When two actors have the same mental state but one happens to harm another person (unlucky actor) and the other one does not (lucky actor), the latter elicits a milder moral judgement. To understand how this outcome effect would affect post-harm interactions between victims and perpetrators, we examined how the social role from which transgressions are perceived moderates the outcome effect, and how outcome effects on moral judgements transfer to agentic and communal interpersonal goals. Three vignette experiments (N = 950) (...) revealed similar outcome effects on moral judgement across social roles. In contrast, outcome effects on agentic and communal goals varied by social role: victims exhibited the strongest outcome effects and perpetrators the weakest, with bystanders falling in between. Moral judgement did not mediate the effects of outcome severity on interpersonal goals. We discuss the possibility that outcome severity raises normative expectations regarding post-harm interactions that are unrelated to moral considerations. (shrink)

In the exploratory study reported here, we tested the efficacy of an intervention designed to train teenagers with Möbius syndrome (MS) to increase the use of alternative communication strategies (e.g., gestures) to compensate for their lack of facial expressivity. Specifically, we expected the intervention to increase the level of rapport experienced in social interactions by our participants. In addition, we aimed to identify the mechanisms responsible for any such increase in rapport. In the study, five teenagers with MS interacted with (...) three naïve participants without MS before the intervention, and with three different naïve participants without MS after the intervention. Rapport was assessed by self-report and by behavioral coders who rated videos of the interactions. Individual non-verbal behavior was assessed via behavioral coders, whereas verbal behavior was automatically extracted from the sound files. Alignment was assessed using cross recurrence quantification analysis and mixed-effects models. The results showed that observer-coded rapport was greater after the intervention, whereas self-reported rapport did not change significantly. Observer-coded gesture and expressivity increased in participants with and without MS, whereas overall linguistic alignment decreased. Fidgeting and repetitiveness of verbal behavior also decreased in both groups. In sum, the intervention may impact non-verbal and verbal behavior in participants with and without MS, increasing rapport as well as overall gesturing, while decreasing alignment. (shrink)

Sharing social media research datasets allows for reproducibility and peer-review, but it is very often difficult or even impossible to achieve due to legal restrictions and can also be ethically questionable. What is more, research data repositories and other research infrastructure and research support institutions are only starting to target social media researchers. In this paper, we present a practical solution to sharing social media data with the help of a social science data archive. Our aim is to contribute to (...) the effort of enhancing comparability and reproducibility in social media research by taking some first steps towards setting standards for sustainable data archiving. We present a showcase for sharing social media data with the example of a big dataset containing geotagged tweets through a research data archive. We provide a general background to the process of long-term archiving of research data. After some consideration of the current obstacles for sharing and archiving social media data, we present our solution of archiving the specific dataset of geotagged tweets at the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences, a publicly funded German data archive for secure and long-term archiving of social science data. We archived and documented tweet IDs and additional information to improve reproducibility of the initial research while also attending to ethical and legal considerations, and taking into account Twitter’s terms of service in particular. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophers and psychologists conceived of emotions as brain- and body-bound affairs. But researchers have started to challenge this internalist and individualist orthodoxy. A rapidly growing body of work suggests that some emotions incorporate external resources and thus extend beyond the neurophysiological confines of organisms; some even argue that emotions can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents. Call this the extended emotions thesis. In this article, we consider different ways of understanding ExE in philosophy, psychology, and the (...) cognitive sciences. First, we outline the background of the debate and discuss different argumentative strategies for ExE. In particular, we distinguish ExE from cognate but more moderate claims about the embodied and situated nature of cognition and emotion. We then dwell upon two dimensions of ExE: emotions extended by material culture and by the social factors. We conclude by defending ExE against some objections and point to desiderata for future research. (shrink)

I offer a preliminary defense of the hypothesis of extended emotions (HEE). After discussing some taxonomic considerations, I specify two ways of parsing HEE: the hypothesis of bodily extended emotions (HEBE), and the hypothesis of environmentally extended emotions (HEEE). I argue that, while both HEBE and HEEE are empirically plausible, only HEEE covers instances of genuinely extended emotions. After introducing some further distinctions, I support one form of HEEE by appealing to different streams of empirical research—particularly work on music and (...) emotion regulation. However, I register skepticism about a second and more radical form of HEEE. (shrink)

Philosophical work exploring the relation between cognition and the Internet is now an active area of research. Some adopt an externalist framework, arguing that the Internet should be seen as environmental scaffolding that drives and shapes cognition. However, despite growing interest in this topic, little attention has been paid to how the Internet influences our affective life — our moods, emotions, and our ability to regulate these and other feeling states. We argue that the Internet scaffolds not only cognition but (...) also affect. Using various case studies, we consider some ways that we are increasingly dependent on our Internet-enabled “techno-social niches” to regulate the contours of our own affective life and participate in the affective lives of others. We argue further that, unlike many of the other environmental resources we use to regulate affect, the Internet has distinct properties that introduce new dimensions of complexity to these regulative processes. First, it is radically social in a way many of these other resources are not. Second, it is a radically distributed and decentralized resource; no one individual or agent is responsible for the Internet’s content or its affective impact on users. Accordingly, while the Internet can profoundly augment and enrich our affective life and deepen our connection with others, there is also a distinctive kind of affective precarity built into our online endeavors as well. (shrink)

A family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external resources. I consider how these “scaffolded” approaches might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. I first introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding” and make some taxonomic distinctions. Next, I use schizophrenia as a case study to argue—along with others in phenomenological psychopathology—that schizophrenia is fundamentally a self-disturbance. However, I offer a subtle reconfiguration of these approaches. I argue that schizophrenia (...) is not simply a disruption of ipseity or minimal self-consciousness but rather a disruption of the scaffolded self, established and regulated via its ongoing engagement with the world and others. I conclude by considering how this scaffolded framework indicates the need to consider new forms of intervention and treatment. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Ausgehend von den Erfahrungswerten sechs Klinischer Ethiker*innen an Universitätsklinika in Deutschland wurde eine strukturierte Auseinandersetzung mit dem Arbeitsfeld der Fortbildungen im Rahmen der Klinischen Ethikarbeit vorgenommen. Die Zusammenarbeit wurde von der Fragestellung geleitet, was bei der Konzeption einer Ethik-Fortbildung innerhalb einer Einrichtung zu berücksichtigen ist. Der methodische Zugang zur Beantwortung der explorativen Fragestellung bestand in einem mehrstufigen, deskriptiven Verfahren, das alternierend in gemeinsamen Arbeitssitzungen und individueller Arbeit zwischen den Sitzungen umgesetzt wurde. Als Resultat zeigt der Aufsatz eine Übersicht über (...) die Bandbreite möglicher Fortbildungsformate auf, die denjenigen Hilfestellung bieten kann, die in ihrer Einrichtung Fortbildungen zu ethischen Themen konzipieren und durchführen wollen. Darüber hinaus bietet er einen Überblick über die bei der Umsetzung jeweils zu berücksichtigenden _direkt strukturierenden_ sowie _indirekt strukturierenden_ Merkmale. Es wird an Beispielen aufgezeigt, welche Formatvarianten sich in Kombination mit welchen direkt strukturierenden Merkmalen in den ausgewählten Universitätsklinika bewährt haben. Der Beitrag liefert eine Diskussionsgrundlage, um die strukturierte Auseinandersetzung mit konzeptionellen Fragen ethischer Fortbildung in der Klinik zu befördern. (shrink)

Self-disorders in depression and schizophrenia have been the focus of much recent work in phenomenological psychopathology. But little has been said about the role the material environment plays in shaping the affective character of these disorders. In this paper, we argue that enjoying reliable (i.e., trustworthy) access to the things and spaces around us — the constituents of our material environment — is crucial for our ability to stabilize and regulate our affective life on a day-today basis. These things and (...) spaces often play an ineliminable role in shaping what we feel and how we feel it; when we interact with them, they contribute ongoing feedback that " scaffolds " the character and temporal development of our affective experiences. However, in some psychopathological conditions, the ability to access to these things and spaces becomes disturbed. Individuals not only lose certain forms of access to the practical significance of the built environment but also to its ​ regulative​ significance, too — and the stability and organization of their affective life is compromised. In developing this view, we discuss core concepts like " affordance spaces " , " scaffolding " , and " incorporation ". We apply these concepts to two case studies, severe depression and schizophrenia, and we show why these cases support our main claim. We conclude by briefly considering implications of this view for developing intervention and treatment strategies. (shrink)

Bowers et al. focus their criticisms on research that compares behavioral and brain data from the ventral stream with a class of deep neural networks for object recognition. While they are right to identify issues with current benchmarking research programs, they overlook a much more fundamental limitation of this literature: Disregarding the importance of action and interaction for perception.

Optical distortions as a visual disturbance are inherent in many optical devices such as spectacles or virtual reality headsets. In such devices, distortions vary spatially across the visual field. In progressive addition lenses, for example, the left and right regions of the lens skew the peripheral parts of the wearers visual field in opposing directions. The human visual system adapts to homogeneous distortions and the respective aftereffects are transferred to non-retinotopic locations. This study investigates simultaneous adaptation to two opposing distortions (...) at different retinotopic locations. Two oppositely skewed natural image sequences were presented to 10 subjects as adaptation stimuli at two distinct locations in the visual field. To do so, subjects were instructed to keep fixation on a target. Eye tracking was used for gaze control. Change of perceived motion direction was measured in a direction identification task. The point of subjective equality, that is, the angle at which a group of coherently moving dots was perceived as moving horizontal, was determined for both retinal locations. The shift of perceived motion direction was evaluated by comparing PSE before and after adaptation. A significant shift at both retinal locations in the direction of the skew distortion of the corresponding adaptation stimulus is demonstrated. Consequently, parallel adaptation to two opposing distortions in a retinotopic reference frame was confirmed by this study. (shrink)

Psychiatric disorders share an excess of seasonal birth in winter and spring, suggesting an increase of neurodevelopmental risks. Evidence suggests season of birth can serve as a proxy of harmful environmental factors. Given that prenatal exposure of these factors may trigger pathologic processes in the neurodevelopment, they may consequently lead to brain volume alterations. Here we tested the effects of season of birth on gray matter volume in a transdiagnostic sample of patients with schizophrenia and depression compared to healthy controls. (...) We found a significant effect of season of birth on gray matter volume with reduced right hippocampal volume in summer-born compared to winter-born patients with depression. In addition, the volume of the right hippocampus was reduced independent from season of birth in schizophrenia. Our results support the potential impact of season of birth on hippocampal volume in depression. (shrink)

Das von Mitgliedern des Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschungszentrums der Universitäten Mainz und Trier sowie des Gutenberg-Museums in Mainz gemeinsam vorbereitete Ausstellungs- und Katalogprojekt veranschaulicht anhand von Beispielen aus unterschiedlichen Forschungsrichtungen die enge Beziehung von Wissen und Raum. Die Resultate interdisziplinärer wissenschaftlicher Arbeit werden so - im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes - veranschaulicht und ihre Aktualität für ein breites Publikum einsichtig gemacht. Die Ausstellung, die vom 30. Oktober 2008 bis zum 29. März 2009 im Gutenberg-Museum in Mainz zu sehen sein wird, vermittelt also (...) nicht nur kunst- und kulturhistorisches Faktenwissen. Vielmehr soll die Ausstellung die bewusste Auseinandersetzung mit Wissen und seiner Verortung fördern. Die Verbindung von Wissen und Raum lässt vielfältige Assoziationen zu. Denkt man zunächst an Schulen und Universitäten, Bibliotheken, Archive und Museen, kommen dann auch noch andere Wissensräume in den Blick: das Internet, unser Schreibtisch, Kirchen, Bücher, Zeitschriften, Filme, Bilder, Landkarten, das menschliche Gehirn. Überall wird Wissen in den unterschiedlichsten Räumen gesammelt, aufbewahrt, geordnet und zugänglich gemacht. (shrink)

Patientenmobilität und grenzüberschreitende Gesundheitsversorgung sind alltägliche Phänomene in der Europäischen Union (EU). Im Jahr 2011 hat die EU eine Richtlinie erlassen, um in diesem Kontext Rechtssicherheit herzustellen. Bisher gibt es keine umfassenden systematischen Studien über ethische Aspekte grenzübergreifender Gesundheitsversorgung. In dieser Arbeit werden die rechtlichen Entwicklungen der grenzübergreifenden Gesundheitsversorgung dargestellt und die in der Literatur vereinzelt erwähnten ethisch relevanten Aspekte heuristisch und auf Patiententypologien aufbauend systematisch inventarisiert und diskutiert. Es zeigt sich, dass die Möglichkeit der Patientenmobilität und die damit vor (...) allem verbundenen Finanzierungsregelungen die Autonomie einiger Patienten sicherlich verbessern kann. Allerdings können wohl nicht alle Patienten Versorgungsverbesserungen erwarten. Im Gegenteil können sogar negative Konsequenzen für einige Patienten folgen, was vor allem aus gerechtigkeitstheoretischen Überlegungen kritisch zu sehen ist. (shrink)

As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of affective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person’s emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account of human/AI interaction, according to which these encounters involve an (...) elaborate practise of imaginative pretence: a make-believe in which the artificial agent is attributed a life of its own. We attend, specifically, to the temporal characteristics of these fictions, and to what we imagine artificial agents are doing when we are not looking at them. (shrink)

As the pre-eminent Enlightenment philosopher, Kant famously calls on all humans to make up their own minds, independently from the constraints imposed on them by others. Kant's focus, however, is on universal human reason, and he tells us little about what makes us individual persons. In this book, Katharina T. Kraus explores Kant's distinctive account of psychological personhood by unfolding how, according to Kant, we come to know ourselves as such persons. Drawing on Kant's Critical works and on his (...) Lectures and Reflections, Kraus develops the first textually comprehensive and systematically coherent account of our capacity for what Kant calls 'inner experience'. The novel view of self-knowledge and self-formation in Kant that she offers addresses present-day issues in philosophy of mind and will be relevant for contemporary philosophical debates. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of philosophy, as well as of philosophy of mind and psychology. (shrink)

For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones and search engines as memory aids. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold emotional consciousness, including the self-regulative processes constitutive of emotional (...) consciousness. In developing this idea, I consider the ‘material’ and ‘worldmaking’ character music, and I apply these considerations to two case studies: music as a tool for religious worship, and music as a weapon for torture. (shrink)

Although enactive approaches to cognition vary in terms of their character and scope, all endorse several core claims. The first is that cognition is tied to action. The second is that cognition is composed of more than just in-the-head processes; cognitive activities are externalized via features of our embodiment and in our ecological dealings with the people and things around us. I appeal to these two enactive claims to consider a view called “direct social perception” : the idea that we (...) can sometimes perceive features of other minds directly in the character of their embodiment and environmental interactions. I argue that if DSP is true, we can probably also perceive certain features of mental disorders as well. I draw upon the developmental psychologist Daniel Stern’s notion of “forms of vitality”—largely overlooked in these debates—to develop this idea, and I use autism as a case study. I argue further that an enactive approach to DSP can clarify some ways we play a regulative role in shaping the temporal and phenomenal character of the disorder in question, and it may therefore have practical significance for both the clinical and therapeutic encounter. (shrink)

We argue that the notion of "mental institutions"-discussed in recent debates about extended cognition-can help better understand the origin and character of social impairments in autism, and also help illuminate the extent to which some mechanisms of autistic dysfunction extend across both internal and external factors (i.e., they do not just reside within an individual's head). After providing some conceptual background, we discuss the connection between mental institutions and embodied habits of mind. We then discuss the significance of our view (...) for understanding autistic habits of mind and consider why these embodied habits are sometimes a poor fit with neurotypical mental institutions. We conclude by considering how these insights highlight the two-way, extended nature of social impairments in autism, and how this extended picture might assist in constructing more inclusive mental institutions and intervention strategies. (shrink)

We develop a general framework for forcing with coherent adequate sets on [Formula: see text] as side conditions, where [Formula: see text] is a cardinal of uncountable cofinality. We describe a class of forcing posets which we call coherent adequate type forcings. The main theorem of the paper is that any coherent adequate type forcing preserves CH. We show that there exists a forcing poset for adding a club subset of [Formula: see text] with finite conditions while preserving CH, solving (...) a problem of Friedman [Forcing with finite conditions, in Set Theory: Centre de Recerca Matemática, Barcelona, 2003–2004, Trends in Mathematics, pp. 285–295.]. (shrink)

In this paper we adopt Sterelny's framework of the scaffolded mind, and his related dimensional approach, to highlight the many ways in which human affectivity is environmentally supported. After discussing the relationship between the scaffolded-mind view and related frameworks, such as the extended-mind view, we illustrate the many ways in which our affective states are environmentally supported by items of material culture, other people, and their interplay. To do so, we draw on empirical evidence from various disciplines, and develop phenomenological (...) considerations to distinguish different ways in which we experience the world affectively. (shrink)

The study examines how multinational organizations implement the concept of ethics and compliance programs into their businesses and the extent to which these programs were geared to the 2004 Amendments. The study explores the applicability of the 2004 Amendments and analyzes the instruments organizations use to successfully develop and maintain these programs. By including research from various fields, a theoretical framework was developed for implementing an ethics and compliance program that takes into account the 2004 Amendments.

In recent literature many theorists, including Eklund (2011), endorse or express sympathy towards the view that the evaluative content of thick terms is not asserted with utterances of sentences containing them but rather part of their secondary content. In this article we discuss a number of features of thick terms which speak against this view. We further argue that these features are not shared by another, recently much-discussed, class of hybrid evaluative terms, so-called slurs, and that the evaluative contents of (...) these might thus very well be secondary. (shrink)

Despite increasing interest in the work of Tetsuro Watsuji, his discussion of intentionality remains underexplored. I here develop an interpretation and application of his view. First, I unpack Watsuji’s arguments for the inherently social character of intentionality, consider how they connect with his more general discussion of embodiment and betweenness, and then situate his view alongside phenomenologists like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Next, I argue that Watsuji’s characterization of the social character of intentionality is relevant to current discussions in phenomenological (...) psychopathology. I consider how it can help illuminate the character and structure of some anomalous experiences in schizophrenia. I argue further that this application can enrich existing attempts to connect Watsuji and psychopathology, such as those found in the work of the psychiatrist Bin Kimura. (shrink)

This paper addresses ethical issues surrounding global supply chains of multinational companies in developing countries. In particular, it considers the development and application of industry-wide ethical standards and codes of conduct for multinational supply chains in China. We describe and analyze the ethical norms and compliance components of such industry-wide regimes in the toy, textile, and consumer electronics industries. We argue that this development represents an positive attempt to institutionalize emergent international ethical standards and practices into this component of the (...) Chinese economy. (shrink)

I defend a model of the musically extended mind. I consider how acts of “musicking” grant access to novel emotional experiences otherwise inaccessible. First, I discuss the idea of “musical affordances” and specify both what musical affordances are and how they invite different forms of entrainment. Next, I argue that musical affordances – via soliciting different forms of entrainment – enhance the functionality of various endogenous, emotiongranting regulative processes, drawing novel experiences out of us with an expanded complexity and phenomenal (...) character. I argue that music therefore ought to be thought of as part of the vehicle needed to realize these emotional experiences. I appeal to different sources of empirical work to develop this idea. (shrink)

ExcerptThis article compares two fairly recent autobiographical works about the experiences of two highly publicized global disasters: Josef Haslinger's Phi Phi Island: Ein Bericht (2004) and Kathrin Röggla's really ground zero: 11. september und folgendes (2001). Röggla was in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. Haslinger was a victim of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, where he vacationed with his family. Both tell stories that are at once intensely personal, relating threats to the narrator's very existence, and decidedly public, as (...) the events in question were broadcast around the world and subject to prolific media commentary and overwhelming visual representation. (shrink)

It has recently been pointed out that the cloudiness of the concept of authenticity as well as inflated ideologies of the ‘true self’ provide good reasons to criticize theories and ideals of authenticity. Nevertheless, there are also good reasons to defend an ethical ideal of authenticity, not least because of its critical and oppositional force, which is directed against experiences of self-abandonment and self-alienation. I will argue for an elaborated ethical ideal of authenticity: the ambitious ideal of a continuous self-reflective (...) process of ‘self-authentication’. For this purpose, the ideal of being authentic in expressing and unfolding one’s individual personality and characteristics will be combined with the ideal of being ‘an authentic person’ - whereby ‘a person’ is to be understood in a Kantian sense as an autonomous person who is reasonable and morally responsible. (shrink)