Institutional review boards, tasked with facilitating ethical research, are often pulled in competing directions. In what we call the protection-inclusion dilemma, we acknowledge the tensions IRBs face in aiming to both protect potential research participants from harm and include under-represented populations in research. In this manuscript, we examine the history of protectionism that has dominated research ethics oversight in the United States, as well as two responses to such protectionism: inclusion initiatives and critiques of the term vulnerability. We look at (...) what we know about IRB decision-making in relation to protecting and including “vulnerable” groups in research and examine the lack of regulatory guidance related to this dilemma, which encourages protection over inclusion within IRB practice. Finally, we offer recommendations related to how IRBs might strike a better balance between inclusion and protection in research ethics oversight. (shrink)

This paper argues against incorporating assessments of individual responsibility into healthcare policies by expanding an existing argument and offering a rebuttal to an argument in favour of such policies. First, it is argued that what primarily underlies discussions surrounding personal responsibility and healthcare is not causal responsibility, moral responsibility or culpability, as one might expect, but biases towards particular highly stigmatised behaviours. A challenge is posed for proponents of taking personal responsibility into account within health policy to either expand the (...) debate to also include socially accepted behaviours or to provide an alternative explanation of the narrowly focused discussion. Second, a critical response is offered to arguments that claim that policies based on personal responsibility would lead to several positive outcomes including healthy behaviour change, better health outcomes and decreases in healthcare spending. It is argued that using individual responsibility as a basis for resource allocation in healthcare is unlikely to motivate positive behaviour changes, and is likely to increase inequality which may lead to worse health outcomes overall. Finally, the case of West Virginia's Medicaid reform is examined, which raises a worry that policies focused on personal responsibility have the potential to lead to increases in medical spending overall. (shrink)

This article reflects on the relevance and applicability of the Belmont Report nearly four decades after its original publication. In an exploration of criticisms that have been raised in response to the report and of significant changes that have occurred within the context of biomedical research, five primary themes arise. These themes include the increasingly vague boundary between research and practice, unique harms to communities that are not addressed by the principle of respect for persons, and how growing complexity and (...) commodification in research have shed light on the importance of transparency. The repercussions of Belmont's emphasis on the protection of vulnerable populations is also explored, as is the relationship between the report's ethical principles and their applications. It is concluded that while the Belmont Report was an impressive response to the ethical issues of its day, the field of research ethics involving human subjects may have outgrown it. (shrink)

Sensory and tracking technologies are being introduced into workplaces in ways Taylor and the Gilbreths could only have imagined. New work design experiments merge wellness with productivity to measure and modulate the affective and emotional labour of resilience that is necessary to survive the turbulence of the widespread incorporation of agile management systems, in which workers are expected to take symbolic direction from machines. The Quantified Workplace project was carried out by one company that fitted sensory algorithmic devices to workers’ (...) computers and bodies, which, this article argues, identify workers’ so-called agility and reveal management practices that track affective and emotional labour, categorized in the project as stress, subjective productivity and wellbeing. Capital’s accelerated attempts to capture more areas of work and workers’ capacities facilitate the conversion of labour power into a source of value but also results in alienation and abstraction. Participants’ resistance to participation in the Quantified Workplace reveals tensions in the labour process when affect is measured in processes of corporate change. (shrink)

I describe my current thinking on two old questions—the causal role of appraisals and the relationship of appraisal theories to basic emotions theories and constructivist theories, and three (sort of) new questions—the completeness of appraisals, the role of language, and the development of automaticity in emotional responses.

This article provides a brief introduction to psychological emotion theories, particularly appraisal theory. According to appraisal theory emotions are combinations of a person’s appraisal of the novelty, valence, certainty, goal conduciveness, causal agency, controllability, and morality of a situation. These dimensions correspond to elements of the stories attorneys attempt to create in arguing a case. Appraisal theory puts specific content into the vague concept of reappraisal, accounting for emotional changes that go beyond the changes in valence and intensity generally studied (...) by law and emotions scholars. (shrink)

Some thoughts on the nature of networks, the prevalence of emotional experiences, and the importance of new questions.

The ‘new normality’ of food crises requires nuanced understandings of emergent responses. Through an exploratory analysis of public-facing reports from major food governance actors, this study empirically outlines mainstream solution frames for addressing the contemporary food crisis and the ways in which these differ from the 2008 food crisis. Using food regime theory as the theoretical underpinning, four con­sistently used solution frames are identified that provide insight into the organizing principles of the third food regime: promoting trade liberalization, emphasizing agricultural (...) productivism, mobilizing private finance, and leveraging data. The latter two involve recent shifts in governance responses that shape global food governance and impact global food insecurity in novel ways. (shrink)

It is argued here that the practice of medical students performing pelvic exams on women who are under anesthetic and have not consented is immoral and indefensible. This argument begins by laying out the ethical justification for the practice of informed consent, which can be found in autonomy and basic rights. Foregoing the process of consent within medicine can result in violations of both autonomy and basic rights, as well as trust, forming the basis of the wrong of unauthorized pelvic (...) examinations. Several objections to this argument are considered, all of which stem from the idea that this practice constitutes an exception to the general requirement of informed consent. These objections suggest that nonconsensual pelvic examinations on women under anesthetic are ethically acceptable on utilitarian grounds, in that they offer benefits either to the patient or to society, or on the grounds of triviality, in that consent is already presumed, or the practice is insignificant. Each of these objections is rejected and the practice is deemed indefensible. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 28-31, January/February 2022.

This paper offers a critical analysis of several accounts of the placebo effect that have been put forward. While the placebo effect is most often thought of as a control in research and as a deceptive tool in practice, a growing body of research suggests that it ought to be thought of as a powerful phenomenon in its own right. Several accounts that aim to draw boundaries around the placebo effect are evaluated in relation to current evidence and it is (...) argued that none of them adequately capture the variability and potency of the phenomenon. Two accounts, however, that point towards the underlying mechanisms of the placebo effect, are shown to offer promise in terms of developing a more comprehensive account of the placebo effect. (shrink)

In recent years social financiers have been increasingly investing in alternative food systems to improve sustainability outcomes. However, social finance for alternative food systems remains small and marginalized. This article seeks to understand why this approach is not yet making a larger impact towards food system transformation. It does so by investigating a specific application of social finance through the case of Slow Money to get answers as to why social finance occupies a niche role in food system transformation. These (...) answers provide helpful lessons for Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) seeking to transform food systems towards greater sustainability. This study tracks the intended impacts of these initiatives and provides insights about the potential role of social finance for promoting AFNs. Key themes emerged regarding the ability of social financing initiatives to support AFNs and transform the food system for greater sustainability. These themes resonate with the literature on AFNs in meaningful ways, but also highlight an important contradiction between systemic change and individual action. The findings show that the Slow Money model contains some useful elements for radical transformation but is ultimately limited in its ability to support deeper, transformative change. The conclusion advances recommendations for ways of enhancing the transformative potential of community financing initiatives in light of the findings, emphasizing the role of public investments. (shrink)

The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists-agile thinkers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines and geographies-convened to discuss their radical visions of the beautiful world, and the manifestos that may help to guide us there. Their treatises have been captured and luminously expanded in the pages of this book. Cherokee Nation citizen and professor (...) Joseph M. Pierce asserts that "[f]or this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations." Informed by her practice of "curation as care," Brazilian film curator Janaína Oliveira evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality: "it's almost by falling that you live.... The beautiful world dances the stumbles. The beautiful world dances dancing." Kenyan-British visual artist Phoebe Boswell uses the space of a virtual gallery to ask, "If we burn down the institution, what happens next? Do we trust ourselves to know?" and gestures toward the possibility of this "as yet unlived, unexperienced thing." Professor and MacArthur fellow Saidiya Hartman asks us to consider our capacity to burn, stating that "[P]ragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable." And Mexican-American author Cristina Rivera Garza gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, which "lays the groundwork for the irruption.... The subjunctive is the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo." Through these expansive, transformative essays, new ways of being are threaded and proposed, illuminating our path towards this possible beautiful world. (shrink)

There is compelling evidence that pain experience is influenced by cognitive states. We explore one specific form of such influence, namely placebo analgesia, and examine its relevance for the cognitive penetration debate in philosophy of mind. We single out as important a form of influence on experience that we termradical cognitive penetration,and argue that some cases of placebo analgesia constitute compelling instances of this phenomenon. Still, we urge caution in extrapolating from this to broader conclusions about cognitive penetration in perceptual (...) experience. Instead, we suggest that the cognitive penetration of pain raises distinctive psychological, epistemological, and ethical issues. (shrink)

Building on decades of rich discussions of why 'nothing about us without us' matters in the field of psychiatry, this paper aims to illuminate the justifications underlying participatory research in psychiatry, and how these justifications might shape participatory methodologies. This is accomplished through the examination of several epistemic and ethical features of psychiatry that underlie the importance of engaging in participatory research in the field, unpacking their connection to participatory research, and offering suggestions related to their implications for research methodologies. (...) The epistemic features include: the irreducible value of patient experience, the extent of disagreement and uncertainty in the field, and the value-laden nature of knowledge in psychiatry. The ethical features include: the preponderance of harm, denials of agency and epistemic injustice, and the constant struggle for power. These features offer useful touchpoints for thinking through why participation matters in mental health research. (shrink)

In recent years, the possible benefits of mindfulness meditation have sparked much public and academic interest. Mindfulness emphasizes cultivating awareness of our immediate experience and has been associated with compassion, empathy, and various other prosocial traits. However, neurobiological evidence pertaining to the prosocial benefits of mindfulness in social settings is sparse. In this study, we investigate neural correlates of trait mindful awareness during naturalistic dyadic interactions, using both intra-brain and inter-brain measures. We used the Muse headset, a portable electroencephalogram device (...) often used to support mindfulness meditation, to record brain activity from dyads as they engaged in naturalistic face-to-face interactions in a museum setting. While we did not replicate prior laboratory-based findings linking trait mindfulness to individual brain responses, self-reported mindful awareness did predict dyadic inter-brain synchrony, in theta and beta frequencies. These findings underscore the importance of conducting social neuroscience research in ecological settings to enrich our understanding of how neural correlates of social traits such as mindful awareness manifest during social interaction, while raising critical practical considerations regarding the viability of commercially available EEG systems. (shrink)

William James was not a basic emotion theorist in that he did not propose a list of basic emotions or concern himself with the question of which emotions were really basic. He may have believed that some emotions evolved earlier and spread more widely than others; whether this makes him a basic emotion theorist is a matter of taste.

As participatory research practices are increasingly taken up in health research, claims related to experiential authority and expertise are frequently made. Here, in an exploration of what grounds such claims, we consider how feminist standpoint theory might apply to the psy sciences (psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and so on). Standpoint theory claims that experiences of marginalization and critical engagement can lead to a standpoint that offers an epistemic advantage within a domain of knowledge. We examine experiences of marginalization and critical (...) engagement in the mental health system, as well as evidence for epistemic advantages resulting from these experiences. This evidence, found in the identification of problematic assumptions and the development of new tools and theories in the field, grounds our argument that standpoint theory is indeed relevant to the psy sciences and that many of those who have experienced marginalization and have engaged critically have an epistemic advantage when it comes to knowledge-production. The implications of this argument are significant: those who have attained a standpoint within the psy sciences ought to be included in research and given both tools and funding to develop research programs. However, we must be wary of the risks of tokenization, cooptation, and essentialization that are likely to accompany such a transformation. (shrink)

Urban communities experiencing marginalization often disproportionately bear the risks and burdens of research and are left out of research ethics governance processes. To address this, many communities have created place-based and community-led research ethics governance initiatives to ensure that community voice is included in discussions surrounding research conduct. Place-based strategies in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside, the Bronx, and the Philadelphia Promise Zone successfully mobilize community perspectives in research ethics, filling in a significant gap in our current system of institutional research (...) ethics review and oversight. These cases demonstrate that place-based research ethics governance has the potential to account for the community-level risks posed by research projects and to ensure communities receive more felt benefits. Place-based communities sidestep simplistic notions of identity based on single shared features and make space for intersectional analyses and diverse community viewpoints to be considered. Such communities have a unique claim to expertise given their shared experience of place, which grants them the ability to see problematic assumptions embedded in scientific projects as well as community-level concerns within research. Despite this, many marginalized communities are excluded from current research ethics oversight processes. This exclusion demands critical examination and a way forward to facilitate the integration of place-based community oversight strategies within research ethics governance. (shrink)

How are data science systems made to work? It may seem that whether a system works is a function of its technical design, but it is also accomplished through ongoing forms of discretionary work by many actors. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork with a corporate data science team, we describe how actors involved in a corporate project negotiated what work the system should do, how it should work, and how to assess whether it works. These negotiations laid the (...) foundation for how, why, and to what extent the system ultimately worked. We describe three main findings. First, how already-existing technologies are essential reference points to determine how and whether systems work. Second, how the situated resolution of development challenges continually reshapes the understanding of how and whether systems work. Third, how business goals, and especially their negotiated balance with data science imperatives, affect a system’s working. We conclude with takeaways for critical data studies, orienting researchers to focus on the organizational and cultural aspects of data science, the third-party platforms underlying data science systems, and ways to engage with practitioners’ imagination of how systems can and should work. (shrink)

The Moscow Psychological Society, a learned society founded in 1885 at Moscow University, was the philosophic center of the revolt against positivism in the Russian Silver Age. In 1889 it began publication of Russia's first regular, specialized journal in philosophy, Questions of Philosophy and Psychology. By the end of its activity in 1922, the Psychological Society had included most of the country's outstanding philosophers and had played the major role in the growth of professional philosophy in Russia. ;While the Silver (...) Age mounted a broad-based revolt against positivism, neo-idealist philosophy in the Psychological Society was distinctive in the theoretical depth of its critique. For leading philosophers in the Society , neo-idealism was a compelling defense of the self against positivist reductionism and naturalism, a defense that took the form, moreover, of a modernized, theoretically explicit theism, in which the value of the person is rooted in transcendent being . In this, neo-idealism promoted not only the autonomization and professionalization of Russian philosophy but also the theoretical development of Russian liberalism. ;This dissertation argues: that a learned society of philosophers had special significance in Russia, where the frail social foundations of liberalism made its intellectual defense all the more imperative; that the Psychological Society, especially in its programmatic symposium, Problems of Idealism , was integrally involved in the Russian Liberation Movement; that the neo-idealist development of Russian liberalism drew heavily on Kant, in its substantiation of the possibility of personalism and in its critique of utopianism; and that the neo-idealist critique of utopianism, specifically in the responses of Psychological Society philosophers to their colleague, Vladimir Solov'ev, provides an excellent measure of the distinctiveness of neo-idealism relative to other currents in the Silver Age. (shrink)

Researchers are concerned about whether manipulations have the intended effects. Many journals and reviewers view manipulation checks favorably, and they are widely reported in prestigious journals. However, the prototypical manipulation check is a verbal (rather than behavioral) measure that always appears at the same point in the procedure (rather than its order being varied to assess order effects). Embedding such manipulation checks within an experiment comes with problems. While we conceptualize manipulation checks as measures, they can also act as interventions (...) which initiate new processes that would otherwise not occur. The default assumption that manipulation checks do not affect experimental conclusions is unwarranted. They may amplify, undo, or interact with the effects of a manipulation. Further, the use of manipulation checks in mediational analyses does not rule out confounding variables, as any unmeasured variables that correlate with the manipulation check may still drive the relationship. Alternatives such as nonverbal and behavioral measures as manipulation checks and pilot testing are less problematic. Reviewers should view manipulation checks more critically, and authors should explore alternative methods to ensure the effectiveness of manipulations. (shrink)

In their target article, Zamina Mithani, Jane Cooper, and J. Wesley Boyd make a compelling case for the importance of “counter storytelling” in bioethics. They obse...

Racial disparities in pain treatment are well documented. Such disparities are explained with reference to factors related to providers, health care structures, and patient behaviors. Racial differences in pain experiences, although well documented, are less well understood. Explanations for such differences usually involve genetic or psychological factors. Here, we argue that racial differences in pain experiences might also be explained by disparities in pain treatment. Based on what we know about the nature of pain, particularly the cognitive and affective aspects (...) of the phenomenon, it is likely that disparities in the treatment of racialized patients can lead to significant racial differences in pain experience that show up at the population level. We argue that the failure of research programs to consider this causal factor is an example of white ignorance. We also consider several implications of the link between racial disparities in pain treatment and racial differences in pain experience. (shrink)

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, proponents of digital psychiatry were touting the promise of various digital tools and techniques to revolutionize mental healthcare. As social distancing and its knock-on effects have strained existing mental health infrastructures, calls have grown louder for implementing various digital mental health solutions at scale. Decisions made today will shape the future of mental healthcare for the foreseeable future. We argue that bioethicists are uniquely positioned to cut through the hype surrounding digital mental health, which can (...) obscure crucial ethical and epistemic gaps that ought to be considered by policymakers before committing to a digital psychiatric future. Here, we describe four such gaps: The evidence gap, the inequality gap, the prediction-intervention gap, and the safety gap. (shrink)

The practice of medically assisted dying has long been contentious, and the question of what to call it has become increasingly contentious as well. Particularly among U.S. proponents of legalizing the practice, there has been a growing push away from calling it “physician‐assisted suicide,” with assertions that medically assisted dying is fundamentally different from suicide. Digging deeper into this claim about difference leads to an examination of the difference between two kinds of suffering—suffering from physical conditions and suffering from psychological (...) conditions—and therefore leads also toward an examination of whether requests for medical assistance in dying by those suffering from psychological conditions and those suffering from physical conditions should be painted with the same brush. In this article, I aim both to illuminate some of the considerations that ought to be included in discussions related to medically assisted dying and to shed light on what the indirect effects of such discussions can be. I consider some of the reasons commonly given for holding that suicide and medically assisted dying differ fundamentally and then whether the conclusion that medically assisted dying should not be called “suicide” follows from the premises. I ask what else might justify the conclusion that the two acts ought to be called by different names, and I examine possible justifications for accepting this premise, as well as what justifications might exist for emphasizing how the acts are alike. Finally, I argue that we should be cautious before concluding that medically assisted dying should not be called “suicide.” We need more evidence either that the two acts are fundamentally different or that emphasizing differences between them is not likely to do more harm than good. (shrink)

We investigate whether smile mimicry and emotional contagion are evident in non-text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC). Via an ostensibly real-time audio-visual CMC platform, participants interacted with a confederate who either smiled radiantly or displayed a neutral expression throughout the interaction. Automatic analyses of expressions displayed by participants indicated that smile mimicry was at play: A higher level of activation of the facial muscle that characterises genuine smiles was observed among participants who interacted with the smiling confederate than among participants who interacted (...) with the unexpressive confederate. However, there was no difference in the self-reported level of joviality between participants in the two conditions. Our findings demonstrate that people mimic smiles in audio-visual CMC, but that even though the diffusion of emotions has been documented in text-based CMC in previous studies, we find no convincing support for the phenomenon of emotional contagion in non-text-based CMC. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, several hospitals implemented “birthing alone” policies, banning companions from accompanying individuals giving birth. We offer an ethical analysis of these policies. First, we examine them through a consequentialist framework of risks and benefits. Second, we consider the significance of birth, highlighting the unique ways in which risks, relationships, and rights are understood in the context of obstetrics. We conclude that birthing alone policies are largely unjustified, as the harm they are certain to cause outweighs their possible (...) benefits and because they fail to take into account what matters to mothers. (shrink)

This paper questions the assumption that the term 'person' designates what we essentially are or ought to be. I use Hegel to argue against Locke and Kant that personal identity is not the foundation of certain legal and moral practices but their effect; and Nietzsche to suggest that being a person is the price we pay for certain kinds of social life. The concept of a person is an abstraction from our human and embodied existence, and to assume that it (...) picks out what is central to our existence makes it impossible to understand the moral significance of birth, growth, dependence, sexuality, procreation and death. (shrink)

It has been theorized that the contagion of behaviors may be related to social cognitive abilities, but empirical findings are inconsistent. We recorded young adults’ behavioral expression of contagious yawning and contagious smiling to video stimuli and employed a multi-method assessment of sociocognitive abilities including self-reported internal experience of emotional contagion, self-reported trait empathy, accuracy on a theory of mind task, and observed helping behavior. Results revealed that contagious yawners reported increases in tiredness from pre- to post-video stimuli exposure, providing (...) support for the internal experience of emotional contagion, and were more likely to provide help to the experimenter relative to non-contagious yawners. Contagious smilers showed stably high levels of self-reported happiness from pre- to post-video exposure, were more likely to provide help to the experimenter, and had increased accuracy on a theory of mind task relative to non-contagious smilers. There were no differences in self-reported trait empathy for contagious versus non-contagious yawners or smilers. Contagious yawning may be related to some basic (i.e., emotional contagion) and advanced (i.e., helping behavior) sociocognitive processes, whereas contagious smiling is related to some advanced sociocognitive processes (i.e., theory of mind and helping behavior). (shrink)