity. No significant relationships were found between SED and resting-state connectivity. BNST-PVN connectivity was associated with the number of lifetime affective diagnoses. Exposure to threat during early development may entrain altered patterns of resting-state connectivity between these stress-related ROIs in ways that contribute to dysregulated neural and physiological responses to stress and subsequent affective psychopathology. (shrink)

J. Gingell, E. P. Brandon; Popular Culture, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 34, Issue 3, 7 March 2003, Pages 461–485, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-97.

This chapter deals with a crucial component of our position, the presumption that there are objective grounds for preferring one thing to another within the various cultural institutions we deal with, that there are better or worse symphonies, soufflés and theories of the atom. The task of showing this is more urgent for some institutions than others. While philosophers can doubt anything, most people are persuaded of the objectivity of our efforts to comprehend the physical world and to weigh, count (...) and measure accurately in many areas of human activity. Again, when we are faced with a choice among functional objects or processes, most people will admit that we can ground a preference for a knife or an exercise routine on objectively established facts: sharpness, or measurable increase in strength. Here, certainly, various conflicting desiderata may enter and make actual decisions more difficult — the sharpest knife may also be the most expensive; we may need to worry about its safety features; it may be ugly; and so on. But many will doubt that our judgements of comparative worth for non-functional objects such as paintings or sonatas can claim a similarly objective basis. We shall, therefore, concentrate our efforts on the most doubted areas, but will begin with the less contentious, where we think it is useful to draw attention to the genuine problems some philosophers have stressed, to show in fact that what we believe to be popular unconcern deserves to be somewhat ruffled. (shrink)

Arnold wrote in an educational tradition that both lay in a main line of descent from the cultural formations he most valued and equipped him with the tools necessary to appreciate many of the elements in those traditions that are not in his native language. So when he referred, as exemplars of high culture, to Homer and Cicero, Montesquieu and Goethe, he presumed acquaintance with their works in the original languages on his own part and on that of his audience. (...) His own vernacular derived from that of Shakespeare and the Authorised Version of the Bible. (shrink)

Defenders of high culture can be found invoking many and various allies. Many are, we think, out of place. These defences raise issues that we do not need to worry about or themselves create unnecessary difficulties for clarity of thought on these matters. In this chapter we will touch upon a number of such irrelevancies. We will begin by examining the assimilation of high culture to religion and religious concerns in the thought of Eliot and Scruton: this will allow us (...) to indicate our stance on the place of religion in schools. We will then examine some psychological and sociological issues that Bantock has invoked in defending his secular vision of the role of culture, and conclude with Barrow's curious identification of culture with general intelligence. (shrink)

The fact that education is, and must be, a process of enculturation for those being educated gives us some, but by no means enough, guidance as to what we would expect to see going on in our schools. For given that our educational institutions are part of our culture and, given that anything that is part of our culture will transmit cultural messages, if we put children in school and let them play all day, or simply asked teachers to explain (...) their hobbies to the children, then some processes of enculturalisation would be going on. But no one with any real concern for either our children or their education would think such things fulfil a proper role for schools. Certainly if, as Arnold thought, education is a question of passing on, or trying to pass on, the features from our culture that we value, then any such reliance on random processes must be ruled out. Instead we have to select those aspects of our culture which we wish our children to partake of and insist that our educational establishments make sustained and intentional efforts to ensure such participation. (shrink)

In the course of this book we shall frequently appeal to what we call an Arnoldian filter, a principle we wish to urge for choosing much of what should form part of education in schools. This priniciple is based on a remark in Matthew Arnold's Preface to Culture and Anarchy,1 that culture is a matter of getting ‘to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (1935, p.6, emphasis (...) added). Arnold's work here and elsewhere is often seen as a key monument in English humanist thought. Trilling claims that ‘he established criticism as an intellectual discipline among the people of two nations and set its best tone’ (1949, p.3). It may not be of merely historical interest to consider some of the concerns that drove Arnold to offer culture in his sense as a contribution to contemporary and future society. (shrink)

Whereas Phillips and colleagues argue that knowledge representations are more basic than belief representations, we argue that an accurate analysis of what is fundamental to theory of mind may depend crucially on the context in which mental-state reasoning occurs. Specifically, we call for increased study of the developmental trajectory of mental-state reasoning within socially evaluative contexts.

The concept of political obligation has not attracted much attention within Heideggerian scholarship. In this paper, we identify and explicate Heidegger’s conception of political obligation embedded in his pre-Kehre works. It will be argued that Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time and his address as Rector of Freiburg contain a latent associative account of political obligation. We argue that the ontological framework disclosed in Being and Time and the more concrete policy prescriptions of the Rectoral Address reveal a communitarian ethos (...) which animates the early Heideggerian canon and grounds his account of political obligation. For Heidegger, Dasein must be connected to a particular community’s ontological heritage in order to delimit its ontical possibilities in concrete situations. It will be argued that this relationship between ontological heritage and ontical possibilities is what defines political obligation for Heidegger. (shrink)

Science is driven by technical innovations, and perhaps nowhere as visibly as in neuroscience. In the past decade, advances in methods have led to an explosion of studies in cognitive (Gazzaniga et...

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People is recognized as a masterpiece among the historical literature of medieval England and Europe. Completed in 731, it comprises in a single flowing narrative a coherent history of the conversion of the English peoples to Christianity, and the story of the island kingdoms and churches from the 590s to the early eighth century, prefaced by a sketch of the earlier history of Britain. In 1969 the Clarendon Press published the new edition in Oxford (...) Medieval Texts, edited by Bertram Colgrave and Sir Roger Mynors. Mynors's masterly text and textual introduction replaced much of Charles Plummer's great edition of 1896; but the historical notes did not attempt to match in scale and detail Plummer's second volume of commentary. To fill this gap the late Professor J. M. Wallace-Hadrill devoted the last years of his life to a new commentary, one of the finest and most mature fruits of his scholarship - more succinct than Plummer, tauter, more relevant, above all drawing together and adding to the findings of a galaxy of modern scholars. Prepared for the press by Thomas Charles-Edwards, helped by Patrick Wormald and others, this book completes the new Bede, and is prefaced by a paper characteristic of Professor Wallace-Hadrill on `Bede and Plummer'. (shrink)

Hobbes Studies presents a special issue dedicated to the career and work of Professor Johann Sommerville on the occasion of his retirement. This introduction provides a brief overview of Sommerville’s professional achievements and the major themes of his scholarly work over the past forty years. It closes with a very brief summary of the contributions made in his honor.

Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) often ruminate about past experiences, especially those with negative content. These repetitive thoughts may interfere with cognitive processes related to attention and conflict monitoring. However, the temporal nature of these processes as reflected in event-related potentials (ERPs) has not been well-described. We examined behavioral and ERP indices of conflict monitoring during a modified flanker task and the allocation of attention during an attentional blink (AB) task in 33 individuals with MDD and 36 healthy controls, (...) and whether their behavioral performance and ERPs varied with level of rumination. N2 amplitude elicited by the flanker task was significantly reduced in participants with MDD compared to healthy controls. Level of self-reported rumination was also correlated with N2 amplitude. In contrast, P3 amplitude during the AB task was not significantly different between groups, nor was it correlated with rumination. No significant differences were found in behavioral task performance measures between groups or by rumination levels. These findings suggest that rumination in MDD is associated with select deficits in cognitive control, particularly related to conflict monitoring. (shrink)