Recognising and responding appropriately to emotions is critical to adaptive psychological functioning. Psychopathic traits (e.g. callous, manipulative, impulsive, antisocial) are related to differences in recognition and response when emotion is conveyed through facial expressions and language. Use of emotional music stimuli represents a promising approach to improve our understanding of the specific emotion processing difficulties underlying psychopathic traits because it decouples recognition of emotion from cues directly conveyed by other people (e.g. facial signals). In Experiment 1, participants listened to clips (...) of emotional music and identified the emotional content (Sample 1, N = 196) or reported on their feelings elicited by the music (Sample 2, N = 197). Participants accurately recognised (t(195) = 32.78, p <.001, d = 4.69) and reported feelings consistent with (t(196) = 7.84, p <.001, d = 1.12) the emotion conveyed in the music. However, psychopathic traits were associated with reduced emotion recognition accuracy (F(1, 191) = 19.39, p <.001) and reduced likelihood of feeling the emotion (F(1, 193) = 35.45, p <.001), particularly for fearful music. In Experiment 2, we replicated findings for broad difficulties with emotion recognition (Sample 3, N = 179) and emotional resonance (Sample 4, N = 199) associated with psychopathic traits. Results offer new insight into emotion recognition and response difficulties that are associated with psychopathic traits. (shrink)

Precision Medicine has become a common label for data-intensive and patient-driven biomedical research. Its intended future is reflected in endeavours such as the Precision Medicine Initiative in the USA. This article addresses the question whether it is possible to discern a new ‘medical cosmology’ in Precision Medicine, a concept that was developed by Nicholas Jewson to describe comprehensive transformations involving various dimensions of biomedical knowledge and practice, such as vocabularies, the roles of patients and physicians and the conceptualisation of disease. (...) Subsequently, I will elaborate my assessment of the features of Precision Medicine with the help of Michel Foucault, by exploring how precision medicine involves a transformation along three axes: the axis of biomedical knowledge, of biomedical power and of the patient as a self. Patients are encouraged to become the managers of their own health status, while the medical domain is reframed as a data-sharing community, characterised by changing power relationships between providers and patients, producers and consumers. While the emerging Precision Medicine cosmology may surpass existing knowledge frameworks; it obscures previous traditions and reduces research-subjects to mere data. This in turn, means that the individual is both subjected to the neoliberal demand to share personal information, and at the same time has acquired the positive ‘right’ to become a member of the data-sharing community. The subject has to constantly negotiate the meaning of his or her data, which can either enable self-expression, or function as a commanding Superego. (shrink)

In 1371 Edward III appealed to Parliament for a grant of taxation in order to support the war recently reopened against the French. The resulting lay subsidy, levied in each parish throughout the country and designed to contribute a total of £50,000 to the royal coffers, marked a change in the taxation procedures used in England since the 1330s and opened a period of experimentation which was to culminate in the three poll taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1380. It has (...) long been appreciated that the dramatic increase in royal financial demands in the 1370s, coinciding with the decline of English fortunes on the Continent, produced widespread disaffection in the country, which manifested itself in the Good Parliament of 1376 and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The 1371 Parliament and the tax which it granted therefore have much to tell us about the attitudes of political society in England to the military and domestic policies of the Crown during Edward III's last years. (shrink)

The classical two-body system with Lorentz-invariant Coulomb work function V = -k/ρ is solved in 3+1 dimensions using the manifestly covariant Hamiltonian mechanics of Stückelberg. Particular solutions for the reduced motion are obtained which correspond to bound attractive, unbound attractive, and repulsive scattering motion. A lack of perihelion precession is found in the bound attractive orbit, and the semiclassical hydrogen spectrum subsequently contains no fine structure corrections. It is argued that this prediction is indicative of the correct classical special relativistic (...) two-body theory. (shrink)

Written in a relaxed, readable style, A Concise Introduction to Pure Mathematics leads students gently but firmly into the world of higher mathematics. It provides beginning undergraduates with a rigourous grounding in the basic tools and techniques of the discipline and prepares them for further more advanced studies in analysis, differential equations, and algebra. This edition contains additional material on secret codes, permutations, and prime numbers. It features more than 200 exercises, with many completely new. The text is organized into (...) relatively independent chapters, allowing instructors to tailor the book to meet their individual course needs. · Contains extra material concerning prime numbers, forming the basis for data encryption · Explores "Secret Codes" - one of today's most spectacular applications of pure mathematics Discusses Permutations and their importance in many topics in discrete mathematics. (shrink)

This book argues that the ability to integrate biological and psychological levels of understanding is inhibited by two important issues. Ideas about the autonomic nervous system are integrated with those from the author's previous text A Basic Theory of Neuropsychoanalysis.