Background Debates on the use of race in biomedical research have typically overlooked immigrant groups outside of the black-white racial dichotomy. Recent biomedical research on South Asians and cardiovascular disease provides an opportunity to understand how scientists define race and interpret racial health disparities from an underexamined perspective. Purpose To examine how researchers in the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) study defined a South Asian population, and then compared health differences between South Asians and other (...) populations. Methods Qualitative content analysis was performed on eleven articles from August 2013 to January 2021 that directly compared the South Asian cohort in MASALA to four other groups. The MASALA study design article was also included in this analysis. Articles were analysed for how South Asians were defined, and for how health differences between South Asians and other populations were studied and discussed. Results Researchers in MASALA were neither clear nor precise in defining South Asians as either an ancestral group or ethnic group. Their studies also prioritised investigating genetic and molecular causes of the cardiovascular health disparity between South Asians and other populations and failed to examine possible social factors. Conclusions These findings reflect a broader trend in biomedical research in which race and racial health disparities are poorly defined and studied, limiting scientists’ understanding of the relationship between race and health. I propose methodologies to help researchers define populations and design studies without relying on biologically reductive assumptions. (shrink)

Achieving a high quality of life is dependent upon how individuals face adversity. Positive psychological interventions are well-suited to support coping efforts; however, experimental research is limited. The purpose of the current research was to examine whether different savoring interventions could increase important coping resources in response to a social-evaluative hassle. We completed an experimental mixed subject design study with a university student sample. All participants completed a hassle induction task and were then randomly assigned into different intervention groups. Positive (...) emotion ratings were collected at three points in time. Results revealed a significant time x intervention interaction effect, such that individuals in the savoring the moment intervention reported higher levels of positive emotions compared to individuals assigned to the true control group, guided imagery control group, and savoring through reminiscence intervention. Such findings represent a significant extension to savoring theory and offer support for savoring the moment exercises as a primary prevention strategy to bolster effective responses to social-evaluative hassles. (shrink)

Recent research indicates that interpersonal communication is noisy, and that people exhibit considerable insensitivity to problems in communication. Using a dyadic referential communication task, the goal of which is accurate information transfer, this study examined the extent to which interlocutors are sensitive to problems in communication and use other‐initiated repairs (OIRs) to address them. Participants were randomly assigned to dyads (N = 88 participants, or 44 dyads) and tried to communicate a series of recurring abstract geometric shapes to a partner (...) across a text–chat interface. Participants alternated between directing (describing shapes) and matching (interpreting shape descriptions) roles across 72 trials of the task. Replicating prior research, over repeated social interactions communication success improved and the shape descriptions became increasingly efficient. In addition, confidence in having successfully communicated the different shapes increased over trials. Importantly, matchers were less confident on trials in which communication was unsuccessful, communication success was lower on trials that contained an OIR compared to those that did not contain an OIR, and OIR trials were associated with lower Director Confidence. This pattern of results demonstrates that (a) interlocutors exhibit (a degree of) sensitivity to problems in communication, (b) they appropriately use OIRs to address problems in communication, and (c) OIRs signal problems in communication. (shrink)

Moral stress is an increasingly significant concept in business ethics and the workplace environment. This study compares the impact of moral stress with other job stressors on three important employee variables—fatigue, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions—by utilizing survey data from 305 customer-contact employees of a financial institution’s call center. Statistical analysis on the interaction of moral stress and the three employee variables was performed while controlling for other types of job stress as well as demographic variables. The results reveal that (...) even after including the control variables in the statistical models, moral stress remains a statistically significant predictor of increased employee fatigue, decreased job satisfaction, and increased turnover intentions. Implications for future research and for organizations are discussed. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy, Volume 62, Issue 4, Page 427-438, December 2021.

There are things we routinely say that may strike us as literally false but that we are nonetheless reluctant to give up. This might be something mundane, like the way we talk about the sun setting in the west, or it could be something much deeper, like engaging in talk that is ostensibly about numbers despite believing that numbers do not literally exist. Rather than regard such behaviour as self-defeating, a "fictionalist" is someone who thinks that this kind of discourse (...) is entirely appropriate, even helpful, so long as we treat what is said as a useful fiction, rather than as the sober truth. "Fictionalism" can be broadly understood as a view that uses a notion of pretense or fiction in order to resolve certain puzzles or problems that otherwise do not necessarily have anything to do with literature or fictional creations. Within contemporary analytic philosophy, fictionalism has been on the scene for well over a decade and has matured during that time, growing in popularity. There are now myriad competing views about fictionalism and consequently the discussion has branched out into many more subdisciplines of philosophy. Yet there is widespread disagreement on what philosophical fictionalism actually amounts to and about how precisely it ought to be pursued. This volume aims to guide these discussions, collecting some of the most up-to-date work on fictionalism and tracing the view's development over the past decade. After a detailed discussion in the book's introductory chapter of how philosophers should think of fictionalism and its connection to metaontology more generally, the remaining chapters provide readers with arguments for and against this view from leading scholars in the fields of epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and others. (shrink)

Discusses three concepts crucial to an understanding of the nature of religion: anxiety, guilt, and freedom. The various essays examine these from the viewpoint of several different religious traditions, movements and thinkers. Contents: Editor's Preface. Donald Gard: A Personal Perspective. Part I. Guiltless Morality; The Family of Changing Woman: Nature and Women in Navaho Thought; The Sacraments as "Fear-provoking" and "Awe-inspiring" Rites in the Greek Fathers; The Doctrine of Karma; Two Concepts of Predestination in Current Islamic Thought. Part II. The (...) Spirit of Medieval Penitents; The Evolution of Freedom as Catholicity in Catholic Ethics; Agape and the Liberation Movements. Part III. Calvin's Idea of Freedom in the Ethics of Schleiermacher and Barth; Creativity and Freedom in the Thought of Martin Buber; The Liberating Visions of C. G. Jung; 'The World's Most Perverse Habit'; Appendix: Study Questions. (shrink)

In the verbal domain, there is only very weak evidence favoring the view that working memory is an active state of long-term memory. We strengthen existing evidence by reviewing two recent fMRI studies of verbal working memory, which clearly demonstrate activation in the superior temporal lobe, a region known to be involved in processing speech during comprehension tasks.

The idea of the common good has been a signature feature of Catholic social teaching and so of modern Catholic engagement in public affairs. It has recently been suggested that the notion is now obsolete due to changes in the culture and politics of the West. In keeping with this suggestion, some argue that Catholics should abandon it in favor of an appeal based on lower intermediate goods in a manner more related to Augustine’s engagement with the largely pagan culture (...) of his time than to Aquinas’s categories tailored to an integrally Christian society. I argue that such a solution misreads aspects of the tradition and of the present political and cultural situation and I suggest some alternative grounds on which Catholic engagement with contemporary public life should proceed and that thinking again about the common good is a necessary part of such engagement. (shrink)

Introduction Limited treatments for Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) highlight the need to explore innovations including Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), with patient perspectives key to ethical protocol development.Methods Seven MCI patients and four care partners were interviewed (Feb 2023–Jan 2024) about daily MCI challenges, desired treatment outcomes, and views on DBS. Thematic analysis following COREQ guidelines identified key themes.Results DBS was a novel concept for all (7/7), and most expressed interest (6/7) despite concerns about invasiveness (6/7) and preference to exhaust medications (...) first (4/7). Care partners (4/4) shared concerns about invasiveness and emphasized proven efficacy. Key deciding factors included the involved procedural risk (6/7), desired significant outcomes (6/7), and prior testing for MCI (7/7). Most participants (6/7) were hesitant to be the first to try DBS, while one was willing.Conclusion Patient and care partner insights on DBS for MCI are crucial for balancing innovation with ethical, patient-centered research. (shrink)

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large‐scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and negative information contained (...) in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals. (shrink)

According to Charles Taylor, practical reasoning helps us overcome cultural conflicts of val-ue when we are able to show that the passage from one value to another represents an epistemic gain. This paper argues that practical reasoning can be effective in pathological cases of cultural convergence but only if it is understood as a species of the creative social imagination.

In The Principles of Mathematics Revisited Jaakko Hintikka proposes nothing less than “to prepare the ground for the next revolution in the foundations of mathematics”. Hintikka’s proposal involves a rejection, inter alia, of the views that ordinary first-order logic is the basic elementary logic and that axiomatic set theory is a natural framework for theorizing about mathematics.

Orthologic is non-classical logic and has been studied as a part of quantumlogic. OL is based on an ortholattice and is also called minimal quantum logic. Sequent calculus is used as a tool for proof in logic and has been examinedfor several decades. Although there are many studies on sequent calculus forOL, these sequent calculi have some problems. In particular, they do not includeimplication connective and they are mostly incompatible with the cut-eliminationtheorem. In this paper, we introduce new labeled sequent (...) calculus called LGOI, and show that this sequent calculus solve the above problems. It is alreadyknown that OL is decidable. We prove that decidability is preserved when theimplication connective is added to OL. (shrink)

Bradley's rich and complex version of Absolute Idealism plays a key role not only in Idealist philosophy, politics, and ethics, but also in the development of modern logic, analytical philosophy, and pragmatism, as well as in the thinking of such figures as R. G. Collingwood and A. N. Whitehead. Topics covered include: the history of Idealism in the twentieth century; Bradley's relation to figures such as Bernard Bosanquet, C. A. Campbell, Brand Blanshard, John Watson, John Dewey, and others; (...) Bradley's influence on twentieth-century empiricism, modern logic, and analytical philosophy; and his significance for contemporary debates in epistemology and ethics. (shrink)