While previous research has linked executive attention to emotion regulation, the current study investigated the role of attentional alerting (i.e., efficient use of external warning cues) on younger (N=39) and older (N=44) adults’ use of gaze to regulate their mood in real time. Participants viewed highly arousing unpleasant images while reporting their mood and were instructed to deliberately manage how they felt and to minimise the effect of those stimuli on their mood. Fixations toward the most negative areas of the (...) images were recorded with eye tracking. We examined whether looking less at the most negative regions, compared to each individual's own tendency, was a beneficial mood regulatory strategy and how it interacted with age and alerting ability. High alerting older adults, who rely more on external cues to guide their attention, experienced a smaller decline in mood over time by activating a less-negative-looking approach (compared to their own average tendency), effectively looking away from the most negative areas of the images. More negative gaze patterns predicted better mood for younger adults, though this effect decreased over time. Alerting did not moderate gaze–mood links in younger adults. Successful mood regulation may thus depend on particular combinations of age, fixation, and attention. (shrink)

How can low-income, non-English-speaking parents become advocates, leaders, and role models in their children’s schools? _A Cord of Three Strands_ offers a close study of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, a grassroots organization on the northwest side of Chicago, whose work on parent engagement has drawn national attention. The author identifies three elements—induction, integration, and investment—that together capture the dynamic and developmental nature of successful parent engagement. Writing with both optimism and urgency, author Soo Hong offers richly detailed portraits of (...) parents’ experiences and addresses the complex and sometime conflicting relationships among school, family, and community. (shrink)

Background: This article aims to review research manuscripts in the past 5 years that focus on the effects of debt on depression, anxiety, stress, or suicide ideation in Asian countries.Methods: A search for literature based on the PRISMA guidelines was conducted on Medline, PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and ScienceDirect, resulting in nine manuscripts meeting inclusion criteria. The studies were conducted in Thailand, Korea, Singapore, Pakistan, India, Cambodia, and China.Results: The findings of the studies show that there is evidence to (...) support that being in debt is related to Asian participants experiencing depression, anxiety, stress, or suicide ideation. However, the studies are limited to quantitative studies only. The definition of debt is also unclear in most manuscripts. Few manuscripts also examined how other factors influence the relationship between debt and mental illness.Conclusion: There are limited studies on the psychological effects of debt on the Asian population. Future studies should focus on the relationship between debt and psychological well-being among this population. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of the social brain and the endorphin-based bonding mechanism that underpins it for the evolution of religion. I argue that religion evolved as one of the behavioural mechanisms designed to facilitate community bonding when humans first evolved the larger social groups of ~150 that now characterise our species. This is not a matter of facilitating cooperation, but of engineering social cohesion – a very different problem. Analysis of the size of C19th utopian communities suggests that (...) a religious basis both allowed larger groups to form and greatly enhanced their longevity. I suggest that religion evolved in two stages: an early immersive form with no formal structure based on trance-dancing (a form still evident in the rituals and practices of many hunter-gatherers) and a later form which had more formal structures and gave rise to our modern doctrinal religions. I argue that the modern doctrinal religions did not replace ancestral immersive religions but rather that the doctrinal component was overlaid on the ancient immersive form, thereby giving rise to the mystical stance that underlies all world religions. I suggest that it is this mystical stance that causes the constant upwelling of cults and sects within world religions. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to argue against the claim that agent causation is more fundamental than event causation. To accomplish this aim, I shall first briefly discuss the motivation behind agent causation. Second, I shall highlight the differences between agent causation and event causation. Third, I shall begin briefly with the weaker claim held by Timothy O’Connor and Randolph Clarke that there is no good reason to believe that event causation is more fundamental than agent causation. Fourth, I (...) shall discuss the stronger claim held by E. J. Lowe that agent causation is more fundamental than event causation, and raise objections against the various arguments Lowe advances for the stronger claim. To the extent that my objections against Lowe’s stronger claim succeed, they raise questions for O’Connor’s and Clarke’s weaker claim. (shrink)

The minimally conscious sta te (MCS) is usually ascribed when a patientwith brain damage exhibits obser vable volitional behaviors that predict recovery ofcognitive funct ions. Nevertheless, a patient with brain damage who lacks motorcapacit y might nonetheless be in MCS. For this reason, some clinicians use neuralsignals as a communicative means for MCS ascription. For instance, a vegetativestate patient is diagnosed with MCS if activity in the motor area is observed whenthe instruction to imagine wiggling toes is given. The validi (...) ty of using neuralsignals in ascribing MCS requires a special sort of inference. That is, no-reportparadigmatic assessments must have inductively strong ways of inferring a pur-ported informationa l content from the observed neural signal that grounds the factthat the patient has top-down cognitive control (or residual volition). Shannon’smathemat ical theory of communication and Bayes’ theorem reveals the formalstructure of neural communication. On the basis of relevant data from the neuro-science literature, I conclude that the formal structure combined with the data showsthat neural signals can be used as a communicative means for operational diagnosticcriteria for MCS ascription. (shrink)

F an Zhen’s 范縝 “Shen Mie Lun 神滅論” can be read as a debate between a physicalist and a dualist in the philosophy of mind. This debate, known as the “mind-body problem” in the Western tradition, has a long history beginning with the ancient Greeks, and is still rife to this very day. Many of the arguments found in the “Shen Mie Lun” correspond to arguments found in the history of Western thought, including those of Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Frege, and (...) Ryle. My aims in this essay are threefold: (1) offer a philosophical translation and explication of the key arguments in the “Shen Mie Lun,” (2) compare them with the corresponding arguments of some relevant Western philosophers, and (3) clarify F an Zhen’s position on the mind-body problem through comparing the conceptual distinctions employed by him with those employed by his Western counterparts. (shrink)

According to the expressive view of voting, a voter derives expressive utility from casting a vote. We present two possible sources of expressive utility: social interaction with voters having the same political preferences, and interestingness of the election. First, it has been suggested that a voter's expressive utility may increase when there are more voters having the same political preference. We extend this line of study and test the hypothesis that a voter's expressive utility increases as the number of voters (...) having the same political preferences increases in the local community, where interaction occurs more frequently with others than it does with others in distant communities. Second, we propose and test the other hypothesis, that voters’ expressive utility is larger when the election is more interesting. Using 2008 parliamentary election data from Korea, where the election consists of both 245 single-member districts and only one nationwide district for proportional representatives, we find supporting evidence for these two arguments: the turnout rate is significantly and positively related to the share of proportional representation votes for the largest party in each single-member district; the turnout rate is also significantly and positively related to the number of polls for single-member district election conducted by major broadcasting companies, which we use as a proxy variable for interestingness of the election. (shrink)

al-Juzʼ 1. Uṣūl al-masāʼil al-akhlāqīyah -- al-juzʼ 2-3. Furūʻ al-masāʼil al-akhlāqīyah.

This study assesses the causal relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and financial performance (FP). We perform our empirical analyses on a sample of 179 publicly held Canadian firms and use the measures of CSP provided by Canadian Social Investment Database for the years 2004 and 2005. Using the “Granger causality” approach, we find no significant relationship between a composite measure of a firm’s CSP and FP, except for market returns. However, using individual measures of CSP, we find a robust (...) significant negative impact of the environmental dimension of CSP and three measures of FP, namely return on assets, return on equity, and market returns. This latter finding is consistent, at least in the short run, with the trade-off hypothesis and, in part, with the negative synergy hypothesis which states that socially responsible firms experience lower profits and reduced shareholder wealth, which in turn limits the socially responsible investments. (shrink)

The functionalist conception of artificial moral agency holds that certain real-world AI systems should be considered moral agents because doing so benefits the recipients of AI actions. According to this view, human agents who are causally accountable for the morally significant actions of these AIs are deemed blameworthy or praiseworthy and may face sanctions or rewards, regardless of whether they intended the AI actions to occur. By meta-analyzing psychological experiments, this paper reveals a close alignment between the functionalist conception and (...) the folk understanding of artificial moral agency. People treat certain real-world AI systems as moral agents even when they do not attribute consciousness or free will to them. When ordinary people attribute moral responsibility to these systems, these attributions are also distributed among the users, programmers, and manufacturers of the systems. This distribution holds even when people do not view the causal contributions of these human agents to these systems’ actions as wrongful. (shrink)

Intuitively, proper referential extensions of psychological and moral terms exclude artifacts. Yet ordinary speakers commonly treat AI robots as moral patients and use psychological terms to explain their behavior. This paper examines whether this referential shift from the human domain to the AI domain entails semantic changes: do ordinary speakers literally consider AI robots to be psychological or moral beings? Three non-literalist accounts for semantic changes concerning psychological and moral terms used in the AI domain will be discussed: the technical (...) view (ordinary speakers express technical senses), the habit view (ordinary speakers subconsciously express ingrained social habits), and the emotion view (ordinary speakers express their own affective empathetic emotional states). I discuss whether these non-literalist accounts accommodate the results of relevant empirical experiments. The non-literalist accounts are shown to be implausible with respect to the ordinary use of agency-terms (e.g., “believe,” “know,” “decide,” etc.), and therefore I conclude that the concepts ordinary speakers express by agency-terms in reference to AI robots are similar to the concepts they express when applying the same terms to humans. When ordinary speakers extend emotion-terms and/or moral-patiency-terms to AI robots, however, I argue that semantic changes have taken place because ordinary speakers are in fact referring to their own affective empathetic emotional states rather than AI robots. This argument suggests that the judgments made by ordinary speakers regarding the proper referential extensions of emotion-terms and moral-patiency-terms are fallacious. (shrink)

Organizational members are likely to harbor different allegiances, values, and identifications that can affect how they respond to their organization’s stigmatization. Drawing on the empirical case of a public broadcaster in South Korea initially stigmatized for its association with an authoritarian government, we focus on the responses of different intra-organizational groups to stigma and their interactions with each other and with external audiences. We find that faced with stigma, groups in the organization were divided about how to respond, with those (...) defying the stigma and advocating a close relationship with the government competing with those who shared the values of stigmatizing audiences. Both groups sought control over journalism work, the organizational attribute for which the broadcaster was stigmatized, allying with external audiences that shared their respective visions. The dominance of the group that defied the stigma led to increased stigmatization of the organization by existing audiences and additionally prompted the participation of initially passive audiences in its denigration, eventually leading to organizational decline. We contribute to the literature on stigma by promoting an understanding of heterogeneity among members in stigmatized organizations and its implications for the consequences of stigma. We also contribute to theorizing stigmatization as a relational process by demonstrating how the heterogeneity of organizational members’ experience of stigma interacted with audience heterogeneity and highlighting the relative roles played by active and passive audiences in bringing about the decline of a stigmatized organization. (shrink)

Behaviorally assessing residual consciousness of acutely comatose patients involves a high rate of false-negatives. That is, long-term behavioral assessment shows that 41% of vegetative state patients in fact have residual consciousness. Nonetheless, surrogates need to remove ventilation before the acute-phase passes away if they want to induce medico-legal death due to pragmatic factors, such as financial costs. So, surrogate decision-making regarding behaviorally nonresponsive acutely comatose patients involves a moral dilemma: should we ignore the chance that patients have residual consciousness for (...) the sake of pragmatic factors? This paper examines whether neural methods can resolve the moral dilemma. Neural methods are used to assess residual consciousness of behaviorally nonresponsive postcomatose patients. For instance, by instructing a vegetative state patient to imagine wiggling all of her toes, conscious- ness is ascribed if brain activities are localized in the supplementary motor area. Since the most extensive application of neural methods has been in chronic population, it is unclear whether such methods can resolve the moral dilemma. I argue that neural methods also involve a high rate of false-negatives because current tasks of neural methods are structurally misguided. Given the argument, there is no significant difference between behavioral and neural methods regarding the moral dilemma. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to identify how older Korean people seek information and their desire to participate in decision making about their health care. A total of 165 elderly people living in Seoul, South Korea, participated in the study. Data were collected during individual interviews using the Autonomy Preference Index. The mean information-seeking score was high. The mean score for their desire to participate with a physician in decision making was lower, but this was higher when family members (...) were involved. The study indicates that many older people want to receive information about their health care. Families (or guardians), as well as older people themselves, should be included in the decision-making process. Nurses can encourage older people to express their wishes, while treating each individual with respect. (shrink)

Despite the entrenched acceptance of normal science in health care, it appears that authoritative, positivist, linear, risk averse, certainty-based thinking can only get us so far along the route of optimum health. This paper examines labor and childbirth as a paradigm case of a complex adaptive system (CAS) and offers the example of techniques used in a master-level course on normal childbirth to illustrate how maternity care clinicians can be introduced to complexity-based thinking through reflexive analysis of real life clinical (...) narratives. It suggests that these techniques might be used as a basis for answering the question, what is likely to work for this person, in this situation, given the range of evidence, and given their values and beliefs, my values and beliefs, and my clinical skills and knowledge? Topics discussed in this paper include complexity, pregnancy, and childbirth; mainstreaming complexity-focused decision making in maternity care; and using story in practice. In conclusion, complexity theory appears to offer a good explanatory model for pregnancy and childbirth, both in general, and for specific individuals. Future work in this area should examine the efficacy and limits to formal story telling in maternity care, with the aim of increasing optimal maternity care for mothers and babies, and for the staff and organizations that deliver the care. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Relational reasoning is a higher-order executive function that involves the ability to perceive meaningful patterns within a body of seemingly unrelated information. In this study, the ability of 749 fourth (Mage= 10), sixth (Mage= 12), eighth (Mage= 14), and tenth graders (Mage= 16) to identify meaningful relational patterns was investigated. This general cognitive ability was assessed by means of the Test of Relational Reasoning-Junior (TORRjr), a 32-item measure organized into four 8-item scales that assess analogical, anomalous, antinomous, and antithetical reasoning. (...) Students’ performance on the TORRjr was analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis, measurement invariance test, and non-parametric median-based analyses. The confirmatory factor analysis supported that the higher-order factor model was the best fit for the TORRjr data for the Korean students. The measurement was determined to be invariant by gender but variant across grade levels. The non-parametric analysis resulted in an asymptotic (a constant increasing up to grade 6 and then a level off witnessed from grades 8 to 10) development pattern in overall relational reasoning across the grades. In comparison to analogy and anomaly, antinomy and antithesis scores were more fully developed by grade 8 and that level of performance was maintained at grade 10. The TORRjr appeared to be a viable measure for the Korean samples up to approximately 15 years of age. The significance of these findings for research and instructional practice are discussed. (shrink)

In their pursuit of addressing social and environmental challenges, social entrepreneurs should be social transformers emancipating stakeholders. Rosa’s critical theorizing in philosophy and sociology points the ways to expanding the conventional conception of social entrepreneurship to include long-term social transformation. Modifying Rosa, social entrepreneurship is not anti-capitalist but reforms capitalism. The key relevant concepts in Rosa are resonance, alienation, ambivalence, vulnerability, dynamic stabilization through the triple A of appropriation, acceleration, and activation, and emancipatory interest. We consider social entrepreneurs as resonant (...) actors, they satisfy threefold resonance preconditions: cognitive, material, and social. As a matter of fact, they are rejecting alienation through their effort to provide others with a high(er) social value. Rosa’s theoretical framework is a new and inspiring phenomenological and critical lens that is worth studying in relationship to a social entrepreneurship point of view because social entrepreneurs are facing huge challenges and multiple paradoxes that Rosa’s thinking enables their better understanding. An essential precondition of the resonance of social entrepreneurs is their vulnerability, which is strengthened by the escalatory logic of acceleration of the world fostering ambivalence. Entering in resonance with the world is a cause and a consequence of vulnerability. Only a vulnerable social entrepreneur can experience resonant actions as a prerequisite to reach the “good life”. Our findings underline the necessity to reconcile Rosa’s theoretical analysis with the effectual logic of social entrepreneurship in which it is necessary for social entrepreneurs to resonate with all stakeholders to gain legitimacy and be able to identify the sources of their true “emancipatory interest” in long-term social transformation. (shrink)

This paper examines the methodological problem of casuistry by reference to Immanuel Kant's position on it. He addressed “Casuistical Questions” in his last work on ethics, Metaphysik der Sitten, in order to defend his position against attacks from scholars defending an Aristotelian eudemonistic viewpoint. It is argued that Kantian casuistry has much in common with the Aristotelian idea of emphasizing the moral objectives and sensibility of an agent in concrete circumstances. Nevertheless, Kant did not entirely adopt the case-oriented ethical perspective (...) because he saw the moral duty as the „wide“ one. Moral duties are wide in the sense that they demand continuous self-examination: asking whether there might be a better way to limit one's maxim by another. According to Kant, although casuistry as a case study could give moral law or duties more practicability through the training of moral judgment, the moral agent cannot use with individual cases in order to modify or devise new moral rules or duties. (shrink)

In this essay, I aim to address the two related problems faced by ontological emergence and propose a solution. First, I shall briefly outline the concept of emergence, the distinction between ontological and epistemological emergence, as well as the distinction between synchronic and diachronic emergence, and focus mainly on synchronic ontological emergence. Second, I shall discuss the two related problems faced by synchronic ontological emergence—configurational forces and downward causation. Third, I shall present a solution to these problems—affirming ontological emergence but (...) denying vertical causation. Last, I shall address objections to the ontological emergence without vertical causation view. (shrink)

The current methods in psychoanalytic studies of God images and representations have focused almost exclusively on individual, internal processes. This article examines how psychological anthropologists go about formulating symbolic representations of deity in their research, in comparison with the object relations method of God- representations. Drawing on Melford Spiro's integrative proposal for interpreting the mental and collective representations in religious symbol systems, this paper proposes that there is a need for a comprehensive model of the representational process in the Eastern (...) world in order to suit its cultural traditions. The author uses both theoretical and historical materials as well as personal narrative throughout its entirety to balance the two in a mutual and coherent flow of understanding. Noting the culturally patterned interactions with culturally postulated God-symbols, the object relations method of God- representations will be utilized to probe how God is both created and found on a collective level as well as individual level. (shrink)

Post-comatose patients are classified as being in a minimally conscious state when they have executive functions. Because traditional behavioral assessments may not capture signs of executive functions in post-comatose patients, clinicians look to localized brain activities in response to task instructions, such as imagining wiggling toes, to diagnose minimal consciousness. This paper critically assesses the assumption underlying such alternative methods: that brain activities are neural signals conveying information about minimal consciousness. Based on a Shannon-inspired idea of information, I distinguish between (...) informational and engineering aspects of clinical tasks. The informational aspect concerns the conditional probability that, for example, given activity in the motor areas of the brain in response to task instructions, a patient is imagining wiggling toes. The engineering aspect concerns efficient activation of the relevant brain areas in a patient under the task conditions. This distinction shows that the current alternative methods are not informationally problematic, but are structurally “ill-formed.” For instance, the toe-imagery task requires the capacity to comprehend syntactically complex sentences, which can be dissociated from minimal consciousness. I propose a misrepresentation task, which tests the capacity to misconceptualize lukewarm water as melting wax, as a supplement to the current alternative methods. This task is as informationally reliable as these methods, but is structurally “well-formed,” as it does not rely methodologically on prerequisites such as language comprehension. (shrink)

The objective of this research is to find the meeting point between the second precept of Pancasila and the global ethics of Kung. The article also discusses the value of the second precept of Pancasila as found in the global ethics. This research is intended to recognise human rights as the convergence of the second sila (principle) of Pancasila, namely, 'a just and civilised humanity' with Hans Kung's global ethics. The method used in this research is a literature study containing (...) relevant theories. The second principle of Pancasila, Kemanusiaan yang Adil dan Beradab, is the basis for understanding the life of humanity, unity and justice in Indonesia and becomes the basis for humans to understand themselves and others. CONTRIBUTION: This research offers significant insights into the value of human rights as a meeting point between the second sila of Pancasila and Hans Kung's global ethics. The second sila of Pancasila and Hans Kung's global ethics emphasise that everyone has rights. Human rights do not contradict with the typical Indonesian culture of deliberation and mutual cooperation, because the second principle of Pancasila, namely, a just and civilised humanity, is the basis for ensuring human rights. The Constitution of Indonesia of 1945, article 27 paragraph 1 also guarantees human rights. Human rights do not encourage individualism; instead, they protect individuals and groups. Human rights are not meant to promote egoism, but they help to maintain solidarity among people and ensure the well-being of society. They are a means to respect human dignity and protect the weak. (shrink)