Learning through social interaction has been documented widely; however, how introverted people are socially engaged in learning is largely unknown. The aim of this study was, first, to examine the reliability and validity of the social engagement scale among students at Finnish comprehensive schools. Then, we aimed to examine the interaction effect of introversion and social engagement on self-esteem, schoolwork engagement, and school burnout. Based on a sample of 862 ninth grade students in Finland, we found that a two-factor model (...) best fitted the social engagement scale (i.e., social engagement and social disengagement). Further, we found that introverts with high social engagement have higher self-esteem than introverts with low social engagement. Our results implied that introverts should be given extra support when they encounter group work in school. (shrink)

The schoolwork engagement inventory: Energy, Dedication, and Absorption is a measure of students' engagement in schoolwork and has been demonstrated valid in Western student populations. In this study, we adapted this inventory to and tested its psychometric appropriates in Chinese upper secondary school students. Participants were 1,527 general high school students and 850 vocational high school students. The mean age of the total sample was 16.21 years. The results of confirmatory factor analyses showed that a modified one-factor model fitted the (...) data best. The results of the multigroup CFA showed that the factor structure was metrically invariant across school tracks and scalarly invariant across gender and school types. Moreover, schoolwork engagement was negatively related to emotional exhaustion and positively related to self-efficacy, perseverance of effort, teacher–student relationships, and life satisfaction. Overall, the CEDA can be regarded as a valid measure for the assessment of student engagement in the Chinese upper secondary school context. (shrink)

Current educational reforms concerning curricula and digitalization challenge educators to meet new demands for learning and schooling. What is common for current educational reforms is that they tend to emphasize competencies that are not related to the traditional subject-matters and reflect a stance which presents learning as a naturally reflective and collaborative act. It is often assumed that teachers are automatically ready to implement ideas of this kind in practice. In this study, we propose that teachers’ theories about knowledge, knowing (...) and learning, particularly their epistemic theories, may be related to how teachers approach these reforms which challenge their previous ways of working and how they perceive their wellbeing at work. To examine these matters, we explored the dynamic interrelations between teachers’ epistemic theories, conformity with the novel curricular and digital reforms, perceptions of the school leadership, work engagement and burnout. Participants were Finnish class teachers and subject-matter teachers. Both data sets were collected before the COVID-19 pandemic. For data analysis, we plotted correlation network figures. Results showed that if teachers’ epistemic theory was in harmony with the curricular or digital reforms, there is a positive association with work engagement and negative association with burnout. In sum, results of this provided a hint of the phenomenon suggesting that teachers’ epistemic theories may be a factor which buffers teachers to meet the current epistemic and developmental challenges of teachers’ profession, and furthermore, serve as grounds for a positive association for teachers to feel adequate and satisfied in their work. (shrink)

To better understand the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math aspiration, the article examines the critical role of domain-specific motivation. Using longitudinal data from 5th and 6th grade students, person-oriented analyses was applied to understand the gendered motivational profiles and their longitudinal influence on achievement and STEM aspiration. Specifically, we aimed to derive motivational belief profiles regarding science, mathematics, and language, analyze the stability and change in the profiles between the 5th and 6th grade, assess the relationship between (...) motivational profiles and achievement and STEM aspiration, and test for gender differences. We derived four motivational profiles for both years: high motivation in all subjects, high mathematics motivation, low mathematics motivation, and low motivation in all subjects. Latent transition analysis revealed that most students remained in the same profile throughout the 2 years. We found evidence of gendered differences in the motivational profiles and the chance of transitioning between profiles. More girls are characterized by low math motivation, while boys are more likely to transition to higher math motivation in 6th grade. The motivational difference is reflected in their achievement, although not strongly coupled with their STEM aspiration. The findings suggest that at this developmental stage, Finnish students have not developed a strong association between STEM aspiration and their domain-specific motivation, although their motivation may have influenced their achievement. Interpretation and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Perceptual theories of emotion purport to avoid the problems of traditional cognitivism and noncognitivism by modelling emotion on perception, which shares the most conspicuous dimensions of emotion, intentionality and phenomenality. In this paper, I shall reconstrue and discuss four key arguments that perceptual theorists have presented in order to show that emotion is a kind of perception, or that there are close analogies between emotion and perception. These arguments are, from stronger to weaker claims: the perceptual system argument; the argument (...) from noninferential structure; the argument from epistemic role; and the argument from phenomenology. I argue that, while the arguments in favour of assimilating emotion to perception fail, the analogies between emotion and perception are not as close as perceptual theorists suggest even if some emotions resemble perception more than others, thanks to the two-levelled structure of emotional processing. (shrink)

Existing scientific concepts of group or shared or collective emotion fail to appreciate several elements of collectivity in such emotions. Moreover, the idea of shared emotions is threatened by the individualism of emotions that comes in three forms: ontological, epistemological, and physical. The problem is whether or not we can provide a plausible account of ?straightforwardly shared? emotions without compromising our intuitions about the individualism of emotions. I discuss two philosophical accounts of shared emotions that explain the collectivity of emotions (...) in terms of their intentional structure: Margaret Gilbert's plural subject account, and Hans Bernhard Schmid's phenomenological account. I argue that Gilbert's view fails because it relegates affective experience into a contingent role in emotions and because a joint commitment to feel amounts to the creation of a feeling rule rather than to an emotion. The problems with Schmid's view are twofold: first, a phenomenological fusion of feelings is not necessary for shared emotions and second, Schmid is not sensitive enough to different forms of shared concerns. I then outline my own typology that distinguishes between weakly, moderately, and strongly shared emotions on the basis of the participants? shared concerns of different degree of collectivity, on the one hand, and the synchronization of their emotional responses, on the other hand. All kind of shared emotions in my typology are consistent with the individualism of emotions, while the question about ?straightforward sharing? is argued to be of secondary importance. (shrink)

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. In this article, we study a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration. It did so by reallocating its internal research funds for at least five years to “research platforms” that required researchers from at least two of the three schools within the university to (...) participate. Using data from semi-structured interviews from researchers in three of these platforms, we identify specific tensions that the strategy has generated in this case: in the allocation of platform resources, in the division of labor and disciplinary relations, in choices over scientific output and academic careers. We further show how the particular platform format exacerbates the identified tensions in our case. We suggest that certain features of the current platform policy incentivize shallow interdisciplinary interactions, highlighting potential limits on the value of attempting to push for interdisciplinarity through internal funding. (shrink)

Register-based research can provide important and valuable contributions to public health research, but involves ethical issues concerning the balance of public health benefits and individual autonomy. This study aimed to describe the opinions of the Finnish public about these issues.

Characterized by globalization, increasing pluralism, and new complexities of citizenship, the contemporary world sets challenges to the ways in which we conceptualize the processes of searching for shared solutions to ever-complicated societal problems. Whilst the political rhetoric emphasizes citizen participation, engagement, and “voice”, there are increasing feelings of frustration, incompetence, and disinterest regarding political engagement. In order to conceptually grasp the problematic of searching for shared solutions and the related challenges to education, we draw on John Dewey’s idea of the (...) method of democracy and complement this with some critical perspectives inspired by Antonio Gramsci. Further, we reflect on the implications for contemporary adult education by discussing the notion of competence in the theoretical framework developed. (shrink)

Research on the phenomenology of agency for joint action has so far focused on the sense of agency and control in joint action, leaving aside questions on how it feels to act together. This paper tries to fill this gap in a way consistent with the existing theories of joint action and shared emotion. We first reconstruct Pacherie’s account on the phenomenology of agency for joint action, pointing out its two problems, namely the necessary trade-off between the sense of self- (...) and we-agency; and the lack of affective phenomenology of joint action in general. After elaborating on these criticisms based on our theory of shared emotion, we substantiate the second criticism by discussing different mechanisms of shared affect—feelings and emotions—that are present in typical joint actions. We show that our account improves on Pacherie’s, first by introducing our agentive model of we-agency to overcome her unnecessary dichotomy between a sense of self- and we-agency, and then by suggesting that the mechanisms of shared affect enhance not only the predictability of other agents’ actions as Pacherie highlights, but also an agentive sense of we-agency that emerges from shared emotions experienced in the course and consequence of joint action. (shrink)

This paper provides a reinterpretation of Paulo Freire’s philosophy of hope and suggests that this interpretation may function as a fruitful ground for democratic education that aims to contest the prevailing neoliberal ‘common sense’. The paper defines hope as a democratic virtue required for resisting the discursive practises and affective mechanisms associated with the contemporary neoliberal ethos—those, which Carlos Alberto Torres characterizes as the “neoliberal common sense” and Lauren Berlant as “cruel optimism”. Conclusively, the paper constructs three principles for democratic (...) education –´history as possibility´, ´the ethics of intervention´, and ´democratization’—which are intended to function as a foundation for democratic education through which the virtue of hope can be fostered. These principles are argued to form a basis for reviving the political dimensions of education and thus allowing collective transformative action. (shrink)

There is a widely extended viewpoint about physical possibility, what we will call Standard Approach, which holds that the physically possible is delimited by the nomological structure of physical theories: to be physically possible is to be in accordance with the physical laws, to be physically impossible is to be prohibited by physical laws and to be physically necessary is to be demanded by the physical laws. However, it is possible to show that this approach is too relaxed and permissive (...) when it comes to collecting and systematizing many of the modal intuitions present in the physical community. In this work we will argue, on the one hand, that the notion of physical possibility is more complex and richer than suggested by the standard approach and, on the other hand, that it is necessary to add some extra elements to the characterization of physical possibility in order to that it is adequate in scientific contexts. (shrink)

Philosophers widely agree that emotions may have or lack appropriateness or fittingness, which in the emotional domain is an analogue of truth. I defend de Sousa's account of emotional truth by arguing that emotions have cognitive content as digitalized evaluative perceptions of the particular object of emotion, in terms of the relevant formal property. I argue that an emotion is true if and only if there is an actual fit between the particular and the formal objects of emotion, and the (...) emotion's propositional content is semantically satisfied, or the target of the emotion exists. Emotions meet the syntactic and disciplinary requirements of minimally truth-apt states. Appropriate fit occurs when lower-level properties of particular objects of emotion provide sufficient warrant to make ascription of the relevant formal properties superassertable. (shrink)

Existing economic models of prosociality have been rather silent in terms of proximate psychological mechanisms. We nevertheless identify the psychologically most informed accounts and offer a critical discussion of their hypotheses for the proximate psychological explanations. Based on convergent evidence from several fields of research, we argue that there nevertheless is a more plausible alternative proximate account available: the social motivation hypothesis. The hypothesis represents a more basic explanation of the appeal of prosocial behavior, which is in terms of anticipated (...) social rewards. We also argue in favor of our own social motivation hypothesis over Robert Sugden’s fellow-feeling account (due originally to Adam Smith). We suggest that social motivation not only stands as a proximate account in its own right but also provides a plausible scaffold for other more sophisticated motivations (e.g., fellow-feelings). We conclude by discussing some possible implications of the social motivation hypothesis on existing modeling practice. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the interdisciplinary theory of collective affective niche construction, which extends the extended mind (ExM) thesis from cognitive to affective phenomena. Although theoretically innovative, the theory lacks a detailed psychological account of how collective affectivity is scaffolded. It has also been criticized for its uncritical assumption of the subject qua the autonomous user of the affective scaffolding as disposable resources, abstracting away from embedded subjectivity in particular techno-political arrangements. We propose that the social motivation hypothesis, an account (...) grounded in recent empirical and theoretical developments in psychology as well as in the classic theory of moral sentiments, will address the former criticism by explicating the basic mechanisms of human social orientation at work in collective affective niche construction. We also begin to address the latter normative criticism in mobilizing a so-called we-mode approach to collective emotion. To make these theoretical dialectics salient, we study social media as a case of collective affective niches, focusing on the impact on subjective well-being. Finally, we briefly identify promising future directions in building a normative theory of affective niche construction on the collective level. (shrink)

Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigate how novices learning the “inner body” acting technique in the context of a community theater project share their experiences of the bodily exercises through verbal and embodied conduct. We focus on how verbal description and bodily enactment of the experience mutually elaborate each other, and how the experienced sensorimotor and affective qualities are made to be witnessed and recognized by the others. Participants describe their experiences without naming qualities. Instead, a display of the experienced (...) qualities is made accessible to others through coordinating the unfolding talk and bodily conduct. In particular, we show how grammatical and action projection is fulfilled by interconnected verbal and embodied conduct, with body movement and posture giving off ineffable experiential qualities. The moving body appears both as a source of the experience and as a resource for depicting perceived qualities to others; additional resources (non-specific person reference and gaze aversion) contribute to organizing the subjective and intersubjective layers of the reflection of the experiences. The study contributes to and extends recent research on sensoriality in interaction by focusing on phenomena of proprioception and interoception. The data are two cases drawn from 60 h of video-recordings made in the context of a devised community theater project. The data are in Finnish with English translations. (shrink)

Background: The concept of dignity can be divided into two main attributes: absolute dignity that calls for recognition of an inner worth of persons and social dignity that can be changeable and can be lost as a result of different social factors and moral behaviours. In this light, the nursing profession has a professional dignity that is to be continually constructed and re-constructed and involves both main attributes of dignity. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine how nurses (...) described nursing’s professional dignity in internal medicine and surgery departments in hospital settings. Research design: The research design was qualitative. Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the ethics committees of the healthcare organizations involved. All the participants were provided with information about the purpose and the nature of the study. Participants: A total of 124 nurses participated in this study. Method: The data were collected using 20 focus group sessions in different parts of Italy. The data were analysed by means of a conventional inductive content analysis starting from the information retrieved in order to extract meaning units and sorting the arising phenomena into conceptually meaningful categories and themes. Results: Nursing’s professional dignity was deeply embedded in the innermost part of individuals. Regarding the social part of dignity, a great importance was put on the values that compose nursing’s professional identity, the socio-historical background and the evolution of nursing in the area considered. The social part of dignity was also linked to collaboration with physicians and with healthcare assistants who were thought to have a central role in easing work strain. Equally important, though, was the relationship with peers and senior nurses. Conclusion: The organizational environments under scrutiny with their low staffing levels, overload of work and hierarchical interactions did not promote respect for the dignity of nurses. To understand these professional values, it is pivotal to comprehend the role of different health professions in their cultural milieu and the evolution of the nursing profession in diverse countries. (shrink)

BackgroundHealthcare ethics is neglected in clinical practice in LMICs such as Nepal. The main objective of this study was to assess the current status of knowledge, attitude and practice of healthcare ethics among resident doctors and ward nurses in a tertiary teaching hospital in Nepal.MethodsThis was a cross sectional study conducted among resident doctors and ward nurses in the largest tertiary care teaching hospital of Nepal during January- February 2016 with a self-administered questionnaire. A Cramer’s V value was assessed to (...) ascertain the strength of the differences in the variables between doctors and nurses. Association of variables were determined by Chi square and statistical significance was considered if p value was less than 0.05.ResultsOur study demonstrated that a significant proportion of the doctors and nurses were unaware of major documents of healthcare ethics: Hippocratic Oath, Nuremberg code and Helsinki Declaration. A high percentage of respondents said that their major source of information on healthcare ethics were lectures, books, and journals. Attitude of doctors and nurses were significantly different in 9 out of 22 questions pertaining to different aspects of healthcare ethics. More nurses had agreement than doctors on the tested statements pertaining to different aspects of healthcare ethics except for need of integration of medical ethics in ungraduate curricula,paternalistic attitude of doctor was disagreed more by doctors. Notably, only few doctors stood in support of physician-assisted dying.ConclusionsSignificant proportion of doctors and nurses were unaware of three major documents on healthcare ethics which are the core principles in clinical practice. Provided that a high percentage of respondents had motivation for learning medical ethics and asked for inclusion of medical ethics in the curriculum, it is imperative to avail information on medical ethics through subscription of journals and books on ethics in medical libraries in addition to lectures and training at workplace on medical ethics which can significantly improve the current paucity of knowledge on medical ethics. (shrink)

Fallibilist pluralism is a moral and epistemological position that preserves both broadly conceived ethical pluralisms and the possibility of searching for a shared moral vision. In this essay Katariina Holma defends fallibilist pluralism as an important epistemological contribution to today's theories on citizenship education and analyzes the educational difficulties of adopting fallibilist pluralism as a conceptual framework in which citizens would encounter different others. Holma argues that to be successful, theories on citizenship education require—in addition to a justified philosophical (...) foundation—a more profound psychological understanding of the role emotions play in human morality and moral development. Holma also analyzes two philosophical biases that tend to obscure our understanding of the central role played by emotional dispositions on encountering difference. (shrink)

It is this demand to address questions emerging from these experiential and normative perspectives to which this book on emotions, ethics, and authenticity ...

La Constitución dogmática Lumen gentium ha rescatado desde la tradición cristiana la expresión Iglesia doméstica para referirse a la familia. Dicha expresión posee en sí misma una riqueza incalculable al momento de descubrir el misterio de la esencia y misión de la familia cristiana, por lo que aporta elementos fundamentales para la elaboración de una teología de la familia. Es por este motivo que la presente investigación pretende levantar una propuesta de lectura eclesiológica de la Iglesia doméstica, a partir de (...) cuatro claves de lectura: cristológica, sacramental, pneumatológica y escatológica. The dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium has rescued from Christian tradition, the expression Domestic Church referred to the family. Such expression possess in itself an invaluable richness considering that discovers the essence and the mission of Christian family. That´s why it contributes with fundamental matters to the elaboration of a Theology of the Family. For this reason, this research pretends to raise a proposal of ecclesiological reading of Domestic Church, based in four key reading points: Christological, sacramental, pneumatological and eschatological. (shrink)

El propósito del artículo es profundizar el carácter absoluto de la auto-comunicación de Dios al hombre, lo cual entregará un aporte a la teología actual en lo que se refiere a la comprensión y utilización del concepto de auto-comunicación, y a la vez entender de un modo renovado el encuentro entre Dios y el hombre, lo que permitirá hallar nuevas pistas para la entrega del mensaje cristiano al hombre contemporáneo. El escrito aborda el tema en dos tópicos: el primero en (...) razón del Dios absoluto, como fundamento de la auto-comunicación y el segundo que trata el carácter trinitario de la auto-comunicación absoluta. (shrink)

The present study combines dehumanization research with the concept of organizational trust to examine how employees perceive various types of maltreatment embedded within the organizational practices that form the ethical climate of an organization. With the help of grounded theory methodology, we analyzed 188 employment exit interview transcripts from an ICT subcontracting company. By examining perceived trustworthiness and perceived humanness, we found that dehumanizing employees can deteriorate trust within organizations. The violations found in the empirical material were divided into animalistic (...) and mechanistic forms of dehumanization and linked to perceived integrity and benevolence, respectively. Based on the results, a model describing the link between dehumanization and trust is presented and discussed in relation to the ways in which perceptions of humanness become rooted in practices and affect the basic assumptions underlying ethical organizational behavior. (shrink)

Resumen En el siguiente artículo se pretende hacer una lectura teológica del poder siguiendo a Karl Rahner en su concepción del mismo como don, tarea y posibilidad. El poder es don divino para el ser humano el cual participa del poder de Dios, sin embargo, cuando lo ejerce puede corromperse y pierde la finalidad para lo que es entregado. De este modo, el mal ejercicio del poder tiene repercusiones tanto para la persona como para la sociedad, graves consecuencias, por eso (...) es necesario asumir la responsabilidad de cada acción. En este sentido, el ejercicio del poder es una tarea esencial para la vida en sociedad y, a la vez, es una posibilidad de construcción del Reino con alcances escatológicos. Abtracts The following article intends to make a theological reading of power following Karl Rahner in his conception of it as a gift, task and possibility. Power is a divine gift for the human being who participates in the power of God, however when exercised it can be corrupted and loses the purpose for what is delivered. In this way, the bad exercise of power has repercussions for both the person and society, serious consequences, that is why it is necessary to take responsibility for each action. In this sense, the exercise of power is an essential task for life in society and at the same time, it is a possibility of building the Kingdom with eschatological scope. (shrink)

This article investigates conceptions of morality within the framework of ressentimentful victimhood in the manosphere, while also exploring avenues for resistance among young individuals encountering the “hatred pipeline”. In Study 1, we use the emotional mechanism of ressentiment to examine how incels construct narratives of victimhood rooted in the notion of sexual entitlement that remains owed and unfulfilled, alongside its “black pill” variant emphasising moral and epistemic superiority. Through a linguistic corpus analysis and content examination of 4chan and Incel.is blog (...) posts, we find evidence of ressentiment morality permeating the language and communication within the incel community, characterised by blame directed at women, and the pervasive themes of victimhood, powerlessness, and injustice. In Study 2, we delve into young individuals’ reflections on incel morality and victimhood narratives as they engage with online networks of toxic masculinity in the manosphere. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with young participants who have accessed the manosphere, we explore their perceptions of risks, attribution of blame, and experiences of empathy towards individuals navigating the “hatred pipeline”. Our analysis underscores the significance of ressentiment in elucidating alternative conceptions of morality and victimhood, while shedding light on the potential for acceptance or resistance within online environments characterised by hatred. (shrink)

Affect control theory is a sociological theory developed for modeling and predicting emotions and social behaviors in social interaction. In this commentary, I identify a few potential problems in the theory, as presented in the target article and elsewhere, and in its suggested compatibility with other major emotion theories. The first problem concerns ACT’s capacity to model emotion generation insofar as emotions have nonconceptual content. The second problem focuses on the limits of modeling interaction on the basis of fixed affective (...) meanings of identities. Finally, ACT has problems with explaining the dynamic change of affective meanings, given its tenets that people seek to maintain the established affective meanings of social roles and situations and deflections are not expressed in behavior but compensated by identity-confirming behavior. (shrink)

In this article, I will introduce and explore the critical spirit component of critical thinking and defend it as significant for the adequate conceptualization of critical thinking as an educational aim. The idea of critical spirit has been defended among others by such eminent supporters of critical thinking as John Dewey, Israel Scheffler, and Harvey Siegel but has not thus far been explored and analyzed sufficiently. I will argue that the critical spirit has, in addition to cognitive, also moral and (...) emotional dimensions. Finally, I will touch upon some critiques which see that critical thinking either does not or ought not to involve moral or emotional dimensions. (shrink)

Finland is internationally known as one of the leading centers of twentieth century analytic philosophy. This volume offers for the first time an overall survey of the Finnish analytic school. The rise of this trend is illustrated by original articles of Edward Westermarck, Eino Kaila, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Jaakko Hintikka. Contributions of Finnish philosophers are then systematically discussed in the fields of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, ethics and social philosophy. Metaphilosophical reflections on (...) the nature of philosophy are highlighted by the Finnish dialogue between analytic philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory. (shrink)

There are two opposite views about the relation of collective emotions and normativity. On the one hand, the philosopher Margaret Gilbert (1997, 2002, 2014) has argued for years that collective emotions are by constitution normative as they involve the participants’ joint commitment to the emotion. On the other hand, some theorists especially in sociology (Durkheim 2009, 2013a; Collins, 2004) have claimed that the values of particular objects and/or social norms originate from and are reinforced by collective emotions that are intentionally (...) directed or associated with the relevant objects or actions. In this chapter, I discuss these opposing views about the relation of collective emotions and normativity, defending the latter view. While collective emotions typically emerge in situations in which some shared value or concern of the participants is at stake, I suggest that collective emotions may also ontologically ground norms in the manner suggested by Durkheim. I present support for this view from a recent sociological case study on the emergence of punitive norms in the social movement Occupy Geneva. (shrink)

Artikkeli on kommentaari Elisa Aaltolan teoksesta Varieties of Empathy – Moral Psychology and Animal Ethics, joka käsittelee erilaisia empatian muotoja sekä niiden moraalisia ansioita ja rajoituksia etiikassa, erityisesti suhtautumisessa eläimiin. Totean aluksi olevani Aaltolan kanssa samaa mieltä teoksen pääasioista, ja keskityn kommenteissani kahteen sivuteemaan: kognitiivisen empatian moraaliseen statukseen ja reflektiivisen empatian sisältöön. Kognitiivisen empatian osalta pohdin ovatko narsistisista tai psykopaattisista persoonallisuushäiriöistä kärsivät henkilöt parhaita esimerkkejä affektiivisen empatian puutteen moraalisista vaikutuksista. Ehdotan että kognitiivisen empatian moraalista statusta voisi tutkia myös sellaisilla henkilöillä, (...) joiden hoidossa käytetään beetasalpaajia, jotka heikentävät tunteisiin kuuluvaa kehollista aktivaatiota ja siten oletettavasti myös affektiivista empatiaa. Reflektiivisen empatian osalta pohdin tarkkaavaisuuden roolia kriittisessä reflektiossa. Aaltola erittelee tarkkaavaisuutta mindfulness-ajattelun sekä Iris Murdochin ja Simone Weilin filosofioiden avulla. Tarkkaavaisuuteen myös kuuluu kriittinen näkökulma, sillä sen tarkoitus on paljastaa ja oikaista epäjohdonmukaisuudesta, puutteellisesta tiedosta tai ymmärryksestä tai puolueellisuudesta johtuvia virheitä empaattisessa suhtautumisessa muihin eläimiin ja ihmisiin. Totean, että Aaltolan esitys jättää kuitenkin avoimeksi, mistä tällainen kriittisen arvioinnin ja eettisen kultivoinnin näkökulma nousee, jos tarkkaavaisuus ei ole luonteeltaan analyyttista eikä ensisijaisesti rationaalistakaan. Näistä huomautuksista huolimatta suosittelen Aaltolan teosta kaikille empatiasta ja etiikasta kiinnostuneille. (shrink)