ObjectivePhysical isolation measures, known as lockdown or shelter-in-place, experienced during coronavirus disease 2019 have the potential to cause psychological distress. This study was conducted to examine parents’ perceived stress and whether reports of rewards and challenges during lockdown impact stress.MethodsData were collected using a cross-sectional online survey in New South Wales, Australia, across the 4-week lockdown. The survey was completed by 158 parents of children aged under 6 years. Stress was measured using the short form of the Perceived Stress Scale. (...) Rewards and challenges were reported in response to two open-ended questions.ResultsThere was a weak negative correlation between PSS-4 scores and days in isolation, with parents who had spent longer in isolation reporting fewer stress symptoms. The relationship between time in isolation and stress was moderated by the degree to which parents described more rewards than challenges: parents who perceived high rewards and low challenges reported lower PSS-4 scores with more days in lockdown, whereas parents who perceived low rewards and high challenges reported higher PSS-4 scores with more days in lockdown. The moderation model examining associations between time in isolation and rewards ratio explained 13% of the variance in PSS-4 scores.ConclusionLockdowns are not uniformly or consistently negative experiences for parents. Identifying positive aspects of the experience may serve to buffer negative mental health risks across time. Understanding resilience strategies is critical for supporting current psychological wellbeing and to adequately prepare for future pandemic experiences. (shrink)

Clark highlights a neglected issue in research on language use: the process by which speakers and addressees anchor utterances with respect to individual entities in their common ground. In his review, he identifies the challenges linked to investigations of anchoring, but also displays the pitfalls of evading it.

A Theory of the Microdynamics of Occurrent Thought presents what is, perhaps, the first comprehensive theory of the microdynamics of occurrent thought to be presented in the psychological, cognitive, and philosophical literatures.

The Kolmogorov complexity of a finite binary string is the length of the shortest description of the string. This gives rise to some ‘standard’ lowness notions for reals: A isK-trivial if its initial segments have the lowest possible complexity and A is low forKif using A as an oracle does not decrease the complexity of strings by more than a constant factor. We weaken these notions by requiring the defining inequalities to hold only up to all${\rm{\Delta }}_2^0$orders, and call the (...) new notions${\rm{\Delta }}_2^0$-bounded K-trivialand${\rm{\Delta }}_2^0$-bounded low for K. Several of the ‘nice’ properties ofK-triviality are lost with this weakening. For instance, the new weaker definitions both give uncountable set of reals. In this paper we show that the weaker definitions are no longer equivalent, and that the${\rm{\Delta }}_2^0$-boundedK-trivials are cofinal in the Turing degrees. We then compare them to other previously studied weakenings, namelyinfinitely-often K-trivialityandweak lowness for K. We show that${\rm{\Delta }}_2^0$-boundedK-trivial implies infinitely-oftenK-trivial, but no implication holds between${\rm{\Delta }}_2^0$-bounded low forKand weakly low forK. (shrink)

I was led to philosophy by politics. There can be no foundation for political action except in ethics; and there can be no foundation for ethics except in some form of metaphysics, whether religious or other. And one cannot travel very far along the philosophic road— particularly if one has in mind the need of arriving at some definite destination—without finding as an obstacle the perennial problem of Free Will. It is an obstacle which has somehow to be crossed. It (...) cannot be evaded or ignored. The man who is dealing with public affairs—with the principles of Criminal Law, for example, or with the factors that make for peace or war, and indeed with any of the major questions that confront our society—if he tries to think things out, is faced constantly by the problem of individual human responsibility; just as the man of religion is faced by it constantly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 279 shirted gangsters of the totalitarian regimes. Only gradually did Sorel come to seek his paragons of virtue among the proletariat, partly because of his disillusionment with Jean Jaur~s over the Dreyfus case. Sorel had been one of the first to champion Dreyfus, but felt that demagogues had transformed the latter's cause into a new dogmatism and a new establishment. Sorel was genuinely concerned about some of (...) the deepest problems facing modern industrial man. He could not believe that they could be solved, either by "demagogic plutocracy" or by orthodox Marxism. Hence he sought to synthesize Vico, Proudhon, Marx, and Bergson in a new movement that should be both liberal and revolutionary and heroically virtuous. The strongest influence upon his thinking, says Goriely, came from Vico, from whom he borrowed "the fundamental idea of his whole work: "Man does not know what he does' " (105). History can therefore be rational only after it has happened: "The future is the field in which we use our imaginations, not our understandings" (109). That Sorel anticipated many twentieth-century developments in philosophy and politics, there can be no doubt. The author says that he was "the first philosopher in France who sought not only to locate man in history and society, but also to locate history and society in man, to give them a significance which may be called existential" (148). Before William James's pragmatism reached European shores, Sorel had made such statements as "Science is a means of verifying the possibility of acting in a certain manner." 1Even some of his pessimistic fears anticipated such developments as Burnham's "managerial revolution," at the same time that he welcomed the growth of industrial techniques in other hands (155). Professor Goriely's careful tracing of Sorel's profusion of suggestions for the ethical redemption of mankind in a machine age reveals the unreconciled contradictions in his pluralism. In the R~[lexions he could resolve the conflicts of myth versus utopia, force versus violence, liberalism versus absolutism, says Goriely, only "'by a conceptual jugglery.., which sets the mind's teeth on edge rather than stimulates it" (200). Caught between the poles of an attachment to historical tradition and to liberty, Sorel celebrated the constant tension between the two. Man lives only to create; he "has no other end than the creative ~lan itself. Born of liberty, history can never block its course.., it is always a point of departure toward the future.... Human institutions, the products of an infinity of obscure causes, never realize any universal moral principle. They live in the relative, which man ought to accept with moderation and a sense of the limits of the possible, without ever losing the sense of the unlimited" (222). HAROLD A. LARRABEE Union College 1Georges Sorel, "Storia e scienza sociale," Rivista itallana di sociologia, March-June, 1902,p. 224. Storia Della Filosofia: La Filosofia del Novecento. By E. Paolo Lamanna. Intuizionismo, filosofia dell'azione e modernismo--Prammatismo--La problematica della scienza--La problematica della storla. (Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1963. 671 pp. 3800 L.) This first of three volumes describing the philosophies of the twentieth century, and the fifth volume in Lamanna's History of Philosophy, is truly a monumental and encyclopedic work. In this volume alone there are concise, clear, scholarly expositions of the important ideas of more than fifty philosophers, including biographical information and bibliographical references. The style is exceptionally intelligible and the organization of even complicated materials is well defined with good headings and with definitions that are intelligible 280 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY even to a layman. The work is not only very informative but amazingly objective and dispassionate. And despite its disinterestedness it is highly interesting, for it succeeds in presenting each philosopher's ideas as one imagines he would like to present them himself, sympathetically and persuasively. One leaves the book after reading about the achievements of our own little century marvelling at the variety and range of recent achievements. For over and above our follies and horrors, these thinkers emerge as men trying hard and ably to be sane and tell the truth. Lamanna himself emerges as a mind with an extraordinary critical ability to... (shrink)