Purpose: This experimental cross-sectional research study examined the emotional reactivity and emotion regulation in preschool-age children who do and do not stutter by assessing their psychophysiological response during rest and while viewing pictures from the International Affective Picture System.Method: Participants were 18 CWS and 18 age- and gender-matched CWNS. Participants' psychophysiological responses were measured during two baselines and two picture viewing conditions. Skin conductance level and heart rate were measured to assess emotional reactivity. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia was measured to assess (...) emotional regulation. Participants' shyness and executive function were assessed via parent report and considered for their effects on participants' psychophysiological responses.Results: First, CWNS and CWS did not differ in their initial baseline SCL, heart rate, or RSA, but all participants had higher SCL and lower RSA in the second baseline, subsequent to the first challenge condition, compared to the first baseline. Second, during the challenge conditions, CWS did not differ from CWNS in their SCL, but showed a significantly higher heart rate than CWNS. Third, CWS exhibited a significantly lower RSA during the challenge conditions compared to CWNS. Lastly, the temperamental quality of shyness was associated with preschool-age children's SCL, such that participants who were rated higher in shyness had a higher SCL during the challenge conditions. Participants' executive function had a marginally significant effect on the RSA, such that the participants who had higher executive function composite scores exhibited lower RSA during the challenge conditions.Conclusions: Our findings suggest that CWS and CWNS did not differ in their emotional reactivity and emotional regulation abilities at rest. During challenge conditions, however, CWS tended to be more emotionally reactive, as indicated by a higher heart rate, and also employed more emotional regulation, indexed by a greater decrease in RSA, compared to CWNS. Preschool-age children's behavior is largely dominated by reactivity, but there is the emergence of regulation, which can help children adjust to various contextual demands. For CWS who are more emotionally reactive, regulatory skills may be particularly critical to their prognosis and treatment. (shrink)

During nearly two centuries, American storytellers have celebrated comic figures, ebullient showoffs who turned up on one frontier after another—in the old South, in Kentucky and Tennessee, along the great inland rivers, in the mountains and the mines and on the prairies. Often, the stories went, when these characters engaged in a favorite pastime—playfully bragging about their strength, their skill and their exploits—they used animal metaphors such as Opossum, Screamer, Half-Horse Half-Alligator, the Big Bear of Arkansas or Gamecock of the (...) Wilderness to furnish nicknames. Often they were also identified as fictional or real frontiersmen—Mike Fink, Nimrod Wildfire, Jim Doggett, Pecos Bill—and tall tales clustered around them. Explaining a metaphor and a nickname, an Ohio newspaper in 1830 cited the most famous braggart of this sort: "Ring-tailed roarer—A most vicious fellow—a Crockett." . . . The stories did not have to have roots in reality and often were not new. The real Crockett was well built, handsome, ruddy-cheeked. But traditional jokes made ugliness a funny quality. Falstaff claimed Bardolph's crimson proboscis glowed with a flame that made torches inoperative. The Spectator in 1711 told about "Spectator's" election to England's Ugly Club. Joke 177 in Joe Miller's Jests was about the British kingdom's champion ugly man. When Gus Longstreet entered law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1813, a student welcomed him: "Here, sir, is a knife always given to the ugliest student. . . . Until now it has been mine, but beyond doubt, sir, since you are here, I have now no right to it any longer." Andy Jackson—"Old Hickory"—won a like award. Lore had it that Davy was so repulsive looking that if he grinned at a raccoon, it tumbled from its tree. Once, worried because he grinned and grinned without bringing down his victim, he was relieved when a close look showed he had mistaken a knot for a beast. All the same, he had grinned all the bark off the branch. Walter Blair is professor emeritus in the department of English at the University of Chicago. His many influential works include Native American Humor and Horse Sense in American Humor. "Americanized Comic Braggarts" appears in a slightly different version in the book America's Humor from Poor Richard to Doonesbury. (shrink)

Treating mathematical science as a distinct cultural entity subject to environmental factors which influence its evolution, the author examines the creation and development of its major concepts since early times.

In this paper it is proposed that important components of moral development and moral judgment rely on two forms of emotional learning: stimulus-reinforcement and response-outcome learning. Data in support of this position will be primarily drawn from work with individuals with the developmental condition of psychopathy as well as fMRI studies with healthy individuals. Individuals with psychopathy show impairment on moral judgment tasks and a pronounced increased risk for instrumental antisocial behavior. It will be argued that these impairments are developmental (...) consequences of impaired stimulus-aversive conditioning on the basis of distress cue reinforcers and response-outcome learning in individuals with this disorder. (shrink)

This paper surveys interdisciplinary research on gratitude that has been conducted since the review paper translated into German in this issue ‘Recent work on the concept of gratitude in philosophy and psychology’, was published in the Journal of Value Inquiry in 2013. We share progress on our subsequent research, and report on key developments in the field. We revisit familiar themes regarding conditions placed on gratitude, the structure and moral value of gratitude, and the pedagogical implications of research on gratitude, (...) addressing the issue of how the virtue of gratitude should be promoted and taught. As befits a collection dedicated to exploring gratitude’s potential ‘shadow’, we consider again the valence of gratitude and whether it is as quintessentially positive as many have assumed. (shrink)

This target article considers the relation of fluid cognitive functioning to general intelligence. A neurobiological model differentiating working memory/executive function cognitive processes of the prefrontal cortex from aspects of psychometrically defined general intelligence is presented. Work examining the rise in mean intelligence-test performance between normative cohorts, the neuropsychology and neuroscience of cognitive function in typically and atypically developing human populations, and stress, brain development, and corticolimbic connectivity in human and nonhuman animal models is reviewed and found to provide evidence of (...) mechanisms through which early experience affects the development of an aspect of cognition closely related to, but distinct from, general intelligence. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of emotion in fluid cognition and on research indicating fluid cognitive deficits associated with early hippocampal pathology and with dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis stress-response system. Findings are seen to be consistent with the idea of an independent fluid cognitive construct and to assist with the interpretation of findings from the study of early compensatory education for children facing psychosocial adversity and from behavior genetic research on intelligence. It is concluded that ongoing development of neurobiologically grounded measures of fluid cognitive skills appropriate for young children will play a key role in understanding early mental development and the adaptive success to which it is related, particularly for young children facing social and economic disadvantage. Specifically, in the evaluation of the efficacy of compensatory education efforts such as Head Start and the readiness for school of children from diverse backgrounds, it is important to distinguish fluid cognition from psychometrically defined general intelligence. (Published Online April 5 2006) Key Words: cognition; cognition-emotion reciprocity; developmental disorders; emotion; fluid cognition; Flynn effect; general intelligence; limbic system; neuroscience; phenylketonuria; prefrontal cortex; psychometrics; schizophrenia. (shrink)

This book investigates the Ancient Stoic thinkers’ views on gender and sexuality. A detailed scrutiny of metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy reveals that the Stoic philosophers held an exceptionally equal view of men and women’s rational capacities. In its own time, Stoicism was frequently called ‘ the manly school’ of philosophy, but this volume shows that the Stoics would have also transformed many traditional notions of masculinity. Malin Grahn-Wilder compares the earlier philosophies of Plato and Aristotle to show that (...) the Stoic position often stands out within Ancient philosophy as an exceptionally bold defense of women’s possibilities to achieve the highest form of wisdom and happiness. The work argues that the Stoic metaphysical notion of human being is based on strikingly egalitarian premises, and opens new perspectives to Stoic philosophy on the whole. (shrink)

Evidence shows that changes in the architecture, design, and decor of health care facilities can improve patient care and in the long run reduce expenses. These essays detail the state of the research, look inside two hospitals that put some of these innovations into practice, and consider how design fits into the moral mission ofhealth care.

While 90 percent of participants in a 2005 Gallup poll indicated that they would donate an organ if asked, only 40 percent of Americans have registered to do so, according to 2012 data from Donate Life America; likely even fewer have shared their donation wishes with loved ones. Undoubtedly, the single biggest reason for the discrepancy between the number of potential transplants and the number actually performed is our failure to talk with loved ones about our wishes regarding organ donation. (...) Although many resources already exist to hold these conversations, we can do more, and the emergence of social media provides an intriguing new opportunity. Two years ago, Organize.org set out to create the first nationwide organ donation registry in the United States. (shrink)

Akira Kurosawa is arguably known as the director who opened up Japanese film to Western audiences and following his death in 1998, a process of reflection has begun about his life's work as whole and its legacy to the cinema and its global audiences. Rashomon has arguably become the best known Japanese film, ever. After this, his twelfth film, Kurosawa's reputation was firmly established in international cinema, and Rashomon continues to be discussed and imitated more than sixty years after its (...) first screening. This volume addresses issues beyond the realm of Rashomon within film studies, and to do with the Rashomon effect which itself has become a widely recognized English term referring to significantly different perspectives and interpretations of different eyewitnesses to the same dramatic event. The dual figures of ripples and circles comprise the organizing image and principle of this book as each chapter addresses either the movement of ripples, representing the continuing and vibrant influence of Rashomon effects into the twenty-first century, or of circles, representing specific events, such as the publication of a new script, a particular production, or a remake. (shrink)

This paper examines some of the gendered insecurities informing some of the livelihood practices of Zimbabwean migrants in northern South Africa from 2004-2011, the period in which I carried out almost annual ethnographic research in this region. Situating these practices within wider policy shifts and changing migration patterns at the national and local scales, this paper shows the importance of attending to gendered dependencies and insecurities when analysing migrant livelihoods in southern Africa. These include those found within humanitarian organizations targeting (...) Zimbabwean migrants in their programs and policies in the border area. These gendered insecurities, which are woven into the fabric of travel, work and accommodation for these migrant Zimbabwean women in northern South Africa, should be examined in struggles for social justice. By drawing on the lens of social critique to engender a wider sense of the social justice needs for Zimbabwean women migrants in South Africa, this essay aims to broaden the focus of activism on women migrants to also attend to gendered insecurities in their everyday economic and shelter-seeking activities. (shrink)

Fifty years ago this summer, the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act was adopted by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and approved by the American Bar Association. The UAGA has provided a sound and stable legal platform on which to base an effective nationwide organ donation system. The cardinal principles of altruism, autonomy, and public trust are still important. At a time when confidence and trust in our government and many private institutions has declined, maintaining trust and confidence (...) in our health care system and its commitment to “first, do no harm” has never been more important. Any policies that override these core ethical principles could cause irreparable damage to the public's faith in our transplant system. While progress has been made to increase organ registration and the number of organs transplanted, much more must be done to realize the potential of life‐saving therapy without jeopardizing ethical principles. (shrink)

Ten years ago, when I was president and chief executive officer of Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego, if you had asked me about our commitment to environmental sustainability or about the hospital's carbon footprint, I would have given you a blank look. The issues were simply not on my radar screen. And that was true of most health care leaders.The good news? Environmental sustainability is becoming a health care priority, and exciting progress is occurring. In Greening Health Care: How (...) Hospitals Can Heal the Planet, Kathy Gerwig eloquently relates how one leading large health care system, Kaiser Permanente, achieved remarkable results in responding to the environmental health challenge over the past several years. (shrink)

Drawn from the photography journal Photofile, this volume collects work by prominent critics, theorists, and cultural commentators about many of Australia's most significant photoartists. It illustrates how, located between the realms of fine art and visual culture, photography has underpinned many key developments in our understanding of both during the last decades of the twentieth century. The essays investigate a wide range of subjects including documentary photography, race and representation, and photography and national identity.

Regular polysemes are sets of ambiguous words that all share the same relationship between their meanings, such as CHICKEN and LOBSTER both referring to an animal or its meat. To probe how a distributional semantic model, here exemplified by bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), represents regular polysemy, we analyzed whether its embeddings support answering sense analogy questions similar to “is the mapping between CHICKEN (as an animal) and CHICKEN (as a meat) similar to that which maps between LOBSTER (as (...) an animal) to LOBSTER (as a meat)?” We did so using the LRcos model, which combines a logistic regression classifier of different categories (e.g., animal vs. meat) with a measure of cosine similarity. We found that (a) the model was sensitive to the shared structure within a given regular relationship; (b) the shared structure varies across different regular relationships (e.g., animal/meat vs. location/organization), potentially reflective of a “regularity continuum;” (c) some high-order latent structure is shared across different regular relationships, suggestive of a similar latent structure across different types of relationships; and (d) there is a lack of evidence for the aforementioned effects being explained by meaning overlap. Lastly, we found that both components of the LRcos model made important contributions to accurate responding and that a variation of this method could yield an accuracy boost of 10% in answering sense analogy questions. These findings enrich previous theoretical work on regular polysemy with a computationally explicit theory and methods, and provide evidence for an important organizational principle for the mental lexicon and the broader conceptual knowledge system. (shrink)

This paper will address the political and ethical ramifications of Derrida's concern for friendship in relation to his concerns with the future of democracy, rights of hospitality and cosmopolitics. The questions addressed read as follows: Is there a way we can get beyond this stance which not only consolidates a friendship of the ‘perhaps’ with a friendship of the promise, but also implicates their consolidation with the very future of what we today call democracy? Is there a way in which (...) we can substantiate something more than a romanticized call for a future integration of friendship and democracy while avoiding the pitfalls of on one hand, substantiating a model of friendship for politics or, on the other, offering a disguised and naïve return to a metaphysics of friendship as the saving grace of social unity? Through a close reading of the conclusion to Politics of Friendship as well as his concerns with friendship in Spectres of Marx and Rogues: Two Essays on Reason it will be argued that Derrida's insistence on the future of friendship is bound up with the notion of an ethical promise to the thought of friendship as the condition for its political and ethical relevance. (shrink)

Various social animal species have been noted to inhibit aggressive attacks when a conspecific displays submission cues. Blair (1993) has suggested that humans possess a functionally similar mechanism which mediates the suppression of aggression in the context of distress cues. He has suggested that this mechanism is a prerequisite for the development of the moral/conventional distinction; the consistently observed distinction in subject's judgments between moral and conventional transgressions. Psychopaths may lack this violence inhibitor. A causal model is developed showing (...) how the lack of this mechanism would explain the core behavioural symptoms associated with the psychopathic disorder. A prediction of such a causal model would be that psychopaths should fail to make the moral/conventional distinction. This prediction was confirmed. The implication of this finding for other theories of morality is discussed. (shrink)

The notion that God and the world are mutually interdependent is generally taken to be unique to twentieth-century process theology. Largely, process thinkers have focused on classical theists, rather than the mystics. My thesis, however, is that, centuries before process came along, there were Western mystical concepts stressing that God needed the universe in order to become conscious and complete. In support of my thesis, I will provide a synopsis of the doctrines of God as found in mystics such as (...) Boehme, Dionysius, Eckhart, and then show how Whitehead’s aesthetic provides a coherent philosophical psychology of ecstasy. Key words: aesthetic experience, causal efficacy, consequent nature of God, ecstasy, feeling, German Romanticism, primordial nature of God, reformed subjectivist principle, Nicht, unconscious experience. (shrink)

Researchers have long suspected that grapheme-color synaesthesia is useful, but research on its utility has so far focused primarily on episodic memory and perceptual discrimination. Here we ask whether it can be harnessed during rule-based Category learning. Participants learned through trial and error to classify grapheme pairs that were organized into categories on the basis of their associated synaesthetic colors. The performance of synaesthetes was similar to non-synaesthetes viewing graphemes that were physically colored in the same way. Specifically, synaesthetes learned (...) to categorize stimuli effectively, they were able to transfer this learning to novel stimuli, and they falsely recognized grapheme-pair foils, all like non-synaesthetes viewing colored graphemes. These findings demonstrate that synaesthesia can be exploited when learning the kind of material taught in many classroom settings. (shrink)

To the Editor: It was with great interest that our Canadian Palliative Sedation Therapy Guideline working group read Jeffrey Berger's recent article ("Rethinking Guidelines for the Use of Palliative Sedation," May-June 2010). Given our own group's efforts to develop national guidelines, we have rethought the issue of palliative sedation therapy several times over the past year.The use of clear and concise definitions is fundamental to the development of any consensus guidelines on this topic. In the article, the term "palliative sedation (...) to unconsciousness," or PSU, implies the concerning assumption that sedation will knowingly be to unconsciousness in the palliative case under consideration. This conflicts with .. (shrink)

Three public lectures delivered in the Chemistry Lecture Hall of the Rice Institute, April 9, 10, and 11, 1928, by Wilder D. Bancroft, Ph.D., D.Sc., World War Memorial Professor of Physical Chemistry at Cornell University.

Treating mathematical science as a distinct cultural entity subject to environmental factors which influence its evolution, the author examines the creation and development of its major concepts since early times.