Self-regulation in early childhood is an important predictor of success across a variety of indicators in life, including health, well-being, and earnings. Although conceptually self-regulation has been defined as multifaceted, previous research has not investigated whether there is conceptual and empirical overlap between the factors that comprise self-regulation or if they are distinct. In this study, using a bifactor model, we tested the shared and unique variance among self-regulation constructs and prediction to pre-academic and social-emotional skills. The sample included 932 (...) preschool children, their parents, and their teachers in the United States. Children’s self-regulation was assessed using measures of executive function, behavioral self-regulation, and emotion regulation. The bifactor model demonstrated a common overarching self-regulation factor, as well as distinct executive function and emotion regulation factors. The common overarching self-regulation factor and executive function predicted children’s pre-academic and social-emotional skills. The emotion regulation factor predicted children’s social-emotional skills. Identifying the shared and unique aspects of self-regulation may have important implications for supporting children’s regulatory skills as well as their success in school. (shrink)

Cognitive reappraisal is an important emotion regulation strategy that shows considerable developmental change in its use and effectiveness. This paper presents a systematic review of the evidence base regarding the development of cognitive reappraisal from early childhood through adolescence and provides methodological recommendations for future research. We searched Scopus, PsycINFO, and ERIC for empirical papers measuring cognitive reappraisal in normative samples of children and youth between the ages of 3 and 18 years published in peer-reviewed journals through August 9th, 2018. (...) We identified 118 studies that met our inclusion criteria. We first present a quantitative review of the methodologies used to investigate cognitive reappraisal in children and adolescents, with attention to variations in methodologies by the sample age range. We then present a qualitative review of findings with attention to: the age at which children begin to effectively use cognitive reappraisal to regulate their emotions, and developmental changes in cognitive reappraisal from early childhood through adolescence. We consider how methodological differences may contribute to inconsistencies in findings, highlight gaps in the literature that remain to be addressed, and make recommendations for future directions. (shrink)

Paul Krugman and others deny that bitcoin has legitimate uses. Critics like Krugman also fail to distinguish bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies. But once we isolate bitcoin from the rest of the field, we see how special, and how useful, it is. In this chapter, we explain why bitcoin is unique among cryptocurrencies as a credibly neutral monetary asset and why this is important. Its uniqueness doesn’t owe entirely to its age (as the oldest) or market ranking (as the most valuable). (...) As a credibly neutral monetary asset, bitcoin solves problems for those in less than ideal circumstances. And beyond bitcoin’s functionality, its origin and surrounding culture also help to explain why people trust bitcoin more than any other cryptocurrency to solve these problems. Nothing else comes close. This gap between bitcoin and everything else has implications for policy-making, journalism, and academic research. (shrink)

Allthough small business accounts for over 90% of businesses in U.K. and indeed elsewhere, they remain the largely uncharted area of ethics. There has not been any research based on the perspective of small business owners, to define what echical delemmas they face and how, if at all, they resolve them. This paper explores ethics from the perspective of small business owner, using focus groups and reports on four clearly identifiable themes of ethical delemmas; entrepreneurial activity itself, conflicts of personal (...) values with business needs, social responsibility and the impact of owners' personality on business ethics. The mechanisms for resolving ethical dilemmas is not at all clear, as there appears to be a web of filters which are used in an inter-connected way. However a common starting point for resolving an ethical delemma which involves others is based on identifying who it is (e.g., a friend or institution) and the quality of the relationship with that person. The research yielded a rich source of material on business ethics and it is clear that future researchers must focus on this sector if business ethics is to make significant advances. (shrink)

I defend and revise the systematic account of normative functions (teleofunctions), as recently developed by Gerhard Schlosser and by W. D. Christensen and M. H. Bickhard. This account proposes that teleofunctions are had by structures that play certain kinds of roles in complex systems. This theory is an alternative to the historical etiological account of teleofunctions, developed by Ruth Millikan and others. The historical etiological account is susceptible to a general ontological problem that has been under-appreciated, and that offers important (...) reasons to adopt the systematic account. However, the systematic account must be revised to allow for two distinct kinds of teleofunctions in order to avoid another ontological problem. (shrink)

This article analyzes the origins of the “responsible corporate officer” doctrine: the trial of Joseph Dotterweich. That doctrine holds that an officer may be personally liable for the criminal act of a subordinate if the officer was, in some indefinite way, able to prevent the violation. Applying this doctrine, the prosecution of Dotterweich entailed strict liability for a strict liability offense. The underlying offenses—the interstate sale of one misbranded and adulterated drug and one misbranded drug—were said to be strict liability (...) offenses. And then, with respect to Dotterweich as the corporation’s general manager, the government argued that he was strictly liable because he stood in “responsible relation” to the company’s acts. The government never tried to prove that the company, Buffalo Pharmacal, was negligent, nor did it try to prove that Dotterweich was negligent in his supervision of the employees of Buffalo Pharmacal. The prosecutor and judge were candid about this theory throughout the trial, although the judge conceded that it seemed bizarre and unfair. The defense lawyer repeatedly sought to inject what became known throughout the trial as the “question of good faith,” but was circumvented at almost every turn. What would thus seem to be the crux of any criminal trial—the personal fault of the defendant—was carefully shorn from the jury’s consideration. The government’s theory was so at odds with intuitive notions of liability and blame that, as one probes into the case, and looks at the language used in the government’s appellate briefs, imputations of moral fault inevitably crept in. Yet the government was not entitled to make such accusations, as it had pruned moral considerations from the trial. The article argues that the responsible corporate officer doctrine can never enjoy a secure place in our legal system. First, the doctrine is at a minimum in tension with, and often in direct opposition to, basic principles of the criminal law; and second, the doctrine fails, when followed to its logical conclusions, to accord with basic notions of fair play. The article concludes that the responsible corporate officer doctrine is either unnecessary, in cases in which the evidence establishes personal fault, or unjust, in cases in which it creates liability in the absence of personal fault through the unspecified notion of “responsibility.” The Dotterweich case illustrates what is contemplated by the latter possibility, and why it is problematic in any judicial system that purports, in the words of the Model Penal Code, “to safeguard conduct that is without fault from condemnation as criminal.”. (shrink)

Recent evidence on intertemporal choice suggests that decision-makers may exhibit both increasing and decreasing impatience simultaneously, called inverse-S discounting. This paper introduces trichotomic discounted utility to model inverse-S discounting. Under trichotomic discounted utility the decision-maker distinguishes between short-term delays, medium-term delays, and long-term delays. Exponential discounting holds within each category, but not necessarily across each category. We provide preference foundations for trichotomic discounted utility in the timed outcomes framework and in the consumption streams framework. The key axiom is a weakening (...) of the time consistency axiom that allows for both increasing and decreasing impatience. We also consider a weak, local version of time consistency, and show that this plausible condition is satisfied only by discount functions with exponential “pieces”. (shrink)

This article presents a process account of some typicality effects and related similarity-dependent accuracy and response time phenomena that arise in the context of supervised concept acquisition. We describe Symbolic Concept Acquisition (SCA), a computational system that acquires and activates category prediction rules. In contrast to gradient representations, SCA performs by probing for prediction rules in a series of discrete steps. For learning new rules, it acquires general rules but then incrementally learns more specific ones. In describing SCA, we emphasize (...) its functionality in terms of accuracy and efficiency and motivate its design within the set of symbolic mechanisms and memory structures defined by the Soar architecture (Laird, Newell & Rosenbloom, 1987). For replicating human behavior, we first show how SCA exhibits some typicality effects in the course of learning responding faster and more accurately to more typical test examples. Then, using data from human experiments, we evaluate SCA's qualitative predictions on accuracy and response time on individual dataset instances. We show how SCA's predictions correlate with human data across three experimental conditions concerning the effect of instruction on learning strategy. (shrink)

The publication in theJournal of the American Medical Association of a narrative entitled “It's Over, Debbie,” in which a gynecology resident apparently performs euthanasia, has stirred considerable debate characterized by varying interpretations not only of the ethical issues involved but of the meaning of the text itself. Formal analysis reveals the narrative to be strikingly literary in its ambiguity, its foregrounding of its own textuality, and its dominant structure of repetition and reversal. The analysis points to features that account for (...) some of the varying interpretations in the debate, and it calls into question the relation of the text to whatever events it may represent and to how the resident may have perceived these events. (shrink)

In 2017 and 2018 [Name of research project] organized two transnational youth resistance art workshops. These workshops addressed online social justice issues and placed emphasis on pushing back against technology-facilitated violence and surveillance in networked spaces. Our engagement with these workshops raised three dilemmas associated with these sorts of resistive social justice art projects. This article explores these dilemmas, which include how to enable the production of digital art in a manner that is attentive to intersectional issues of digital literacy (...) and access; artistic appropriations of sexually explicit, discriminatory or hateful speech and their relation to cultural appropriation; and defamation, privacy, copyright and trademark considerations relating to artistic appropriations. In addressing these dilemmas, examples of regulatory frameworks shaping resistance opportunities and social justice initiatives are highlighted, along with suggestions for addressing these dilemmas for those who may wish to facilitate or engage in youth resistance art workshops in future. (shrink)

In spite of ethical analyses assimilating the palliative deactivation of pacemakers to commonly accepted withdrawings of life-sustaining therapy, many clinicians remain ethically uncomfortable with pacemaker deactivation at the end of life. Various reasons have been posited for this discomfort. Some cardiologists have suggested that reluctance to deactivate pacemakers may stem from a sense that the pacemaker has become part of the patient’s “self.” The authors suggest that Daniel Sulmasy is correct to contend that any such identification of the pacemaker is (...) misguided. The authors argue that clinicians uncomfortable with pacemaker deactivation are nevertheless correct to see it as incompatible with the traditional medical ethics of withdrawal of support. Traditional medical ethics is presently taken by many to sanction pacemaker deactivation when such deactivation honors the patient’s right to refuse treatment. The authors suggest that the right to refuse treatment applies to treatments involving ongoing physician agency. This right cannot underwrite patient demands that physicians reverse the effects of treatments previously administered, in which ongoing physician agency is no longer implicated. The permanently indwelling pacemaker is best seen as such a treatment. As such, its deactivation in the pacemaker-dependent patient is best seen not as withdrawal of support but as active ending of life. That being the case, clinicians adhering to the usual ethical analysis of withdrawal of support are correct to be uncomfortable with pacemaker deactivation at the end of life. (shrink)

Experimental studies suggest that individuals exhibit more risk aversion in choices among prospects when the payment and resolution of uncertainty are immediate relative to when it is delayed. This leads to preference reversals that cannot be attributed to discounting. When data suggest that utility is time-independent, probability weighting functions, such as those used to model prospect theory preferences, can accommodate such reversals. We propose a simple descriptive model with a two-parameter probability weighting function where one of these parameters depends on (...) the time at which a prospect is resolved. The time-dependent parameter is responsible for the curvature of the probability weighting function and is regarded as an index of sensitivity towards changes in probabilities. We provide conditions that characterize increased sensitivity towards more distant probabilities; this can account for the observed relatively less risk aversion towards delayed prospects. In our framework, the discount function is unrestricted, such that the model is compatible with empirical findings of non-constant discounting. In a simple application to bargaining we illustrate when it is advantageous for an individual to advance or delay the bargaining resolution time if an opponent displays increased sensitivity towards probability changes with delay. (shrink)

The book develops a comprehensive and measured case that bitcoin is a net benefit to the world, despite its imperfections. Resistance Money is intended for all, from the clueless to the specialist, from the proponent to the die-hard skeptic, and everyone in between.

In this article, we describe what cryptocurrency is, how it works, and how it relates to familiar conceptions of and questions about money. We then show how normative questions about monetary policy find new expression in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These questions can play a role in addressing not just what money is, but what it should be. A guiding theme in our discussion is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results (...) of disciplines like computer science and economics. Note: this article is the first entry within a two-part sequence on the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Cryptocurrency. (shrink)

In this article, we identify three key design dimensions along which cryptocurrencies differ -- privacy, censorship-resistance, and consensus procedure. Each raises important normative issues. Our discussion uncovers new ways to approach the question of whether Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies should be used as money, and new avenues for developing a positive answer to that question. A guiding theme is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results of disciplines like computer science and (...) economics. Note: this article is the second entry within a two-part sequence on the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Cryptocurrency. (shrink)

Public health care interventions—regarding vaccination, obesity, and HIV, for example—standardly take the form of information dissemination across a community. But information networks can vary importantly between different ethnic communities, as can levels of trust in information from different sources. We use data from the Greater Pittsburgh Random Household Health Survey to construct models of information networks for White and Black communities--models which reflect the degree of information contact between individuals, with degrees of trust in information from various sources correlated with (...) positions in that social network. With simple assumptions regarding belief change and social reinforcement, we use those modeled networks to build dynamic agent-based models of how information can be expected to flow and how beliefs can be expected to change across each community. With contrasting information from governmental and religious sources, the results show importantly different dynamic patterns of belief polarization within the two communities. (shrink)

Psychopathy refers to a range of complex behaviors and personality traits, including callousness and antisocial behavior, typically studied in criminal populations. Recent studies have used self-reports to examine psychopathic traits among noncriminal samples. The goal of the current study was to examine the underlying factor structure of the Self-Report of Psychopathy Scale–Short Form (SRP-SF) across complementary samples and examine the impact of gender on factor structure. We examined the structure of the SRP-SF among 2,554 young adults from three undergraduate samples (...) and a high-risk young adult sample. Using confirmatory factor analysis, a four-correlated factor model and a four-bifactor model showed good fit to the data. Evidence of weak invariance was found for both models across gender. These findings highlight that the SRP-SF is a useful measure of low-level psychopathic traits in noncriminal samples, although the underlying factor structure may not fully translate across men and women. (shrink)

Boyer's formulation neglects that humans are embodied agents. It is a biological imperative to distinguish self from other. Ownership of ideas, bodies, objects, and locations is an inevitable extension of this. We argue that (1) the body's capability influences the inputs that guide future actions, and (2) bodies in action influence all of cognition, from perception to decision making.

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

A model of autobiographical remembering and the creation of personal culture is proposed. In this model we hypothesize that autobiographical memories are instantiations--objectifications as in metaphors or idioms-constituted through reconstructive processes that come to be recognized as self. Such memories are subsequently subjectified as personal culture. Our emphasis is on the functions and uses of autobiographical remembering, especially in interaction with others, where reconstructed memories are marked with affective significance. We propose that memories become autobiographical as a function of how (...) they are used--to establish and maintain intimacies or to calm ourselves during times of hightened anxiety-and signified by affect and emotion. From an object-relations theory perspective, autobiographical memories are seen as transitional phenomena (selfobjects) that reconstitue caregiving relationships both when we are alone and when we are interacting with others. (shrink)

McCullough et al. propose an evolved cognitive revenge system which imposes retaliatory costs on aggressors. They distinguish between this and other forms of punishment (e.g., those administered by judges) which are not underpinned by a specifically designed evolutionary mechanism. Here we outline mechanisms and circumstances through which the revenge system might nonetheless infiltrate decision-making within the criminal justice system.

The integration of digital phenotyping in psychiatry promises unprecedented insights into mental health, particularly in college settings where mental well-being is a growing concern. The COVID-19...

All those interested in the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, and more generally contemporary Catholic scholarship, problems in philosophy of religion, and ...