Attentional bias to threat has been almost exclusively examined after participants experienced repeated pairings between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). This study aimed to determine whether threat-related attentional capture can result from observational learning, when participants acquire knowledge of the aversive qualities of a stimulus without themselves experiencing aversive outcomes. Non-clinical young-adult participants (N = 38) first watched a video of an individual (the demonstrator) performing a Pavlovian conditioning task in which one colour was paired (...) with shock (CS+) and another colour was neutral (CS−). They then carried out visual search for a shape-defined target. Oculomotor measures evidenced an attentional bias toward the CS+ colour, suggesting that threat-related attentional capture can ensue from observational learning. Exploratory analyses also revealed that this effect was positively correlated with empathy for the demonstrator. Our findings extend empirical and theoretical knowledge about threat-driven attention and provide valuable insights to better understand the formation of anxiety disorders. (shrink)

This paper examines the iconic conception of aesthetic education in the work of Friedrich Schiller, with the aim of elucidating Schiller’s unique innovation of this notion in understanding i) the relationship between aesthetic and ethical value and ii) the transformative possibilities within a collective, social dimension of aesthetic experience. The paper provides an overview of the Kantian origins of Schiller’s aesthetic programme (Section 1). It then considers Schiller’s critique of the perceived failings of the Kantian and Enlightenment republican models of (...) ethical value and political emancipation (Section 2) before turning to his positive alternative aesthetic programme (Section 3). The paper concludes (Section 4) with some evaluation and reflection on Schiller’s original contributions. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Emergence or Reduction?".

Background: Childhood cancer care involves many ethical concerns. Deciding on treatment levels and providing care that infringes on the child’s growing autonomy are known ethical concerns that involve the whole professional team around the child’s care. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to explore healthcare professionals’ experiences of participating in ethics case reflection sessions in childhood cancer care. Research design: Data collection by observations, individual interviews, and individual encounters. Data analysis were conducted following grounded theory methodology. Participants and research (...) context: Healthcare professionals working at a publicly funded children’s hospital in Sweden participated in ethics case reflection sessions in which ethical issues concerning clinical cases were reflected on. Ethical considerations: The children’s and their parents’ integrity was preserved through measures taken to protect patient identity during ethics case reflection sessions. The study was approved by a regional ethical review board. Findings: Consolidating care by clarifying perspectives emerged. Consolidating care entails striving for common care goals and creating a shared view of care and the ethical concern in the specific case. The inter-professional perspectives on the ethical aspects of care are clarified by the participants’ articulated views on the case. Different approaches for deliberating ethics are used during the sessions including raising values and making sense, leading to unifying interactions. Discussion: The findings indicate that ethical concerns could be eased by implementing ethics case reflection sessions. Conflicting perspectives can be turned into unifying interactions in the healthcare professional team with the common aim to achieve good pediatric care. Conclusion: Ethics case reflection sessions is valuable as it permits the discussion of values in healthcare-related issues in childhood cancer care. Clarifying perspectives, on the ethical concerns, enables healthcare professionals to reflect on the most reasonable and ethically defensible care for the child. A consolidated care approach would be valuable for both the child and the healthcare professionals because of the common care goals. (shrink)

Being robustly committed to state neutrality which does not permit the promotion of liberal-perfectionist ideals and denying that there is anything normatively relevant or ‘special’ about religion leaves liberal-egalitarians embroiled in a paradox. If religion is not special, how and why do liberal states afford it differential treatment (in comparison with non-religious analogues like secular doctrines or deeply-held beliefs of individual conscience)? This paper explores liberal-egalitarian strategies for resolving this paradox with predominant reference to the disaggregation strategy advanced by Cécile (...) Laborde. After discussing the novelty and advantages of disaggregation relative to other liberal-egalitarian strategies, the paper distinguishes between the coverage and the basis in justification of differential treatment to argue that disaggregation does not ultimately succeed in solving the latter. Despite this, reflecting on the clarifications achieved through disaggregation and the deeper issues of justification and justice emerging therefrom, the paper concludes by proposing the need to consider a lateral solution to the paradox and speculating on what this might look like. (shrink)

This article addresses the exclusivism–inclusivism debate about religious reasons in law within a justificatory liberal framework. The question of whether religious reasons have justificatory capacity for attaining public justification has increasingly been seen as a matter of how public justification is understood between two rival models: the consensus model being aligned with exclusivism, the convergence model with inclusivism. More recently, however, that alignment has been challenged with attempts to show that consensus can reach an equivalent degree of inclusivism as convergence. (...) Against this, I contend that the purported equivalence is misplaced. First, I identify a crucial ambiguity about public justification and two corresponding domains. Upon demonstrating these to be mutually independent and severable, I conclude that the moves to equalize the models are confined within the more narrow domain while, in the more fundamental domain, the choice of model continues to prove determinative as to the exclusivist or inclusivist valence of justificatory liberalism. (shrink)

Background Ethical sensitivity is a prerequisite for ethical nursing practices. Efforts to improve nurses’ ethical sensitivity are required to correctly recognise ethical conflicts and for sound decision-making. Because an emerging infectious disease response involves complex ethical issues, it is important to understand the factors that influence public health nurses’ ethical sensitivity while caring for patients with COVID-19, an emerging infectious disease. Objectives This study aims to identify the relationship between nursing professionalism, the organisation’s ethical climate, and the ethical sensitivity of (...) nurses who care for emerging infectious disease patients in Korean public health centres. Further, it sought to identify factors influencing ethical sensitivity and the mediating effect of the organisational ethical climate to inform guidelines and improve ethical sensitivity. Research design This was a cross-sectional descriptive study. Participants and research context Data were collected from February 3 to 8 March 2021. Participants included 167 nurses caring for patients with COVID-19 in public health centres in South Korea. Ethical consideration This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Chung-Ang University and followed the principles of research ethics. Results The factors influencing ethical sensitivity were working at a COVID-19 disease direct response department, nursing professionalism, and organisation’s ethical climate. The organisation’s ethical climate showed a partial mediating effect on the influence of nursing professionalism on ethical sensitivity. Conclusion Our findings show that nurses’ ethical sensitivity can be improved by refining the organisation’s ethical climate and nursing professionalism. (shrink)

Background: Moral distress is an important and well-studied phenomenon among nurses and other healthcare providers, yet the conceptualization of parental moral distress remains unclear. Objective: The objective of this dimensional analysis was to describe the nature of family moral distress in serious pediatric illness. Design and methods: A dimensional analysis of articles retrieved from a librarian-assisted systematic review of Scopus, CINAHL, and PsychInfo was conducted, focusing on how children, parents, other family members, and healthcare providers describe parental moral distress, both (...) explicitly through writings on parental moral experience and implicitly through writings on parental involvement in distressing aspects of the child’s serious illness. Ethical considerations: To promote child and family best interest and minimize harm, a nuanced understanding of the moral, existential, emotional, and spiritual impact of serious pediatric illness is needed. The cases used in this dimensional analysis come from the first author’s IRB approved study at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and subsequent published studies; or have been adapted from the literature and the authors’ clinical experiences. Findings: Three dimensions emerged from the literature surrounding parent moral distress: an intrapersonal dimension, an interpersonal dimension, and a spiritual/existential dimension. The overarching theme is that parents experience relational solace and distress because of the impact of their child’s illness on relationships with themselves, their children, family, healthcare providers, their surrounding communities, and society. Discussion: Elucidating this concept can help nurses and other professionals understand, mitigate, or eliminate antecedents to parental moral distress. We discuss how this model can facilitate future empirical and conceptual bioethics research, as well as inform the manner in which healthcare providers engage, collaborate with, and care for families during serious pediatric illness. Conclusion: Parent moral distress is an important and complex phenomenon that requires further theoretical and empirical investigation. We provide an integrated definition and dimensional schematic model that may serve as a starting point for future research and dialogue. (shrink)

There is nothing like an overwhelming consensus of opinion to encourage a less than rigourous approach to analyzing complex ethical issues. Unfortunately, this is nowhere more apparent than in the discussion of human reproductive cloning contained in the federal House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs’ report on human cloning, released last August The report may well fulfil the first half of its project, namely the empirical task of adequately summarizing and categorizing the various submissions made to (...) the Committee. However, it is clearly inadequate as a discussion of the ethical and legal permissibility of human reproductive cloning. (shrink)

Over the past decade AIDS research has turned toward the use of pharmacology in HIV prevention, including pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP): the use of HIV medication as a means of preventing HIV acquisition in those who do not have it. This paper explores the contradictory reasons offered in support of PrEP—to empower women, to provide another risk-reduction option for gay men—as the context for understanding the social meaning of the experimental trials that appear to show that PrEP works in gay men (...) and heterosexual couples but not single women. The PrEP debates reveal the different ideas about “demedicalization” in the earlier gay health and women’s health movements and highlight the relationship between health activism and critique of research ethics in the context of a global pharmaceutical market. (shrink)

In recent years, the far right “culture war” has to an increasing extent been allowed to set the terms for cultural policy debates, in Sweden and internationally. In the Swedish context, empty accusations against public cultural institutions of “wokeist” bias and “cancel culture” have found support in a public report from the governmental Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis, which claims that national public funding bodies are imposing politically correct demands on their applicants, with a “detrimental influence” on the freedom of (...) art. This article shows that the ACPA lacks grounds for these claims. Taking its cue from the ACPA’s report, it instead focuses on the fundamental and contested concept of the freedom or the autonomy of art. It seeks to outline what would need to characterise a critical concept of the autonomy of art today, and asks what the political implications would be of a rigorous understanding of such a concept. It argues that cultural policy should be understood as a project of cultural democratization, which should in turn be understood as a project of autonomy. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 57-59.

The narrative approach to identity has developed as a sophisticated philosophical response to the complexities and ambiguities of the human, lived situation, and is not – as has been naively suggested elsewhere – the imposition of a generic form of life or the attempt to imitate a fictional character. I argue that the narrative model of identity provides a more inclusive and exhaustive account of identity than the causal models employed by mainstream theorists of personal identity. Importantly for ethical subjectivity, (...) the narrative model gives a central and irreducible role to the first-person perspective. I will draw the connection between narrative identity and ethical subjectivity by way of an exposition of work by Paul Ricoeur and Marya Schechtman, and a brief consideration of Korsgaard’s work on practical identity and normative ethics. I argue that the first-person perspective – the reflective structure of human consciousness – arises from human embodiment, and therefore the model of identity required of embodied consciousness is more complex and irreducibly first-personal than that provided in a causal account. What is required is a self-constitution model of identity: a narrative model of identity. (shrink)

In this essay I take issue with Derek Parfit's reductionist account of personal identity.Parfit is concerned to respond to what he sees as flaws in the conception of the role of 'person' in self-interest theories. He attempts to show that the notion of a person as something over and above a totality of mental and physical states and events (in his words, a 'further fact'), is empty, and so, our ethical concerns must be based on something other than this. My (...) objections centre around the claim that Parfit employs an impoverished conception of 'life'. Parfit misconceives the connection between 'I' and one's body, and, so, despite his rejection of a metaphysical conception of 'self', remains within the logic of Cartesianism. What Parfit and other reductionists call an 'impersonal' perspective, I shall call the third-person perspective: a perspective which one in general may take. Against Parfit I shall offer a more complex conception of 'self' through the concept of 'bodily perspective'. I emphasize the irreducible ambiguities of human embodiment in order to show the presuppositions and the limitations of Parfit's view. Of interest is the conception of time and the model of continuity that is appropriate to an embodied subject's life. I employ Paul Ricoeur's concept of 'human time' to argue that the reflective character of human experience demands a model of temporality and continuity that differs significantly from the one Parfit employs. (shrink)

It is indeed important to identify the rich variety of systems for the adaptive control of behaviour, rather than squeezing this richness into a few boxes. We need to recognise both the variety of systems for the cognitive control of adaptive behaviour and to chart the relationships between such systems. But I shall argue that these projects are not best pursued by asking about the extent of animal rationality. The argument develops in three stages. The first outlines a picture of (...) the selective regimes that drive the evolution of the sophisticated use of information by animal agents. The second argues that hominid cognition has evolved in response to a somewhat different set of " 3 " challenges and that the transmission of social information and skill has come to be both a critical and an unusual feature of hominid selective and developmental environments. The third draws upon the ideas of Dan Sperber and others in arguing that the social transmission of information introduces a vetting problem. I shall suggest that we see rationality as an evolved response to this vetting problem. (shrink)

The development of a framework for coding argumentations schemes in the transcripts of classroom dialogical deliberations on controversial, socioscientific topics is described. Arriving at a coding framework involved resolving a number of complex issues and challenges that are discussed in order to create practical remedies. The description of the development process is based on audio recordings and written exchanges between the authors as they attempted to resolve differences in the interpretation and application of argumentation schemes . These deliberations address theoretical (...) and practical concerns for adapting notions of argumentation schemes to the practical context of analyzing authentic classroom interactions. The framework was developed to accommodate research and curriculum development in school science education. A practical framework for analyzing argumentation in authentic classroom contexts is proposed and implications for science education and argumentation theory are raised. (shrink)

The reverse correlation (RC) method has been widely used, because it allows visualization of mental representations without a priori assumptions about relevant dimensions. We employed the RC method to visualize mental representations of self and examined their relationships with traits related to self-image. For this purpose, 110 participants (70 women) performed a two-image forced choice RC task to generate a classification image of self (self-CI). Participants perceived their self-CIs as bearing a stronger resemblance to themselves than did CIs of others (...) (filler-CIs). Valence ratings of participants who performed the RC task (RC sample) and of 30 independent raters both showed positive correlations with self-esteem, explicit self-evaluation, and extraversion. Moreover, valence ratings of independent raters were negatively correlated with social anxiety symptoms. On the other hand, valence ratings of the RC sample and independent raters were not correlated with depression symptoms, trait anxiety, or social desirability. The results imply that mental representations of self can be properly visualized by using the RC method. (shrink)

The essays in this collection, which were written by European and North American specialists, position intermediality as a praxis of interpretative analysis in order to show how intermediality challenges our notion of art. The writers examine the various intermedial relations between the arts, which may take the form of reference to another form of art, a combination of two or more forms of art or a generic transformation from one form of art to another. In such cases, an intermedial approach (...) helps us to grasp the changing relationship between the arts, which affects our reception of experience. Intermediality has profoundly changed our understanding of interdisciplinary relations, formerly examined in the field of interart studies. By introducing a medial aspect, intermediality has succeeded in making a "leap" from past practices of artistic interrelatedness to our contemporary medial age, in which literature along with other arts may be understood as a medium. This ambitious undertaking has contributed to the liberation of literature and other arts from an isolated position in the established scholarly landscape with its clear-cut borderlines between disciplines. The essays in this collection are a valuable contribution to this on-going discussion about the relationships between the arts. The variety of essays published in this collection makes it an excellent introduction to academics and university students in such disciplines as literature, music, theatre, art history and media studies. Due to its clarity - which does not sacrifice philosophical depth concerning the role of intermedial studies for several forms of art - this book will also be of interest to academics and students who are currently working at advanced level art schools. (shrink)

To establish the claim that racism is an ideology that consists of having morally impermissible attitudes towards people in virtue of their racialised identities, Appiah claims that a (false) belief in race is not automatically morally wrong. This paper examines what is involved in believing in races and shows that believing in races is in itself morally problematic as it involves stereotyping that undermines agency.

Identity construction — the process of creating and building a new future self — is an integral part of a person’s professional career development. However, at present we have little understanding of the psychological mechanisms that underpin this process. Likewise, we have little understanding of the barriers that obstruct it, and which thus may contribute to inequality in career outcomes. Using a social identity lens, and particularly the Social Identity Model of Identity Change (SIMIC), we explore the process of academic (...) identity construction among doctoral students. Through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 22 PhD candidates, we observe that the identity construction process relies on a person’s perception of a navigable pathway between their current self and their future self. Importantly, participants who were able to access multiple identity resources were more likely to perceive a navigable pathway to a future professional self (e.g., as an academic), unless they perceived these identities to be incompatible with those held by leading members of the profession (e.g., their supervisors). This research suggests that the identities that people are able to access as they progress in their careers may play an important role in their ongoing professional identity construction and career success. (shrink)

This paper offers a new perspective on historical understandings of the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body, by studying the way that British explorers of tropical Africa drank alcohol and wrote about drink between c.1850 and c.1910. We demonstrate that alcohol was simultaneously classified as a medicinal, a preventative and a pleasurable drink, shaped by competing medical theories, but that distinctions between these different roles were highly blurred. We also show how many explorers thought certain drinks helped to protect (...) white bodies from the effects of tropical diseases. While popular amongst travellers, these views came under growing scrutiny in the latter part of the nineteenth century, reflecting both changing scientific views about the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body and the development of a much larger European presence in tropical Africa. However, even those who opposed tropical drinking often supported the use of other stimulants and viewed the tropics as uniquely dangerous. As such, the paper challenges the idea that the late nineteenth century marked a paradigm shift in scientific attitudes towards tropical environments, as much previous scholarship has suggested. At the same time, our examinations of explorers’ descriptions of drinking by African people demonstrates how ideas about racial difference played an important role within medical understandings of alcohol. Overall, this paper examines the heterogeny of attitudes to alcohol to be found within tropical medicine and documents the continuities in approach shown between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (shrink)

Some feminist discourses blame some men for gender inequality, gender domination, and gender-based violence. Some women use such discourse as a perfect scenario to criticize some men’s behavior. Indeed, they usually do so with Oppressed Traditional Masculinities but not with Dominant Traditional Masculinities, who are the men who were violent with those women and with whom some of those women chose to have relationships. However, there have always been men who have been on the side of women and have never (...) committed violence against them. Therefore, New Alternative Masculinities reject being indicated as guilty of the violence committed against women by DTM. Through a communicative approach, applying six semi-structured interviews with a communicative orientation and a communicative data analysis of all information, this article explores both women’s communicative acts that blame OTM for what DTM have done to women and NAM’s reactions to these accusations to stop such blaming to make it possible to overcome hegemonic discourses. (shrink)

Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities scholars’ uses and gratifications of Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interview transcripts to learn about these scholars’ professional use of Twitter. Our findings show that Twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within DH invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels (...) as both an information network and a social network. We find that Twitter follow relationships reflect common academic interests and are closely tied to scholars’ pre-existing social ties and conference or event co-attendance. The concept of the invisible college continues to be relevant but requires revisiting. The invisible college formed on Twitter is messy, consisting of overlapping social contexts, scholars with different habits of engagement, and both formal and informal ties. Our research illustrates the value of using multiple methods to explore the complex questions arising from Big Data studies and points toward future research that could implement Big Data techniques on a small scale, focusing on sub-topics or emerging fields, to expose the nature of scholars’ invisible colleges made visible on Twitter. (shrink)

I dispute the claim that the disclosure of the life-world by phenomenology is an accomplishment of 'permanent' significance. By briefly reviewing the meaning of the "world" and "life-world" in the writings of Husserl, Gurwitsch, Schutz-Luckmann, Ortega, Heidegger, Jonas, Straus, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, I show that they all treat the world, or rather the affairs which comprise it, as passively present whether viewed as a mental acquisition or as the "Other." But the meaning of the world-as that wherein are met physical (...) demands upon us which must be satisfied if we are to continue living-cannot be considered either as a mental acquisition or as something that is "other" and over against us. A living being as living cannot fail to attend to the agency of the affairs of which the life-world consists, as well as one's own exploring and coping actions. If we are to really speak of life, then we must acknowledge the mutual and reciprocal activities of living beings and world. (shrink)