Humans have been shown capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness, and how this differs from learning about conscious cues. Participants’ manual (Experiment 1) and saccadic (Experiment 2) response speeds were influenced by both conscious and unconscious (...) cues. However, participants were only able to adapt to reversals of the cue-target contingencies (Experiment 1) or changes in the reliability of the cues (Experiment 2) when consciously aware of the cues. Therefore, although visual cues can be processed unconsciously, learning about cues over a few trials requires conscious awareness of them. Finally, we discuss implications for cognitive theories of consciousness. (shrink)

Male-dominated and sex segregated elite professional and amateur sport1 in North America constitutes a "sport nexus" (Burstyn, 1999; Heywood & Dworkin, 2003) that combines economic and cultural influence to reinforce and perpetuate gender injustice. The sport nexus is an androcentric sex-segregated commercially powerful set of institutions that is highly visible and at the same time almost completely taken for granted to the extent that its anti-democratic impetus goes virtually unnoticed. The sport nexus’s hegemonic role in defining sporting norms (Coakley & (...) Donnelly, 2004) means that its role in shaping lower level amateur and recreational sporting institutions and cultures is highly significant. Fraser (2007) defines gender justice, and hence democracy, in terms of "participatory parity," that is, material and cultural equality for women. The sport nexus itself is characterized by highly gendered occupational segregation (Coventry, 2004). It further contributes to gender injustice, homophobia and transphobia by promoting the ideology of the two sex system (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and gendering citizenship as fundamentally male (Burstyn, 1999). Feminist strategies for sport reformation attempt to reduce or eradicate the role of the sport nexus in legitimating and perpetuating gender injustice. In this article I consider the potential of these strategies and conclude with a set of recommendations for transforming organized sport at both elite and recreational levels. (shrink)

Certified nursing assistants (CNAs) provide the majority of direct care to nursing home residents in the United States and, therefore, are keys to ensuring optimal health outcomes for this frail older adult population. These diverse direct care workers, however, are often not recognized for their important contributions to older adult care and are subjected to poor working conditions. It is probable that social‐based discrimination lies at the core of poor treatment toward CNAs. This review uses perspectives from critical social theory (...) to explore the phenomenon of social‐based discrimination toward CNAs that may originate from social order, power, and culture. Understanding manifestations of social‐based discrimination in nursing homes is critical to creating solutions for severe disparity problems among perceived lower‐class workers and subsequently improving resident care delivery. (shrink)

Since they are modern characters, living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age which preceded it, I have drawn my people as split and vacillating, a mixture of the old and the new. and I think it not improbable that modern ideas may, through the media of newspapers and conversation, have seeped down into the social stratum which exists below stairs. My souls are agglomerations of past and present cultures, scraps from books and (...) newspapers, fragments of humanity, torn shreds of once-fine clothing that has become rags, in just the way that a human soul is patched together. (shrink)

There is a time of day immediately before dusk when the outline of every object becomes sharply delineated. It was just that moment. The lacerated edges of wooden beams in the wreckage, the freshness of the rents in the shredded trees, and the curled zinc sheets with their puddles of rain water - everything appeared almost unpleasantly vivid. In the extreme west only a horizontal line of scarlet was to be seen in the sky between two or three towering black (...) burned-out buildings. Flecks of scarlet were also visible through the windows of the ruined structures. It was as if someone had turned on a red light in a deserted and uninhabited house. (Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn). (shrink)

Accounts of normal appearances in Goffman's Stigma and Garfinkel's "Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person" are compared. It is found that in these two classic interactionist texts the formulation of stigma requires the production of normal appearances that occlude interactants' selves. In effect, selves are stigmatized. The essay reads Goffman and Garfinkel in terms of each other, and in certain emergent paradoxes rediscovers the missing (stigmatized) selves.

Understanding legal rules not as determinants of behavior but as points of reference for conduct, this volume considers the ways in which rules are invoked, referred to, interpreted, put forward, or blurred. It also asks how both legal practitioners and lay participants conceive of and participate in the construction of facts and rules, and thus, through decisions, defenses, pleas, files, evidence, interviews and documents, actively participate in law's life. With attention to the formulation of notions such as person, evidence, intention, (...) cause and responsibility in the course of legal practices, Legal Rules in Practice provides the outlines of a praxiological anthropology of law - an anthropology that focuses on words, concepts and reasoning as actively used to solve conflicts with the help of legal rules. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of law with interests in ethnomethodology, rule-based conduct and practical reasoning. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRegret over missed opportunities leads adults to take more risks. Given recent evidence that the ability to experience regret impacts decisions made by 6-year-olds, and pronounced interest in the antecedents to risk taking in adolescence, we investigated the age at which a relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making emerges, and whether that relationship changes at different points in development. Six- and 8-year-olds, adolescents and adults completed a sequential risky decision-making task on which information about missed opportunities was available. Children (...) also completed a task designed to measure their ability to report regret when explicitly prompted to do so. The relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making did not emerge until 8 years, at which age it was associated with the ability to explicitly report regret, and was stronger in adults than in adolescents. These novel results highlight the potential importance of the ability to experience r... (shrink)

This paper reports an experimental comparison of attitudes toward time and toward money in experience-based decisions. Preferences were elicited under rank-dependent utility for prospects with two or three consequences expressed either in time or in monetary units. Probabilities were unknown but learned through sampling. More specifically, time and money were compared under two conditions. In a first experiment, both consequences and probabilities of prospects were unknown and learned through sequential sampling. In a second experiment, the possible consequences were revealed after (...) the sampling. A real incentive system was implemented for both time and money. The heterogeneity of preferences was assessed for time and for money through individual and mixed modeling estimations. We observe that the nature of consequences (time or money) modifies probability weighting in terms of elevation and sensitivity. Subjects exhibit more optimism and less sensitivity to probability changes when deciding about time than about money. Revealing the consequences impacts the shape of the utility function and leaves probability weighting unchanged. We also observe that the real incentives have no effect except for the reduction in decision errors. This effect is stronger for money than for time. (shrink)

Essays address the issues involved with man's treatment of animals, from the use of animals in scientific research to the moral question of keeping wild animals in captivity.

The RNA polymerase of Enterobacteria senses the physiological state of the cell by interaction with signal molecules such as ppGpp and responds by altering the rate of initiation of rRNA and tRNA species so as to limit or enhance the capacity for further growth.

The approach is by a winding road about nine miles long, boldly cut out of the rock … the road comes to an end in front of a long underground passage leading into the mountain, enclosed by a heavy double door of bronze. At the far end of the underground passage a wide lift, panelled with sheets of copper, awaits the visitor. Through a vertical shaft of 330 feet cut right through the rock, it rises up to the level of (...) the Chancellor's [Hider's] dwelling place. Here is reached the astonishing climax. The visitor finds himself in a strong and massive building containing a gallery with Roman pillars, an immense circular hall with windows all around … It gives the impression of being suspended in space … The whole, bathed in the twilight of the autumn evening is grandiose, wild, almost hallucinating. The visitor wonders whether he is awake or dreaming. (shrink)

The treatment of eye brightness in Tolstoy's Anna Karenin is read to reveal a centuries-old Western eye code of love. This eye code is then used as a test of interaction theories essayed by Mead and by Goffman and of subjectivities left faceless by Foucault, Mulvey, Sartre and Lacan. The implications of Tolstoy's eye code are followed through to the conclusion that a woman in love (such as Anna Karenin) is a Nazi in the image of Hitler.

Martin Heidegger was engaged in a continual struggle to find words - new words, both descriptive and analytical - for his radical form of philosophy. This tendency can be traced from Being and Time, where he elaborated an entirely new vocabulary for his ontological enquiry; to Contributions to Philosophy, which saw him committed to a transformation of language; to later essays on poets such as Rilke and Trakl in On the Way to Language. The Writing of Aletheia is the first (...) study to appear in either English or German that provides a full account of Heidegger's language and writing style. Focusing not only on his major philosophical works but also on his lectures, public talks and poetry, this book explores the complex textuality of Heidegger's writing: the elaborate chains of wordplay and neologistic formations; the often oblique, circuitous and regressive exposition of his ideas; the infamous tautologies; the startling modification of grammatical rules and syntax; the idiosyncratic typography of his texts; the rhetorical devices, imagery and symbolism; and the tone and voice of his writing. All of these aspects betray not only his will to structure and his assertiveness but also his ongoing self-questioning and reflectiveness about the ultimate goal of his philosophical quest. (shrink)

Classical thinkers -- The consensus tradition -- Critical perspectives -- Feminism and law -- The interpretive tradition -- Postmodernism and difference -- Legal pluralism and globalisation.