Sustained attention, a key cognitive skill that improves during childhood and adolescence, tends to be worse in some emotional and behavioural disorders. Sustained attention is typically studied in non-affective task contexts; here, we used a novel task to index performance in affective versus neutral contexts across adolescence (N = 465; ages 11–18). We asked whether: (i) performance would be worse in negative versus neutral task contexts; (ii) performance would improve with age; (iii) affective interference would be greater in younger adolescents; (...) (iv) adolescents at risk for depression and higher in anxiety would show overall worse performance; and (v) would show differential performance in negative contexts. Results indicated that participants performed more poorly in negative contexts and showed age-related performance improvements. Those at risk of depression performed more poorly than those at lower risk. However, there was no difference between groups as a result of affective context. For anxiety there was no difference in performance as a function of severity. However, those with higher anxiety showed less variance in their reaction times to negative stimuli than those with lower anxiety. One interpretation is that moderate levels of emotional arousal associated with anxiety make individuals less susceptible to the distracting effects of negative stimuli. (shrink)

In Wrong Medicine, Lawrence J. Schneiderman, M.D., and Nancy S. Jecker, Ph.D., address issues that have occupied the media and the courts since the time of Karen Ann Quinlan. The authors examine the ethics of cases in which medical treatment is offered--or mandated--even if a patient lacks the capacity to appreciate its benefit or if the treatment will still leave a patient totally dependent on intensive medical care. In exploring these timely issues Schneiderman and Jecker reexamine the doctor-patient relationship and (...) call for a restoration of common sense and reality to what we expect from medicine. They discuss economic, historical, and demographic factors that affect medical care and offer clear definitions of what constitutes futile medical treatment. And they address such topics as the limits on unwanted treatment, the shift from the "Age of Physician Paternalism" to the "Age of Patient Autonomy," health care rationing, and the adoption of new ethical standards. (shrink)

Der Autor beginnt mit einer Erörterung der Leibnizschen These, man müsse substantielle Formen annehmen, wenn man die inertia erklären wolle, und fragt dann, in welcher Weise man den Begriff der substantiellen Form zu dem in Beziehung zu setzen habe, was Leibniz über materielle Substanzen sagt. Der zentrale Begriff ist hier der Begriff der Repräsentation von einem bestimmten Gesichtspunkt oder einer bestimmten Lage aus, welche die Substanz von ihrer materia prima gewinnt. Bei der Erörterung der Frage, wie Leibniz' Substanzbegriff mit den (...) anderen Teilen seiner Philosophie zusammenstimmt, merkt der Verfasser an, Leibniz sei versucht zu sagen, materielle Dinge seien nur Phänomene. Aber diese Auffassung würde die konkreten Teile der Leibnizschen Philosophie zerstören. Davon abgesehen macht Leibniz es aufgrund seines Bestehens auf dem vollständigen In-sich-selbst-Enthaltensein (self-containedness) der Substanz schwer, die Einheit einer zusammengesetzten Substanz zu erklären. Anschließend behandelt der Autor einige Auffassungen, die er für Mißverständnisse Leibnizens hält. Wenn man behauptet, Raum und Zeit seien Ordnungen, so besagt das nicht, daß Monaden keine raum-zeitlichen Beziehungen zukommen. In gleicher Weise folgt aus der Behauptung, materielle Dinge seien phaenomena bene fundata, nicht, daß sie nur Repräsentationen im Geiste seien. Zum Schluß legt der Verfasser dar, daß Leibniz' scheinbar paradoxe Behauptung, Substanzen handelten nicht aufeinander, mit den'Lehren der modernen Wissenschaft übereinstimmt. (shrink)

It is not only in science that abstraction is found as a method of dealing with the world, and we may profitably begin by showing its wide use in ordinary practical life.

There is one nautical term which has been neglected by those who have written about the Greek ship—for the very good reason that it had ceased to be used literally by the time our records, literary and epigraphic, begin. This is a pity, since the silence of experts has resulted in an absurdity, or at least obscurity, appearing in the dictionaries. An unattested original meaning ‘under-rower’ has been universally assumed for the word ujnjpenjs . This assumption not merely requires proof (...) but is in sore need of explanation. What is an ‘under-rower’? And why did the term pass out of use in that sense? (shrink)

The word τερθρεία, which L. and S.8 derived from τερατεία and translated ‘the use of claptraps’, is perhaps best known from its occurrence in Isocrates , but the new edition has spread the net more widely, citing Philo, Philodemus, Proclus, Galen, Dion. Hal., and giving its meaning as ‘the use of extreme subtlety, hair-splitting, formal pedantry’. This agrees better with the gloss / κενοσπονδία attributed to Orus of Miletus in Et. Mag. 753. 4. Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Plutarch each use τερθρεύομαι (...) once. In the Helen Isocrates, condemning the futile ingenuity of the Sophists in writing encomia on such unworthy objects as salt and humble-bees, holds that such tours de force are immoral, as tending to deceive, representing a literary form of the vice περιεργία. Τερθρεία, then, should take its place, as a recognized term for the idle over-elaboration of a banausic theme, in the vocabulary of Greek literary criticism. It does not, however, appear in Rhys Roberts's ‘Glossary of Greek Rhetoric’ appended to his edition of D.H.'s On Literary Composition. No doubt this is because τερθρεία does not occur in this or any other of D.H.'s Scripta Rhetorica. But D.H. himself uses the word in Antiq. Rom. . Similarly J. F. Lockwood does not discuss the term in his lists in C.Q. xxxi and xxxii, where he collects words which are used metaphorically by D.H. in literary criticism. The metaphor in τερθρεία is certainly not obvious; but the literary sense must have involved some transference of meaning, for it is not to be expected that the word τερθρεία sprang, in full panoply of critical significance, from the brain of the Muse of Rhetoric; and it is part of the purpose of this paper to point the way to an explanation, or at least to set forth some known facts about the word and its possible congeners. (shrink)