Mindfulness and compassion meditation are thought to cultivate prosocial behavior. However, the lack of diverse representation within both scientific and participant populations in contemplative neuroscience may limit generalizability and translation of prior findings. To address these issues, we propose a research framework calledIntersectional Neurosciencewhich adapts research procedures to be more inclusive of under-represented groups. Intersectional Neuroscience builds inclusive processes into research design using two main approaches: 1) community engagement with diverse participants, and 2) individualized multivariate neuroscience methods to accommodate neural (...) diversity. We tested the feasibility of this framework in partnership with a diverse U.S. meditation center (East Bay Meditation Center, Oakland, CA). Using focus group and community feedback, we adapted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) screening and recruitment procedures to be inclusive of participants from various under-represented groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, gender and sexual minorities, people with disabilities, neuropsychiatric disorders, and/or lower income. Using person-centered screening and study materials, we recruited and scanned 15 diverse meditators (80% racial/ethnic minorities, 53% gender and sexual minorities). The participants completed the EMBODY task – which applies individualized machine learning algorithms to fMRI data – to identify mental states during breath-focused meditation, a basic skill that stabilizes attention to support interoception and compassion. All 15 meditators’ unique brain patterns were recognized by machine learning algorithms significantly above chance levels. These individualized brain patterns were used to decode the internal focus of attention throughout a 10-min breath-focused meditation period, specific to each meditator. These data were used to compile individual-level attention profiles during meditation, such as the percentage time attending to the breath, mind wandering, or engaging in self-referential processing. This study provides feasibility of employing an intersectional neuroscience approach to include diverse participants and develop individualized neural metrics of meditation practice. Through inclusion of more under-represented groups while developing reciprocal partnerships, intersectional neuroscience turns the research process into an embodied form of social action. (shrink)

Five studies examined the extent to which autobiographical memory retrieval is hierarchical, whether a hierarchical search depends on central executive resources, and whether retrieving memories that are “higher” in the hierarchy impairs problem‐solving ability. The first study found that random generation (assessed using a button‐pressing task) was sensitive to changes in memory load (digit span). The second study showed that when participants fail to retrieve a target event, they respond with a memory that is higher up the hierarchy. The third (...) study showed that memory is more generic only when participants use low imageable cues under cognitive load. The final two experiments showed that experimental manipulation of memory specificity affects problem solving (MEPS performance). The data are consistent with Conway and Pleydell‐Pearce's hierarchical retrieval model of autobiographical memory, and suggest that overgeneral memory in nonclinical participants is associated with reduced executive capacity only when retrieval is “top‐down” (generative). (shrink)

Both RalA and RalB interact with the ubiquitous calcium sensor, calmodulin (CaM). New structural and biophysical characterisation of these interactions strongly suggests that, in the native membrane‐associated state, only RalA can be extracted from the membrane by CaM and this non‐canonical interaction could underpin the divergent signalling roles of these closely related GTPases. The isoform specificity for RalA exhibited by CaM is hypothesised to contribute to the disparate signalling roles of RalA and RalB in mitochondrial dynamics. This would lead to (...) CaM shuttling RalA to the mitochondrial membrane but leaving RalB localisation unperturbed, and in doing so triggering mitochondrial fission pathways rather than mitophagy. (shrink)

The emergence of key concepts in Reinhart Koselleck’s sense has been much discussed in conceptual history, but mainly for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The article documents a post–World War II emergence of the concept of health, from relative anonymity to becoming a key concept, comparable to concepts such as politics, democracy, and culture. While previous research has emphasized conceptual mobility, this article focuses on conceptual aggregation, where the concept of health assembles and assimilates meanings, becoming essential to discourse. This (...) is explained with reference to the development of the welfare state and the political use of a positive, expanded health concept. The article utilizes a collocation analysis of Norwegian digitized newspapers 1950–2010, culled from the uniquely extensive database of the Norwegian National Library. (shrink)

The proposal of anything like a feminist epistemology has, I think, two sources. Feminist scholars have demonstrated how the scientific cards have been stacked against women for centuries. Given that the sciences are taken as the epitome of knowledge and rationality in modern Western societies, the game looks desperate unless some ways of knowing different from those that have validated misogyny and gynephobia can be found. Can we know the world without hating ourselves? This is one of the questions at (...) the core of discussions of feminist epistemology. It has spinoffs, e.g., can we know the world in ways that will permit women as well as men to thrive? Can we know the world without hating any human group? and so on. Now, these questions might be answered in a way that does not require any rethinking of fundamental philosophical issues. Some philosophers might argue that sexism in the sciences from Aristotle to human sociobiology results from a masculinist blinding that impedes the normal workings of the human cognitive apparatus. Unblinded, that apparatus produces real knowledge rather than ideology. Or: that was then, this is now. This somewhat overestimates the progress made in the sciences in the last 20 years, but can be read as a promissory note. (shrink)

Objective To study parental attitudes to participating in questionnaire research about perinatal postmortem immediately after late miscarriage, stillbirth and termination for fetal abnormality. Design Prospective self-completion questionnaire. Setting UK fetal medicine and delivery unit. Patients 35 women and their partners after second or third trimester pregnancy loss, making decisions about having a postmortem. Methods Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about postmortem decision-making which included questions about their attitudes to taking part in research. Prior to giving full approval for (...) the study, the Research Ethics Committee requested feedback after 10 questionnaires had been returned. Results Responses from the first 10 participants were positive about the research and the REC allowed the study to continue. 31 questionnaires were received from parents of 17 babies. Of the 22 participants who answered a question about the impact of participating in this research, 73% stated that completing the questionnaire had helped them feel better about the decision whether or not to consent to postmortem and none reported any adverse effect of completing the questionnaire. Additional comments made by 19 participants supported this finding. Conclusion Research into this sensitive area of perinatal medicine where there is a poor outcome is possible and is indeed well received by many parents. RECs should not automatically take a negative stance towards studies of this type. (shrink)

According to the theory of contextual integrity (CI), privacy norms prescribe information flows with reference to five parameters — sender, recipient, subject, information type, and transmission principle. Because privacy is grasped contextually (e.g., health, education, civic life, etc.), the values of these parameters range over contextually meaningful ontologies — of information types (or topics) and actors (subjects, senders, and recipients), in contextually defined capacities. As an alternative to predominant approaches to privacy, which were ineffective against novel information practices enabled by (...) IT, CI was able both to pinpoint sources of disruption and provide grounds for either accepting or rejecting them. Mounting challenges from a burgeoning array of networked, sensor-enabled devices (IoT) and data-ravenous machine learning systems, similar in form though magnified in scope, call for renewed attention to theory. This Article introduces the metaphor of a data (food) chain to capture the nature of these challenges. With motion up the chain, where data of higher order is inferred from lower-order data, the crucial question is whether privacy norms governing lower-order data are sufficient for the inferred higher-order data. While CI has a response to this question, a greater challenge comes from data primitives, such as digital impulses of mouse clicks, motion detectors, and bare GPS coordinates, because they appear to have no meaning. Absent a semantics, they escape CI’s privacy norms entirely. (shrink)

The paper argues that the reconciliation of the Causal Theory of Perception with Disjunctivism requires the rejection of causal particularism – the idea that the ontology of causation is always and everywhere an ontology of particulars (e.g., events). The so-called ‘Humean Principle’ that causes must be distinct from their effects is argued to be a genuine barrier to any purported reconciliation, provided causal particularism is retained; but extensive arguments are provided for the rejection of causal particularism. It is then explained (...) how the reconciliation of the causal theory with disjunctivism can proceed on the basis of an ontology of facts. (shrink)

The paper argues that the reconciliation of the Causal Theory of Perception with Disjunctivism requires the rejection of causal particularism – the idea that the ontology of causation is always and everywhere an ontology of particulars (e.g., events). The so-called ‘Humean Principle’ that causes must be distinct from their effects is argued to be a genuine barrier to any purported reconciliation, provided causal particularism is retained; but extensive arguments are provided for the rejection of causal particularism. It is then explained (...) how the reconciliation of the causal theory with disjunctivism can proceed on the basis of an ontology of facts. (shrink)

The term “value of life” can refer to life’s intrinsic dignity: something nonincremental and time-unaffected in contrast to the fluctuating, incremental “value” of our lives, as they are longer or shorter and more or less flourishing. Human beings are equal in their basic moral importance: the moral indignities we condemn in the treatment of e.g. those with dementia reflect the ongoing human dignity that is being violated. Indignities licensed by the person in advance remain indignities, as when people might volunteer (...) their living, unconscious bodies for surrogacy or training in amputation techniques. Respect for someone’s dignity is significantly impacted by a failure to value that person’s very existence, whatever genuine respect and good will is shown by wanting the person’s life to go well. Valuing and respecting life is not, however, vitalism: there can be good and compelling reasons for eschewing some means of prolonging life. (shrink)

This article defends two claims. First, humans could be in relationships characterised by hate with some robots. Second, it matters that humans could hate robots, as this hate could wrong the robots (by leaving them at risk of mistreatment, exploitation, etc.). In defending this second claim, I will thus be accepting that morally considerable robots either currently exist, or will exist in the near future, and so it can matter (morally speaking) how we treat these robots. The arguments presented in (...) this article make an important original contribution to the robo-philosophy literature, and particularly the literature on human–robot relationships (which typically only consider positive relationship types, e.g., love, friendship, etc.). Additionally, as explained at the end of the article, my discussions of robot hate could also have notable consequences for the emerging robot rights movement. Specifically, I argue that understanding human–robot relationships characterised by hate could actually help theorists argue for the rights of robots. (shrink)

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to (...) treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry. (shrink)

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) has been mainly described from a risk perspective, with a focus on endogenous, exogenous, and temporal risk factors that can interact to facilitate lethal outcomes. Here we discuss the limitations that this risk-based paradigm may have, using two of the major risk factors for SIDS, prone sleep position and bed-sharing, as examples. Based on a multipronged theoretical model encompassing evolutionary theory, developmental biology, and cultural mismatch theory, we conceptualize the vulnerability to SIDS as an imbalance (...) between current physiologic-regulatory demands and current protective abilities on the part of the infant. From this understanding, SIDS appears as a developmental condition in which competencies relevant to self-protection fail to develop appropriately in the future victims. Since all of the protective resources in question are bound to emerge during normal infant development, we contend that SIDS may reflect an evolutionary mismatch situation—a constellation in which certain modern developmental influences may overextend the child’s adaptive (evolutionary) repertoire. We thus argue that SIDS may be better understood if the focus on risk factors is complemented by a deeper appreciation of the protective resources that human infants acquire during their normal development. We extensively analyze this evolutionary-developmental theory against the body of epidemiological and experimental evidence in SIDS research and thereby also address the as-of-yet unresolved question of why breastfeeding may be protective against SIDS. (shrink)

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) framework assumes an efference copy based on the interlocutor's intentions. Yet, elaborate attribution of intentions may not always be necessary for online prediction. Instead, contextual cues such as speaker gaze can provide similar information with a lower demand on processing resources.

Educational reformers all around the globe are continuously searching for ways to make schools more effective and efficient. In Germany, this movement has led to reforms that reduced overall school time of high track secondary schools from 9 to 8 years, which was compensated for by increasing average instruction time per week in lower secondary school. Based on prior research, we assumed that this reform might increase gender disparities in STEM-related outcomes, stress, and health because it required students to learn (...) similar content in less amount of time. Therefore, we investigated how the school time reform affected gender disparities at the end of upper secondary school between 2011 and 2013. Specifically, we considered representative data of the last two cohorts who completed lower secondary school before the reform and the first two cohorts after the reform from the National Educational Panel Study. Potential differences in gender disparities were investigated for upper secondary school outcomes of subject-specific standardized test performance, self-concept, and interest in mathematics, biology and physics, as well as outcomes of school-related stress and health. Overall, we found substantial disparities between girls and boys, which seemed to change little after the reform. Exceptions were the statistically significant gender × reform interactions for one stress dimension and two health dimensions which increased for both boys and girls, but more strongly for girls. (shrink)

The relevance of the research problem lies in the necessity of an axiological approach to the formation of the personality in education and the task of strengthening the ideal image of the function. The aim of this article is studying and understanding the culture of personality formation mechanisms in relation to future specialists. The leading method of research was the theoretical analysis of philosophical and cultural approaches to the cultural formation of the personality and to the content of human culture. (...) Content analysis was based on the philosophical and cultural concepts of V. S. Bibler, M. Buber, J. G. Herder, I. Kant, L. N. Kogan, D. S. Likhachev, A. Schweitzer, M. Scheler, and others. The experiment method was the experimental realization of formation stages of the future specialist as a person of culture, which allowed revealing the positive role of cultural mechanisms in this process. The result is the stages of human culture formation as well as mechanisms for their implementation. The article may be useful for specialists of the educational sphere, social philosophers, and culturologists. (shrink)

Successive UK governments have adopted failure as a strategy in the reform of public education in England: first, to construct crises in order to blame professionals/parents/children for a failing system; and second, to provide rescue solutions that are designed to fail in order to sustain the change imperative. We describe this as policy mortality, or the integration of systemic and organisational ‘death’ within reform design. Our research demonstrates the interplay between the blame for the ‘wrong’ type of school, leader, teacher, (...) pupil, parent, and the claimed ‘solutions’ in the form of new schools (e.g., between 70 and 90 different types in England), organisations (e.g., MATs), professionals (e.g., CEOs), pupils (e.g., branded access to a school place), and parents (e.g., consumer choice). Our research contribution is conceptual through the development of new thinking about policy mortality, whereby the claim is for ‘success’ but the reality is that some professionals, schools, children and parents are required to fail. (shrink)

People can be moved and touched by exceptional closeness between people or by outstanding willpower. We investigated the causal effect of these feelings on motivations. We based our research on the previously identified phenomenon that feelings of being moved are stronger in unfavourable circumstances (e.g. psychological closeness after conflict, high achievement against all odds). In two studies in the US (N1 = 136) and in Germany (N2 = 161), we independently varied context (love vs. willpower) and circumstances (favourable vs. unfavourable) (...) in short stories and assessed feelings of being moved as well as the motivation to show love and the motivation to show willpower after each story. In both contexts and consistent across the two studies, unfavourable circumstances elicited stronger motivations to show love as well as stronger motivations to show willpower. Multilevel mediation modelling revealed that these effects were mediated by feelings of being moved. This indicates that feelings of being moved enhance pro-social as well as achievement-related motivations. (shrink)

This paper presents the idea, structure, history, goals, and accomplishments of mathematics and science laboratories as they have been organized and taught at Trinity College. The laboratories are designed to develop specific science and mathematics problem-solving skills, presenting them within the context of humanities-related inquiry (e.g. neural network theory within the context of philosophy of mind). These laboratories are especially valuable in providing humanities students with literacy in advanced science and mathematics materials that, since they are not requisite for humanities (...) majors, humanities students would not be exposed to otherwise. Especially in the case of philosophy, laboratories bear the additional benefit of dissolving insularity, opening up study onto directly relevant fields and enriching and informing philosophical inquiry. The author concludes by considering philosophy’s relationship to science and mathematics, what these relationships imply for how a philosophy education should be structured, and the important role that science and mathematics laboratories play in that education. (shrink)

Berkeley and Helmholtz proposed different indirect mechanisms for size perception: Berkeley, that size was conditioned to various cues, independently of perceived distance; Helmholtz, that it was unconsciously calculated from angular size and perceived distance. The geometrical approach cannot explain size-distance paradoxes (e.g., moon illusion). The dorsal/ventral solution is dubious for close displays and untestable for far displays.

The interactions between literature and science and between literature and psychoanalysis have been among the most thriving areas for interdisciplinary study in recent years. Work in these 'open fields' has taught us to recognize the interdependence of different cultures of knowledge and experience, revealing the multiple ways in which science, literature, and psychoanalysis have been mutually enabling and defining, as well as corrective and contestatory of each other. Inspired by Gillian Beer's path-breaking work on literature and science, this volume presents (...) fourteen new essays by leading American and British writers. They focus on the evolutionary sciences in the nineteeth-century; the early years of psychoanalysis, from Freud to Ella Freeman Sharpe; and the modern development of the physical sciences. Drawing on recent debates within the history of science, psychoanalytic literary criticism, intellectual history, and gender studies, the volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the formation of knowledge. Among its recurrent themes are: curiosity and epistemology; 'growth', 'maturity', and 'coming of age' as structuring metaphors ; taxonomy; sleep and dreaming and elusive knowledge; the physiology of truth; and the gender politics of scientific theory and practice. The essays also reflect Beer's extensive influence as a literary critic, with close readings of works by Charlotte Brontë, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Edith Ayrton Zangwill, Charlotte Haldane, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Karin Boye. (shrink)

Technological innovations such as next generation sequencing and DNA hybridisation enrichment have resulted in multi‐fold increases in both the quantity of ancient DNA sequence data and the time depth for DNA retrieval. To date, over 30 ancient genomes have been sequenced, moving from 0.7× coverage (mammoth) in 2008 to more than 50× coverage (Neanderthal) in 2014. Studies of rapid evolutionary changes, such as the evolution and spread of pathogens and the genetic responses of hosts, or the genetics of domestication and (...) climatic adaptation, are developing swiftly and the importance of palaeogenomics for investigating evolutionary processes during the last million years is likely to increase considerably. However, these new datasets require new methods of data processing and analysis, as well as conceptual changes in interpreting the results. In this review we highlight important areas of future technical and conceptual progress and discuss research topics in the rapidly growing field of palaeogenomics. -/- . (shrink)

Why should the work of the ancient and the medievals, so far as it relates to nature, still be of interest and an inspiration to us now? The contributions to this enlightening volume explore and uncover contemporary scholarship's debt to the classical and medieval past. Thinking About the Environment synthesizes religious thought and environmental theory to trace a trajectory from Mesopotamian mythology and classical and Hellenistic Greek, through classical Latin writers, to medieval Christian views of the natural world and our (...) relationship with it. The work also offers medieval Arabic and Jewish views on humanity's inseparability from nature. The volume concludes with a study of the breakdown between science and value in contemporary ecological thought. Thinking About the Environment will be a invaluable source book for those seeking to address environmental ethics from a historical perspective. (shrink)