Background: Managing HIV treatment is a complex multi-dimensional task because of a combination of factors such as stigma and discrimination of some populations who frequently get infected with HIV. In addition, patient-provider encounters have become increasingly multicultural, making effective communication and provision of ethically sound care a challenge. Purpose: This article explores ethical issues that health service providers in the United States and Botswana encountered in their interaction with patients in HIV care. Research design: A descriptive qualitative design was used (...) to collect data from health service providers and patients using focused group discussions. This article is based on responses from health service providers only. Participants and context: This article is based on 11 focused group discussions with a total sample of 71 service providers in seven US sites and one Botswana site. Ethical considerations: Ethical review boards at all the study sites reviewed the study protocol and approved it. Ethical review boards of the study’s coordinating centers, Rutgers University and the University of California at San Francisco, also approved it. The study participants provided a written informed consent to participate. Findings: HIV service providers encountered ethical challenges in all the four Beauchamp and Childress’ biomedical ethics of respect for patients’ autonomy, beneficence, justice, and nonmaleficence. Discussion: The finding that HIV service providers encounter ethical challenges in their interaction with patients is supported by prior studies. The ethical challenges are particularly prominent in multicultural care and resource-constrained care environments. Conclusion: Provision of HIV care is fraught with ethical challenges that tend to pose different issues depending on a given care environment. It is important that strong partnerships are developed among key stakeholders in HIV care. In addition, health service providers need to be provided with resources so they can provide quality and ethically sound care. (shrink)

Although we find Gangestad & Simpson's argument intriguing, we question some of its underlying assumptions, including: (1) that fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is consistently heritable; (2) that symmetry is driving the effects; (3) that use of parametric tests with FA is appropriate; and (4) that a short-term mating strategy produces more offspring than a long-term strategy.

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

Roger Sullivan's earlier book, Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory, has done for Kant's moral philosophy what Henry Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense has done for Kant's metaphysics: it offers a comprehensive and plausible account of Kant's thought and defends it from common objections and misunderstandings. Sullivan's new book draws upon his earlier one, distilling its insights into an ideal introduction to Kant's ethics that will be both useful to undergraduate and graduate students and also interesting to Kant (...) specialists. (shrink)

In spring 2020, COVID-19 and the ensuing social distancing and stay-at-home orders instigated abrupt changes to employment and educational infrastructure, leading to uncertainty, concern, and stress among United States college students. The media consumption patterns of this and other social groups across the globe were affected, with early evidence suggesting viewers were seeking both pandemic-themed media and reassuring, familiar content. A general increase in media consumption, and increased consumption of specific types of content, may have been due to media use (...) for coping strategies. This paper examines the relationship between the stress and anxiety of university students and their strategic use of media for coping during initial social distancing periods in March-April 2020 using data from a cross-sectional survey. We examine links between specific types of media use with psychological well-being concepts, and examine the moderating roles of traits (hope, optimism, and resilience) as buffers against negative relationships between stress and anxiety and psychological well-being. Our findings indicate that stress was linked to more hedonic and less eudaimonic media use, as well as more avoidant and escapist media-based coping. Anxiety, on the other hand, was linked to more media use in general, specifically more eudaimonic media use and a full range of media-based coping strategies. In turn, escapist media was linked to negative affect, while reframing media and eudaimonic media were linked to positive affect. Avoidant coping was tied to poorer mental health, and humor coping was tied to better mental health. Hedonic and need-satisfying media use were linked to more flourishing. Hope, optimism, and resilience were all predictive of media use, with the latter two traits moderating responses to stress and anxiety. The findings give a nuanced portrait of college students’ media use during a pandemic-induced shutdown, showing that media use is closely intertwined with well-being in both adaptive and maladaptive patterns. (shrink)

The founding of the Han 漢 dynasty by a man of common birth, Liu Bang 劉邦, precipitated a new awareness that class boundaries had become more fluid than in prior generations. New fashions threatened the established social order as wealthy individuals pretended to status that they had not yet achieved. To respond to these concerns, Jia Yi 賈誼 proposed a new sumptuary code regulating a range of luxury goods from apparel to accessories to ritual wares. This sumptuary system was designed (...) to bolster the authority of the imperial throne and to distinguish members of the Han government and the imperial family from other elites. This essay will present an overview of Jia Yi’s sumptuary code and consider its relationship to earlier theories of ritual reform. It will argue that his system combined Lord Shang’s 商 theory of circumstantial advantage with a new scheme of imperial publicity. The final section of this study assesses the implementation of Jia Yi’s recommendations by using jade as a case study. Based on recent archaeological evidence, I argue that Jia Yi’s ideas about jade in the context of his sumptuary guidelines have a contemporaneity with the revitalization of jade craft in the early Western Han. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to reframe crises as moments of organizational opportunity instead of moments of organizational threat. The predominant crisis communication approach involves defensive pos...

The executive hypothesis of self-regulation places cognitive information processing at the center of self-regulatory success/failure. While the hypothesis is well supported by cross-sectional studies, no study has tested its primary prediction, that temporary lapses in executive control underlie moments of self-regulatory failure. Here, we conducted a naturalistic experiment investigating whether short-term variation in executive control is associated with momentary self-regulatory outcomes, indicated by negative affect reactivity to everyday stressors. We assessed working memory capacity (WMC) through ultra-brief, ambulatory assessments on smart (...) phones five times per day in a 7-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study involving college-aged adults. We found that participants exhibited more negative affect reactivity to stressor exposures during moments when they exhibited lower than usual WMC. Contrary to previous findings, we found no between-person association between WMC and average stress reactivity. We interpret these findings as reflecting the role of executive control in determining one’s effective capacity to self-regulate. (shrink)

This article presents a critique of an article previously featured in Nursing Philosophy (10: 26–33) by Ursula Naue and Thilo Kroll, who suggested that people living with dementia are assigned a negative status upon receipt of a diagnosis, holding the identity of the ‘demented other’. Specifically, in this critique, we suggest that unwitting use of the adjective ‘demented’ to define a person living with the condition is ill-informed and runs a risk of defining people through negative (self-)attributes, which has a (...) deleterious impact upon that person's social and relational personae. Moreover, use of the locution ‘demented’ reinforces a divide between the ‘demented’ (them) and the ‘healthy others’ (us). Social constructionist theory, malignant positioning and viewing people with dementia as semiotic subjects are the philosophical pillars through which we construct the main arguments of the critique. The article concludes with the voice of one of the authors, a younger person with dementia, asking for language in dementia care to be carefully reconsidered and reframed and for the recognition of the diagnosed person's agency in the conduct of their day-to-day lives. (shrink)

This dialogue discusses a proposal for the legalization of torture under specific circumstances and contrasts it with arguments for a total ban on torture. We consider three types of objection: first, that the difficulty of having adequate knowledge renders the stock “ticking bomb” scenario such a low-probability hypothetical as to present no realistic threat to a policy banning all torture; second, that empirically the information gleaned from torture is so unlikely to be reliable that it could not justify the moral (...) risk; and third, that sanctioning torture, even if only under the most extreme circumstances, would generate a ‘culture of torture,’ hence undermining fragile advances in international human rights rooted in unwavering commitment to human dignity. Compelling as these arguments appear, not all the conversants are wholly convinced by them; to this extent the dialogue ends aporetically. (shrink)

We refine the constructions of Ferrante-Rackoff and Solovay on iterated definitions in first-order logic and their expressibility with polynomial size formulas. These constructions introduce additional quantifiers; however, we show that these extra quantifiers range over only finite sets and can be eliminated. We prove optimal upper and lower bounds on the quantifier complexity of polynomial size formulas obtained from the iterated definitions. In the quantifier-free case and in the case of purely existential or universal quantifiers, we show that Ω quantifiers (...) are necessary and sufficient. The last lower bounds are obtained with the aid of the Yao-Håstad switching lemma. (shrink)

From certain sorts of premise, individuals reliably infer invalid conclusions. Two Experiments investigated a possible cause for these illusory inference: Reasoners fail to think about what is false. In Experiment 1, 24 undergraduates drew illusory and control inferences from premises based on exclusive disjunctions (“or else”). In one block, participants were instructed to falsify the premises of each illusory and control inference before making the inference. In the other block, participants did not receive these instructions. There were more correct answers (...) for illusory disjunctions whose premises had been falsified than there were for illusory disjunctions that had not been falsified. A second Experiment introduced illusory inferences in a real world context that accentuated falsification of premises. Accuracy also improved. Knowledge of how to falsify premises and to consider their implications for true premises transferred to a new problem introduced at the end of the Experiment without the falsification instruction. The participants' ratings of the difficulty of the inferences showed that they did not err simply because illusory inferences are perceived to be more difficult than control problems. The model theory predicts these results because it postulates that the limitations of working memory preclude the representation of false information. (shrink)

In a fictional conversation designed to appeal to both working teachers and social philosophers, three educators take up the question of whether critical thinking itself can, or should, be taught independently of an explicit consideration of issues related to social justice. One, a thoughtful but somewhat traditional Enlightenment rationalist, sees critical thinking as a neutral set of skills and dispositions, essentially unrelated to the conclusions of morality, problems of social organization, or the content of any particular academic discipline. A second (...) interlocutor, steeped in “critical” pedagogy of Paulo Freire, insists that the problem is the pose of neutrality itself. On this view, all honest and effective approaches to teaching must confront the hegemony of unjust relationships, institutions, and conceptual schemes. The third character attempts to resolve the tension between these two opposed camps. (shrink)

We begin this chapter with a review of the history of synaesthesia and a comparison of what we consider to be either genuine or inauthentic manifestations of the phenomenon. Next, we describe the creation and development of synaesthetic consistency tests and explore reasons why assessing consistency became the most widely used method of confirming the genuineness of synaesthesia. We then consider methodologies that demonstrate synaesthesia's authenticity by capitalizing on properties other than consistency. Finally, we discuss how together, consistency tests and (...) other methodologies are helping researchers determine prevalence and elucidate the mechanisms of synaesthesia. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

Working parents in are struggling to balance the demands of their occupation with those of childcare and homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, studies show that women are shouldering more of the burden and reporting greater levels of psychological distress, anxiety, and depression relative to men. However, research has yet to show that increases in psychological symptoms are linked to changes in stress during the pandemic. Herein, we conduct a small-N study to explore the associations between stress and psychological symptoms (...) during the pandemic among mothers using structural equation modeling, namely latent change score models. Thirty-three mothers completed questionnaires reporting current anxious and depressive symptoms, as well as stressful life experiences prior to-versus during the pandemic. Women endorsed significantly more stressful events during the pandemic, relative to the pre-pandemic period. Additionally, 58% of mothers scored as moderate-to-high risk for developing a stress-related physical illness in the near future because of their pandemic-level stress. Depressive symptoms were associated with the degree of change in life stress, whereas anxiety symptoms were more related to pre-pandemic levels of stress. The present study preliminarily sheds light on the nuanced antecedents to mothers’ experiences of anxious and depressive symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although further work is needed in larger, more diverse samples of mothers, this study highlights the potential need for appropriate policies, and prevention and intervention programs to ameliorate the effects of pandemics on mothers’ mental health. (shrink)

In this article, we review the psychology of hero development and hero worship. We propose that heroes and hero narratives fulfill important cognitive and emotional needs, including the need for wisdom, meaning, hope, inspiration, and growth. We propose a framework called the heroic leadership dynamic to explain how need-based heroism shifts over time, from our initial attraction to heroes to later retention or repudiation of heroes. Central to the HLD is idea that hero narratives fulfill both epistemic and energizing functions. (...) Hero stories provide epistemic benefits by providing scripts for prosocial action, by revealing fundamental truths about human existence, by unpacking life paradoxes, and by cultivating emotional intelligence. To energize us, heroes promote moral elevation, heal psychic wounds, inspire psychological growth, and exude charisma. We discuss the implications of our framework for theory and research on heroism, leadership processes, and positive psychology. (shrink)

Whitehead's Philosophy of Science By VICTOR LOWE BOTH AS AN INVESTIGATOR of the foundations of mathematics and as a philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead ...

Although ethics is an essential component of undergraduate medical education, research suggests current medical ethics curricula face considerable challenges in improving students’ ethical reasoning. This paper discusses these challenges and introduces a promising new mode of graduate and professional ethics instruction for overcoming them. We begin by describing common ethics curricula, focusing in particular on established problems with current approaches. Next, we describe a novel method of ethics education and assessment for medical students that we have devised, the Medical Ethics (...) Bowl. Finally, we suggest pedagogical advantages to MEBs when compared to other ethics curricula. (shrink)

This book moves toward building a new and more comprehensive theory of literature, philosophy, psychology, and art. The extremely popular work of Ken Wilber, unites the best of both western and eastern thought and affirms that the stages of consciousness, more refined than that of the reasoning mind, do exist.