Counter storytelling, used in critical race theory and narrative ethics, is a tool used to contradict and expose the oppression in a dominant narrative, by focusing attention on the stories of the...

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic is influencing our lives in an enormous and unprecedented way. Here, we explore COVID-19-lockdown's consequences for creative activity. To this end, we relied on two extensive diary studies. The first, held on March 2019, involved 78 students who reported their emotions and creativity over 2 weeks. The second, conducted on March 2020, involved 235 students who reported on their emotions, creativity, and the intensity of thinking and talking about COVID-19 over a month. We found that (...) compared with 2019, during the lockdown, students engaged slightly yet statistically significantly more in creative activities. An analysis of diaries collected during the pandemic also showed that the days when students spent more time discussing or searching for information about COVID-19 were characterized by a higher creative activity yet also mixed emotions. We discuss potential explanations of these unexpected results along with future study directions. (shrink)

Children who experience parentification may have trouble performing developmental tasks due to being overwhelmed by their family caregiving roles and responsibilities. Past studies have found that parentification is negatively associated with academic achievement. However, most of these studies are limited in that they are retrospective and examine the association but not the mechanisms shaping them. The aim of the study was to explore to what extent diverse types of parentification relate to academic achievement and to what extent these relations are (...) mediated by self-reported quality of life among adolescents. The study sample was composed of Polish early adolescents. Types of parentification were measured with the Parentification Questionnaire for Youth, and quality of life was assessed with KidScreen27. School achievement was measured based on mean semester grade. We explored the associations among study variables and performed six mediation models in the planned analyses. Overall, bivariate relations were significant in a theoretically expected way, although the effect sizes for these associations were rather small. In the mediation analyses, the results showed that four of the six models were not significant. Different from previous studies, instrumental parentification was positively related to school achievement. Additionally, this positive association was mediated by adolescents’ general quality of life. Taken together, the findings were similar and different from the empirical literature base on types of parentification and select outcomes. (shrink)

Idiopathic Parkinson’s disease impairs working memory, but the exact nature of this deficit in terms of the underlying cognitive mechanisms is not well understood. In this study patients with mild clinical symptoms of PD were compared with matched healthy control subjects on a computerized battery of tests designed to assess spatial working memory and verbal working memory. In the spatial working memory task, subjects were required to recall a sequence of four locations. The verbal working memory task was methodologically identical (...) except for the modality of the stimuli used, requiring subjects to orally recall a sequence of six digits. In either case, half of the sequences were structured in a way that allowed ‘chunking’, while others were unstructured. This manipulation was designed to dissociate the strategic component of task performance from the memory-load component. Mild medicated patients with PD were impaired only on the structured versions of the verbal working memory tasks. The analogous deficit in the spatial working memory was less pronounced. These findings are in agreement with the hypothesis that working memory deficits in PD reflect mainly the executive component of the tasks and that the deficits may be at least partly modality-independent. (shrink)

This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Améry, a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Améry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

Study in the period of coronavirus disease 2019 lockdown and the effect of different exercise training programs on the quality of life dimension are limited. This randomized control study as a part of which the impact of an 8-week neuromuscular training program on the 90 healthy young individuals’ QoL after COVID-19 lockdown was assessed using a short form of the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire comprising of four domains. The intervention group took part in a neuromuscular training program consisting of dynamic neuromuscular stabilization (...) and whole-body vibration training. In contrast, the control group did not participate in any programmed physical activity. From pre- to post-intervention test, the NT group significantly and substantially improved [mean change ] all the QoL domains, physical for 12.78 scores, psychological for 13.12 scores, social relationships for 20.57 scores, and environmental for 24.40 scores. These results suggest that the NT program could enhance QoL in young and healthy participants following COVID-19 lockdown. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege is not only the father of contemporary mathematical logic and the philosophy of logic, but — as advocated by others, especially M. Dummett – he is, above all, the founder of contemporary research in logic and the philosophy of language. The categories and concepts introduced by Frege were assimilated by philosophers studying language and inspired further detailed analyses. It seems impossible to overestimate the role of Frege’s theory, despite the fact that his objectives — setting a logical basis (...) for mathematics, undoing the psychologizing of logic, building a clear and accurate language for logic and science — differ from the ones set out by contemporary explorers of language. (shrink)

Trust is a fundament of decent and just health care. In a subtle relation between patient and physician trust not only fuels the process of therapy but also plays a therapeutic role itself. Trust is a precondition of successful cooperation – it lowers its costs, increases efficiency and brings satisfaction to the partners. Only altruistic trust acts as such. Philosophical arguments as well as experiments analysing birth of trust in health care praxis prove the validity of the altruistic model. Distinction (...) between these two models casts light on the contemporary health care crisis. Many of todays’ reforms improve only cognitive side of trust by increasing predictability and efficiency of the health care system, while neglecting its crucial – ethical side. Article analyses also ambivalent influence of new technologies on these processes. (shrink)

Exposure Therapy (ET) has demonstrated its efficacy in the treatment of phobias, anxiety and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), however, it suffers a high drop-out rate because of too low or too high patient engagement in treatment. Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) is comparably effective regarding symptom reduction and offers an alternative tool to facilitate engagement for avoidant participants. Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that both ET and VRET normalize brain activity within a fear circuit. However, previous studies have employed brain imaging (...) technology which restricts people’s movement and hides their body, surroundings and therapist from view. This is at odds with the way engagement is typically controlled. We used a novel combination of neural imaging and VR technology—Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and Immersive Projection Technology (IPT), to avoid these limitations. Although there are a few studies that have investigated the effect of VRET on a brain function after the treatment, the present study utilized technologies which promote ecological validity to measure brain changes after VRET treatment. Furthermore, there are no studies that have measured brain activity within VRET session. In this study brain activity within the prefrontal cortex (PFC) was measured during three consecutive exposure sessions. N = 13 acrophobic volunteers were asked to walk on a virtual plank with a 6 m drop below. Changes in oxygenated (HbO) hemogl... (shrink)

Recent arguments claim that behavioral science has focused – to its detriment – on the individual over the system when construing behavioral interventions. In this commentary, we argue that tackling economic inequality using both framings in tandem is invaluable. By studying individuals who have overcome inequality, “positive deviants,” and the system limitations they navigate, we offer potentially greater policy solutions.

The subject of the paper is a philosophical analysis of the womanhood in the context of M. Merleau-Ponty`s ontology of corporeality (la chair). The womanhood is grasped (after Levinas) as a cosmic element, penetrating the tissue of the embodiment of the logos of the world. As an element of the same ontological level as death, the womanhood on the one hand brakes up the stability instilled in the human world and introduces an anxiety into a plural entity. On the other (...) hand it also brings in a vigil, which generates responsibility for the stability instilled in the human world. (shrink)

Objectives Study participants are 46 women with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. Occurrence of the M-R-K-H syndrome is one in 4000-5000 female children. It was investigated whether coping styles mediate the effect of neuroticism on positive and negative affect, and whether this mediation is moderated by the level of N as well as whether this moderated mediation is moderated by length of awareness of illness. Methods: Neuroticism, coping style as well as positive and negative emotions were assessed using the Polish version of NOE-FFI, (...) CISS and Scale of Emotional State. Results: Emotion coping style fully or partly mediated the relationship between neuroticism and emotions and these mediations were moderated by the level of N. Additionally, direct effect of neuroticism on NA was moderated by the time for which a patient has been aware of the disease. Conclusions: The level of neuroticism and the length of illness are important factors for the psychological functioning of women with M-R-K-H Syndrome. In women with medium and high neuroticism, effect of N on NA was indirect and also direct - but only in those who have been aware of the diagnosis for 6 years or more. Relations with positive emotions were different: the indirect effect was observed only in women with a moderate and low neuroticism. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the translation into English and Korean of the old Polish criminal law terminology used by Adam Mickiewicz in his renown poem entitled “Master Thaddeus, or the Last Foray in Lithuania: A Nobility’s Tale of the Years 1811–1812, in Twelve Books of Verse” Mickiewicz (Pan Tadeusz czyli ostatni zjazd na Litwie. Historia szlachecka z roku 1811 i 1812 we dwunastu księgach wierszem). The research methods used encompass the analysis of parallel texts of the (...) poem. The authors first selected the fragments of the poem containing criminal law terminology. Next analysed two translations into English (Biggs in Master Thaddeus, or the last Forey in Lithuania—by Adam Mickiewicz, an Historical epic poem in XII books, translated from the original by Biggs, with a Preface by W.R. Morfill, M.A. and Notes, by the translator and Edmond Naganowski, Trübner et Comp, London, 1885 and MacKenzie in Adam Mickiewicz. Pan Tadeusz or the Last Foray in Lithuania. A Tale of the Gentry in the Years 1811 and 1812 translated into English verse with Introduction by Kenneth R. Mackenzie, Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, Londyn, 1990) and one into Korean Cheong et al. (『판 타데우시』 [Pan Tadeusz] Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, 2005). The findings reveal that the terminology under scrutiny in the majority of cases must be considered obsolete and legal system-bound. Mickiewicz (1834) referred to the laws binding Poles under the Third Lithuanian Statute (Wilno, 1774). Therefore, the translators had to face the challenge of deciphering the appropriate meanings and finding equivalents sufficiently conveying them. (shrink)

This sixth volume of Collected Papers includes 74 papers comprising 974 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2015-2021 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 121 co-authors from 19 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abdel Nasser H. Zaied, Abduallah Gamal, Amir Abdullah, Firoz Ahmad, Nadeem Ahmad, Ahmad Yusuf Adhami, Ahmed Aboelfetouh, Ahmed Mostafa Khalil, Shariful Alam, W. Alharbi, Ali Hassan, Mumtaz Ali, Amira S. Ashour, Asmaa Atef, Assia Bakali, Ayoub Bahnasse, A. A. Azzam, Willem K.M. Brauers, Bui (...) Cong Cuong, Fausto Cavallaro, Ahmet Çevik, Robby I. Chandra, Kalaivani Chandran, Victor Chang, Chang Su Kim, Jyotir Moy Chatterjee, Victor Christianto, Chunxin Bo, Mihaela Colhon, Shyamal Dalapati, Arindam Dey, Dunqian Cao, Fahad Alsharari, Faruk Karaaslan, Aleksandra Fedajev, Daniela Gîfu, Hina Gulzar, Haitham A. El-Ghareeb, Masooma Raza Hashmi, Hewayda El-Ghawalby, Hoang Viet Long, Le Hoang Son, F. Nirmala Irudayam, Branislav Ivanov, S. Jafari, Jeong Gon Lee, Milena Jevtić, Sudan Jha, Junhui Kim, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, Songül Karabatak, Abdullah Kargın, M. Karthika, Ieva Meidute-Kavaliauskiene, Madad Khan, Majid Khan, Manju Khari, Kifayat Ullah, K. Kishore, Kul Hur, Santanu Kumar Patro, Prem Kumar Singh, Raghvendra Kumar, Tapan Kumar Roy, Malayalan Lathamaheswari, Luu Quoc Dat, T. Madhumathi, Tahir Mahmood, Mladjan Maksimovic, Gunasekaran Manogaran, Nivetha Martin, M. Kasi Mayan, Mai Mohamed, Mohamed Talea, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Gulistan, Raja Muhammad Hashim, Muhammad Riaz, Muhammad Saeed, Rana Muhammad Zulqarnain, Nada A. Nabeeh, Deivanayagampillai Nagarajan, Xenia Negrea, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Jagan M. Obbineni, Angelo de Oliveira, M. Parimala, Gabrijela Popovic, Ishaani Priyadarshini, Yaser Saber, Mehmet Șahin, Said Broumi, A. A. Salama, M. Saleh, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Dönüș Șengür, Shio Gai Quek, Songtao Shao, Dragiša Stanujkić, Surapati Pramanik, Swathi Sundari Sundaramoorthy, Mirela Teodorescu, Selçuk Topal, Muhammed Turhan, Alptekin Ulutaș, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Ştefan Vlăduţescu, Dan Valeriu Voinea, Volkan Duran, Navneet Yadav, Yanhui Guo, Naveed Yaqoob, Yongquan Zhou, Young Bae Jun, Xiaohong Zhang, Xiao Long Xin, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas. (shrink)

Myślą Ludwika Gumplowicza polscy uczeni zainteresowali się stosunkowo późno. Jej pierwsze opracowania autorstwa Jana Karola Kochanowskiego, Stanisława Posnera, Mieczysława Szerera, Jana Stanisława Bystronia, Aleksandra Kraushara przypadają na lata 1910–1917, a więc na okres zwany Młodą Polską, który wpisuje się w ogólnoeuropejski modernizm. Nowa generacja uczonych, pisarzy i artystów, działająca w okresie młodopolskim znacząco różniła się w przyjmowanych założeniach filozoficzno-ideowych od pokolenia pozytywistów i realistów krytycznych. Niemniej ukształtowane w pozytywizmie nawyki myślenia nie zanikły po roku 1890 całkowicie – pozostały one (...) indywidualnym a zarazem wspólnym dorobkiem intelektualnym generacji szkół i uczonych wykształconych w dobie pozytywizmu. Postawy światopoglądowe pozytywizmu i modernizmu przenikały się, zaś zasadniczym łączącym je elementem, pomimo programowego buntu modernizmu wobec haseł pozytywistycznych, było zadłużenie wobec naturalizmu. Jednak że schyłkowe lata XIX wieku przynoszą antyscjentystyczne niepokoje, w tym krytykę pozytywistycznego modelu nauki, teorii ewolucjonizmu i jemu właściwego rozumienia postępu, protest przeciwko utylitaryzmowi i odrodzenie metafizyki. […] W polskich pracach z lat 1910–30 poświeconych socjologii L. Gumplowicza interesujące są trzy wątki, wskazujące na kierunek i postać, jaki przybrała recepcja dzieła socjologa z Grazu: zespół wspólne podzielanych przekonań odnośnie genezy systemu Gumplowicza oraz dwie warstwy wartościowania jego dorobku: pozytywna i negatywna. Zatem nasze ujęcie opinii, sądów i ocen sformułowanych przez St. Posnera, M. Szerera, J. St. Bystronia, A. Kraushara oraz F. Mirka pod adresem teorii Gumplowicza będzie miało charakter syntetyzującego przeglądu, uwzględniającego specyfikę stanowisk w kwestiach, które znacząco się od siebie różnią. Ta uwaga odnosi się przede wszystkim do bardzo zindywidualizowanej krytyki spuścizny Gumplowicza. Jako odrębne w tym przeglądzie wyróżnione zostanie stanowisko J. K. Kochanowskiego z uwagi na jego odmienność: oryginalne i twórcze nawiązanie polskiego historyka i socjologa do myśliciela z Grazu. (shrink)

The necessity of wearing masks in response to the spread of the Covid-19 took Europe and the USA by surprise. Legislation needed to be enacted to enforce the obligation on citizens not used to such practices. The authors investigate the semiotic function of masks, legislations enacted to enforce their usage in public places, and the mask-related discourse with a view to seeing how societies reacted to this imposition. A broad semiotic perspective is provided to analyze different attitudes and types of (...) MRD that have emerged in Poland, France, and the USA. (shrink)

M. Mokienko in his article “The key transformative tendencies of the Pentecostal religious centres in post-soviet Ukraine” points to the direction of development of translocal structures of Ukrainian Pentecostalism. The author examines historical-theological and ecclesiological prerequisites of institutionalisation and argues that integrative processes among Pentecostals led to centralisation of their structures and government and stimulated establishment of these in Ukrainian religious landscape.

The Greeks and Romans have been charged with destroying the ecosystems within which they lived. In this book, however, M. D. Usher argues rather that we can find in their lives and thought the origin of modern ideas about systems and sustainability, important topics for humans today and in the future. With chapters running the gamut of Greek and Roman experience – from the Presocratics and Plato to Roman agronomy and the Benedictine Rule – Plato's Pigs brings together unlikely bedfellows, (...) both ancient and modern, to reveal surprising connections. Lively prose and liberal use of anecdotal detail, including an afterword about the author's own experiments with sustainable living on his sheep farm in Vermont, add a strong authorial voice. In short, this is a unique, first-of-its-kind book that is sure to be of interest to anyone working in Classics, environmental studies, philosophy, ecology, or the history of ideas. (shrink)

This interview with M. Beatrice Fazi explores in detail her work on computation. Focusing in particular upon her recent publications, it covers the themes of contingency and indeterminacy. The questions explore Fazi’s perspectives on computational aesthetics, abstraction and experience. Through an interrogation of the conceptual insights that Fazi’s recent work offers, the interview outlines an agenda for future work in the philosophy of computation and sets forward a series of conceptual policies for seeing the digital, software and data in a (...) fresh light. (shrink)

Special groups [M. Dickmann, F. Miraglia, Special Groups : Boolean-Theoretic Methods in the Theory of Quadratic Forms, Memoirs Amer. Math. Soc., vol. 689, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2000] are a first-order axiomatization of the theory of quadratic forms. In Section 2 we investigate reduced special groups which are a lattice under their natural representation partial order ; we show that this lattice property is preserved under most of the standard constructions on RSGs; in particular finite RSGs and RSGs of (...) finite chain length are lattice ordered. We prove that the lattice property fails for the RSGs of function fields of real algebraic varieties over a uniquely ordered field dense in its real closure, unless their stability index is 1 . We show that Open Problem 1 has a positive answer for the RSG of the field Q . In the final section we explore the meaning of Open Problem 1 for formally real fields, in terms of their orders and real valuations; we introduce the notion of “parameter-rank” of a positive-primitive first-order formula of the language for special groups. (shrink)

Jacob (history, New School for Social Research) proposes that the science of the 17th and 18th centuries was eventually accepted because it was made compatible with larger political and economic interests. A celebration of the recently concluded 33 volume edition of the Collected works of John Stuart Mill, produced over a period of nearly 30 years, the last 20 under the guiding genius (and hand) of general editor Robson. Following a tributary history of the project itself, essays cover Mill's career (...) as a thinker and as a bureaucrat and public servant, exploring the effects of the various milieu--domestic, political, administrative, religious, and cultural--in which he moved. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Empathy of pain as a multi-dimensional process includes sharing and understanding the pain of others in relation to oneself. Subjects in such studies are typically members of western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. In the literature review that we conducted, we observed that little is known about the empathy for pain in people who are not members of societies with these cultural characteristics. We often understand those who are “similar” to us more easily - ones who belong to “our” (...) cultural circle. However, contact with another culture could help prevent such bias. Group characteristics, such as focus on others, hierarchy preference, or cultural differences in self-constructs, can change the activity of brain regions associated with empathy and compassion. Increasing the diversity of the research participants connected with education level, poverty, industrialization, and respect for basic citizen freedoms seem to be necessary to fully understand the mechanisms that influence the development and operation of empathy. (shrink)

Marjorie Grene has argued in a number of contexts that any attempt to reduce the explanation of human actions to “mechanistic” explanations is doomed to failure in advance because it is absurd. “This argument examines the status of the reductivist thesis in its own terms and reduces it to absurdity …” ; “the attempt to reduce human purposive, or ‘intentional,‘ action to physiology and ultimately to physics and chemistry is an absurdity rather than simply a confusion”. I wish to show (...) that this argument is fallacious because it involves a petitio principii; and if Plato can be credited with introducing the same argument in the Theaetetus, as she suggests, so much the worse for Plato. (shrink)