IntroductionAllocation of research funds relies on peer review to support funding decisions, and these processes can be susceptible to biases and inefficiencies. The aim of this work was to determine which past interventions to peer review and decision-making have worked to improve research funding practices, how they worked, and for whom.MethodsRealist synthesis of peer-review publications and grey literature reporting interventions in peer review for research funding.ResultsWe analysed 96 publications and 36 website sources. Sixty publications enabled us to extract stakeholder-specific context-mechanism-outcomes (...) configurations for 50 interventions, which formed the basis of our synthesis. Shorter applications, reviewer and applicant training, virtual funding panels, enhanced decision models, institutional submission quotas, applicant training in peer review and grant-writing reduced interrater variability, increased relevance of funded research, reduced time taken to write and review applications, promoted increased investment into innovation, and lowered cost of panels.ConclusionsReports of 50 interventions in different areas of peer review provide useful guidance on ways of solving common issues with the peer review process. Evidence of the broader impact of these interventions on the research ecosystem is still needed, and future research should aim to identify processes that consistently work to improve peer review across funders and research contexts. (shrink)

This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient “personal story” within mental health organizations. The sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having “lived experience” has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. However, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. We explore how personal (...) stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from “agents of change” towards one of “disability tourism” or “patient porn.” We mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption, and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool for socio-political change. (shrink)

In this article, we comment upon and provide an arts-informed example of an emotive-focused reflection of a health care practitioner. Specifically, we use poetry and photographic imagery as tools to un-earth practitioners’ emotions within agonizing and traumatic clinical encounters. In order to recognize one’s own humanness and authentically engage in the art of medicine, we immerse ourselves in the first author’s poetic and photographic self-reflection. The poem and image are intended to inspire interpretation and meaning based on the reader’s own (...) professional and/or personal context. The last line of the poem is “I take off the gloves. My hands are marked.”. (shrink)

Christians share a common concern for the earth. Evangelicals emphasize creation care; mainline Protestants embrace the green movement; the Catholic Church lists "10 deadly environmental sins;" and the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch has declared climate change an urgent issue of social and economic justice. This textbook examines seven contemporary environmental challenges through the lens of classical Christian virtues. Authors Kathryn Blanchard and Kevin O'Brien use these classical Christian virtues to seek a "golden mean" between extreme positions by pairing each (...) virtue with a pernicious environmental problem. Students are thus led past political pitfalls and encouraged to care for other creatures prudently, to develop new energy sources courageously, to choose our food temperately, to manage toxic pollution justly, to respond to climate change faithfully, to consider humanity's future hopefully, and to engage lovingly in advocacy for God's earth. Readers will emerge from this text with a deeper understanding of contemporary environmental problems and the fundamentals of Christian virtue ethics. (shrink)

The Catholic Tradition requires the faithful to form and follow their conscience. This is the case even with the recognition that consciences can be malformed and one can make errors in practical judgments. Water Shaping Stone examines various aspects of this tradition regarding conscience by using, among other sources, twentieth-century magisterial documents, theologians' works, and Scripture. Kathryn Lilla Cox argues that while the Magisterium retains teaching authority, and a responsibility to help form consciences through its teaching, focusing only on (...) the Magisterium leads to incomplete formation. A more holistic vision of conscience formation means considering the formation of the moral agent to be a multifaceted process that draws on, for example, teaching, prayer, rituals, Scripture, practices, and virtues, along with relationships with the Triune God and communities of accountability. This vision of conscience formation retains the magisterial teaching authority while acknowledging discipleship as the theological basis for making and assessing practical judgments of conscience. (shrink)

ALTHOUGH BIRTH CONTROL REMAINS A CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC AMONG Roman Catholics, it has all but disappeared in Protestant discussions of sexual ethics, owing to the seemingly more pressing issues of abortion and in vitro fertilization, as well as to the almost unanimous approval of contraceptive use among Protestant church bodies in the mid-1900s. This essay seeks to revive some past Reformed arguments pertinent to the subject, especially John Calvin's and Karl Barth's teachings on marriage and children, which both theologians view (...) as distinct goods. Marriage is seen as a covenant relationship, a good in and of itself, even apart from procreation; while children are a gift or "divine offer" from God that demands response. Reviving distinctively Christian descriptions of marriage and children is crucial to critiquing the utilitarian language that seeks to overshadow current conversations about marriage and children. (shrink)

This article argues that the power of religion to shape experience presupposes the mobilization of religious identity through social opposition. This thesis is developed through a critique of George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine. The article first examines Lindbeck's thesis that religion shapes experience in light of Talal Asad's critique of Geertz's concept of religion. It argues that in order to understand how ‘religion’ shapes experience we must look outside the immanent sphere of cultural‐religious meaning that Lindbeck, following Geertz, identifies (...) with ‘religion’. Religious authority ultimately derives from the recognition of a social group. Next, looking at the nature of doctrine in light of Kathryn Tanner's thesis that Christian identity is essentially relational, it argues that church doctrines function to mobilize group identity through social opposition. In this respect they resemble the mobilizing slogans of political discourse more than, as Lindbeck's theory proposes, the grammatical rules governing Wittgensteinian language games. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration by Amy LevadLloyd SteffenRedeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration Amy Levad minneapolis: fortress press, 2014. 233 pp. $39.00.Amy Levad (University of St. Thomas) has added a theological voice to the national conversation that Michelle Alexander opened with her devastating critique of the American criminal justice system in The New Jim (...) Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander showed how policies grounded in the war on drugs have disproportionately distressed racial and ethnic minorities—African Americans and Latinos—and the poor, destroying lives and communities. Incarceration in the United States is today a system that perpetuates what Alexander called a “caste” system from which escape is, especially among black males, virtually impossible. In this informed and well-presented study, Levad takes up Alexander’s social justice analysis, extending it in new directions, offering a creative theological contribution to the mass incarceration crisis in the world’s first “genuine prison society.”Levad observes that a limitation in the Christian response to mass incarceration is the “lack of Catholic voices” (47), which her book makes an effort to correct. She draws on core insights of Catholic tradition to address conditions that foster crime while also responding “to the ways in which the criminal justice crisis both reflects and sustains social injustices” (48). Her book offers a wonderfully clear analysis of mass incarceration and related issues such as recidivism strategies and policing policies. She advocates “pulling levers,” policing policies that aim at avoiding prison, versus harsh “window-breaking” policies that for deterrence reasons criminalize even minor offences. Levad addresses theories of punishment, proposes ideas for prison reform, and, while acknowledging a limited need for prisons, sets forth constructive suggestions for how best to decarcerate society through restorative justice and rehabilitation practices that reintegrate offenders into society.The study is a provocative interdisciplinary conversation between criminology and theology. Levad’s focus is on liturgy and sacrament, the central resources of Roman Catholic theology, finding in the Eucharist the theological [End Page 204] model for inviting the marginalized and dispossessed into the common fellowship of human dignity. She then argues that penance and reconciliation yield attitudes and behaviors that parallel secular restorative justice efforts. Advocating alternatives to prison while denying the effectiveness of punitive retribution, Levad critiques the approaches of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and other Catholics. She highlights Kathryn Soltis as a Catholic scholar who uses theological resources to affirm the dignity of prisoners, attend to the common good, and seek ways to repair relationships between victims and offenders.Some of Levad’s ideas could be developed further. Pluralism, for instance, is mentioned as a contextual issue for her theological work but never thoroughly developed. Utilitarianism is denied a constructive ethics role, but Levad’s discussion of recidivism appeals to it as a marker of the common good (122). And Levad’s attention to the internal failures of the Church in confronting social justice issues leads one to wonder whether the decarcerated vision of society she desires is practicable.Levad speaks to the heart of the incarceration crisis in America, challenging the willingness of Americans to “throw people away” (198) through imprisonment—especially the young, the poor, and minorities. With her underlying question of “what kind of people we want to be and what we want our communities to be like” (43), Levad presents readers with a distinctive “vision of justice in God’s reign conveyed by liturgy and sacraments” (197). With that, she has accomplished what she set out to do: confront the social injustice of mass incarceration with the best insights of modern criminology but also with a theological perspective that embodies the struggle to realize an engaged Catholic praxis of justice.Lloyd SteffenLehigh UniversityCopyright © 2016 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in (...) their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Renegotiating Power, Theology, and Politics ed. by Joshua Daniel and Rick ElgendyAndy DunningRenegotiating Power, Theology, and Politics Edited by Joshua Daniel and Rick Elgendy HAMPSHIRE, UK: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2015. 195 PP. $99.00After Michel Foucault and the advent of liberationist thought, power has become an increasingly important topic in theology. This volume of essays is a valuable addition to a series that recognizes power's importance, New Approaches to Religion (...) and Power, edited by Joerg Rieger. As the editors note in their introduction, the material contained here began as a collection of papers presented at a 2012 conference on authority, power, and theology.Offerings from William Schweiker and Robin Lovin bookend the collection. Schweiker extends themes he has explored elsewhere, articulating a moral realism grounded on the "integrity of life" and its claim on human beings as responsible actors (16). Lovin's essay concludes the book with an examination of authority in modernity. He argues that the various goods that claim our allegiance are fragmented and competitive rather than unified, that secular and sacred are no longer viewed as complementary. The challenge as Lovin sees it is "to figure out how we can submit ourselves to the multiple authorities that are necessary for the goods that we have chosen without losing those goods to the demands of creating and maintaining them" (187).Other essays take up questions of power in religion and politics from diverse points of view. Kathryn Tanner offers a theology of power drawing on Foucault's insight that human power relations can be understood as good to the extent that the subjects of power can resist and dismantle them, while God's is the only power good in its very irresistibility. Rick Elgendy offers a nuanced picture of revelation "without authority" but not thereby robbed of power, which comports with Tanner's vision. Jonathan Tran addresses revelation's authority in dialogue with both Karl Barth and Stanley Cavell, producing a winsome account of revelation in a pluralistic, relational, necessarily linguistic world.Power is extraordinarily difficult to navigate in intercultural conversation and in the world of real politics, and chapters by Marion Grau and Vincent Lloyd address these concerns. Grau takes up the former, working toward what she calls a "polydox hermeneutic of the sacred, a theopoetical epistemology" by which the embodied nature of knowledge can be recognized and made part of hermeneutical dialogue (134). In a sobering argument, Lloyd engages the work of Raymond Geuss to note that while political philosophers and political actors use similar language, for political actors this language is primarily rhetoric used [End Page 223] to gain power. Philosophers mistake this common language for common purpose and thus "operate with the false consciousness that their systematic work could have an effect." Lloyd argues that political theology can avoid this trap by taking the critique of ideology as its primary task, finding in Huey Newton an exemplar of "political theology at its best" (159).This volume rewards rereading. These essays and others included in the book are admirably clear and well written. They engage and argue with one another and will evoke similar reactions in their readers. While some of the arguments may be too immersed in the discussions of their specific fields for even advanced undergraduate courses, graduate students will find in this book a stimulating sampler of the theological concerns raised by power and authority in religion, theology, and politics, and thoughtful approaches with which to navigate them.Andy DunningSt. Andrew United Methodist Church and Iliff School of TheologyCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theology for Liberal Protestants: God the Creator by Douglas F. OttatiRubén Rosario RodríguezTheology for Liberal Protestants: God the Creator Douglas F. Ottati GRAND RAPIDS, MI: EERDMANS, 2013. 377 PP. $38.00Douglas Ottati offers the first volume of a two-volume systematic theology that is firmly and unapologetically grounded in the nineteenth-century liberal Protestant tradition. To paraphrase Gary Dorrien, Ottati's work can be categorized as among those contributors to the discipline (...) of theology, like Kathryn Tanner, seeking to bridge the longstanding gap between Yale postliberalism and Chicago liberalism. In other words, the absolute rejection of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Adolf von Harnack, and Ernst Troeltsch by neo-orthodox theologians early in the twentieth century no longer serves as an adequate typology, thus necessitating the need for a different narrative—one that sees greater continuity between Protestant liberalism, its neo-orthodox opponents, and the narrative and postliberal theologies that have sprouted from the fertile soil of this supposed discontinuity.Ottati defends and reclaims use of the term "liberal" through an appeal to the Reformed theological tradition within which he stands (along with supposedly irreconcilable rivals Schleiermacher and Karl Barth) by recognizing the place of John Calvin as an advocate for compassionate civil discourse and cooperation grounded in distinctly Christian piety and praxis. Accordingly, "A liberal Protestant is one whose piety and sensibility join Protestant convictions about Bible, tradition, church, history and truth with sustained attention to critical argument and scientific inquiries, a developed historical consciousness, and a commitment to social criticism and reform" (14). He then reconceptualizes the discipline of Christian theology through a series of axiomatic propositions that locates the theologian within a particular faith community yet in continuous dialogue with the surrounding culture; confronts the radical plurality of our current age by pursuing comparative theological discourse; and is receptive to scientific, literary, and philosophical world views (even when these world views prove hostile to a Christian perspective) as naturally flowing from the Christian's pious submission "to God as Creator, Judge, and Redeemer" of all humanity in its many varied manifestations. In other words, Ottati presents diversity, tolerance, and cooperation as distinctly Christian virtues that can and ought to help Christians build bridges with differing religious and philosophical perspectives on the basis of a shared humanistic foundation that is nevertheless biblically and theologically grounded.This systematic theology intentionally follows Calvin's organizing schema in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) of the twofold knowledge of God as [End Page 214] Creator and Redeemer; it greatly admires and respects its theological ancestors, including Augustine, Martin Luther, and Schleiermacher, yet offers a critical evaluation—and, when needed, rejection—of these same forebears. Like Katherine Sonderegger's recent Systematic Theology (a projected three-volume work), Ottati's contribution stands as a corrective against the twentieth century emphasis on a Trinitarian doctrine of God that often excludes classical reflection on the attributes of God. Whether or not he is avoiding classical Trinitarian language because he wants to avoid idle speculation about the Triune God (à la Calvin) will become more evident in the second volume when (if?) he addresses the work of the Spirit as part of God's act of reconciliation in Christ. This first volume is the work of a brilliant thinker who is guided by a pastoral sensibility that will find an audience in the church, in the seminary, and—perhaps most surprisingly—in the university classroom in great part because it takes very seriously the call to make the Christian faith intelligible and relevant in the face of external criticism of Christian piety and practice. In the end, what it offers is a rediscovery of the concept of wonder at the Creation and its infinitely mysterious source to a radically pluralistic and increasingly agnostic culture.Rubén Rosario RodríguezSaint Louis UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Predictive processing accounts of neural function view the brain as a kind of prediction machine that forms models of its environment in order to anticipate the upcoming stream of sensory stimulation. These models are then continuously updated in light of incoming error signals. Predictive processing has offered a powerful new perspective on cognition, action, and perception. In this chapter we apply the insights from predictive processing to the study of emotions. The upshot is a picture of emotion as inseparable from (...) perception and cognition, and a key feature of the embodied mind. (shrink)

Two fundamentally different perspectives on knowledge diffusion dominate debates about academic disciplines. On the one hand, critics of disciplinary research and education have argued that disciplines are isolated silos, within which specialists pursue inward-looking and increasingly narrow research agendas. On the other hand, critics of the silo argument have demonstrated that researchers constantly import and export ideas across disciplinary boundaries. These perspectives have different implications for how knowledge diffuses, how intellectuals gain and lose status within their disciplines, and how intellectual (...) reputations evolve within and across disciplines. We argue that highly general claims about the nature of disciplinary boundaries are counterproductive, and that research on the nature of specific disciplinary boundaries is more useful. To that end, this paper uses a novel publication and citation network dataset and statistical models of citation networks to test hypotheses about the boundaries between philosophy of science and 11 disciplinary clusters. Specifically, we test hypotheses about whether engaging with and being cited by scientific communities outside philosophy of science has an impact on one’s position within philosophy of science. Our results suggest that philosophers of science produce interdisciplinary scholarship, but they tend not to cite work by other philosophers when it is published in journals outside of their discipline. Furthermore, net of other factors, receiving citations from other disciplines has no meaningful impact—positive or negative—on citations within philosophy of science. We conclude by considering this evidence for simultaneous interdisciplinarity and insularity in terms of scientific trading theory and other work on disciplinary boundaries and communication. (shrink)

Crop genetic resources constitute a ‘new’ global commons, characterized by multiple layers of activities of farmers, genebanks, public and private research and development organizations, and regulatory agencies operating from local to global levels. This paper presents sui generis biocultural community protocols that were developed by four communities in Benin and Madagascar to improve their ability to contribute to, and benefit from, the crop commons. The communities were motivated in part by the fact that their national governments’ had recently ratified the (...) Plant Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol, which make commitments to promoting the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities and farmers, without being prescriptive as to how Contracting Parties should implement those commitments. The communities identified the protocols as useful means to advance their interests and/or rights under both the Plant Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol to be recognized as managers of local socio-ecological systems, to access genetic resources from outside the communities, and to control others’ access to resources managed by the community. (shrink)

This article describes our efforts to screen and enrol clinical trial participants conscientiously in the COVID-19 pandemic setting. We present the standard screening and enrolment process prior to, and our process of adapting to, the pandemic. Our goal was to develop a way to screen and enrol people for clinical trials that was both equitable and effective. In addition, we outline the steps our research department took to ensure that ethical, clinical and logistical factors were considered when matching a patient (...) to a clinical trial. (shrink)

Attachment theory proposes that the activation of the attachment system enacts emotion regulation (ER) to maintain security or cope with insecurity. However, the effects of ER on attachment states and their bidirectional influences remain poorly understood. In this ecological momentary assessment study, we examined the dynamics between attachment and ER. We hypothesised that attachment states and ER influence each other through time. Specifically, we hypothesised bidirectional short-term cycles between state attachment security and reappraisal, state attachment anxiety and rumination, and state (...) attachment avoidance and suppression. We also tested how trait attachment is related to state attachment and ER. One hundred twenty-two participants (Mage = 26.4) completed the Experiences in Close Relationship–Revised and reported state attachment and ER seven times daily for seven days. The results were only partly consistent with our cycle hypotheses yet revealed a cycle between low state attachment security and rumination that was attenuated by reappraisal. Moreover, rumination and suppression predicted increased insecure states, and reappraisal predicted increased secure and insecure states. Finally, trait attachment showed associations with state attachment and ER. Our study suggests regulatory dynamics between attachment and ER and opens important questions about their functional relationship in maintaining attachment-related behavioural patterns and emotional well-being. (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

The precarious rights of senior citizens, especially those who are highly educated and who are expected to counsel and guide the younger generations, has stimulated the creation internationally of advocacy associations and opinion leader groups. The strength of these groups, however, varies from country to country. In some countries, they are supported and are the focus of intense interest; in others, they are practically ignored. For this is reason we believe that the creation of a network of all these associations (...) is essential. The proposed network would act as a support for the already-existing policies of the United Nations’ High Commission for Human Rights, of independent experts, and of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Older People. All three have long ago recommended the creation of a recognized instrument for uniting presently scattered efforts. The proposed network, therefore, will seek to promote the international exchange of relevant expertise, and it will reinforce the commitments and actions that single countries are currently taking to meet these objectives. For example, informative public events can be organised to promote particular support initiatives and to provide an opportunity for new members of the network to be presented. The network will promote health for senior citizens, disease prevention, senior mobility, safe free time for seniors, alimentary education, protection against new risks and dangers, as well as equity in the services necessary for seniors to adopt new information and communication technologies. In the case of retired academic members, the network will promote equality with respect to continuing use of digital technologies (particularly email), continuing access to research libraries, and the guaranteed ability for seniors to fund their own research programs and to deliver free seminars. (shrink)

We discuss our concerns associated with three assumptions upon which the model of Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer is based: assumed generalisability of decontextualised experimental programs, assumed highly modular architecture of the language production systems, and assumed symbolic computations within the language production system. We suggest that these assumptions are problematic and require further justification.

Advocates for the professionalization of clinical bioethics argue that bioethics professionals play an important role in contemporary medicine and patient care, especially when addressing complex ethical questions that arise in the delivery of reproductive medicine. For bioethics consultants to serve effectively, they need adequate training in the medical and ethical issues that patients and clinicians will face, and they need skills to facilitate effective dialog among all parties. Because clinical ethics consultation is a “high‐stakes endeavor” that can acutely affect patient (...) care, efforts are under way to ensure that bioethics consultants have the competence to provide such guidance. Yet to date, no studies have examined whether the training of bioethics consultants meets the needs of health care professionals who are on the front lines of such issues. In fact, limited information is available on the reproductive health issues that bioethics training programs address or the degree to which these programs meet the needs of patients confronting reproductive health decisions and their clinicians. It is therefore important to answer this key question: What are the primary ethical issues encountered in reproductive medicine that currently affect patient care? Equally important, are bioethics training programs prepared to address those issues?To begin to answer these questions, we conducted parallel surveys of directors of graduate bioethics training programs and obstetrician‐gynecologists. The goal of this project is to lay the groundwork to establish a working partnership between bioethics educators and reproductive medicine practitioners to address the often troubling and frequently complex ethical issues in reproductive medicine. (shrink)

This illuminating Research Handbook analyses the role that emotions play and ought to play in legal reasoning and practice, rejecting the simplistic distinction between reason and emotion. International expert contributors take multidisciplinary approaches, drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, literary theory, psychology, history, and sociology to examine the role of a wide range of emotions across a variety of legal contexts. Chapters consider how the rich tapestry of human emotion impacts legal actors, influences legal doctrine, and shapes the dynamics of legal institutions. (...) Moving beyond legal contexts traditionally considered rife with emotion such as the criminal law and jury trials, the Handbook explores how emotion relates to contracts, property, bankruptcy, international law, and truth and reconciliation commissions. It also reflects on the importance of research methodologies, theories, and techniques for assessing the role of emotion in the legal arena. Surveying the depth and complexity of law and emotion across a panoply of legal actions, institutional contexts, and legal doctrines, this Research Handbook will be critical reading for academics and students of legal theory and legal philosophy. Its detailed examination of emotions in the practice of private, public, international, and criminal law will also be beneficial for lawyers, judges, and policymakers. (shrink)

In his still-authoritative history of science essay, Kuhn showed that scientific discoveries commence with awareness of anomaly that researchers initially struggle to notice. Kuhn drew on a psychological study to illustrate the problem. Bruner and Postman asked people to name playing cards on brief exposure. Most cards were normal, but some were anomalous, such as a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. On brief exposure all participants fitted the anomalous cards unhesitatingly into their existing cognitive scheme, (...) identifying them as, for example, a six of spades or a four of hearts. With longer exposures subjects began to hesitate: ‘That’s a six of... (shrink)

The paper reports a study of children's attitudes to school based on a questionnaire survey of 845 pupils in their first year of secondary school in England, together with interviews with a sample of the children. A clearly structured set of attitudes emerged from a factor analysis which showed a distinction between instrumental and affective aspects of attitudes but also dimensions within these, including a sense of teacher commitment and school as a difficult environment. Virtually all children had a strong (...) sense of the importance of doing well at school. However, a substantial minority were not sure that they would stay on after 16. There were few differences between boys and girls or between children from different socio-economic backgrounds but children planning to leave at 16 enjoyed school less and were less sure that it had anything to offer them. There was an almost universal commitment to the value of education but, for a minority, an ambivalence about the experience and relevance of schooling for them. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This article considers the experiences of a group of women science students of color who reported encountering moral injustices, including misrecognition, lack of peer support, and disregard for their altruistic motives. We contend that university science departments face a moral imperative to cultivate equal relationships and the altruistic power of science.

Building rapport is considered important in investigative interviewing of children about alleged sexual abuse, but theoretical understanding of the nature of rapport and how to judge its presence remains sketchy. This article argues that the conversation analytic concept of progressivity may provide empirical tractability to the concept of rapport and indeed may be partially what people are detecting when they judge the presence of rapport. A single case is analysed, drawn from a corpus of 11 video-taped interviews with children conducted (...) by police in an Australian sexual crime unit. Analysis focuses on how the interviewer responds when progressivity breaks down, and how restoration is collaboratively achieved. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for future work that might investigate a more thoroughly social interactional account of rapport, and in terms of new ideas about what might constitute skilful interviewing practices amongst investigative interviewers. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

The goal of this study was to assess the relationships between computational approaches to analyzing constructed responses made during reading and individual differences in the foundational skills of reading in college readers. We also explored if these relationships were consistent across texts and samples collected at different institutions and texts. The study made use of archival data that involved college participants who produced typed constructed responses under thinking aloud instructions reading history and science texts. They also took assessments of vocabulary (...) knowledge and proficiency in comprehension. The protocols were analyzed to assess two different ways to determine their cohesion. One approach involved assessing how readers established connections with themselves. The other approach involved assessing connections between the constructed responses and the texts that were read. Additionally, the comparisons were made by assessing both lexical and semantic comparisons. The result showed that both approaches for analyzing cohesion and making the comparisons were correlated with vocabulary knowledge and comprehension proficiency. The implications of the results for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

As nursing continues to develop as a professional discipline, it is important for nurses to have a central question to guide their research. Since the 1800s, nursing practice and research have covered a wide scope in cooperation with other disciplines. This wide area of nursing practice and research has led to the proposal that the central question be: How can the well‐being of a person, family, community, or population be improved? The proposed question must remain flexible and open to revision (...) because nurses will continue to adapt to the changing needs of their patients and populations and to their complex and evolving work environments. (shrink)

Totemism, a topic that fascinated and then was summarily dismissed by anthropologists, has been resurrected by evolutionary psychologists' recent attempts to explain religion. New approaches to religion are all based on the assumption that religious behavior is the result of evolved psychological mechanisms. We focus on two aspects of Totemism that may present challenges to this view. First, if religious behavior is simply the result of evolved psychological mechanisms, would it not spring forth anew each generation from an individual's psychological (...) mechanisms? Yet, Australian Totemism, like other forms of Totemism, is profoundly traditional, copied by one generation from the prior ones for hundreds of generations. Regardless of personal inclinations, individuals are obligated to participate. Second, it is problematic to assume that all practitioners of Totemism actually believe their religious claims. We propose an alternative explanation that accounts for the persistence of Totemism and that does not rely on an assumption that its practitioners are preliterate or naive because they have strange beliefs. We focus on Totemism as a cultural mechanism aimed at building and sustaining social relationships among close and distant kinsmen. (shrink)