AimThe aim of our study was to analyze physical activity levels, sitting time, physical fitness, and their relationship with depressive symptoms after home confinement in previously active older adults.MethodsThis cross-sectional study sample comprised 68 older adults from a community-based exercise program conducted in Porto, Portugal. After home confinement, participants were assessed in person for lower-body strength, cardiorespiratory fitness, agility/dynamic balance, handgrip strength, and anthropometry. Telephone interviews were performed to evaluate depressive symptoms with the Geriatric Depression Scale – 15 items and (...) physical activity levels through the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. Individuals were also asked to self-report changes in their physical activity levels and time spent sitting.ResultsNinety percent of older adults self-reported a decrease in overall physical activity levels, and nearly 65% increased daily sitting time during the home confinement. However, previously active older adults still presented high levels of physical fitness after 11 weeks of home confinement. Overall, 52.9% of participants scored 5 or more points on GDS-15, which is suggestive of depression. Higher levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and cardiorespiratory fitness were found in the non-depressed group compared with the depressed group. Finally, results from multiple regression analysis revealed that MVPA was negatively associated with depression. This model explained 16.4% of the variability seen in depression score, controlled for age, gender, and education.ConclusionEven reporting a decline in physical activity, older adults who previously participated in a formal exercise program, still presented high levels of physical fitness after 11 weeks of home confinement. However, MVPA, but not physical fitness, seems to be an associated depression score in previously active older adults. These results reinforce the importance of older adults to remain physically active, since higher levels of MVPA may have a protective effect on depressive symptoms and, therefore, mitigate the negative impact of home confinement on mental health. Future longitudinal research studies are needed to ascertain these results. (shrink)

Background: Chronic Pain (CP) has serious medical and social consequences, and leads to economic burden that threatens the sustainability of healthcare services. Thus, optimized management of pain tools to support CP patients in adjusting to their condition and improving quality of life is timely. Although Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is considered an evidence-based psychological approach for CP, evidence for the efficacy of online-delivered ACT for CP is still scarce. At the same time, studies suggest that self-compassion mediates the change (...) in disability and psychopathological symptoms in ACT interventions for CP, although self-compassion is not a specific target in ACT. Thus, an explicit focus on self-compassion might increase the efficacy of ACT interventions for CP, although this hypothesis has not been tested. This study aims to develop an eHealth ACT and compassion-based self-management intervention for CP, the iACTwithPain, and to compare its efficacy in improving health outcomes to a similar ACT-only intervention and a waiting list group. Methods: The eHealth platform that will host the interventions will be developed using a flat design identity and will be interactive. The iACTwithPain intervention will comprise 8 weekly self-management sessions, and will be developed taking into consideration the psychological flexibility model applied to CP, with the addition of explicit compassion-based components. To analyse whether the iACTwithPain intervention will present superiority in improving CP’s impact and related health markers over the two other conditions, this study will follow a RCT design with three arms. CP patients will be recruited through direct contact with patient associations and healthcare services and a national press release in Portugal. Outcome measurement will be conducted at baseline, post-intervention and at 3- and 6-months follow-ups. The interventions’ acceptability will also be assessed. Discussion: The iACTwithPain intervention is expected to improve CP patients’ psychosocial functioning, quality of life, and empowerment, by promoting adaptive disease management and regulation of pain-related internal experiences. Results will contribute to a better understanding on the pertinence of adding compassion elements to ACT for CP and to reach an optimized intervention for CP. (shrink)

BackgroundThis pilot study aims to test the usability of the iACTwithPain platform, an online ACT-based intervention for people with chronic pain, to obtain information on which intervention and usability aspects need improvement and on expected retention rates.MethodsSeventy-three Portuguese women with chronic pain were invited to complete the first three sessions of the iACTwithPain intervention assess their quality, usefulness and the platform’s usability. Twenty-one accepted the invitation. Additionally, eight healthcare professionals working with chronic medical conditions assessed the platform and the intervention (...) from a practitioner’s point of view.ResultsThis study presented a considerable attrition rate (71.43%) among chronic pain participants, with six completers. There were no significant differences in demographic or clinical variables between dropouts and completers except for completed education (participants who dropped out presented less education than completers). Reasons for dropout were related to difficult personal events occurring during the time of the intervention, lack of time, or having forgotten. There seemed to be an overall satisfaction with both the intervention, its contents and form of presentation of information, and the platform, concerning its design, appearance, and usability. Real image videos were preferred over animations or audio by chronic pain participants. Healthcare professionals emphasized the appealing and dynamic aspects of the animation format.ConclusionThis study informs the ongoing improvement of the iACTwithPain platform and provides valuable information on aspects researchers should consider while developing online psychological interventions for chronic pain. Further implications are discussed. (shrink)

Microbiome research shows that human health is foundationally intertwined with the ecology of microbial communities living on and in our bodies. This challenges the categorical separation of organisms from environments that has been central to biomedicine, and questions the boundaries between them. Biomedicine is left with an empirical problem: how to understand causal pathways between host health, microbiota and environment? We propose a conceptual tool – environmentality – to think through this problem. Environmentality is the state or quality of being (...) an environment for something else in a particular context: a fully perspectival proposition. Its power lies partly in what Isabelle Stengers has called the efficacy of the word itself, contrasting the dominant sense of the word environment as something both external and fixed. Through three case studies, we argue that environmentality can help think about the causality of microbiota vis-a-vis host health in a processual, relational and situated manner, across scales and temporalities. We situate this intervention within historical trajectories of thought in biomedicine, focusing on the challenge microbiome research poses to an aperspectival body. We argue that addressing entanglements between microbial and human lives requires that the environment is brought into the clinic, thus shortening the conceptual gap between medicine and public health. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to identify the relative contribution of individual and contextual predictors to students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism. A group of 324 students from a tertiary institution in New Zealand completed an online survey. The findings indicate that gender, justice sensitivity, and understanding of university policies regarding academic dishonesty were the key predictors of the students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism, both as agents of dishonest conduct and as witnesses (...) of misconduct among their peers. The implications of these findings for the development of policies and initiatives in tertiary institutions are discussed. (shrink)

This study investigates whether employees attribute different motives to their organization's corporate social responsibility efforts and if these motives influence employee performance. Specifically, we investigate whether employees could distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic CSR motives by surveying 229 employee–supervisor dyads from various industries , and the impact of these perceptions on in-role and extra-role performance of subordinates. We found that employee task performance increases when employees attribute both intrinsic and extrinsic motives for CSR. Moreover, when employees perceive that their organization (...) invests in a CSR practice that is both intrinsic and extrinsic, they also tend to exert extra effort in their work. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed alongside future research directions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:So Close and Other EssaysOn Hélène Cixous’s writingJoana Masóce n’est jamaispar l’intérieurni par le centreque je passe—Antonin Artaud, Cahiers d’Ivry, (1947–1948)At the end of the sixteenth century, the genre of the essay transformed the relationship between the subject and object of writing, since the essay emerged as a reaction against other literary forms—such as the commentary, the gloss or the treatise—in which the object of study is not problematized. (...) The gloss, the commentary, or the treatise deal with disciplines or thematic topics—astronomy, agronomy, theology, physics, history—in the proper sense, whereas the essay tends to focus on the approach to those issues. To put it differently, the essay is not strictly concerned with these issues or topics in themselves, but with the approach to them by means of writing.With Michel de Montaigne, specifically in his Essays published between 1580 and 1595, we are faced with writing where the knowledge of the object is no longer the sole center of the text. Despite being actually concerned with the Greek philosophical tradition, sixteenth-century religious wars, and, among many other topics, European colonialism in America, Montaigne’s Essays try to contest the privilege of the object, the privilege of the referent of writing, in [End Page 131] favor of its subject: the subject of writing and the writing itself, what we call in French une écriture de soi.As is well known, in his Essays Montaigne’s writing conveys neither message nor knowledge regarding things and topics, but what he calls “la continuelle mutation et branle” des êtres [“nostre estre”] et des objects [“ des objects”]: “the continual and perpetual mutation” of “beings” and “objects” (257).This epistemological crisis of the essay—abandoning the privilege of the object or theme for an emphasis on questioning the subject of writing and the modalities of the approach to the object—is explicit in the etymology of the word essay. Beyond the notion of attempt—in French, essayer means “to try,” “to attempt to do something”—essayer, from the Latin verb ex-agere, is a compound word of the verb agere, “to act,” in French agir. In Latin, the meaning of agere—“to act”—differs from facere, as agir does in French from faire, “to do”; it is in this way that these two verbs designate a different relationship between the subject and the object of the action. Although agere and facere both refer to action, the verb agere at the origin of the word essay designates an action accomplished by a subject, whereas facere is a transitive verb whose emphasis is placed on the object.While, on the one hand, facere is to be read in the register of transitivity—as is explicit in the following Latin phrases: facere litteram, “to write a letter,” or facere furtum, “to commit theft”—on the other hand, agere, although a transitive verb in Latin, underscores and anticipates the kind of intransitivity of action we will later find in Roman languages. In these Latin phrases, one can see that in Latin, at the same time that, the syntactic construction of agere requires an object, this object is not, strictly speaking, the real object produced by the verb, because in the phrases agere vitam, agere aetatem, or agere aevum, “to spend time or to live,” time is not the real object produced by the verb “to spend.” In Latin, “life,” vitam, “age,” aetatem, or “lifetime,” aevum, are not the real objects produced by the verb agere. This perhaps explains the evolution of the verb in French, or in English, where “to act” and agir have become intransitive verbs, reinforcing the idea that the essay appears to be a genre where whatever has to be done or said is not simply presented as an object.Moreover, instead of the conclusive verb facere, which designates the action as a result or an achievement—the letter is already written, or the theft is already commited—the temporality of agere, in Latin, is a durative one, as in the phrases agere vitam, aetatem, or aevum, “to live.” By its emphasis, not on the object... (shrink)

Resenha de Chaisemartin, N.; Theodorescu, D. Le théâtre d’Aphrodisias : les structures scéniques. Aphrodisias 8.

The present study aimed to explore and map the views of Portuguese laypersons regarding the acceptability of downsizing and restructuring measures during a recession. Two hundred and seven participants with various levels of training in economics were presented with a number of realistic scenarios depicting various measures, and were asked to indicate the extent to which they considered them to be acceptable. The scenarios were created by varying three factors likely to have an impact on people’s views: the magnitude of (...) a company’s reduction in net sales, the magnitude of planned downsizing, and the way in which downsizing would be implemented, either through layoffs, job alliances or both. Six qualitatively different personal positions were found. Four of these following positions were expected: never acceptable, mainly depends on the magnitude of downsizing, mainly acceptable and job alliance. Two unexpected positions were also observed: drastic measures and undetermined. (shrink)

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity – particularly diversity of viewpoints – for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political diversity can undermine (...) the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority's thinking. (4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology. (shrink)

In this paper we propose that the term skill acquisition, as commonly used in traditional psychology, and the philosophy, education, movement science and performance development literatures, has been biased by an organismic asymmetry. In cognitive and experimental psychology, for example, it refers to the establishment of an internal state or representation of an act which is believed to be acquired as a result of learning and task experience. Here we elucidate an ecological perspective which suggests that the term skill acquisition (...) may not refer to an entity but rather to the emergence of an adaptive, functional relationship between an organism and its environment, thus avoiding an inherent organismic asymmetry in theorizing. In this respect, the terms 'skill adaptation' or 'skill attunement' might be more suitable to describe this process. (shrink)

Nowadays, that part of Amazonia which is situated on Brazilian territory is more and more the focus of attention for communication methods and the international agenda. This enormous expanse of land covered by tropical forest of unequalled beauty, extending over several Brazilian states, possesses an extremely rich biodiversity, with a vast potential reserve of natural resources of all sorts, and inspires admiration as well as inevitable greed. The intensification of human activity in the region has given rise to problems such (...) as deforestation and a resulting loss of organic matter whose importance has yet to be properly evaluated; it has also led to conflict between the different local groups, such as the indigenous population, gold prospectors and the big landowners, and to the degradation of quite extensive areas, thus provoking questions on how best to promote sustained development in the region. (shrink)

Does the interaction between climactic demands, monetary resources, and freedom suggest a more general relationship between the environmental challenges that human societies face and their resources to meet those challenges? Using data on press freedom (Van de Vliert 2011a), we found no evidence of a similar interaction with natural resources (as measured by oil exports) or risk for natural disasters.

El objetivo de este texto es mostrar la tensión que existe entre dos proyectos: el humanista y el transhumanista. Aquí se expondrá la tesis de que el proyecto transhumanista puede proponer una vida que vale la pena ser vivida desde la mejora tecnológica. Para lograr defender esta tesis se propondrá como itinerario examinar la tesis de la excepcionalidad humana y la propuesta transhumanista; las posturas bioconservadoras y bioliberales y la postulación del cyborg en el contexto del antropoceno como proyecto de (...) un transhumanismo moderado. (shrink)

This paper presents a new theoretical justification for the Cournot–Bertrand model to arise in equilibrium when firms have, at the outset, the same cost structure and sell symmetrically differentiated products. The Cournot–Bertrand model assumes some firms compete on price, adjusting their production to meet demand, while others set quantities and let their price adjust until market equilibrium is reached. We show that this may occur endogenously due to the possibility of entry, which may be deterred when some of the incumbents (...) decide to set prices, while others free ride on this behavior and choose quantities. (shrink)

The transition and adaptation of students to higher education involve a wide range of challenges that justify some institutional practices promoting skills that enable students to increase their autonomy and to face the difficulties experienced. The requirements for this adaptation were particularly aggravated by the containment and sanitary conditions associated with coronavirus disease 2019. With the aim of promoting academic success and preventing dropout in the first year, a support program was implemented for students enrolled in two courses in the (...) area of education at a public university in northern Portugal during the first semester of 2020/2021. Three sessions of 50/60 min were implemented, namely, the first session focused on the verbalization of the demands, challenges, and difficulties of the transition, and the second and third sessions focused on the difficulties of academic adaptation and academic performance. Data from a dropout risk screening instrument and from the activities performed during sessions were analyzed. The main results point to student satisfaction with the content and the activities of the sessions and their usefulness. Students report not only high satisfaction levels with HE attendance, but also some emotional exhaustion due to academic activities. The continuity of the program is recommended with some improvements in its planning to ensure a more definitive version of the program in the next two years. (shrink)

A short introduction to the medievalist Armindo de Sousa, in which the author analyses the most relevant aspects of this scholar's professional and academic life and illustrates the most significant lines of study and features of his work.

O mais divulgado modelo iconográfico mariano da época contemporânea, presente em quase todos os templos católicos do mundo, nasceu em Portugal na sequência das Aparições de Fátima de 1917. Não teria o conhecido desenvolvimento sem que no processo cultual interviesse a disciplina escultórica que logo em 1920 faria cristalizar, através do escopro de um santeiro, a imagem de Nossa Senhora do Rosário de Fátima. O estudo do tipo, do arquétipo e dos subtipos da Virgem de Fátima, primeiramente produzidos em oficinais (...) trabalhos de santeiros e, em fase posterior, interpretados por artistas, permite entender os contornos do nascimento de uma realidade imagética, isto é, de uma iconografia ex nihilo e o seu, necessariamente, tardio desenvolvimento estético. (shrink)

This essay is a review of Peter McLaren's most recent work, Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire. The essay situates McLaren's work in the philosophical tradition of Marxist Humanism, with reference specifically to Raya Dunayevskaya and Paulo Freire. Despite invoking the work of Dunayevskaya as a foundation for his own project, McLaren does not offer a robust explication of this important thinker, nor of the Hegelian‐Marxist discourse she embraced. Here, as in much of McLaren's work, the reader is (...) not offered rigorous analysis of his philosophical assumptions. The dearth of such analysis, this essay argues, compromises the critical thrust of McLaren's work. In turn, the essay sketches a framework for unpacking the Marxist Humanist paradigm, and, thereby, rethinking the philosophical foundations of contemporary critical pedagogy. (shrink)

Os governos de Fernando Henrique Cardoso são considerados responsáveis por uma forte redução do Estado através de políticas de contenção dos gastos públicos, as quais atingiram também as Forças Armadas. Inversamente, os governos de Lula da Silva apresentaram um discurso desenvolvimentista, que, supostamente, favoreceu o investimento nas Forças Armadas, invertendo as tendências das gestões anteriores. O artigo faz, a partir da leitura de dois textos do cientista político João Roberto Martins Filho e de dados estatísticos da SEORI, a análise crítica (...) e comparativa entre os governos citados em relação aos investimentos – e somente em relação aos investimentos – em Defesa Nacional, na manutenção e modernização das Forças Armadas. (shrink)

O artigo analisa os motivos que fizeram o pensador indígena Ailton Krenak temer um metafórico segundo exílio de Darcy Ribeiro: se o primeiro foi político, após o Golpe Militar de 1964, o mais recente seria intelectual, pelo esquecimento de sua obra. Formula-se, como hipótese, que dois fatores ajudam a entender a ameaça de exílio do legado de Darcy Ribeiro: o primeiro é a forma de escrita ensaística e imaginativa dos seus livros, que desafia o cientificismo acadêmico; o segundo é o (...) conteúdo modernista de seu projeto de Brasil, fundado na inclusão indígena e na educação, tal como sonhara Oswald de Andrade nos anos 1920 ao falar da dupla base com “a floresta e a escola”, o que desafia a história etnocida e ignorante que governou o país. (shrink)

El llamado "argumento de los posibles" desarrollado por Kant en el Beweisgrund está destinado a demostrar la existencia del ens realissimum de la tradición metafísica moderna. El presente estudio pretende explorar la importancia de esta prueba en el contexto global del pensamiento kantiano, a partir de la ambigüedad del concepto de realidad y de su precisión en la filosofía crítica.

Educational Theory, Volume 72, Issue 1, Page 109-117, February 2022.

Early embryogenesis is marked by a frail Spindle Assembly Checkpoint (SAC). The time of SAC acquisition varies depending on the species, cell size or a yet to be uncovered developmental timer. This means that for a specific number of divisions, biorientation of sister chromatids occurs unsupervised. When error‐prone segregation is an issue, an aneuploidy‐selective apoptosis system can come into play to eliminate chromosomally unbalanced cells resulting in healthy newborns. However, aneuploidy content can be too great to overcome, endangering viability.SAC generates (...) a diffusible signal to lengthen time spent in mitosis if needed, ensuring correct chromosome segregation, a fundamental factor in the generation of euploid cells. Thus, it remains puzzling what benefit could come from delaying SAC acquisition till later in the development. In this review, we describe what is known on SAC acquisition in distinct species and highlight pending research as well as potential applications for such knowledge. (shrink)

Este artigo intenta apresentar uma visão panorâmica da complexidade histórica das relações entre sociedade, estado e meio ambiente no Brasil. Argumenta que a genealogia dessas relações evidencia uma trajetória não linear, multifacetada e conflituosa. Há diversas tradições no palco dos confrontos políticos atuais: o Brasil se destaca por uma longa história de destruição, que remonta ao início da colonização do território, mas também por uma fértil tradição de pensamento conservacionista, significativas lutas socioambientais, e pelo pioneirismo nas pautas globais em prol (...) do ambiente. Recuperar e valorizar a complexidade das relações entre sociedade e ambiente pode ser um ato decisivo na construção de caminhos futuros diversos para a questão socioambiental no Brasil, projetando e demonstrando a riqueza e o vigor de diferentes atores e práticas dissonantes. (shrink)

Aquest llibre recull els textos de les reflexions que van tenir lloc en l'encont re internacional SCAN (festival de fotografia), a Internet del 29 de febrer al 1 7 d'abril de 2008, i al Teatre Metropol, el dia 17 d'abril de 2008. Tres teòrics de la imatge de reconegut prestigi internacional -Christian Caujolle, Joan Font cuberta i Radu Stern- van debatre virtualment a internet i posteriorment de form a presencial a Tarragona sobre el paper de la imatge al nostre temps.

Irony is acknowledged to be usually critical: the ironic speaker tends to exhibit an apparent positive attitude in order to communicate a negative valuation. The reverse is considered to be also possible though: the ironic speaker can praise by apparent blaming, although it seldom happens. This unbalance between the two sorts of ironic examples is the so-called asymmetry issue of irony. Here I shall deny the possibility of being ironic without criticizing — hence the asymmetry issue is an illusion. By (...) claiming that irony is always critical I suggest an even stronger claim: criticism is what distinguishes irony from the similar phenomenon of metaphor. (shrink)

The text addresses Foucault’s critical understanding of neoliberalism as a new contemporary governmentality strategy for the conduction of people’s lives. A major aspect of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism relies on his understanding of the neoliberal homo oeconomicus as dependent on subjectivation processes related to self-assumed values and standards oriented by the competitive economic market. Our hypothesis is that governmentality, critique and subjectivation are the core notions that shaped Foucault’s understanding of neoliberalism and form the legacy of his seminal analysis. Contrary (...) to critics who affirm that Foucault flirted or even became fascinated with neoliberalism, we argue that he offered critical tools for its understanding in a critique that is not to be confused with denunciation, however. Accordingly, we discuss Foucault’s conception of critique and relate his analysis of neoliberalism to his notions of governmentality and subjectivation. Finally, we briefly point out how some contemporary critics of the neoliberal order have appropriated and developed Foucault’s conceptual tools in their own understanding of it. We conclude that although Foucault did not propose a comprehensive theory of neoliberalism, he offered important critical insights for the understanding of it in our times. (shrink)

Science aims to transform the subjectivity of individual observations and ideas into more objective and universal knowledge. Yet if there is any area in which first-person experience holds a particularly special and delicate role, it is the sciences of the mind. According to a widespread view, first-person methods were largely discarded from psychology after the fall of introspectionism a century ago and replaced by more objective behavioral measures, a step that some authors have begun to criticize. To examine whether these (...) views are sufficiently informed by actual scientific practice, we conducted a review of methodological approaches in the cognitive science literature. We found that reports of subjective experience are in fact still widely used in a broad variety of different experimental paradigms, both in studies that focus on subjective experience, and in those that make no explicit reference to it. Across these studies, we documented a diverse collection of approaches that leveraged first-person reports, ranging from button presses to unstructured interviews, while continuing to maximise experimental reproducibility. Common to these studies were subjects acting as sensors, intentionally communicating their experience to the experimenter, which we termed “second-person” methods. We conclude that, despite views to the contrary, first-person experience has always been and is still central to investigations of the mind even if it is not recognized as such. We suggest that the conversation ought to be reframed: instead of debating whether to accept subjects’ first-person knowledge we should discuss how best to do so. (shrink)

El artículo investiga los fundamentos racistas del autoritarismo brasileño a través del análisis de la obra de Oliveira Viana. En primer lugar, se desarrolla la idea de “decantación blanca de la teoría social”, fenómeno por el cual la blancura separa y desecha la crítica al racismo de un determinado autor, depurando su pensamiento. Luego, con base en las contribuciones de Clóvis Moura y Michel Foucault, analizamos cómo los argumentos de Viana sobre el “tipo racial” local y el “pueblo” como objeto (...) de ciencia representan un punto de inflexión para la ciencia brasileña. A través del conocimiento gerencial de la población, tales concepciones vinculan decisivamente “raza” y administración pública, constituyendo la soberanía como biopolítica y la arquitectura institucional del Estado como gestión racial de la vida y la muerte. Se concluye que el pensamiento de Viana fue estratégico en el tratamiento de los dilemas de la blanquitud brasileña frente a los impasses resultantes de la posabolición y las transformaciones políticas y económicas globales de principios del siglo XX. (shrink)

In the context of the free will debate, both compatibilists and event-causal libertarians consider that the agent’s mental states and events are what directly causes her decision to act. However, according to the ‘disappearing agent’ objection, if the agent is nothing over and above her physical and mental components, which ultimately bring about her decision, and that decision remains undetermined up to the moment when it is made, then it is a chancy and uncontrolled event. According to agent-causalism, this sort (...) of problem can be overcome if one realizes that the agent herself, as an irreducible substance, is the true originator of her actions. I’ll present arguments that favor this view. Event-causalists have countered that if the agent identifies with some of the inner states that play the self-determining causal role in bringing about the action, then it is as though the action was directly caused by herself. I’ll object that this is not a distinctive aspect of free agency. Agent-causalism has been criticized from most naturalistically inclined fronts, and it must address risks of implausibility, contradiction and unintelligibility. Even though I’ll acknowledge these challenges, I’ll still argue that libertarian free will cannot be defended by any reductionist alternative, and that agent-causalism does not conflict with contemporary science but only with some of its unproven assumptions. (shrink)

-/- Irony is an intriguing topic, central to the study of meaning in language. This book provides an introduction to the pragmatics of irony. It surveys key work carried out on irony in a range of disciplines such as semantics, pragmatics, philosophy and literary studies, and from a variety of theoretical perspectives including Grice's approach, Sperber and Wilson's echoic account, and Clark and Gerrig's pretense theory. It looks at a number of uses of irony and explores how irony can be (...) misunderstood cross-culturally, before delving into the key debates on the pragmatics of irony: is irony always negative? Why do speakers communicate via irony, and which strategies do they usually employ? How are irony and sarcasm different? Is irony always funny? To answer these questions, basic pragmatic notions are introduced and explained. It includes multiple examples and activities to enable the reader to apply the theoretical frameworks to actual everyday instances of irony. (shrink)

O ato de amamentar apresenta diversos benefícios tanto à mãe quanto ao bebê. No entanto, amamentar um bebê com cardiopatia requer inúmeros desafios. Este estudo tem o propósito de compreender a vivência do aleitamento materno de bebês com cardiopatia congênita e as propostas dos serviços de saúde à paciente com essas condições. Estudo descritivo, qualitativo, realizado por meio de entrevista semiestruturada com mães de bebês internados em hospital de referência em cardiopediatria. Utilizou-se a técnica de análise de conteúdo de Minayo, (...) com referencial teórico específico para embasamento da discussão. Os resultados encontrados apontam para a dura realidade dessas mães que se deparam com inúmeras dificuldades diante do enfrentamento da doença e das repercussões emocionais e físicas advindas dela. O impacto emocional e inviabilização dos cuidados com a amamentação exige uma equipe de saúde especializada para oferecer suporte afetivo, fortalecer vínculo mãe-bebê e minimizar prejuízos que a doença pode ocasionar. (shrink)

What happens when we unexpectedly see an attractive potential partner? Previous studies in laboratory settings suggest that the visualization of attractive and unattractive photographs influences the perception of time. The major aim of this research is to study time perception and attraction in a realistic social scenario, by investigating if changes in subjective time measured during a speed dating are associated with attraction. The duration of the dates was variable and participants had to estimate the time that passed. Among other (...) measures, participants also rated the potential partners in terms of their physical attractiveness before and after the dates and reported if they would like to exchange contact with them. Results showed that, in a real speed dating situation, when there is a perception of the partner as being physically more attractive, women tend to overestimate the duration of that meeting, whereas men tend to underestimate its duration. Such changes may reflect evolutionary adaptations which make the human cognitive system more responsive in situations related to reproductive fitness. (shrink)