Vocabulary size has been suggested as a useful measure of “verbal abilities” that correlates with speech recognition scores. Knowing more words is linked to better speech recognition. How vocabulary knowledge translates to general speech recognition mechanisms, how these mechanisms relate to offline speech recognition scores, and how they may be modulated by acoustical distortion or age, is less clear. Age-related differences in linguistic measures may predict age-related differences in speech recognition in noise performance. We hypothesized that speech recognition performance can (...) be predicted by the efficiency of lexical access, which refers to the speed with which a given word can be searched and accessed relative to the size of the mental lexicon. We tested speech recognition in a clinical German sentence-in-noise test at two signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), in 22 younger (18–35 years) and 22 older (60–78 years) listeners with normal hearing. We also assessed receptive vocabulary, lexical access time, verbal working memory, and hearing thresholds as measures of individual differences. Age group, SNR level, vocabulary size, and lexical access time were significant predictors of individual speech recognition scores, but working memory and hearing threshold were not. Interestingly, longer accessing times were correlated with better speech recognition scores. Hierarchical regression models for each subset of age group and SNR showed very similar patterns: the combination of vocabulary size and lexical access time contributed most to speech recognition performance; only for the younger group at the better SNR (yielding about 85% correct speech recognition) did vocabulary size alone predict performance. Our data suggest that successful speech recognition in noise is mainly modulated by the efficiency of lexical access. This suggests that older adults’ poorer performance in the speech recognition task may have arisen from reduced efficiency in lexical access; with an average vocabulary size similar to that of younger adults, they were still slower in lexical access. (shrink)

Anger, indignation, guilt, rumination, victim compensation, and perpetrator punishment are considered primary responses associated with justice sensitivity. However, injustice and high JS may predispose to further responses. We had N = 293 adults rate their JS, 17 potential responses toward 12 unjust scenarios from the victim’s, observer’s, beneficiary’s, and perpetrator’s perspectives, and several control variables. Unjust situations generally elicited many affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses. JS generally predisposed to strong affective responses toward injustice, including sadness, pity, disappointment, and helplessness. It (...) impaired trivialization, victim-blaming, or justification, which may otherwise help cope with injustice. It predisposed to conflict solutions and victim compensation. Particularly victim and beneficiary JS had stronger effects in unjust situations from the corresponding perspective. These findings add to a better understanding of the main and interaction effects of unjust situations from different perspectives and the JS facets, differences between the JS facets, as well as the links between JS and behavior and well-being. (shrink)

In daily life, perceivers often need to predict and interpret the behavior of group agents, such as corporations and governments. Although research has investigated how perceivers reason about individual members of particular groups, less is known about how perceivers reason about group agents themselves. The present studies investigate how perceivers understand group agents by investigating the extent to which understanding the ‘mind’ of the group as a whole shares important properties and processes with understanding the minds of individuals. Experiment 1 (...) demonstrates that perceivers are sometimes willing to attribute a mental state to a group as a whole even when they are not willing to attribute that mental state to any of the individual members of the group, suggesting that perceivers can reason about the beliefs and desires of group agents over and above those of their individual members. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the degree of activation in brain regions associated with attributing mental states to individuals—i.e., brain regions associated with mentalizing or theory-of-mind, including the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and precuneus—does not distinguish individual from group targets, either when reading statements about those targets' mental states (directed) or when attributing mental states implicitly in order to predict their behavior (spontaneous). Together, these results help to illuminate the processes that support understanding group agents themselves. (shrink)

BackgroundAlthough patient advocates have developed templates for standard consent forms, evaluating patient preferences for first in human (FIH) and window of opportunity (Window) trial consent forms is critical due to their unique risks. FIH trials are the initial use of a novel compound in study participants. In contrast, Window trials give an investigational agent over a fixed duration to treatment naïve patients in the time between diagnosis and standard of care (SOC) surgery. Our goal was to determine the patient-preferred presentation (...) of important information in consent forms for these trials.MethodsThe study consisted of two phases: (1) analyses of oncology FIH and Window consents; (2) interviews of trial participants. FIH consent forms were analyzed for the location(s) of information stating that the study drug has not been tested in humans (FIH information); Window consents were analyzed for the location(s) of information stating the trial may delay SOC surgery (delay information). Participants were asked about their preferred placement of the information in their own trial’s consent form. The location of information in the consent forms was compared to the participants’ suggestions for placement. Results34 [17 FIH; 17 Window] of 42(81%) cancer patients approached participated. 25 consents [20 FIH; 5 Window] were analyzed. 19/20 FIH consent forms included FIH information, and 4/5 Window consent forms included delay information. 19/20(95%) FIH consent forms contained FIH information in the risks section 12/17(71%) patients preferred the same. Fourteen (82%) patients wanted FIH information in the purpose, but only 5(25%) consents mentioned it there. 9/17(53%) Window patients preferred delay information to be located early in the consent, before the “Risks” section. 3/5(60%) consents did this.ConclusionsDesigning consents that reflect patient preferences more accurately is essential for ethical informed consent; however, a one-size fits all approach will not accurately capture patient preferences. We found that preferences differed for FIH and Window trial consents, though for both, patients preferred key risk information early in the consent. Next steps include determining if FIH and Window consent templates improve understanding. (shrink)

Globally active companies are involved in the discursive construction of moral legitimacy. Establishing normative conformance is problematic given the plurality of norms and values worldwide, and is particularly difficult for companies operating in morally controversial industries. In this paper, we investigate how organizations publicly legitimize the trade of human tissue for private profit when this practice runs counter to deep-seated and widespread moral beliefs. To do so, we use inductive, qualitative methods to analyze the website discourse of three types of (...) organizations that trade in human tissue and are associated with different degrees of moral controversy with respect to tissue procurement and use. Our analysis reveals an object-oriented approach to moral legitimizing centered on the human tissue as a morally disputed good. We find that the website discourse translates human tissue into technology, constructs normative meaning around a dominant instrumental value associated with human-tissue-as-technology, and reproduces and stabilizes this meaning by six discursive mechanisms that amplify and anchor it. Moreover, the use of amplifying and anchoring discourse was greater in organizations associated with greater controversy. The results are consistent with an object-oriented sociality. (shrink)

Decisions about how and where they deliver their baby are extremely important to pregnant women. There are very strong ethical norms that women’s autonomy should be respected, and that plans around birth should be personalised. However, there appear to be profound challenges in practice to respecting women’s choices in pregnancy and labour. Choices carry risks and consequences—to the woman and her child; also potentially to her caregivers and to other women.What does it mean for women’s autonomy to be respected in (...) obstetrics? How should health professionals respond to refusals of treatment or requests for care outside normal guidelines? What are the ethical limits to autonomy? In this clinical ethics round table, service users, midwives, obstetricians, philosophers and ethicists respond to two hypothetical cases drawn from real-life scenarios. (shrink)

All forms of beauty create appeal or enticement with moral significance. Sublime beauty draws one into a deep relationship that properly promotes the good and true. Parents tend to experience such beauty in their children, as eloquently described in works such as the 14th-century poem ‘The Pearl’, and they see this even when their children are desperately ill or dying. The experience of beauty in one’s child creates or reinforces the morality of caring. Unfortunately, at the end of modernity, the (...) framing of beauty as only instrumental and subjective generally works against any recognition of dignity or respect for the very small pediatric patient. Practitioners who believe in the intrinsic value and dignity of persons as general concepts should recognize parental drawing toward their children as a particularization of a transcendental value. (shrink)

Contemporary understanding of the mechanisms of disease increasingly points to examples of “genetic diseases” with an infectious component and of “infectious diseases” with a genetic component. Such blurred boundaries generate ethical, legal, and social issues and highlight historical contexts that must be examined when incorporating host genomic information into the prevention, outbreak control, and treatment of infectious diseases.

Background: In the context of new reimbursement systems like diagnosis-related groups, moral distress is becoming a growing problem for healthcare providers. Moral distress can trigger emotional and physical reactions in nurses and can cause them to withdraw emotionally from patients or can cause them to change their work place. Objective: The aim of this pilot study was to develop an instrument to measure moral distress among acute care nurses in the German-speaking context, to test its applicability, and to obtain initial (...) indications of the instrument’s validity. Method: The study was designed in 2011 as a cross-sectional pilot survey. Conducted on eight units of one university hospital in German-speaking Switzerland, 294 registered nurses were asked to fill out a web-based questionnaire on moral distress. Ethical considerations: The study proposal was approved by the cantonal ethics committee. All participating nurses provided informed consent and were assured of data confidentiality. Results: The survey had a response rate of 55%. The results show the prevalence of statements on the questionnaire indicating situations with the potential to trigger moral distress. The entire range of answers was used in the responses. Most participants found the questionnaire comprehensible, while some criticized the phraseology of certain statements. Many more found the registration process prior to online access to be too time consuming. Nurses confirmed that the results reflect their subjective assessment of their situation and their experience of moral distress. Conclusion: The newly developed moral distress questionnaire appears to produce face validity and is sufficiently applicable for use in our study. The results indicate that moral distress appears to be a relevant phenomenon also in Swiss hospitals and that nurses were experiencing it prior to the introduction of Swiss diagnosis-related groups. (shrink)

Prior studies have observed selective neural responses in the adult human auditory cortex to music and speech that cannot be explained by the differing lower-level acoustic properties of these stimuli. Does infant cortex exhibit similarly selective responses to music and speech shortly after birth? To answer this question, we attempted to collect functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 45 sleeping infants (2.0- to 11.9-weeks-old) while they listened to monophonic instrumental lullabies and infant-directed speech produced by a mother. To match (...) acoustic variation between music and speech sounds we (1) recorded music from instruments that had a similar spectral range as female infant-directed speech, (2) used a novel excitation-matching algorithm to match the cochleagrams of music and speech stimuli, and (3) synthesized “model-matched” stimuli that were matched in spectrotemporal modulation statistics to (yet perceptually distinct from) music or speech. Of the 36 infants we collected usable data from, 19 had significant activations to sounds overall compared to scanner noise. From these infants, we observed a set of voxels in non-primary auditory cortex (NPAC) but not in Heschl’s Gyrus that responded significantly more to music than to each of the other three stimulus types (but not significantly more strongly than to the background scanner noise). In contrast, our planned analyses did not reveal voxels in NPAC that responded more to speech than to model-matched speech, although other unplanned analyses did. These preliminary findings suggest that music selectivity arises within the first month of life. (shrink)

Depuis une décennie, le terme genre se banalise dans les travaux historiques en français et son utilisation ne génère plus de longues justifications. Tel est le constat qu’on peut tirer de ce volume collectif réunissant chercheur-e-s et doctorant-e-s lors de l’université européenne d’été « Semaine de Haute formation du Doctorat international en Histoire des femmes et des identités de genre à l’époque moderne et contemporaine » en septembre 2008. La réunion, à l’Université Paris Ouest Nanterre...

Surging from the ontopoietic vital timing of life, human self-consciousness prompts the innermost desire to rise above its brute facts. Imaginatio creatrix inspires us to fabulate these facts into events and plots with personal significance attempting to delineate a life-course in life-stories within the ever-flowing stream – existence. Seeking their deep motivations, causes and concatenations, we fabulate relatively stabilized networks of interconnecting meaning – history. But to understand the meaning and sense of these networks’ reconfigurations call for the purpose and (...) telos of our endless undertaking; they remain always incomplete, carried onwards with the current of life, while fluctuating with personal experience in the play of memory. Facts and life stories, subjective desires and propensities, the circumambient world in its historical moves, creative logos and mythos, personal freedom and inward stirrings thrown in an enigmatic interplay, prompt our imperative thirst for the meaning of this course, its purpose and its fulfillment – the sense of it all. To disentangle all this animates the passions of the literary genius. The focus of this collection is to isolate the main arteries running through the intermingled forces prompting our quest to endow life with meaning. Papers by: Jadwiga Smith, Lawrence Kimmel, Alira Ashvo-Munoz, William D. Melaney, Imafedia Okhamafe, Michel Dion, Franck Dalmas, Ludmila Molodkina, Victor Gerald Rivas, Rebecca M. Painter, Matti Itkonen, Raymond J. Wilson III, Christopher S. Schreiner, Bruce Ross, Bernadette Prochaska, Tsung-I Dow, Jerre Collins, Cezary Jozef Olbromski, Victor Kocay, Roberto Verolini. (shrink)

George Annas serves a critical function as an incisive commentator on the interactions between law and medicine and law and public health. Along with Alex Capron, Dena Davis, Rebecca Dresser, and Larry GostinProfessor Annas analyses legal aspects of a spectrum of medicolegal issues both in a forum and in a manner that makes them accessible and understandable to a broad community of healthcare providers. His latest book, SomeChoice, continues that valuable tradition. The bulk of the volume (17 out of (...) 22 chapters) is drawn from essays originally published as the feature of the NewEnglandJournalofMedicine. The topics include such staples of patients' rights debate as the boundaries of informed consent, authorization of medical experiments, and physician-assisted suicide. A treat is the inclusion of less frequently covered issues, such as access to health information concerning presidential candidates and constitutional bounds of limits on cigarette advertising. (shrink)

George Annas serves a critical function as an incisive commentator on the interactions between law and medicine and law and public health. Along with Alex Capron, Dena Davis, Rebecca Dresser, and Larry Gostin—to pinpoint a few—Professor Annas analyses legal aspects of a spectrum of medicolegal issues both in a forum and in a manner that makes them accessible and understandable to a broad community of healthcare providers. His latest book, Some Choice, continues that valuable tradition. The bulk of the (...) volume is drawn from essays originally published as the “Legal Issues in Medicine” feature of the New England Journal of Medicine. The topics include such staples of patients' rights debate as the boundaries of informed consent, authorization of medical experiments, and physician-assisted suicide. A treat is the inclusion of less frequently covered issues, such as access to health information concerning presidential candidates and constitutional bounds of limits on cigarette advertising. (shrink)

Changing values may give rise to intergenerational conflicts, like in the ongoing climate change and energy transition debate. This essay focuses on the interpretative question of how this value change can best be understood. To elucidate the interpretation of value change, two philosophical perspectives on value are introduced: Berlin’s value pluralism and Dworkin’s interpretivism. While both authors do not explicitly discuss value change, I argue that their perspectives can be used for interpreting value change in the case of climate change (...) and the energy transition. I claim that Berlin’s pluralistic account of value would understand the value change as an intergenerational conflict and therefore provide a too narrow and static ground for understanding ongoing value change. Instead, by exploring Dworkin’s standpoint in moral epistemology, this essay distills a more encompassing perspective on how values may relate, converge, overlap, and change, fulfilling their functions in the course of climate change and energy transition. This perspective is further detailed by taking inspiration from Shue’s work on the interpretation of equity in the climate change debate. I argue that the resulting perspective allows us to see value change as a gradual process rather than as a clash between generations and their values. (shrink)

The volumes published in the series Beiträge zur Altertumskunde comprise monographs, collective volumes, editions, translations and commentaries on various topics from the fields of Greek and Latin Philology, Ancient History, Archeology, Ancient Philosophy as well as Classical Reception Studies. The series thus offers indispensable research tools for a wide range of disciplines related to Ancient Studies.

The most famous medieval controversy over the power and the temporal dominion took place between the papacy and the empire. One of the greatest advocates of the imperial domination was Marsilius of Padua, the author of an original work that demonstrated the advantage of acknowledging the emperor’s superiority over the Pope’s. The Defensor pacis, written between 1319 and 1324, was devoted to the dispute on such sovereignty issues as proving that the Pope should be subordinate to the Emperor, and not (...) vice versa. The Defensor pacis takes issue with numerous arguments and views uttered by the papal camp and uses the appropriate quotations from the Bible and Aristotle to show their weakness and inconsistency. The work comprises three parts. The first part is a description of the ideal system, i.e., an elective monarchy, with the specified role of a ruler and a clear indication of the sovereignty of the people. The second and third parts present a challenge to the arguments of the papal camp and analyze the general situation of the Church, suggesting the necessary reforms. Thus, the whole work becomes a compendium of knowledge on appropriate governance. (shrink)

The article estimates socio-psychological climate in the team by using sociometric techniques, expored in the example of Ltd. "ECMUKRAINE" and the algorithm of its formation. The argue that positive social and psychological climate needs constant work of the management focused on the study of the relationship in the team; identifying and solving objective contradictions; creative application of reasonable system of methods, tools and techniques of psychological impact on staff in order to optimize its entire set of relations on the basis (...) of requirements of morality and regulations. (shrink)

Using information on students’ past participation in economic experiments, we analyze whether behavior in public goods games is affected by experience and history. We find that: on average, the amount subjects contribute and expect others to contribute decreases with experience; at the individual level, the proportion of unconditional cooperators decreases with experience, while the proportion of selfish people increases. Finally, history influences behavior less than experience. Researchers are urged to control for subjects’ experience and history to improve the external validity (...) and replicability of results. (shrink)

The nature of the self is an important point at which philosophy and literature intersect. Text, Body and Indeterminacy acknowledges this connection by forging a link between the philosophical concept of the self and the category of the literary character. The philosophical horizon of Text, Body and Indeterminacy is delineated by the neo-pragmatist debate on selfhood. The book entwines the ideas of Richard Rorty and Richard Shusterman by stressing similarity in their aestheticizing of ethics and by showing the difference in (...) their understanding of the self as textual or bodily. The characters created by Pater and Wilde are freshly assessed within this dual philosophical perspective. Their doppelgngers are seen as the forerunners of postmodernist concepts: the cerebral fl[neur is reflected in Rortys model ironist, and the sensuous aesthete returns through Shustermans notion of the somatic self. Text, Body and Indeterminacy establishes how Pater renders his protagonists through discursive patternstropes of Decadence, philosophical theorems, and mythsonly to subvert these vocabularies and to emphasize the reality of the body, the extra-textual dimension of the self. It also shows how Wildes sensuous personae, both bodily and indeterminate, transcend the vocabularies available to the Wildean fl[neurs. Through its interpretations, Text Body and Indeterminacy uniquely combines literary portraits by Pater and Wilde, highlights interlocking themes and, in every reading, points to the ethical gains of tilting the idea of selfhood into the somatic realm. (shrink)

This study focuses on the definition of regions in post-industrial areas (Old Industrial Cities) and the method of cluster analysis as the technique for estimating the degree of depression of a coal region. At times of global economic crisis, it makes sense to study the economic experience of depressed regions, dominated by mono product economies, in order to assess ways to overcome the consequences of the crisis.

The times of restricting reading to just sitting with a book in a cozy armchair are gone. If you ask a modern teenager or university student how they would prefer to do it, the chances are fairly high that the answer you’ll get is a computer screen or an iPad. Digital technologies have become an ordinary tool for everybody dealing with literature, including common readers, students in the field, and professional scholars who have dedicated their lives to literary research. This (...) means the time has come to simultaneously revise the way literature is taught and explored, and this is where the volume Literary Education and Digital Learning: Methods and Technologies for Humanities Studies, edited by Willie van Peer .. (shrink)

In A. Emelianenko's article «Specificity of the philosophical basis of the existentialized theology of J. Wattimo» G. Vattimo's religious views, his contribution to theology and the nature of the interpretation of his ideas by contemporary researchers are examined. The processes of "existentialized theology" and the struggle of the Italian thinker for humanistic ideals and values are analyzed.

John Paul II emphasized the role of culture in the process of integration in Europe. It is culture and values that allow to find and strengthen the common identity of Europe. John Paul II believed them to be more important than economics and institutional ways of integration. Mass media play the important part in today’s culture. The press, radio, television and other electronic media are sources of knowledge, places for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences. The most important collocations of media (...) in papal thought are: service (duty), responsibility, dialogue and formation. Media should serve people by showing them the objective truth, defending human rights, promoting freedom, justice, solidarity and peace. The responsibility of mass media concerns reliability and integrity, care for customers, especially young and disdained. Dialogue, as John Paul II perceived it, has several dimensions: exchanging ideas and finding the best way of development, sharing experiences and abolishing discriminatory stereotypes, ecumenical and inter-religious meetings. Those assignments should be conducted by personal development of a journalist, which includes professional skills and formation: ethical and spiritual, courage and wisdom. John Paul II saw a great role of social communication in the process of integration, especially in the important task of uniting Europe. The truth and dialogue provided by responsible and reliable media should help people abolish the walls in people’s hearts and establish united Europe open to all inhabitants, who differ but are connected by love, values and culture. (shrink)

dwarfs loved Snow White). We report here results from two experiments with young speakers of Modern Greek which support the opposite conclusion: namely, that..