In the last decade, Family Group Conferences have increasingly been used to help people and their networks deal with their problems. The FGC fits well with the call for equal rights and self-management coming from clients and client movements, as well as the economy-driven pressure towards more informal and less professional care coming from governments. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the underlying theory to explain how the FGC works. In this article, we aim to provide such a (...) theoretical basis by examining how the concept of empowerment can be linked with the basic assumptions underlying the FGC. Can making a plan of their own indeed help to empower people and if so, how does the process of empowerment proceed? Empowerment is often mentioned as a goal of the FGC, but authors are not unanimous when it comes to the operationalisation of empowerment, especially on the relational level of the person in his or her social context. In the article, we use the concepts of relational autonomy and resilience to conceptualize empowerment on the relational and individual level. (shrink)

There is little or no general agreement about what researchers should focus on when studying consciousness. The most active scientific studies often use the methods of Cognitive Neuroscience and focus mainly on vision. Other aspects and contents of consciousness, namely thoughts and emotions, are much less studied, possibly leading to a biased view of what consciousness is and how it works. In this essay we describe what we call a referential nucleus, implicit in much of consciousness research. In this context, (...) 'consciousness' refers to reportable content experienced by living individuals. We then discuss the philosophical concept of a phenomenal world and another contemporary view that conscious experience involves, besides integration of information in the brain, participation in action-perception cycles in a natural, social and cultural environment. These views imply a need to reconceptualize 'qualia'as the con-scious aspect of subjective experiences, thus stating properties of consciousness that pose serious challenges to an exclusive approach via Cognitive Neuroscience, because experimental settings oversim-plify conscious experiences, narrowing them to fragments correlated with measured brain activity and behaviour. In conclusion we argue that a science of consciousness requires a broad interdisciplinary range of research, including qualitative methods from the Human Sciences. (shrink)

Despite the importance of emotions for learning and performance of future behaviors, few studies have attempted to qualitatively describe emotions that arise in response to self-control successes and failures. This study is the first qualitative analysis to examine the complexity of goals that give rise to self-control challenges of two types—initiation and inhibition—and the emotions that follow success and failure experiences. Thematic analysis revealed a sometimes blurred line between inhibition and initiation, and a variety of goals that challenge views that (...) successful self-control is good and unsuccessful self-control is bad. Descriptions of self-control challenges and resulting experiences further uncovered distinctions and apparent emotional profiles characteristic of self-control dilemmas involving inhibition or initiation, suggesting that these two forms of self-control are not only theoretically but also experientially distinct. (shrink)

Extending the growing literature on the role of grit in different life domains, this research explores the relationship between grit and involvement in entrepreneurship. The research highlights the role of personal income and satisfaction with one’s current financial situation as moderators of the relationship between grit and entrepreneurial behavior. Using a large representative sample of Spanish young adults and controlling for a number of potential confounding variables, we find that grit is modestly negatively related to the probability of involvement in (...) entrepreneurship. As predicted, however, this relationship is qualified by both income and satisfaction with current financial situation, though in opposite directions and more weakly for satisfaction with financial status. Gritty individuals with higher levels of income are more prone to become entrepreneurs than gritty individuals with lower levels of income. Gritty individuals with lower levels of satisfaction with their financial situation are more likely to set up a business or become self-employed. (shrink)

A community's abilities to promote health and maximize its response to public health threats require fulfillment of one of the four elements of public health legal preparedness, the capacity to effectively coordinate law-based efforts across different governmental jurisdictions, as well as across multiple sectors and disciplines. Government jurisdictions can be viewed “vertically” in that response efforts may entail coordination in the application of laws across multiple levels, including local, state, tribal, and federal governments, and even with international organizations. Coordination of (...) legal responses to public health emergencies also may involve a horizontal dimension comprising numerous and diverse sectors, such as public health, public and private health care, emergency management, education, law enforcement, the judiciary, and the military.Although responses to many acute health threats can implicate multiple jurisdictions and sectors, the jurisdictional and sectoral dimensions of legal preparedness are complex and may vary substantially by the nature of a threat, its geographic and geopolitical extent, and the operational response demanded. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 634-645, July 2022.

Recent studies of naturalistic face‐to‐face communication have demonstrated coordination patterns such as the temporal matching of verbal and non‐verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non‐verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between verbal and non‐verbal behaviors depends on the level of analysis. In a reanalysis of a corpus of naturalistic multimodal communication (Louwerse, Dale, Bard, & Jeuniaux, ), we focus on measuring the temporal patterns of specific (...) communicative behaviors in terms of their burstiness. We examined burstiness estimates across different roles of the speaker and different communicative modalities. We observed more burstiness for verbal versus non‐verbal channels, and for more versus less informative language subchannels. Using this new method for analyzing temporal patterns in communicative behaviors, we show that there is a complex relationship between verbal and non‐verbal channels. We propose a “temporal heterogeneity” hypothesis to explain how the language system adapts to the demands of dialog. (shrink)

This paper is one of the four interrelated action agenda papers resulting from the National Summit on Public Health Legal Preparedness convened in June 2007 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multi-disciplinary partners. Each of the action agenda papers deals with one of the four core elements of public health legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities; competency in using those laws; coordination of law-based public health actions; and information. Options presented in this paper are for consideration by (...) policy makers and practitioners — in all jurisdictions and all relevant sectors and disciplines — with responsibilities for all-hazards emergency preparedness.Advancing and protecting the public's health depends upon the coordination of actions by many, diverse partners. For effective public health preparedness, there must be effective coordination of legal tools and law-based strategies across local, state, tribal, and federal jurisdictions, and also across sectors such as public health, health care, emergency management, education, law enforcement, community design, and academia. (shrink)

“April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire… ” So, begins T.S. Eliot’s iconic poem, “The Wasteland,” challenging the memory of Chaucer’s April from Canterbury Tales, as being a delightful month to go on pilgrimage. Platonic teachings emphasize that you don’t create, you just remember. Might the inverse might also be true, “You don’t remember, you just create.” As the oneirocritic, Robert Bosnak, contends, you do not actually remember your dreams. You remember (...) your memory you recreate the dream in this time. Since the challenges of post-modernism, this is no longer a far-fetched idea. The eminent historian of immigration, Deborah Dash Moore, defines history in this regard, as “a search for a plausible narrative.” “History” is not a record of what happened, but rather, is a record of what we believe happened, or what we want to believe happened. This brings to the fore Foucault’s documenting the relationship of knowledge to power, as well as Freud’s assertion that material which is unacceptable to the ego, is disguised, in order to make them palatable. This places the notion of memory in a different light. There are incidents that occurred fifty years ago that seem as if they occurred five minutes ago. The depth psychologist and champion of the imagination, James Hillman, referred to this process as “soul-making.” Back to T.S. Eliot: when he studied Sanskrit at Harvard, he was certainly aware that the Sanskrit word for memory, smara (from which smrti “that which is remembered,” is derived) is also an epithet for Kama Deva, the Indian Cupid. Hence, the mixing of memory and desire. Perhaps, in this light, the study of history, which is a form of collective memory, is also a form of mass therapy, an effort to process the collective past. Hegel and Marx both believed classical India to be an inferior civilization because it had “no history,” but collections of mythologies. Maybe classical India, however, held an awareness that all memory is myth, a word which in its early Greek form literally translates as “plot.” Jesus declares (in the Gospel story) “Let the dead bury the dead.” As the Jesus narrative exemplifies, however, burying the dead is no easy task. Perhaps our ongoing, ever-morphing narratives, allow us an oblique opportunity to connect with and process our pain. And in this theatre of memory, the goal may not be to accumulate or catalogue what has been spoken (itihasa), but look a good miller, to process the grain into its essence: from what has passed, and is passing, and is to come, into what always is. Perhaps, the pilgrimage of the mind, on its endless perigination of story, is meant to ultimately take us to love, but that may be unspeakable. Keywords: memory, desire, narrative, history, myth, power. (shrink)

The main question that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) pose is whether “what and how we see is functionally independent from what and how we think, know, desire, act, and so forth” (sect. 2, para. 1). We synthesize a collection of concerns from an interdisciplinary set of coauthors regarding F&S's assumptions and appeals to intuition, resulting in their treatment of visual perception as context-free.

The first thorough examination of C. Wright Mills's intellectual roots, this book also is the first to present Mills's full analysis in his unpublished as well as published writings of the work of his precursors, mentors, and critics. Mills' intellectual line of descent is traced from the American institutional economists, especially Thorstein Veblen and Clarence Ayres, and the American pragmatists, especially John Dewey and George H. Mead—an evolution influenced though not determined by ideas from Europe. Always the critic and gadfly, (...) Mills subjected all theories to his special brand of analysis and synthesis. For example, his books on U.S. social stratification are seen by Tilman as a trilogy updating Veblen with ideas from the pragmatists, spiced with a good bit of Max Weber but very little Man. Power, his other chief concern, also was subjected to his creative American eclecticism. As a lifelong seeker of knowledge, Mills studied the great European social thinkers—notably Marx, Mosca, Pareto, Michels, Weber, Mannheim, and Freud—until his untimely death. Explaining Mills's self-description as a "plain Marxist," Tilman writes that it "amounted to little more than a willingness to use Marx's values, vocabulary, and model when these seemed relevant and to ignore them when they did not." Regarding alleged affinities between Freud and Mills, Tilman argues these were "tenuous at best and, although the linkage with the neo-Freudians was stronger, Mills remained critical of Homey and Fromm because they had "not succeeded in entirely overcoming Freud's biological metaphysic." Although the American radical tradition is complex and varied, the heritage that most influenced Mills, Tilman contends, contains elements of evangelical Protestantism and of liberal pragmatism. "It was Charles Wright Mills more than any other thinker in recent years," he concludes, "who synthesized these strands of thought and then wove them into an authentic American radical theory.". (shrink)

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

With the rise of the scientific authority of neuroscience and recent neurotechnological advances, the understanding of the human being and its future is beginning to undergo a radical change. As a result, a normative and existential vacuum is opening and hopes as well as fears about the future are flourishing. Some philosophers are anticipating a broad neuroscientific disenchantment, sociocultural disruption and a new existential anxiety related to the clash of the neuroscientific and humanistic image of humans. Others are expecting the (...) technological and scientific developments to lead to human enhancement and existential emancipation. In the first part of this commentary, I outline these two contrasting responses to the rise of neurocentricism and non-anthropocentrism. In the second part, I argue that the divide between the old anthropocentric paradigm and the emerging neuroscientific is misconceived and that literature and fictional narrative are particularly illustrative of the possibility of integrating scientific materialism with humanism. I use the contemporary literary-philosophical work The Creative Act by Rick Rubin to show that humanist ideas can indeed cohere with anti-essentialist and neuroscientific notions of personal identity and self and how existential meaning and comfort can be found in a neuroscientifically and deterministically explained world. (shrink)

Abstract In his discourses on ‘the lily of the field and the bird of the air,’ Kierkegaard presents faith as the best possible response to our precarious and uncertain condition, and as the ideal way to cope with the insecurities and concerns that his readers will recognize as common features of human existence. Reading these discourses together, we are introduced to the portrait of a potential believer who, like the ‘divinely appointed teachers’—the lily and the bird—succeeds in leading a life (...) that is full of care, but free of worry. Such a portrait, we claim, echoes Kierkegaard’s portrait of the knight of faith in Fear and Trembling . In this essay we suggest that faith, as characterized in the ‘lily and bird’ discourses, is a kind of existential trust that would allow us to overcome worry, while remaining wholeheartedly engaged in the finite realm of our cares and concerns. We claim that Kierkegaard’s goal in these discourses is not to belittle our earthly cares, but to invite us to develop a modified attitude toward all that we are susceptible to worry about. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s11153-011-9322-5 Authors Sharon Krishek, Department of Philosophy, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel Rick Anthony Furtak, Department of Philosophy, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO, USA Journal International Journal for Philosophy of Religion Online ISSN 1572-8684 Print ISSN 0020-7047. (shrink)

This essay investigates the demands on adult children to provide care for their elderly/ill parents from a socio-moral perspective. In order to narrow the examination, the question pursued here is agent-relative: What social and moral complexities are involved for the adult child when her parent(s) need care? First, this article examines our society’s expectation that adult children are morally obligated to provide care for their parents. Second, the essay articulates how transgressing against this normative expectation can inure significant moral criticism. (...) The final sections present these tensions within the context of disability. (shrink)

Considering Pragma-Dialectics honors the monumental contributions of one of the foremost international figures in current argumentation scholarship: Frans van Eemeren. The volume presents the research efforts of his colleagues and addresses how their work relates to the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation with which van Eemeren’s name is so intimately connected. This tribute serves to highlight the varied approaches to the study of argumentation and is destined to inspire researchers to advance scholarship in the field far into the future. Replete with (...) contributions from highly-esteemed academics in argumentation study, chapters in this volume address such topics as: *Pragma-dialectic versus epistemic theories of arguing and arguments; *Pragma-dialectics and self-advocacy in physician-patient interactions; *The pragma-dialectical analysis of the ad hominem family; *Rhetoric, dialectic, and the functions of argument; and *The semantics of reasonableness. As an exceptional volume and a fitting tribute, this work will be of interest to all argumentation scholars considering the astute insights and scholarly legacy of Frans van Eemeren. (shrink)

Recent studies show that the current punitive approach to bullying, in the form of zero-tolerance policies, is ineffective in reducing bullying and school violence. Despite this significant finding, anti-bullying legislation is increasing. The authors argue that these policies are not only ineffective but that they are also unjust, harmful, and stigmatizing. They advocate a broader integrative approach to bullying programs that includes both victims and bullies.