SummaryThe meaning of the term “health” is properly the subject of social, rather than natural, investigation. The structure of modern industrial capitalist society appears to materially and unavoidably produce a meaning of “health” intrinsically involving substantially preventable disease. Because in such a society private investment responds to cyclical and geographic fluctuations in rates of return and competitive labor markets, much of the disease structure (heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, and cancer, among others) encompasses diseases which captive citizens cannot afford to (...) do without. To prevent those diseases through environmental and workplace cleanup, full employment and geographic capital stability is to drive away the very private capital on which economic life is based. Consequently, those diseases are as intrinsic to modern capitalist society as the law of supply and demand and are, therefore, a characteristic component of the meaning of “health,” the socially optimum level of organismic condition, in this epoch. A necessary condition for the emancipation of “health” from socially preventable disease would appear to be the social, rather than private, control of production and accumulation. (shrink)

The SRL vs. ERL theory has shown that the combination of levels of student self-regulation and regulation from the teaching context produces linear effects on achievement emotions and coping strategies. However, a similar effect on stress factors and symptoms of university students has not yet been demonstrated. The aim of this study was to test this prediction. It was hypothesized that the level of student self-regulation (low/medium/high), in interaction with the level of external regulation from teaching (low/medium/high), would also produce (...) a linear effect on stress factors and symptoms of university students. A total of 527 undergraduate students completed validated questionnaires about self-regulation, regulatory teaching, stress factors and symptoms. Using an ex post facto design by selection, ANOVAs and MANOVAs (3 x 3; 5 x 1; 5 x 2) were carried out. The results confirmed that the level of self-regulation and the level of regulatory teaching jointly determined the level of stress factors and symptoms of university students. Once again, a five-level heuristic of possible combinations was configured to jointly determined university students’ level of academic stress. We concluded that the combination of different levels of student regulation levels and regulation from teaching process jointly determines university students’ level of academic stress. The implications for university students’ emotional health, stress prevention and well-being are established. (shrink)

Although emotions play a crucial role in understanding and encouraging sustainable behavior and decision-making, many open questions currently remain unanswered. In this review, we advance three broad areas of particular theoretical and applied importance that affective science and emotion researchers could benefit from engaging with: (1) “ sustainable emotions” or empirically testing the possibility of positive reinforcing feedback loops between anticipatory and experienced emotions following the adoption of sustainable behaviors, (2) “ non- Western emotions” or exploring the extent to which (...) people's understanding and experience of climate-relevant emotions differs across non-WEIRD populations, and (3) “ impactful emotions” or the need to carefully differentiate the conceptual and empirical role of emotions in encouraging the adoption of low-impact (e.g., recycling) versus high-impact (e.g., flying less) environmental behaviors. (shrink)

Contrary to the emotions we feel in everyday contexts, the emotions we feel for fictional characters do not seem to require a belief in the existence of their object. This observation has given birth to a famous philosophical paradox (the ‘paradox of fiction’), and has led some philosophers to claim that the emotions we feel for fictional characters are not genuine emotions but rather “quasi-emotions”. Since then, the existence of quasi-emotions has been a hotly debated issue. Recently, philosophers and psychologists (...) have proposed to solve this debate by using empirical methods and experimentally studying differences between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ emotions. In this paper, our goal is to assess the success of these attempts. We begin by surveying the existing empirical literature and stressing the methodological problems that plague most studies that might seem relevant to the debate, before focusing on recent studies that avoid this pitfall. We then argue that, due to conceptual problems, these studies fail to be relevant to the philosophical debate and emphasize new directions for future empirical research on the topic. (shrink)

Autism Spectrum Condition presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on general purpose neurocognitive mechanisms that are expressed atypically. Here we use the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism approach in the context of cultural niche construction to explain (...) atypicalities of the relational self, specifically its minimal, extended, and intersubjective aspects. We contend that the social self in ASC should not be seen as impaired, but rather as an outcome of atypical niche construction. We unpack the scientific, ethical, and practical consequences of this view, and discuss implications for how the challenges that autistic persons face should be approached. (shrink)

A recently proposed model of sensory processing suggests that perceptual experience is updated in discrete steps. We show that the data advanced to support discrete perception are in fact compatible with a continuous account of perception. Physiological and psychophysical constraints, moreover, as well as our awake-primate imaging data, imply that human neuronal networks cannot support discrete updates of perceptual content at the maximal update rates consistent with phenomenology. A more comprehensive approach to understanding the physiology of perception (and experience at (...) large) is therefore called for, and we briefly outline our take on the problem. (shrink)

This book outlines and evaluates the principal strands of critical legal studies, and achieves much more as well.

Charles Sanders Peirce has been characterized as the greatest American philosophic genius. He is the creator of pragmatism and one of the founders of modern logic. James, Royce, Schroder, and Dewey have acknowledged their great indebtedness to him. A laboratory scientist, he made notable contributions to geodesy, astronomy, psychology, induction, probability, and scientific method. He introduced into modern philosophy the doctrine of scholastic realism, developed the concepts of chance, continuity, and objective law, and showed the philosophical significance of the theory (...) of signs and mathematical logic. The present series is the first published edition of his systematic works. (shrink)

O presente ensaio tem como objetivo fazer uma reflexão acerca da educação e os desafios da ciência e da produção de conhecimento na busca de emancipação. Como trama de fundo, trazemos uma breve discussão sobre a produção de conhecimento na atualidade para além daquilo que Santos chama de “pensamento abissal”. Assim, num primeiro momento, pretende-se pensar a condição da educação na atualidade, isto é, discutir seus rumos em tempos de regressões políticas e econômicas. Em seguida, objetiva-se indicar a necessidade de (...) superação do pensamento abissal, refletindo até que ponto a educação funciona como recurso fundamental para a emancipação e até onde vão seus limites. As aproximações com as temáticas problematizadas ocorrem por meio da perspectiva teórico-metodológico-dialética do fenômeno analisado. Espera-se, com essas aproximações, contribuir com uma proposta inclusiva e emancipatória de valorização dos saberes das experiências, dando visibilidade aos valores e às representações estéticas dos diversos grupos, cujas vozes, muitas vezes, são excluídas e/ou silenciadas nos sistemas educativos, colocando em diálogo com a ciência e reconhecendo as culturas que foram excluídas ao longo dos séculos. Além disso, é preciso contrapor-se ao poder cego de todos os coletivos, fortalecendo a resistência diante dos mesmos por meio do esclarecimento do problema. A busca por uma racionalidade crítica, na produção de conhecimento, passa por tensões e fraturas da própria condição humana no capitalismo contemporâneo, mas isso não quer dizer, necessariamente, que se tenha que abandonar a própria razão, para dispor de uma condição adequada da vida humana para além do pensamento abissal. Palavras-chave: Educação. Emancipação. Produção de conhecimento. Pensamento abissal. (shrink)

The Green Economy is a strategic development concept of the United Nations incorporating a broad array of potential meanings and implications. It is subject to academic conceptualisation, operationalisation, reflection and criticism. The aim of our paper is to conceptualise a subset of the multi-faceted and at times polarised debate around the implications and applications of the Green Economy concept, and to provide reflective grounds for approaches towards the concept. By using qualitative content analysis and a participatory approach, we investigate perceptions (...) of young researchers from various disciplines working on issues related to the Green Economy. The spectrum of disparate perceptions observed among the respondents is accommodated within a two-dimensional model. The dimensions are 1) the degree and nature of desired societal change in relation to the current economic model and set of institutions; and 2) the role of research in delivering such change. We discuss the model in light of the existing literature. (shrink)

Questions of how we claim to know the things that we know and whose claims to knowledge are treated as authoritative are inescapable in reaching legal judgments. I want to illustrate this generalization by referring to a pair of hypothetical self-defense cases that, I argue, require fact finders to judge both how “accurately” each defendant understood the situation in which he found himself and how accurately policymakers can assess the consequences of alternative legal rules.The first case I will deal with (...) is one in which the defendant shoots and kills her sleeping husband. The husband had physically abused her over a long period. While the defendant will of course acknowledge that she was in no immediate danger at the moment she killed the man, her preliminary claim is that she needed to act self-defensively at that moment for fear that she subsequently would be incapable of defending herself against life-threatening attacks that she was convinced would inevitably be made.The second case is one in which a white defendant shoots and kills a black teenager who has confronted him on the subway, in a situation in which the teenager’s “threats” were ambiguous. The shooting victim had brandished no weapon and made no physical contact with the defendant, but he had “asked” the defendant for money and, in the defendant’s mind, displayed a generally threatening demeanor. I will presuppose that this defendant—unlike Bernhard Goetz, the defendant in the notorious New York subway vigilante case on which I partly base this hypothetical model—overtly acknowledges that the race of the victim played a substantial role in his assessment of the danger of the situation. Mark Kelman, professor of law at Stanford University, is the author of A Guide to Critical Legal Studies as well as a number of articles on law and economics, taxation, criminal law, and legal theory. (shrink)

Plant protection problems are simulated by a system of ordinary differential equations with given initial conditions. The sensitivity and resistance of pathogen subpopulations to fungicide mixtures, fungicide weathering, plant growth, etc. are taken into consideration. The system of equations is solved numerically for each set of initial conditions and parameters of the disease and fungicide applications. Optimization algorithms were investigated and a computer program was developed for optimization of these solutions. 14 typical cases of the disease were simulated and optimized (...) in order to determine optimal fungicide treatments. The optimized strategy for fungicide application differs considerably from the commonly used method and seems to be an important new principle in plant protection. The approach developed in this study may be useful for a wide spectrum of purposes in the simulation of leaf diseases. It may also help the biologist to decrease or pinpoint experimental work and analyze its results and is perspective for plant disease control. (shrink)

While comparative literature is often called a discipline in crisis, it is just as often charged with the responsibility to see into the future. But why has comparative literature been give...

One of the most common policy-related messages that economists present to non-economists is the superiority of cash over in-kind transfers as a policy tool. A good deal of government policy on behalf of the poor consists, of course, of various forms of in-kind assistance, such as medical care or food stamps. However, if we wish to help the poor, the argument goes, in-kind transfers are an inferior way to do so.

In this article, I address two objections developed by Kingma against Boorse’s bio-statistical theory of health, the objections that choice of reference classes renders the theory both circular and problematically value-laden. These objections not only apply to the bio-statistical theory of health but also to other naturalistic theories, like the dispositional theory of health. I present three rejoinders. First, I argue that the circularity objection arises from excessive methodological demands. Second, I argue that naturalists can resist the normativist claim that (...) health and pathology are differentiated on the basis of personal or cultural values. Finally, I show that it is possible to justify choices between rival theories of health without the interference of evaluative commitments. With these rejoinders, I conclude that the bio-statistical theory, as well as other naturalistic theories of health utilizing reference classes, is not undermined by Kingma’s arguments. (shrink)

During psychotherapy, patient and therapist tend to spontaneously synchronize their vocal pitch, bodily movements, and even their physiological processes. In the present article, we consider how this pervasive phenomenon may shed new light on the therapeutic relationship– or alliance– and its role within psychotherapy. We first review clinical research on the alliance and the multidisciplinary area of interpersonal synchrony. We then integrate both literatures in the Interpersonal Synchrony (In-Sync) model of psychotherapy. According to the model, the alliance is grounded in (...) the coupling of patient and therapist’s brains. Because brains do not interact directly, movement synchrony may help to establish inter-brain coupling. Inter-brain coupling may provide patient and therapist with access to another’s internal states, which facilitates common understanding and emotional sharing. Over time, these interpersonal exchanges may improve patients’ emotion-regulatory capacities and related therapeutic outcomes. We discuss the empirical assessment of interpersonal synchrony and review preliminary research on synchrony in psychotherapy. Finally, we summarize our main conclusions and consider the broader implications of viewing psychotherapy as the product of two interacting brains. (shrink)

This article examines the question of allegory in Vico. While there have been some attempts to read the New Science as an allegory, little attention has been paid to what Vico himself meant by the term ‘allegory’. In fact, Vico complicates things by referring to two types of allegory: the philosophical allegory and the true poetic allegory. While the former term refers to the mode of signification of the age of man or the third age, the latter term has to (...) do with the poetic characters that Vico ascribes to the divine or first age. Vico further emphasizes the difference between the two types of allegory by calling (or translating) the true poetic allegory “diversiloquium.” Through a careful reading of this unusual translation of the term ‘allegory’, this inquiry suggests a surprising relation between the mode of signification of poetic characters (allegory) and Vico’s philosophy of history. (shrink)

The present article reviews modern research on the psychology of emotion regulation. Emotion regulation determines the offset of emotional responding and is thus distinct from emotional sensitivity, which determines the onset of emotional responding. Among the most viable categories for classifying emotion-regulation strategies are the targets and functions of emotion regulation. The emotion-generating systems that are targeted in emotion regulation include attention, knowledge, and bodily responses. The functions of emotion regulation include satisfying hedonic needs, supporting specific goal pursuits, and facilitating (...) the global personality system. Emotion-regulation strategies are classified in terms of their targets and functions and relevant empirical work is reviewed. Throughout this review, emotion regulation emerges as one of the most far-ranging and influential processes at the interface of cognition and emotion. (shrink)

Why do physicians who've taken the Hippocratic Oath willingly cut into seemingly healthy patients? How do you measure the success of surgery aimed at making someone happier by altering his or her body? Sander L. Gilman explores such questions in Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, a cultural history of the connections between beauty of body and happiness of mind. Following these themes through an impressive range of historical moments and players, Gilman traces how aesthetic alterations of the body (...) have been used to "cure" dissatisfied states of mind. In his exploration of the striking parallels between the development of cosmetic surgery and the field of psychiatry, Gilman entertains an array of philosophical and psychological questions that underlie the more practical decisions rountinely made by doctors and potential patients considering these types of surgery. While surveying and incorporating the relevant theories of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Karl Menninger, Paul Schilder, contemporary feminist critics, and others, Gilman considers the highly unstable nature of cultural notions of health, happiness, and beauty. He reveals how ideas of race and gender structured early understandings of aesthetic surgery in discussions of both the "abnormality" of the Jewish nose and the historical requirement that healthy and virtuous females look "normal," thereby enabling them to achieve invisibility. Reflecting upon historically widespread prejudices, Gilman describes the persecutions, harrassment, attacks, and even murders that continue to result from bodily difference and he encourages readers to question the cultural assumptions that underlie the increasing acceptability of this surgical form of psychotherapy. Synthesizing a vast body of related literature and containing a comprehensive bibliography, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the histories of medicine and psychiatry, and in philosophy, cultural studies, Jewish cultural studies, and race and ethnicity. (shrink)